Quote Originally Posted by xdns View Post
By the way, here is one curious thing: seems that anti-homosexual laws always targeted men only (мужеложество), whereas lesbianism was not punished by the law. Why the bias?
Why the bias?

Потому что пропускать предмет размером с банану в задний проход -- это неудобно, и может быть больно, и даже вредно -- вот почему! (Because being anally penetrated by an object the size of a banana can be uncomfortable, painful, and even harmful -- that's why!)

I mean, the bias against male homosexuality was consistent with the general aversion to anal sex, which historically was sometimes used as a painful humiliation for heterosexual male soldiers who were captured and enslaved by the enemy.

And I don't know what the legal tradition was in Russia, but I know that historically, in English-speaking countries, анальный секс между мужчинами was in a special category of legal horribleness, вместе с скотоложеством (along with bestiality).

But in the English legal tradition, "минет" или "взаимо-дрочка" между мужчинами тоже составляли преступлениями, однако преступления в меньшей степени. ("Blowjobs" or "mutual wanking" between men were also crimes, but crimes of lesser degree.)

Thus, if male homosexuality was a lesser crime when there was no proof that buggery (anal penetration) had occurred, it's not surprising that lesbianism was less punished, because buggery is something that two women can do only with an artificial phallus. But in contrast, male homosexuality always fell under suspicion of possibly "leading to anal sex" or "being a temptation to buggery" even when anal sex did not happen.

So we find that for long stretches of Western history, male/male anal sex was punished very harshly, sometimes by death; while other sex acts between males (oral sex, and sometimes masturbation) were also criminalized, but the punishments were usually lighter; and the law almost totally ignored lesbianism. (Anal sex between a man and a woman was sometimes tolerated more than male/male anal -- reflecting the low status of women generally.)

In the famous case of Oscar Wilde, for example, the "Crown" prosecutors gave him two years in prison (for the crime of oral sex with other males) because they were not able to prove that he had done anal sex (which carried a prison sentence of 20 years, not 2 years!). If Wilde had lived a century earlier, he might have gotten 20+ years for минет с мужиками, but the Death Penalty for anal sex! However, British law had been liberalized a bit in the 1860s, and his case was in the 1890s.