Stephanie Lynn Budin’s The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity presents itself as correction. The claim is simple: earlier scholars got it wrong, and “sacred prostitution” never existed in the ancient Mediterranean or Near East.
But once you strip away the framing, what she actually does is more aggressive than “correction.” She rebuilds the definition so narrowly that the category almost disappears by design.
Sacred prostitution only counts, in her flawed system, if it is explicit sex-for-payment tied directly to temple revenue structures with clear institutional documentation. Anything outside that (ambiguous texts, ritual language, priestly sexual roles, symbolic or economic-religious hybrids) is pushed out of the category before it can even be evaluated.
That move is exactly where the scholarly pushback lands.
Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge points out the structural issue: if your definition is that restrictive, you are no longer testing whether the phenomenon existed, you are deciding in advance what would qualify as evidence. That’s not the neutral cleanup she wants us to believe it's a filtering system that guarantees elimination.
It's an unscientific radical feminist ideology before any facts or evidence.
Craig Gibson’s critique of Aphaca material makes a similar point from a different angle. He argues Budin dismisses or reclassifies evidence that does not fit her model rather than fully engaging with competing readings. In other words, ambiguity is not left open... it is resolved in one direction every time.
Again, unscientific ideology pushing
John Day’s work on biblical material raises the same problem. He argues that Budin’s reinterpretations of key passages in Genesis, Hosea, and Deuteronomy rely on reclassification rather than refutation. The texts don’t stop being potentially sexual or cultic, they are simply re-labeled into non-sexual categories.
This is the pattern critics keep returning to... she's rewriting history to erase sacred sex-workers. Not actually doing academic analysis.
Sexual interpretations are treated as suspect by default. Non-sexual interpretations are treated as safe by default. Once that asymmetry is built in, the outcome is predictable even if each step is argued carefully.
Typical RadFem erasure of anything that disagrees with their ideology.
And this is where Budin’s work connects to a longer history of archaeology and ancient studies.
Modern archaeology did not develop in a vacuum. As Bruce Trigger shows in A History of Archaeological Thought, early archaeology was shaped by European evolutionary thinking that ranked societies on a ladder of development, with Europe at the top and non-European religions treated as earlier, simpler, or less rational forms.
Edward Said’s Orientalism shows how that intellectual structure carried forward into interpretations of “exotic” religions, often reshaping them through European moral assumptions. Talal Asad and later postcolonial theorists show how even modern scholarship still inherits categories that flatten religious systems into more administratively legible forms.
Within that history, erotic-sacred institutions are especially unstable. They tend to get either exaggerated in older Orientalist writing or erased in modern corrective frameworks that prefer cleaner institutional models.
Modern archaeology grew out of European colonial and imperial systems, and it inherited a built-in assumption that Western Christianity and European civilization represented the most “developed” forms of religion and culture. Because of that starting point, Indigenous and polytheist religions were often interpreted through a distorted lens: complex ritual systems were reduced to superstition, sexual or initiatory practices were misread through moral panic or Victorian values, and religious traditions were reorganized into categories that made sense to European institutions rather than to the cultures themselves. In practice, this meant that evidence from non-Christian societies was frequently reclassified, simplified, or explained away in ways that stripped it of its original religious meaning, producing historical narratives that underrepresented the depth, structure, and legitimacy of polytheist worldviews.
Budin sits firmly in this corrective mode. She is not inventing that impulse. It's already built into the discipline. But she applies it with maximum force to anything involving sexuality and religious institutions.
The result is a version of antiquity where erotic ambiguity is steadily drained out unless it survives the strictest evidentiary threshold. Not because ambiguity doesn’t exist in the sources, but because ambiguity itself is treated as something that must be resolved into a non-sexual explanation.
Stephanie Lynn Budin continues this trend of polytheist, pre-Christian, and Indigenous erasure that we see throughout the history of archeology and historical analysis. Her works favor saying Aphrodite’s priestesses weren't supportive of male sexual urges, because that would mean her Radical Feminist ideology was bullshit.
Stephanie Lynn Budin has also taken positions in her published work that align with gender-essentialist interpretations of sex and gender, particularly in rejecting frameworks that treat gender as fluid or nonbinary in ancient contexts. In her discussion of sex and gender in antiquity, she argues against applying modern nonbinary or fluid-gender categories to ancient societies and instead reinforces a binary sex model as the proper analytical foundation for interpreting historical evidence. This stance places her in tension with scholars who use gender-theory approaches to interpret variability in ancient social and religious roles, and it aligns her more closely with gender-critical frameworks that prioritize fixed biological sex categories over contemporary trans and nonbinary conceptual models.
So we see the throughline. Anti-Trans, anti-Enby, and anti-history.
Radical feminism is just fascism...