| | Phaborinos the Hermaphrodite (Site not responding. Last check: ) |
 | | Those who tampered with the most visible variables of masculinity (hairiness, full beard, low voice, etc.) in their self-presentation provoked vehement moral criticism from Christians and pagan alike (especially the Stoics), because they were rightly suspected of undermining the symbolic language in which male privilege and female submission were written. |
 | | Now the ideal Cynic led an itinerant, mendicant lifestyle and did whatever he or she pleased whenever he or she felt like it, believing that the chief aim of humanity was to live fully according to nature and to eschew all pretense of social convention and custom. |
 | | Of course, this encounter was fictional, but still it reveals the uneasiness that some of the nature-focused Cynics must have felt around the artificially-enhanced effeminacy of a hermaphrodite, although the two schools of thought were attacking the same masculinist institution but from exactly opposite strategies. |
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