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Virgins on the cutting-room floor
Bonus Chapter: Male Virginity
Consider the Eunuch
Since before the Christian era, castration has been touted as a surefire way to make a permanent virgin of any man. Legend has it that the Church father Origen had himself castrated as a gesture of sexual renunciation, and there is ample evidence that other especially zealous Christian celibates have done the same. When we think of eunuchs, we may think of these fanatical believers, or we might conjure up fantasies of exotic harems guarded by tall, beardless eunuchs with glittering curved scimitars at their sides. Alternately, and particularly if we’ve read bestselling author Anne Rice’s novel Cry to Heaven, Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy, or are devoted opera fans, we might think of the famous castrati opera singers of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italy, who were castrated in order that they might retain the high, clarion vocal range of boys as they acquired the vocal technique and lung capacity of grown men. But invariably, these men appear to us to have had the maleness physically removed from their bodies: surely they are the ultimate virgins.
This seems logical enough, but it ain’t necessarily so. While castration does necessarily render a man infertile – one of the chief aspects of their value as guards for women’s quarters lay in the fact that they could not compromise the lineage of the household by begetting a child -- being a eunuch is not necessarily a barrier to being sexually active. A long literary, historical, and medical record, ranging from ancient Rome, Greece, and Byzantium on up to the present day, speaks to the sometimes eye-popping sexual careers of castrated men.
Both men and women have been attracted to eunuchs as sexual partners, and many have specifically sought them out. In the ancient world particularly, men of the elite classes could and did take highly public sexual interest in eunuchs, writing about the sensual attractions of the smooth soft skin, beardlessness, and other androgynous physical aspects of castrated men. First-century Roman poets Martial and Suetonius both sing the praises of eunuch musician-courtesans; Suetonius’ Satyricon praises the soft hands and tender buttocks of the eunuchs, in whose sexual receptivity in anal sex he also revels. Like the hijras of contemporary India, who are born male but live essentially as a third sex with some of them undergoing castration along the way, Western eunuchs have not infrequently made their living as prostitutes or courtesans serving a male clientele. But this was by no means limited to the ancient world, and neither was public acknowledgement of eunuch sexiness. The distinctive, androgynous voices and bodies of eunuchs continued to turn heads for centuries, in fact. French novelist Honoré de Balzac, writing well into the 19th century, could still write of a man’s rhapsodic, obsessive attraction to a beautiful castrato in his famous 1831 short story “Sarassine.”
This is not to say that castration turns men into homosexuals. Rather it is to say that necessity is often the mother of strange bedfellows. What people do sexually when circumstances restrict their options often has no bearing on what their sexual preferences would be had they greater freedom to choose. If a man has been castrated and it becomes advisable, due to the constraints of his culture that he become a prostitute or courtesan in order to survive(to wit: castrated men have often been prohibited from marriage and inheritance, and barred from entering particular professions) , it says more about that culture’s attitudes toward eunuchs than about the individual eunuch’s feelings or desires toward other men.
In any event, the idea of “homosexuality” as a specific type of sexual orientation is quite modern, a little over a century old. Male sexual desire for other men has always existed, but has not, for the bulk of our history, constituted a special, exclusive identity. Historically, men who have desired and loved other men have often also been married to, sired children by, and not infrequently also felt genuine sexual desire and emotional love for women. Complicating the question of sexual orientation considerably where eunuchs are concerned is the fact that eunuchs have often been thought of not as men, not as women, but as a third sex unto themselves. Perhaps because Western culture does not have a gender or sex category for a person who is seen as being neither male nor female, we also have no label to characterize a sexual relationship between a man or woman and someone who is seen as being neither.
Whether thought of as male or something else entirely, eunuchs have been considered sexually desirable by, and have frequently engaged in sexual relationships with men and women alike. Fourth-century bishop Basil of Ancyra thought it prudent, in his De virginitate, to warn virginal Christian women against spending time alone with eunuchs: “It is said that those who, having attained virility and the age when the genital member is capable of copulation, have cut off only their testicles, burn with greater and less restrained desire for sexual union, and that not only do they feel this ardor, but they think they can defile any women they meet without risk.” Early Christian opponents of the popular cult of the mother goddess Cybele cast aspersions on the galli, the cult's castrated priests, for pretending to sexual purity yet dallying with women and getting away with it because they could not leave evidence behind in the form of pregnancies.
The convenient fact of eunuchs' infertility also played a part in their popularity among elite women of Enlightenment-era Europe. Female fans swooned after thecastrato opera singers who were the rock stars of their day, entranced by their voices, their fame, and their androgynous savoir-faire. Nearly all the great castrati were at least rumored to have taken advantage of the attentions lavished upon them by their avid female fans, but only some of these relationships were documented in reliable ways.
Viennese fans of the great castrato soprano Luigi Marchesi were reported to swoon and faint at the sound of his voice, just like Elvis Presley’s fans did some 200 years later, and wore tiny enameled miniatures of his face as pendants or pinned to their clothing as talismans of their devotion. Marchesi, for his part, had a well-known affair with Maria Cosway, a well-known painter of miniatures, close friend of Thomas Jefferson, and the wife of celebrated British miniaturist Richard Cosway. The transcendently talented and world-famous Farinelli (né Carlo Broschi, 1705-82) and his operatic rival Caffarelli (né Gaetano Majorano, 1710-1783) were likewise highly sought-after by adoring females, and while Farinelli was uncommonly circumspect about his private life, Caffarelli had a reputation as a temperamental ladies’ man.
How was this possible? Being the receptive sexual partner in either anal or oral sex with another man is certainly not a physical impossibility for any man, whether or not he is castrated. But how could any eunuch be anything other than a virgin with regard to sex with women? The answer lies in the fact that while all eunuchs are created, not all eunuchs are created equal.
Castrations, plainly put, can be performed in several ways, and some leave more behind than others. Castration may involve the complete amputation of the penis along with the scrotum and testicles. But there are also less radical castrations: the removal of the scrotum and testicles while leaving the penis intact, or the removal of the testicles from within the scrotum, leaving the scrotum intact but empty. Castrations were also sometimes performed without any amputation, instead placing the scrotum between two flat rocks or boards and crushing the testicles into nonfunctionality.
From a physiological perspective, such a wide range of castration methods resulted in a fairly wide range of sexual capabilities in the resulting eunuchs. A man without a penis cannot have an erection or be the penetrating partner in penetrative sex. A man with a penis but no testicles may, on the other hand, be able to do both. Assuming that the penis is left intact—and historians believe that this has been the most frequent case, at least in the West, since amputation of the penis adds a vastly higher risk of complication and death—the ability of that penis to function sexually has a great deal to do with the timing of the castration.
The younger a boy was when he was castrated, the less likely he would have been to have experienced the high levels of testicle-produced testosterone normally triggered during early puberty. The less testicular testosterone exposure, the less likely he would be to develop any male secondary sexual characteristics, including voice change, facial hair, or the ability to ejaculate. Men castrated at the verge of puberty or after puberty had commenced, on the other hand, would be quite likely to retain typical adult male sexual function.
In many cases, therefore, the sexual functioning of an eunuch was likely to be identical to that of any other man except for the lack of sperm in the semen. Men can and do ejaculate without sperm, as is amply proven both by the existence of congenitally infertile men and by those who have had vasectomies. Semen consists, by volume, of only about 2 to 5 per cent sperm in any event; most of what makes up semen are secretions from the prostate gland and other related glands that reside inside the male pelvic cavity, where they remain unaffected by castration.
Additionally, we must bear in mind that penis-in-vagina intercourse, while it is often considered the watershed event in terms of the loss of virginity, is by no means the only sexual act possible between a man (or an eunuch) and a woman. Whether they discussed them at length or not, we know from the records of the visual arts, religious texts, and occasionally from literature that people of eras other than our own knew about sexual pleasures that had nothing to do with making the proverbial beast with two backs. Oral sex, manual stimulation, and the use of dildos, which are known to have been used as far back as ancient Greece, are all options that might form part of a eunuch’s sexual life either historically or in the present day.
We don’t know for certain what any given historical eunuch might’ve done with his lover(s). Although we know that some eunuchs chose celibacy -- not least because they were typically prohibited from marrying -- not all of them did. (A few European castrati, during the time of their operatic heyday, even successfully petitioned the Church for permission to marry.) Eunuchs who had sex lives must simply have learned, as we all do as part of the process of becoming sexually active, how to make things work with what they had to work with. Given the responses some of their partners seem to have had, it would seem that what they had to work with was quite adequate to the task at hand.
The question of whether eunuchs are or were virgins, then, cannot be answered with a simple yes. But neither, in many cases, can it be answered with a simple “no.” It depends on the eunuch, and on the definition of virginity being applied. Given what we know of the variability of eunuch bodies and abilities, the variety of possible sexual acts in which eunuchs might engage, and the scattered but definite documentation we have of eunuchs as prostitutes, courtesans, and sought-after ladies’ companions, it is impossible to claim virginity for the group as a whole. Just as with those whose genitals remain as intact as the day they were born, the virginal status of any given eunuch can be guessed at, but never guaranteed.
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I welcome anyone interested in translating any or all of these excerpts to do so, as long as you put them up on the Web and notify me of where they can be found. I plan to link all translated versions from this page.
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