A Question of Honor: The Genderization of Domination

The story of Sodom is a terribly fascinating one. Underneath a veneer of homophobic propaganda, it is a story of Ancient Mediterranean/ Near Eastern values that is more complicated, and painful, than it seems. Primarily, the system's male-honor/ female-shame dichotomy genderizes the concept of domination, linking together the story's twin horrors of implicit misogyny and explicit xenophobia.

The dominant theme in the value system is the maintenance of boundaries and keeping things and people in their place. Holiness 'requires that [things] conform to the class to which they belong persons or things of different classes cannot mix', whether they be fibers, crops, or kinds of food (Lecture Notes). Something to note is that men belong to the class of sexual penetrators, and women belong to the class of those who are sexually penetrated.

Honor, the value that plays the largest role in the Sodom story, is the province of the masculine (Lecture Notes). It is men and men only that can have or obtain honor; women are inherently shameful and outside of the circle of real societal approval and award. Women belong to men, whether they be relatives or husbands. As part of the possessions and household of men, women are part of the territory that must be defended in order to maintain male honor. However, women can be given and taken without loss of honor, as long as the change in 'ownership' or the use is with the permission of their men.

As was hinted at, men maintain their public standing by defending their boundaries, only allowing others past them with their permission (Lecture Notes). Hence an honorable man's household is never breached without permission, no one touches 'his' women without his permission, and a town of honorable men only lets in outsiders with permission. One begins to understand why 'the men of Sodom, all the people to the last man' (Genesis 19:4) show up at the resident alien Lot's door in a bad mood. As a guest in the city himself, Lot did not have the authority to give the strangers/messengers hospitality or permission to enter Sodom. That was for the men of the town to decide, and with the decision taken out of their hands and their boundary violated, they are dishonored.

The intersection of the importance of place and boundaries and the concept of honor as a solely masculine trait creates a system of domination and submission that is genderized whether the situation in question has anything to do with men and women or not. To be dominant is to be the 'honorable' man who protects their territory and enforces their boundaries. To be subordinate or without honor is to be a woman, i.e. to be someone who has their boundaries de facto violated. Putting someone 'in their place' (into a position of subordination) involves treating them like or 'making them into' a woman. In the most extreme circumstances, this involves rape, as forcible sexual penetration would definitively put the one into the class of the penetrated, or female.

Putting the strangers/ messengers, now invaders, 'in their place' was of the utmost importance to the men of Sodom. The only way to heal the breach of their boundaries and their honor is to subordinate and shame the two invaders. The Sodomites plan to take extreme measures and 'make them like women' by violating their bodies and putting them into the culturally despicable category of the penetrated: 'reducing male enemies to serve as females would have been an ultimate shame, a fate considerably worse than death' (Lecture Notes).

In order to maintain his honor, Lot must defend his guests from harm and violation. When he offered them hospitality, the messengers became his clients, meaning that they are under his protection until they leave the town again. In effect, they come under the auspices of his household. . .The primary target of shaming is Lot' (Lecture Notes): to violate the messenger/guests would be to violate Lot's own boundaries, hence dishonoring him.

The misogyny inherent in this honor system makes itself obvious when Lot says '[l]ook, I have two daughters who have not known a man; let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please; only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof' (Genesis 19: 8). By being outside of the realm of honor, women are outside of the realm of personhood. They are not their own, but are the possessions and chattel of men. They have to completely rely on the goodness, mercy, or love of the men who 'own' them, which is a precarious place to stand at best. As in the case of Lot, his daughter's were readily sacrificed in order to protect masculine honor.

The Ancient Near Eastern/ Mediterranean system of male Honor operated at the cost of women. It was a very heavy cost indeed, because their reward for doing half the hard work of daily labor, along with producing and training progeny, was being in a permanently shamed and subordinate position akin to slavery. This genderized domination gets extended to those who are perceived to have infringed on a man's or a group of men's honor. Xenophobia gets expressed, in its extreme forms, as gang rape of outsiders, emphatically putting the enemy into the class of the shameful, the penetrated women.

The most peculiar feature of the Mediterranean concept of Honor is that the reputation of the 'honorable'/ masculine man is dependent upon the honorless/ dishonored. In the case of misogyny, masculine honor is precariously balanced upon the actions of 'honorless' women: honor was 'the reward for successful power maneuvers in which a man's relationship to other men is evaluated through women' (Lecture Notes 10/25). In the case of xenophobia, his or the male plural's honor is dependent upon the dishonoring and subordination ('making into a woman') of the Other or the Enemy. This can come in the form of making the Other a client (hospitality, or coming into the boundaries with permission and under surveillance) or by violation of boundaries: invasion of home territory, sexual invasion of the male person or of the women belonging to the male in question. The AM/ ANE system of honor inevitably exacted a cost for every reward of honor that was given, and it was also precariously dependent upon those who were on the losing end of the honor game.

I end my paper on the genderization of domination (and thusly xenophobia) with one last question brought up by the implications of the AM/ ANE masculine honor system. If the stranger/ invader must be made into a woman to defend masculine honor, does that mean the woman has to be made into a 'stranger' in order to fulfill the demands of the system as well? Both must be dominated in some way in order to keep the subordinate in their place. The extreme measure taken toward male invaders or strangers is to forcibly 'make them into women'. Does this then mean that women must be made 'strangers' from honor and full participation in society in order to fulfill the demands of an honor hungry patriarchal system? The second class status and inherent shamefulness of women seems to answer this question quite thoroughly. In the AM/ ANE system of honor, to create a class that is more honorable requires violence or alienation of another class, whether they be females or foreigners.