Authors set out to correct under-representation of female sounds – and found some surprising revelations
When we hear the beautiful call of a bird from a high bough, we’re told it’s likely to be a male – singing for territory, or belting out tunes to woo a female. But as the annual dawn chorus reaches a crescendo this spring, a new guidebook is urging us to think again – and turn our ears to the hidden world of female birdsong.
The songs, sounds and sights of female birds have historically been overlooked in field guides and sound archives. In 2016, just 0.01% of the bird sounds in the global Xeno-Canto sound library were labelled female. Another sound archive was just 0.03% female, according to a 2018 study.
But the new book – The Sound Approach to Birding 2 – aims to correct this under-representation and properly explain female birdsong. Female birds sing for territorial displays, to ward off other females and to attract extra males, according to Lucy McRobert, a writer and researcher who studied the issue for the guidebook.
The book comes with its own library of 300 sounds from 200 species, accessed via web or app.
The clips are drawn from the larger online archive of Sound Approach, a birdsong project founded in 2000 with confirmed recordings of females for 41% of species found in the Western Palearctic, a biogeographical region encompassing Europe, north Africa and most of the Middle East...
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Hey. look at me. look into my eyeballs. I know what you want from life. You want an absolute CHAOS GREMLIN of an old lady who is 1) horny on main, 2) HELLA QUEER, 3) also a pirate queen, AND ☝️...... 4) magical. And she has sea puppies. Puppies made of the sea. And a MAGIC BOAT
"What is this book?????" i hear you ask.
It is this book by @lincodega!!! PASHA THE STORM!!!!!! The year's absolute best pirate fantasy novel which will blow your tits clean off. I got to read an advance copy and i am here to tell you that it Slaps it Slaps it fully fully Slaps.
It comes out on June 30th, so you should go read it right now and tell your friends who liked Black Sails, Our Flag Means Death, or Running Close to the Wind (For fans of the latter: Imagine if Avra Helvaci was an old woman. This is the kind of horny chaos gremlin energy we're talking about. Everyone around Pasha is like "Pasha no" and Pasha is like "PASHA YES!!!!!!!!")
SUMMARY:
An exiled pirate queen hunts a killer whale on the high seas, while caught between a power-hungry empress and a revolutionary conspiring to end her reign . . .
Pasha the Northern Storm was once the most infamous Meridian pirate who ever sailed the sister oceans. Now, a decade into her exile, Pasha’s afterlife is being held hostage by Atle, an absurdly attractive noble who knows far too much about pirate magic—but not enough about sailing to realize how dangerous Pasha really is.
Minister Atle Itaavar is duty-bound to serve the Kingdom of Garda, but as Queen Thivaldís gathers support for her ambitions of empire, Atle turns to treason to stop her. In order to destroy the Queen’s new necromantic navy, Atle plans to steal the Queen’s flagship, kidnap a washed-up pirate to sail it, and track down a legendary killer whale to bring it down.
But the hunt for the great undying whale drags Pasha, Atle, and the crew of the Dog into a cosmic reckoning as they face threats from ghosts and gods alike—and the Queen of Garda is close behind.
(Also if y'all wanna do me a solid and signal boost please and thank you? Lin deserves it! <3)
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.
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Okay so. The Romans think that sex doesn't count as real sex unless Someone Is Getting Penetrated By A Dick Or Dick-Adjacent Object. Very sort of dick-centric system.
So Latin has six words for "to fuck", divided into three pairs: one pair for each of the possible Holes (ass, mouth, pussy). In each pair there is a word for topping and a word for bottoming.
Most people who know a little about Latin fuck verbs know 'pedicare' and 'irrumare' from the first line of Catullus 16 (Pēdīcābō ego vōs et irrumābō), which is a poem about saying "absolutely shut the fuck up and piss all the way off" to fandom antis and purity police who are making repulsive accusations about you personally, based on things they're reading into your work from a bad-faith perspective. Catullus was so real for that and it's incredibly endearing to me that he was dealing with the same thing we are still dealing with. I got a hater in my askbox doing this about The Wisdom of Emperors just the other day, but I took the high road and, unlike Catullus, did not tell them "I will assfuck you and I will facefuck you"
So here sort of a chart about the verbs:
Topping | Bottoming
Mouth: irrumare | fellare
Ass: pedicare | cevere
Cunt: futuere | crisare
Another fun fact related to the fuck verbs was that the Romans didn't think about sexual orientation in terms of who you're attracted to, they thought about it in terms of "which is your favorite hole and what do you like to do with it." So you'll get graffiti (ancient roman subtweeting) about things like "Marcus is a fututor [cunt-fucker] and a pedico [ass-fucker] but omg girlies I also heard he's a fellator [cock-sucker] 👀👀👀👀" In the modern day we'd just call him bisexual, but in Ancient Rome it is not enough to know if someone is bisexual (they think it's kind of perverted if a man only fucks women, like do you have some kind of freaky pussy fetish???? you've never once even fucked a twink??? dat's gay, bro. gay to not be bi), you also have to know if he's being bisexual in a respectable sort of way
You will notice that pussy-eating is not on this list, because those words do not mean "to fuck", they translate more directly to just "pussy-licking" (cunnilingus), and because the Romans are sexist as all hell and think that's gross and filthy anyway. This is not ONLY because of pussy terror, it's also that the mouth is the most sacred part of the body -- so eating pussy or sucking a dick is actually considered slightly more "shameful" than getting fucked in the ass. (Please note as well that the fuck verbs are gender neutral -- if you're a roman man and your girlfriend owns a strap-on, she can [pedicare] you. but be careful because your sworn enemy in the forum will have a fucking FIELD DAY if he hears about that and will write a Mean Poem about you or subtweet you on a public wall)
The moral of this story is that the Ancient Romans were absolutely *GAGGING* for social media (see Martial's Epigrams, aka My Best Tweets), and the second moral of this story is that if this was a fun post for you, you should look at my kickstarter for alllllll of this kind of nonsense in the form of A Fantasy Novel That's Pretending To Be An Academic Paper With A Fake Bibliography And Foonotes aka The Wisdom of Emperors. And please signal boost this so everyone can know about Latin Fuck Verbs and Roman Subtweeting, we've really learned so much here together
i need everyone to let me lay my head in their lap while they pet my hair and make soothing noises and tell me i'm doing such a good and brave job marketing this book. fuckin sisyphean indignity of hurling it at instagram over and over and getting basically no traction whwkwhfwlfwhjsklgfwhjkl
meanwhile my BELOVED FELLOW TUMBLRINI are being so INCREDIBLY kind and generous with the signal boosting and the general interest and encouragement, i am so grateful
#wait wait wait wait wait hold the fuck up#i was like ‘omg ariaste?? like ariaste from ao3?? like ariaste author of some of my favorite mdzs fics ever????’#‘they have a tumblr?! (how did this not occur to me before lol)’#and then ‘omg ariaste has a BOOK i must read it immediately’#then i go to their tumblr and am SLAPPED IN THE FACE by the fact that ariaste and alexandra rowland are the same person#like. ‘yield under great persuasian’ alexandra rowland.#you’re telling me tam beckett and attempting the impossible au!jiang cheng are written by the same person???? mind. blown.#*becket#this is like when i found out naomi novik was astolat all over again#sorry op you probably have this happen to you all the time it’s just my little mind is struggling to absorb this into rn lol (via @jcbmcdrmtt)
it has only happened to me a handful of times (i am not nearly as famous and cool as @astolat) but it IS delightful fun to harmlessly jumpscare people in this way, i must admit.
extra funny in this case because i believe my AO3 username was listed in the bio at the back of Yield Under Great Persuasion lmaooooo
anyway hi hello yes it is me. a gremlin making questionable choices about doing a kickstarter and now i have played myself with having to do all this promo
#to my deep shame for like 15 seconds I thought that the Fantasy Romans post was a colloquial misspelling of “Fantasy Romance”#And then I was like oh thank god like ROME ROMANS (via @peri-hellion)
No no wait this is hilarious this is so good, this is a brilliant joke and you should not be ashamed of it. "Local romantasy author Alexandra Rowland has written a new romantasy novel" and then the camera pans to me and i'm standing there vibrating with excitement, my hands full of Ancient Roman Trivia And All The Best Bits of HOT GOSS AND EVEN HOTTER TAKES From Classical Antiquity, and the interviewer is like "uhhhhhh i thought this was.... a romance???? novel???? romantasy? romance fantsy?" and i'm like "oh. no. no it's very much not a romance novel this is a ROMANS novel it's about the romans, Roman Fantasy, haha yes can i tell you about the romans???? nevermind i've actually already locked all the doors and windows ANYWAY SO THE FIRST THING YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND IS THAT THE ROMANS DIDN'T ACTUALLY HAVE A GENDER BINARY AND YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND DEEPLY AND *WITH SPECIFICITY* WHAT A 'VIR' IS--" and the interview is crying and shaking while i just hand them trivia tchotchke after trivia tchotchke and unload my pockets into their arms
oh my god okay so. For one thing. They straight up have words for intersex people. If a word exists, the concept exists. So already they're aware that sometimes bodies aren't easily categorized, so anyone who says "but the romans definitely did have a sex/gender binary" is just self-evidently wrong from the get-go.
They also straight up have words and social roles for people we'd now probably classify under the transfeminine umbrella, the galli. These were AMAB people who voluntarily underwent castration, dressed in women's clothes/jewelry/makeup, and were priests and worshippers of a particular religious cult to the goddess Cybele/Magna Mater, and Attis, her consort. (There is a character in the book who is a gallus! She is the emperor's augur, meaning she makes divinations based on observing the flight of birds. Important person to bring along on a quest.) Here is a statue of a gallus looking extremely cool:
But all of that is sort of.... normal to us? Like we get it, we understand that, we go "Oh, yeah, it's like this other idea we already know about," it fits into our mental model, it does not challenge us to bend our brains in any weird yoga poses.
"Vir" is the thing that will do that. "Vir" is often translated as just "man" but this is bad and lacks the weight of certain encoded subtleties. It is one of two words that means man, the other being "homo" (as in homo sapiens), but the vibes of that one are more generally just "a person (nonspecific)". "Vir", however, has extremely specific vibes, because it is not just "a man" as we would think of the concept today. A vir MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST possess ALL of the following traits to qualify as a vir:
adult
freeborn
male-bodied
CITIZEN!!!!!!!
with intact genitals
(behaves correctly as a vir)
If he's a teenage freeborn AMAB citizen, he's not a vir (yet). If he's an adult freeborn transmasculine citizen, he's not a vir. If he's a slave or a freedman or an immigrant (aka Not A Citizen), he's not a vir. If he used to be a vir and then got castrated (either by misadventure or as punishment for a crime), then oops he's not a vir anymore, he's a semivir (half-man). If he is a vir but he doesn't act reputably and adhere to the Required Gender Norms, then he's on THIN FUCKING ICE and should stop immediately and get his act together before his paterfamilias disowns him for Betraying The Vir Code.
From the word "vir" we get words like "virtue" (aka the qualities a vir should have), and "virile" (a vir's ability to be Fucking). This is also where we get words like "triumvirate" (a governing body comprised of three viri) -- which, when you realize what "vir" implies, REALLY showcases how unequivocally other genders were excluded from being full participants in government. Couldn't be elected to public office unless you were a vir!
The thing that makes this incredibly *GENDER* is that there were mandatory anxious toxic masculinity expectations forced on the viri that other AMAB people did not have to comply with. The Romans were out here conceptualizing gender as being something that was as much informed by your SOCIAL CLASS as it was by physical sex. So a male slave, freedman, or foreigner could (for example) refrain from shaving his armpits, and it doesn't really matter. Meanwhile, if you are a vir, you DO have to shave at least your armpits to be behaving Properly. JUST ARMPITS. If you shave your legs or your chest or your pubes, then [middle school voice] EW that's Gay. (The Romans' concept of vir-masculinity was very much a VERY FRAUGHT AND TENUOUS AND ANXIOUS attempt to find a Goldilocks zone in the midst of constantly shifting goalposts. If you're not manly enough, obviously that's gay and bad, we still have this concept today. BUT IF YOU ARE TOO MANLY THAT IS ALSO GAY AND BAD. Gladiators??? A super shredded mega-hot gladiator who's drowning in pussy? The viri are like, "Gay. Gay of him. Unmanly. Effeminate. Ew yuckie no no no." We do not have an upper limit on "how much masculinity is good" in our culture, we sort of think "the more the better" and that's why everyone's horny for a lumberjack.)
A lot of the time people are like "The Romans didn't have homophobia! They only had bottomphobia :D" but actually they DO have homophobia once you account for the fact that "vir" is a separate gender from "servus" (male slave), "libertus" (male freedman), or "peregrinus" (male foreigner/immigrant/other non-citizen), etc. A vir can fuck any of those genders, AND any of the AFAB-aligned genders, AND the galli, AND intersex people and that is perfectly fine and normal and Roman Heterosexual of him. Why is it fine? Because the default cultural assumption is that the vir will be topping. A vir absolutely must top, viri who do not top get mocked and made laughingstocks in satirical plays. This is catastrophic to them. They would genuinely prefer to die in battle, even though it's kind of gay to get stabbed when you think about it because that's basically another man penetrating you????? Cringe. Cringe and effeminate to be stabbed.
Actual Roman homosexuality would be a vir fucking another vir--someone of his own gender. This absolutely cannot happen, because then [GASP] ONE OF THEM WOULD HAVE TO NOT TOP. Morality crisis. Philosophers throughout the empire are clutching their pearls and scribbling the ancient equivalent of Reddit posts about how one time they heard about a guy (vir) who fucked his friend (another vir) and it's Probably Because Of Moral Bankruptcy Such As This That Society Is Collapsing Before Our Eyes, We Live In The End Times If Viri Think It's Okay To Kiss Each Other With Tongue, The Only Thing Morally Worse Than This Is How All the Twinks Are Becoming Gold-diggers (we can't get into the twink golddiggers panic of the 2nd century right now. it's about the viri buying twink boytoy sex slaves and then leaving them their entire vast fortunes in their wills when they died. Seneca the Younger had a Reddit tantrum about it)
basically the Romans did not INVENT toxic masculinity but they did perfect it and raise it to an art form. absolute slapstick comedy clown shit. Don't kiss your wife in public, that's gay. Don't fuck too much. Don't fuck too little. Don't fuck other men's wives. Don't chase pussy. Don't be too fashionable, don't be too unfashionable, don't belt your toga too tightly, don't scratch your nose in public, DEFINITELY do not be an actor, do not play music or dance in public. You can be an orator but that's still a bit sus tbh, because it's LIKE performing in public like an actor, and that's BASICALLY the same as prostituting yourself. Don't comb your hair too much. don't comb your hair too little. Don't be unkempt. Don't be too well-groomed.
[holds up the viri proudly like a naughty cat, stinky bastard man] they are making themselves miserable every day of their lives and that's one of my favorite things to watch a man do <3333 read my book. look at it on kickstarter
this is sincerely only scraping the surface of Roman gender nonsense and how absolutely fucked up these guys were. And i CANNOT get into stuff like how manumission (an enslaved person being voluntarily given freedom) was treated with rituals and attitudes that kinda make it feel like a gender transition process (you get new social roles, you get new expectations, you are washed clean of any "necessary shame" you might have had to endure, a sharp line is drawn between your old life and your new life). I also can't get into the Twink Genders right now or this will be impossibly long (twink is a roman gender, and there are multiple sub-genders under the twink gender umbrella ("puer" "exoletus" "pathicus/cinaedus" etc))
and you thought having a lot of genders was a new modern thing. no no. lol. lmao even. go read Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity, it will give you SO many more cool facts about these fucked up lil guys if you don't want to wait for my book (though the author, a presumably cis man writing in i believe 1994 doesn't have the "ohhhh wait this is GENDER, this is ALL GENDER, this is just GENDERS ALL THE WAY DOWN" epiphany that i, a nonbinary person on tumblr in 2026, am predisposed to perceive)
people should also ask me about the Latin Fuck Verbs sometime.
I have explained about the Latin Fuck Verbs in a second post now 🫡https://www.tumblr.com/ariaste/814238044071854080/please-explain-the-latin-fuck-words-for-science?source=share
“Leonard Nimoy, who played the most famous TV scientist of all time, Mr. Spock, came from an arts and theater background and in real life is nothing like his character. Yet he told me that because Mr. Spock and “Star Trek” have inspired so many young viewers to become scientists, researchers who meet him are always desperate to give him lab tours and explain the projects they’re pursuing in peer-to-peer terms. Mr. Nimoy nods sagely and intones to each one, ‘Well, it certainly looks like you’re headed in the right direction.’”
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I actually think it’s a tragedy for English literature that the inexorable march of time has erased all traces of the Lord of the Rings/Pride and Prejudice crossover fic that was written by the teenage Terry Pratchett.
Y’all haven’t heard about the time Terry Pratchett wrote Lord of the Rings/Pride and Prejudice crossover fic?
[Relevant section: “Before I’d even heard the word ‘fandom’ I was writing weird fan fiction. I wrote a crossover story setting Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in Middle-earth; the rest of the kids loved it, becaues a class of thirteen-year-old boys with volcanic acne and groinal longings is not best placed to appreciate Miss Austen’s fine prose. It was a really good bit when the orcs attacked the rectory…”]
every day i learn more about this man against my will and every day i am more and more obsessed. thank you to my mom for raising me on tiffany aching and UA so that i turned out to be the worlds biggest discworld freak.
