1) Labelled Old Dogs: seemingly a woman and man gossiping. The man says, “She makes freak pornos in her basement,” and the woman replies, “I don't want that degenerate in my neighborhood...”
2) Labelled New Tricks: an exchange of messages.
Sender: I found her NSFW??? (skull emoji)
look at this freak shit (two nauseous emojis)
(A screenshot of an 18+ profile)
Receiver:
I knew there was something off about her lmfaoooo
DMing my mutuals to unfollow her right now (two yawn emojis)
Imagine if we did the “public libraries are punk” thing for other subcultures. Imagine if people made shirts that said “Soup kitchens are grunge” or “Mixed Use Urbanism is Juggalo”.
Sorry, Millennials, but recent paleontologist findings and hyolaryngeal apparatus reconstructions no longer support the hypothesis that "rawr" means "I love you" in dinosaur.
Has anyone asked you what the twink genders are yet because I am so intrigued
FAIR WARNING, we've been having a lot of fun and games but the topic of Ancient Roman twink genders can be a bit of a downer because it intersects with a lot of the ways the Romans were, you know, an imperialist society EXTREMELY built on slavery, so just a heads up that we're gonna brush up against some topics like the violence and sexual abuse that comes along with that situation. Comes with the territory, the Romans were mega fucked up and all your Roman faves ARE problematic.
On the other hand we will also raise some CRUCIALLY IMPORTANT questions such as
DID THE ROMANS TWERK
so you know. it's not ALL downers. we can fit some jokes into this clown car as well. we sort of boogie past the horrors in our safari van going "And off to your left, ladies and gentlethem, behold: some horrors. they do suck and it is very sad, yes. And if you look off to your right: scratching your nose in public is how you cruise for dick if you're an ancient roman bottom."
In my experience all academic discussions of the Romans go this way.
Putting the rest of this behind a cut cause it's gonna be LONG
SO. we went over what the "vir" gender means. The new Ancient Roman gender you will learn today is "puer".
The literal translation of 'puer' is 'boy', and this is why you get people saying things in a scandalized whisper like "The Romans fucked boys, you know." And yes, that's true, the objectification and sexual abuse of enslaved children and adolescents 100% was normalized and unremarkable to the Ancient Romans. However horrific you are imagining it as, it was actually worse than that. Such as wealthy women keeping a bunch of slave children around them as kind of a form of conspicuous consumption? As if they are living jewelry that you decorate your whole Presence with, not just your physical body? These people are dyed in the wool imperialists. This is what happens when you build your society on the idea that dehumanizing people is okay.
HOWEVER. Just like the way people translate "vir" as "man", which leaves out a lot of the subtle nuances, if we leave our understanding of "puer" at just that, it narrows our understanding of the actual breadth of abuse and violent oppression that was happening. SO: the Romans used "puer" in much the same way we use "boy". In English, "boy" can mean literally "a male child or youth", but it can also be used in slang ("cracking open a cold one with the boys" where the boys are your middle-aged male coworkers), or as a derogatory label ("The lord sent his boy to the market" where the boy is a fully adult servant/slave/employee, where the key thing being commented on isn't his age, but his lower social class), or as an admiring endearment ("How was your date with that cute boy from the coffeeshop?"). So when we say "The Romans fucked pueri", we gotta broaden our understanding of who qualifies as a "boy" to them. "Puer" can include slaves of any age, freedmen, male sex workers -- basically any AMAB person who could be sexually exploited by a vir. There are several subcategories of puer, such as "puer delicatus" which is best translated as "alarmingly young boytoy/lap candy".
(The funniest place i have vaguely encountered the phrase 'puer delicatus' is in Anne Rice's Pandora, where the titular Pandora (a vampire who was born during the Roman Empire) narrates about 'that delicate boylike Armand'. Which is another perfectly valid translation of 'puer delicatus', and since she IS an Ancient Roman, that absolutely is the gender she would register Armand as. So this is EXTREMELY funny. One of the roasts of all time.)
BUT WAIT. Because there are some pueri who are
🚨🚨🚨OFF LIMITS🚨🚨🚨
These are the young/adolescent sons of viri, and this is a huge fucking deal. If you are a Proud Roman Dad, you are worrying about this all the time.
You know the way that there's a certain kind of Toxic Masculinity Dad these days who owns a shotgun and lies awake at night having extremely manly panic attacks about the idea of his daughter going to prom where some good-for-nothing might [gasp] Lay A Hand On Her? And you know how he gets weird and obsessively overprotective? And how this becomes kind of about his patriarchy baggage, re: his daughter "belonging" to him, and so anyone who looks twice at her is threatening THIS MAN'S PROPERTY? Like if she has sex in the back of her prom date's car and it's enthusiastically consensual, her dad's still blowing a gasket because "omg that boy (derogatory) just fucked my daughter, and she's my property, therefore it's like he's fucking an extension of ME????? UNACCEPTABLE???" You know this? You've met this archetype of man in high school films?
Ancient Roman viri are also like this, but they are just as paranoid in this way (if not even more paranoid) about their sons as they are about their daughters. If you're a Roman Vir and your son gets fucked by some other vir -- first of all, god forbid it is enthusiastically consensual. Shameful!!! your son! CONSENTED!!! to bottoming!!! Horrors! no no no, you are denying this, he was Seduced, he was Coerced, shut up stupid son don't say anything, quick quick quick look sad!!! it's the only way to save the family's reputation!!!!!! Then you find the Horrible Monstrous Perpetrator who consensually fucked your son and you drag him to court on charges of rape, because even if your wayward slut of a son consented, YOU DIDN'T. YOU, THE PATERFAMILIAS, have had your PROPERTY BESMIRCHED. Hopefully your wayward slut of a son comes to his senses and cooperatively looks sad so you can win the court case. If he continues to be a bottom, DON'T WORRY :) you're legally allowed to kill him if you catch him in the act. :))) you Have To Save The Family's Reputation So He Does Not Bring Shame To You And All Your Collective Ancestors (whose faces you keep in a cabinet in your front room and look at every day just in case you ever forget to feel ashamed of your shortcomings as a descendant).
(FYI if you are a vir, you're also allowed to kill your daughter in similar circumstances, if she's fuckin' people she shouldn't be fuckin' without permission, and also your wife and her lover if you catch them committing adultery on you. If her lover is somebody else's slave and he's running away while you chase him out of your house and beat him with a belt, you might have to go to court on charges of property damage BUT, good news, once you explain the situation, the other vir is going to be like "omg i'm SO SORRY, i didn't know this was happening or what my slave was getting up to, I'm so embarrassed, really this is a shame upon ME, so I withdraw my lawsuit against you and I'm going to send you a gift basket and offer you a job in my vast merchant company in order to offset the Dishonor Carbon Emissions this is causing to my reputation. GOTTA respect the bro code. obvs the slave will either be killed or sent to the silver mines don't even worrrrrryyyyyy about itttt omg i love your toga btw <333")
So obviously this is all a huge hassle, having to worry about your son being pretty and getting seduced by some Rake or Lowlife. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, so what do you do with your son before he has the opportunity to become a wayward slut with dangerous eyelashes he might flutter at some too-swole gladiator???? BUNDLE HIM UP IN A TOGA PRAETEXTA, BAYBEE. Plus you put a necklace on him with an amulet called a bulla. The toga praetexta (it has purple stripes on it) + bulla is ONLY worn by the sons of viri (and some other vir in particular ceremonial circumstances, don't worry about that right now) -- so what you are doing with this is essentially hanging a sign around your son's neck that says in huge letters, "PSA: NOBODY FUCK THIS." You also do not let your son out of the house unless he is supervised by a very trusted tutor. Because you are a Roman vir and you're like, "Men cannot be trusted, men are lurking around every corner just WAITING for the opportunity!!! if somebody sticks his dick in my property then it's like he's sticking his dick in me, and THAT'S EMASCULATING TO ME PERSONALLY." You remain hypervigilant over your son until he stops looking like a puer and starts being more properly vir-presenting with his gender (ie: by shaving his first beard), then you can start to relax and hope that as an Official Grownup he has learned to keep the weird parts of his sex life DISCREET.
Just like Daddy does. :))))) You go to EXTREME and ELABORATE lengths to make sure nobody ever finds out you like a finger up the ass when you're getting your dick sucked. The most important part of being a Vir is getting the hypocrisy exactly right. It's an art form, really.
(for anyone reading this who is an IWTV/The Vampire Chronicles fan: going back to the case study of the vampire Armand and his interactions with local ancient Romans for a second -- as said above, yes, Pandora is textually gendering him as 'puer delicatus'. But I will argue that half of the reason his relationship with Marius is so fucked up and frustrating for him is that Marius can't decide what Roman Gender he wants to assign Armand. If you have the Roman Gender Understanding for context, you can basically watch live on the page while Marius, in his intense indecision, vacillates rapidly back and forth between assigning Armand the "Puer (Son 🥰🧑🎓)" gender and the "Puer (Delicatus 😏🥵)" gender, which means he's shifting the goalposts on how Armand should behave (and what obligations Marius owes him). Upright and honorable son of a freeborn citizen? Teenage sugar baby??? These are mutually exclusive and MUST NOT overlap. This is why Marius gets so fucking grumpy when he sends Armand off to have fun at the brothels (ie: Express Some Roman Vir-Masculinity by Topping Some People, As The Son of A Vir (ie: Marius) Should Be Doing) and Armand comes back like, "I'm a switch :D I had a great time both fucking and getting fucked." Marius is NOT bothering to explain the rules of Roman Gender, because he thinks everyone should just naturally already know them even if it has been 1000 years since the Roman Empire fell and now we are in Renaissance Venice. And even if Armand DID already know the rules, Marius would STILL be giving him the exact same wildly mixed messages on WHICH Roman Gender Expectations Armand is supposed to be adhering to, leading to Armand scrawling "It is unsupportable to be mastered by one who cannot do it. Make clear the way, shepherd, or lay down your staff!" in Marius' journal.)
Okay so that's both sides of the puer coin -- the pueri who are Fuckable (Theoretically Any Marginalized AMAB In A Horny Vir's Line Of Sight) and the pueri who are Categorically Unfuckable (Underage Sons Of Viri).
The next of the twink genders is "Cinaedus/pathicus". The former comes from a verb that means "to wiggle one's ass like a fish" which brings up that huge and important question we foreshadowed earlier:
DID THE ANCIENT ROMANS TWERK
Tragically it is impossible to know for sure. I like to think they did. Not viri, though, obviously. Twerking is gay to them because 1) dancing is gay, and 2) pretending like you're bouncing on a dick (cevere, see the Roman Fuck Verbs explanation) is just as bad as actually bouncing on a dick.
"Cinaedus/pathicus" are both sometimes translated as "catamite" but that's kind of inaccurate the same way "vir = man" is. Both of them are often used in a derogatory way, so I suppose you could translate them as "faggot"? There is kind of a parallel there with modern day queer communities -- there's not much about this in the surviving Roman writings, but apparently the cinaedi did have kind of their own queer subculture/counterculture and would get married to each other (Viri find this bewildering and gross and they're definitely going "but which of you is the wife????").
"Cinaedi" is sort of an equalizing gender, because (other than gallus), it's one of the closest things the Romans had to a self-chosen identity, even though no identity is really self-chosen in Ancient Rome -- identity is not what you think of yourself (the way it is today), identity is what other people see you doing and being, and it is something inherited from your ancestors/lineage, which is why it's so important to keep your weird sex interests DISCREET, otherwise people will Find Things Out About You and then that's what your gender is. "Vir", "puer", "libertus", "servus", those are all things that are IMPOSED on you by society, but "cinaedus" can overlap or even overrule them -- a vir who fails to behave like a proper vir (ie: he goes down on his wife (gasp. that's gay)) is going to get sifted into the cinaedus category, a freedman who presents himself in certain ways is going to get sorted into cinaedus, a brawny beefy bear of a gladiator (too manly, so now he's effeminate) is a cinaedus. In a way it sort of becomes a catch-all category for anyone who has "failed" to live up to the "be as mid as possible, the goal is to be Totally Average" standards of vir-masculinity.
ALLEGEDLY the cinaedi subtly identified themselves to each other (and ALLEGEDLY advertised to potential sex partners that they were willing to bottom) by "scratching the nose". Scholars have puzzled about this for ages. We don't know what that means or why that's the thing. PERSONALLY, my own best guess (which I did present to a Professional Academic, whose response was "....HUH.... WHY HAVEN'T WE THOUGHT OF THAT") is that when the Roman writers say "scratching one's nose" what they actually mean is "PICKING one's nose". Because just a scratch is sort of odd, right? But PICKING the nose -- that looks like a dick penetrating a hole, and it's absolutely in line with the sort of behaviors about which Romans go "excuse me that's gay. penetration of any kind is gay and effeminate. don't put things in any of your holes. gay"
The last of the twink genders is "exoletus", which has sometimes been interpreted as "adult male sex workers", but now we think it's just "a grown-up puer delicatus", with the implication being that they have outgrown most/all of their sexual attractiveness. The viri write a lot of sad poetry about twink death. This is tragic to them. Kind of understandable, because Italian men do not age gracefully, and the amount of sun they get in those parts doesn't help. Your sugar baby hits like 20 years old and you start sweating and reading a lot of self-help manuals about How To Prevent Twink Death From Occurring In Your Favorite Boyfriend, and so you tell him to put wet bread on his face (as moisturizer, presumably) and bat guano on his legs (Ancient Nair). Look at me. This is real. You think i'm kidding about the bat guano and wet bread, I am not kidding.
ALAS, twink death comes for us all, and one day your sugar baby hits 22 years old and people find out that he's got hair on his ass (public baths, unavoidable situation) and even if YOU think he's getting hotter every day, everyone else is like "ummmmm isn't he getting a bit too old to be carrying on with, it's starting to look kind of Gay 😬 you wouldn't want people to think you're PROBLEMATIC, would you??? it's problematic if you're lovers with an adult man, that's a bit gross, people will think you're a bottom" so you break up with him and write some sad poetry because that's one of the only ways besides murder that you, a Totally Respectable Vir, are allowed to express your feelings. (Don't write too much sad poetry, that's also gay)
The sad poetry is framed as, like, a warning to other men not to fall in love with pretty boys because you only get a few years with them and then they Break Your Heart Every Time. :( somehow you are unable to think your way out of this deep and perplexing conundrum you are stuck in, despite your culture's reputation for practicing the kind of powerfully intellectual rhetoric that can justify absolutely anything you feel like in any direction. Gosh. There's just nothing to be done about this one, boys. I guess we'll have to buy a new sex slave and start early-drafting some more sad poetry so that a few years from now you'll be prepared and have something to send to your friends about all his cute little foibles like how he used to demand that you chew his food for him and how he'd take it right from your mouth :(((((((((
(fyi this poem is as real as the bat guano thing, ie: actually real. Straight up they were freaks.)
And then you revise your will to leave said former sugar baby all of your money and your property, and when you die he gets your entire fortune, and Seneca the Younger has a whole-ass tantrum about it and causes a moral panic in the 1st century, because all these Hot Young Men inheriting people's fortunes are getting TOO RICH and TOO POWERFUL and it's causing the Downfall Of Society, and then the early Christians start wandering around going "[vague gestures at all of this Wealthy Vir Decadence and Luxury and Sex Crimes] billionaires are problematic and are actively exploiting people in horrible ways right in front of us, so we're just going to go ahead and expand the definition of 'gay' from 'dick up the ass' to 'also if you're topping'. I'm sure this won't cause problems later on, like 2000 years from now. Everybody Stop Being Horny In The Wrong Way, It's BAD."
And so that's basically why we have to have Pride parades now. Like most of everything else in our society that is pervasively wrong and damaging and we can't squirm ourselves free of, it is in the end all the Ancient Roman Viri's Fault.
Anyway everyone name your favorite Godawful Twink from Roman literature or history, mine is Giton from the Satyricon:
If you would like another book about a Local Godawful Twink facing down the terrifying barrel of impending twink death and destroying the lives of every vir on the continent... The Wisdom of Emperors launches on Kickstarter on May 5th.
Laetitia Ky is an Ivorian feminist artist who creates elaborate sculptures using her own hair, wire, and thread to convey powerful messages about feminism, body positivity, Black beauty, and African heritage. Her intricate hair art, which can take the form of animals, objects, or abstract shapes, is influenced by traditional African hairstyles and serves as a platform for her activism and advocacy for women's rights.
pet peeve is when you look up fashion references from a specific era and you keep getting modern day '[era]-inspired' fashion like NO i want authenticity damn it. i can see your 2020 photo quality and your 2020 hair and your 2020 makeup. youre not fooling me.
hello i'm a historical fashion researcher and i have a lot of experience looking up things! this is a very widely experienced irritation and you're definitely not alone in this, but i am here to share everything i know!
so, ways to get around this:
turn off AI results. they're literally nonsense to us
don't use pinterest because the sources/provenance is often hard to trace
a standard internet search can be okay, but museum collections are the top tier (list of collections below this list)
instead of broad terms like victorian, regency, tudor, renaissance etc. try using the decade you're looking for. if you're not sure of what decade it is but have a vague image in your head, look on the fashion history timeline and just jump around until you find it. but even changing to e.g. 19th century will give better results than victorian
including terms like womenswear/menswear, daywear, formal wear, evening wear, court dress should increase the value of your search too
including "fashion plates" in your search can give you a nice impression of the intended silhouettes of the era. some of these might be a little stylised but will show you what was considered in vogue
for pre-fashion plate eras or things like makeup and styling, you'll have to look at portraiture or manuscripts. these are harder to actually find what you're looking for, but searching museum collections and limiting results to specific date ranges will be your friend
when looking at art, do bear in mind sometimes artists would paint fabric extra flow-y to show off their skills. it might not have been exactly like that in terms of fabric weight or drape. so, a pinch of salt required!
if you find something on image search where the provenance is dubious, reverse image search and you might find a source! i've been able to trace random pinterest images to real sources, but this does take a lot of time and effort and is often not worth the headache
some online resources and museum collections:
fashion history timeline is an invaluable resource if you're trying to get a feel for everything and should be your first port of call. it'll also link to good examples
the met has a vast number of extant examples of clothing, as well as fashion plates
costume institute fashion plates is a subcollection of the met for fashion plates (1800s-1922)
v&a also has many extant garments, fashion plates, and incredible articles on clothing and aesthetics. read the details of the objects because they'll often reveal a lot about the piece
lacma is good for C19th-20th pieces
nypl digital collection for photographs
national portrait gallery or similar for portraiture, or literally any museum in your country that has historical art
national museums scotland can be useful situationally but might be oddly specific
stout style history is a great collection for finding image references for fat people wearing historical clothes. survival bias of a lot of museum pieces tends towards smaller clothing that couldn't be repurposed, but this aims to counter that. it's not sortable, but is still a really nice resource
wikimedia commons is surprisingly handy! and the images, if you should need to link/repost them, are public domain
auction websites sound like a funny one to recommend. some won't have mannequins and some will. just look up historical garment auctions and you'll find some!
anyway, i hope this has been a good place to start for anyone interested! there are probably some i've missed because there are so many museums across the world and i don't know about all of them or can't remember them. but these are the ones i've used the most! (my specialisation/jobs i've had to research for have only really been in western fashion, so my resources reflect that)
Wikipedia has a list of fashion museums. Unfortunately, the page itself is only available in German, but the introductory paragraph is very short and after that, it's organised by country, and then it's a simple list. If you click on a museum's article, the website is usually linked in the overview table.
