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Iphis sees herself as a “natural female,” that is, made female by nature, and female in her nature, and yet she recognizes her passion for a woman. She has no misconceptions about her biological sex nor about her female gender, only problems concerning whether her love is “what is right”. By having Iphis remain a “female-minded” woman despite her upbringing as a male (all by Roman standards), Ovid suggests that the love occurs naturally and not as the result of a cultural construct of gender and sex roles.

Andrea Dworkin has further theorized that the act of heterosexual intercourse — under any circumstances — constitutes a claim of the man’s ownership of the woman and his assertion of his dominance and her inferiority and subordination to him. Ovid’s tale of Iphis and Ianthe confirms at least Iphis’ belief that this is so: Iphis states, “Nevertheless, she is not to be obtained by you”, and later she exclaims that at their wedding Ianthe “will be mine — and not belong to me”; since she cannot possess her sexually, she cannot truly “have” her. This concept is confirmed in the last line of the story when “the boy Iphis gained his Ianthe” (potitur — also “obtained”/“acquired,” i.e., as a possession).

Greek merchants in the fourth century were becoming a cosmopolitan unity, in which the old distinctions of citizenship and nationality were unimportant. The new Athenian mercantile laws recognized this fact, and were an important step towards the unity of the Greek world.

Yet although in the Greek case Amazon society in many respects does represent an inversion of gender roles so that men become like women, and women like men, at the same time the Amazons can also be seen to represent the imaginative extension of certain ideas about women well established within male-dominated society. In other words, what was imagined was not simply a society in which women behaved like men but, rather, what a society would be like if it were ruled by women.

True to the butch role, Megilla pursues Leaena and tempts her with a “much pleasanter method” of sex. Although Lucian left it to the audience’s imagination exactly what the method was, Megilla was the “doer,” the butch, and she expected Leaena to be the passive one, the fem.