Roman orator Quintilian described, "The plucked body, the broken walk, the female attire," as "signs of one who is soft and not a real man." įor Roman men masculinity also meant self-control, even in the face of painful emotions, illnesses, or death. Sulpicius Galus: "For the kind of man who adorns himself daily in front of a mirror, wearing perfume whose eyebrows are shaved off who walks around with plucked beard and thighs who when he was a young man reclined at banquets next to his lover, wearing a long-sleeved tunic who is fond of men as he is of wine: can anyone doubt that he has done what cinaedi are in the habit of doing?" Roman consul Scipio Aemilianus questioned one of his opponents, P. Touching the head with a finger and wearing a goatee were also considered effeminate. Taking an inappropriate sexual position, passive or " bottom", in same-gender sex was considered effeminate and unnatural. Over-refinement, fine clothes and other possessions, the company of women, certain trades, and too much fondness with women were all deemed effeminate traits in Roman society. In Virgil's tale of the two young lovers, Nisus and Euryalus, Euryalus was "beautiful" and had a close relationship with his mother, while Nisus was fast and skilled with weaponry. Callicratidas's sexual desire for boys, then, makes him more of a man it does not weaken or subvert his male gender identity but rather consolidates it." In contrast, "Charicles' erotic preference for women seems to have had the corresponding effect of effeminising him: when the reader first encounters him, for example, Charicles is described as exhibiting 'a skillful use of cosmetics, so as to be attractive to women.'" Callicratidas's inclination renders him hypervirile. The late Greek Erôtes ("Loves", "Forms of Desire", "Affairs of the Heart"), preserved with manuscripts by Lucian, contains a debate "between two men, Charicles and Callicratidas, over the relative merits of women and boys as vehicles of male sexual pleasure." Callicratidas, "far from being effeminised by his sexual predilection for boys. Allegations about the part he was playing there vary, and it would be most unseemly for me to talk about it."
and took them round for the jurors to handle, I think they'd be quite unable to say, if they hadn't been told in advance, whether they had hold of a man's clothing or a woman's." ĭemosthenes is also implicated in passive homosexuality and the prostitution of youth: "There is a certain Aristion, a Plataean., who as a youth was outstandingly good-looking and lived for a long time in Demosthenes' house. Greek historian Plutarch recounts that Periander, the tyrant of Ambracia, asked his "boy", "Aren't you pregnant yet?" in the presence of other people, causing the boy to kill him in revenge for being treated as if effeminate or a woman ( Amatorius 768F).Īs part of Greek politician's ( Aeschines') proof that a member of the prosecution against him, Timarchus, had prostituted himself to (or been "kept" by) another man while young, he attributed fellow prosecutor Demosthenes' nickname Batalos ("arse") to his "unmanliness and kinaidiā" and frequently commented on his "unmanly and womanish temper", even criticising his clothing: "If anyone took those dainty little coats and soft shirts off you. The Younger Apollo Teaching Hyacinth to Play Lyra by Louis de Boullogne The term girly boy comes from a gender-inversion of girly girl. The term tomgirl, meaning a girlish boy, comes from an inversion of tomboy, meaning a boyish girl. The word effete similarly means effeminacy or over-refinement, but comes from the Latin term effetus meaning 'having given birth exhausted', from ex- and fetus 'offspring'. Other vernacular words for effeminacy include: pansy, nelly, pretty boy, nancy boy, girly boy, molly, sissy, pussy, tomgirl, femboy, roseboy, and girl (when applied to a boy or, especially, adult man).
This term has been borrowed from the Greek kinaidos (which may itself have come from a language of Ionian Greeks of Asia Minor, primarily signifying a purely effeminate dancer who entertained his audiences with a tympanum or tambourine in his hand, and adopted a lascivious style, often suggestively wiggling his buttocks in such a way as to suggest anal intercourse.The primary meaning of cinaedus never died out the term never became a dead metaphor." Indeed, the word's etymology suggests an indirect sexual act emulating a promiscuous woman. "A cinaedus is a man who cross-dresses or flirts like a girl. In ancient Koine Greek, the word for effeminate is κίναιδος kinaidos ( cinaedus in its Latinized form), or μαλακοί malakoi: a man "whose most salient feature was a supposedly 'feminine' love of being sexually penetrated by other men". Another Latin term is mollities, meaning 'softness'. Effeminate comes from Latin effeminātus, from the factitive prefix ex- (from ex 'out') and femina 'woman' it means 'made feminine, emasculated, weakened'.