The potency of the eunuch
Daisy Dunn
Wednesday, 14th December 2011
http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/blog/7483403/the-potency-of-the-eunuch.thtmlIn the interest of the general reader, however, the focus of Berry's book is not so much Tenducci's operatic career, but rather the saucy scandals in which he became embroiled in late Georgian England. Drawing on sources as diverse as Aristotle, Galen, and eighteenth-century female novelists, Berry illuminates why a eunuch like Tenducci could prove sexually attractive to women in this period. Since castration was thought to have made men 'colder', and thence more effeminate, they seemingly struck a less threatening chord with genteel women than their testosterone-bristling counterparts.
She adduces some intriguing arguments for why highborn women should have professed love to eunuchs at all. Since these men could not fulfill full sexual arousal, she suggests, they offered women a loophole to the prevailing sexual double standard of the time — an affair without the consequences of pregnancy or legitimate charge of adultery.
