The tale of Phyllis and Aristotle is about how women can dominate intellectual men like Aristotle, physically and emotionally. She even has a leash on him and a whip! Perhaps he likes it? The tale itself belonged to a very popular literary and artistic genre in Europe from the 12th

Well, yes we can. By looking before 1850 I can exclude Gustave Courbet, Gerda Gottlieb Wegener, Toulouse-Lautrec (above), Simeon Solomon and many others where it's obvious. But, also, we can't assume any painting of two women in an intimate clutch means they're lesbians,

The Pope Joan legend may owe something to the Pelagia legends. Pelagia was a female Christian saint in the 4th or 5th century, but there are different versions. Wikipedia focuses on the Pelagia who was an ascetic monk, who wasted away living on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Upon

This was once a thing. Women who lived as men and “married” other women. As far as I know, it’s not really the case anymore in Western countries in that, now, no one needs to actively deceive anybody else in this way. There were many heterosexual couples up until

After Petrarch wrote biographies of famous men, Giovanni Boccaccio went one better with 106 biographies of Famous Women (De Mulieribus Claris). The famous women included Pope Joan. Written in Latin, the book spans Eve, Venus, Minerva, Circe and Penelope, Medea, Flora, Isis, Sappho, and Cleopatra, all the way up to

Kiyomizu ("pure water" - named after its waterfall) is in the eastern hills of Kyoto. It is one of the settings for The Tale of Genji and it is one of the most beautiful spots in Japan as well as (arguably) one of the most famous. It was one

Below is the cover of a book of letters between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Woolf was 10 years older than Sackville-West. I find this book cover worth posting because the publishers evidently decided that Sackville-West would get front billing on the cover, with the coy hand

Vita Sackville-West’s grandmother was known as Pepita, a Spanish dancer who took up with Lord Sackville-West, and they had five children together, before Pepita died in 1871. Their youngest child, Victoria, became Vita’s mother. Pepita had appeared on stage as “The Star of Andalusia” and it

China has its own androgynous figure with the legend of Hua Mulan (木蘭詩) from the 4th-6th centuries CE. She is famous for disguising herself as a man and for fighting in many bloody campaigns before returning home and being outed as a woman at her home near Luoyang in

It is well recognized that founding father of Japanese manga, Osamu Tezuka, was influenced by the early Walt Disney films he saw. It is also well recognized that Walt Disney Studios returned the favor when Tezuka’s Kimba the White Lion (1950-54) was reshaped into The Lion King (1994)

The patron saint of Sexual Fables is Jean-Jacques Rousseau (leavened with a little Cervantes and a little Montaigne). In Confessions (which are not really confessions), Rousseau wrote that fables "wrap useful truths in sensible and agreeable forms." By this he meant that sometimes naked truths are difficult

China has been arresting young women in their Twenties who write gay erotica - danmei. It's been around for years in Japan as yaoi (BL) without incident. As BBC writers put it (here): Haitang and danmei have flourished as uniquely female spaces, although they centre male protagonists. In a

The garden at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent is, in many ways a literary garden because it draws visitors interested in Vita Sackville-West. She created the garden in the 1930's with her husband, Harold Nicolson. The National Trust took it over in 1967 - the website is here. The

Takarazuka is an all-female theatre troupe named after the northern suburb of Osaka of the same name that was founded in 1913. The photo below is of the Grand Theater in Takarazuka (they have another in Tokyo). Unlike the all-male traditional Kabuki, Takarazuka is a hybrid of traditional

The stone marker shown below is all that remains of the Rashōmon Gate, made famous by Akira Kurosawa’s movie of 1950. How appropriate that Rashōmon or Rajōmon (literally “city walls" + "gate”), which was the great southern gate of the city of Kyoto (then known as Heian-Kyo)

There is no really satisfying explanation for how the legend of Pope Joan came into being, which is as it should be. It probably began as a folk tale that somehow got out of hand when the Polish Dominican writer, Martin of Opava (who died in 1278) enhanced the story

The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari) was written by Murasaki Shikibu in the early 11th century. The author is named after the character, not vice versa, since no one knows who really wrote it. The best we can do is assume that it was written by a woman of the

* 855 Joan becomes Pope and dies three years later. Maybe. * 1021 Approximate date by which The Tale of Genji was written by Murasaki Shikibu * 1321 Dante finishes Divine Comedy * 1348 The Black Death. Boccaccio's Decameron is written 1349-1352 * 1361 Boccaccio begins writing On Famous Women, which includes