Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing

by Melissa Mohr

  In English, we don’t really have a swearword for the clitoris. There’s clit, but it’s just not that offensive, and it is rarely used. If you call someone a clit, you’ll probably get puzzled laughter, or even a pitying look. Perhaps English-speaking women should be insulted that clitface and clit for brains are more funny than shocking, that the clitoris doesn’t register high enough in the cultural consciousness to deserve its own swearword.

  I don’t mean to portray the Romans either as medical experts or as proto-Casanovas who devoted their time to unlocking the sexual secrets of the female body. They were plenty misinformed about sex and about women. They believed, for example, that women provided the “matter” during conception, and men the “form.” Women were the “dirt,” according to the Greek authority on everything, Aristotle; men planted the “seed.” And bodies were regulated by a balance of four humors. Men were hot and dry; women were cold and wet. This theory of humors is critical to understanding Roman views of sexuality. The boundary between male and female was not as fixed as it is today. If a woman “heated up,” she could become a man; if a man “cooled down,” he could become a woman. Tribades, then, were women who had gotten hotter, drying their “natural” moisture, and causing their clitoris to grow until it became like a penis. Today, people can change sex completely through surgery, or partly through hormones or cross-dressing. But it is hard, requiring money and determination. In ancient Rome, it was easy—too easy, it was feared. Hang around females too long, spend time playing the lyre instead of performing the military exercises that burned off moisture and kept your temperature up, and you just might find yourself turning into a woman.

  Landica and futuo are words that on one level are very similar to their English counterparts. The Latin f-word means the same thing and is of the same register as the English one, and it is possible at least to imagine an English in which clit is a swearword like cock and dick, since it too is a direct word for a body part in a taboo zone. But the words also reveal some differences, particularly in the way Romans thought about the role of women during sex, and about the physiology that helped to determine that role.

  Now we come to the really strange words, ones we don’t have in English, or ones that are so different from their English equivalents that they are hardly recognizable. These words reveal fundamental differences in the way Romans thought about sexuality, masculinity, power, and the concept of obscenity itself.

  irrumo = to suck in

  pedico = ?

  —Thomas Thomas, Dictionarium, 1587

  The Latin word for man is vir, but in Rome this was not merely an indication of biological sex. Vir carried with it a set of cultural expectations of what “real men” should be. Viri were freeborn citizens, exercised strong self-control, and tried to dominate others, particularly through sexual penetration. (Think twice if ever someone should praise you as “virtuous.”) Men who didn’t fulfill these social criteria were called homines (a neutral word, without the glory of vir) or, especially in the case of slaves, pueri (which literally means “boys”).

  What a man did sexually played a large role in whether he was a vir, but whom he did it with didn’t matter at all. Our categories of “heterosexual” and “homosexual” were meaningless in Rome. It was assumed that “normal” men would want to sleep with women, boys, and sometimes adult men, and that each type of partner provided different pleasures and problems. What a man did with these various partners was the key thing. He must always be the active, penetrating one. He must never allow someone else to penetrate him—that would make him soft (molles), effeminate, less than a man.

  The Latin vocabulary that developed around this sexual schema is all about the penetration of orifices. Futuo could be translated more literally as “to penetrate a vagina.” Pedicare means “to penetrate an anus.” Nothing in the verb specifies whether the anus belongs to a male or to a female—both possibilities were open to a vir, though the anuses of boys were generally considered more desirable. An epigram of Martial makes this vividly clear:

  Catching me with a boy, wife, you upbraid me harshly and point out that you too have an arse [culum]. How often did Juno say the same to her wanton Thunderer! Nonetheless he lies with strapping Ganymede. The Tirynthian used to lay aside his bow and bend Hylas over: do you think Megara had no buttocks? Fugitive Daphne tormented Phoebus: but the Oebalian boy bade those flames vanish. Though Briseis often lay with her back to Aeacus’s son, his smooth friend was closer to him. So kindly don’t give masculine names to your belongings, wife, and think of yourself as having two cunts [cunnos].

  The wife is upset that her husband is unfaithful, not that he is what we today would call “gay.” He is not gay—the category “gay” did not exist in ancient Rome, in which there were no “gay” men as we know them. Berate him though his wife does for going outside the marriage, the husband’s desires are perfectly normal—most men wanted to sleep with both women and boys. She tells her husband that if he wants pedicare, he can do her, but he refuses, citing the examples of gods and heroes (Jupiter, Hercules, Apollo, and Achilles—not such shabby company) who have preferred their boy lovers to their wives in this respect. The poem ends with a cutting rebuke—the wife should not even use the word culus (ass) when referring to herself. Her ass is so different from, and inferior to, a boy’s that she should instead say she has two cunts.

  The verb irrumare involves pretty much the only other orifice available—it means “to penetrate the mouth.” Irrumo is a bit different from the other verbs because, as we’ve seen, it usually carries a threat of violence. You might do it for pleasure, but part of that pleasure would be in humiliating the man you are forcing into fellatio. (You might also irrumate a woman or a boy, but in written records, adult men are usually the target.) Where we today would very likely use some form of fuck to threaten or insult someone, Romans would have used irrumare. (We do have the option of suck my dick, but in English this lacks the connotations of violence and domination carried by the Latin word. It is more of an obnoxious invitation, less of a threat.) There’s a graffito in Ostia, a port town near Rome, that uses irrumo this way. It appears in a room that scholars think was a taberna (a small shop that sold drinks and food) in ancient times, whose owners made the interesting aesthetic choice to decorate with a bathroom theme: on the walls were paintings of people on latrines, accompanied by slogans such as “Push hard, you’ll be finished more quickly.” One of these slogans is Bene caca et irrumo medicos—“Shit well and fuck [irrumate] the doctors.”

  The poet Catullus assails some of his critics with irrumo too. Catullus was accused of effeminacy because he wrote about dalliances with women, the delights of long afternoons spent in bed, rather than about war or farming like the more manly Virgil. He asserts his impugned masculinity with a verbal attack, beginning one poem: Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo, “I will bugger you and make you suck me.” Threatening to stick his penis into the assholes and mouths of other men is supposed to prove that he is a real man. Displaying too much interest in sex with women, in contrast, is what got him accused of effeminacy in the first place.

  Two of the “Seven Sages” who decorated a tavern in Ostia and entertained drinkers with their advice about excretion: “Solon rubbed his belly to shit well” (on left) and “Thales recommends that if you have a hard time shitting you should strain” (on right).

  Decimus Valerius Asiaticus provides a similar defense of his masculinity. This distinguished nobleman was falsely accused of a litany of crimes and moral failings by Publius Suillius Rufus, a crony of the empress Messalina, in AD 47. Asiaticus refused to answer any of the false charges until his honor was stained with an allegation of “softness of body”—effeminacy. Then he scornfully replied, “Suillius, cross-examine your sons: they will testify that I am a man” (interroga, Suilli, filios tuos: virum esse me fatebuntur). The proof that he is not effeminate, not perverted—that he is a real man—is that he has sodomized the sons of his accuser.

  Scholars refer
to the model of masculinity embodied in these verbs (futuo, pedico, and irrumo) as “priapic,” after the garden god Priapus. Priapus was happy to use his giant, always erect penis to penetrate women, boys, or men, for pleasure, certainly, but also to establish who was boss. Integral to this priapic model of sexuality is the idea of sex as domination, as a means of exercising control. This is not to say that individuals didn’t have tender, loving sexual relations, but that in the wider cultural paradigm, sex was about power. Many epigrams from the Priapea, the collection of poetry dedicated to the god, show this fusion of sex and domination. One poem has Priapus addressing potential thieves: “I warn you, boy, you will be buggered; girl, you will be fucked; a third penalty awaits the bearded thief” (Percidere, puer, moneo; futuere, puella; barbatum furem tertia poena manet). Percido literally means “to hit”—this was vulgar slang for pedicatio (anal sex). The third penalty refers to irrumatio, the proper way to have sex with adult men. On one level, this epigram is a joke—it is supposed to be spoken by an effigy of the god as he stands in a garden to protect it, and there is little he can actually do to effect his threats. On another, though, it is a very serious illustration of a very Roman idea about sexuality: that sex and aggression, sex and domination, sex and power are joined and cannot be put asunder.

  Not all men, of course, enjoyed subjugating all these partners equally, as Priapus does. Virgil, whose virile verse was the model for generations of poets, was more inclined to boys (libidinis in pueros pronioris); Ovid preferred women. In his Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), Ovid reveals that “I hate those embraces in which both partners do not consummate; that is why boys please me but little.” But these are just preferences, not exclusive sexual orientations. Virgil and Ovid slept both with men and with women; they just preferred one sex over another. You might say that they were on different ends of the Roman sexual spectrum, but still within the “normal” range. Sometimes, though, someone comes along whose inclinations are so strange that Latin lacks words for them. The emperor Claudius was, as the historian Suetonius writes, “of an extreme lust towards women, completely lacking in experience of males” (libidinis in feminas profusissimae, marum omnino expers). Suetonius is flummoxed by what we today would call a heterosexual—he has no vocabulary to describe a man who is attracted sexually only to women. He does not see this as a good thing, incidentally. His description of Claudius’s habits comes in a long list of his faults, from gluttony—he would eat so much that he would pass out, and his attendants would make him vomit with a feather—and a gambling addiction to a “cruel and bloodthirsty disposition.”

  If a vir’s desires were as catholic as those of Priapus, he could sleep with a large proportion of Roman society. Not everyone, however, was fair game. It was immoral, and illegal, to sleep with freeborn women (except one’s wife), freeborn boys, or freeborn men. They possessed what was called pudicitia, roughly translated as “modesty,” which meant, in practice, the right not to be penetrated. Having sex with them was stuprum, punishable by banishment, loss of property, and loss of certain legal rights. Only slaves, freedmen and women, and prostitutes (who might have once been free but had fallen on hard times) could be solicited without censure. “Only,” though, was a large proportion of the population—25 to 40 percent of people were slaves in the Roman Empire, and probably an equal percentage were the freed slaves known as liberti.

  Romans were especially concerned that no one should commit stuprum with freeborn boys. Boys of this class wore special clothing, the toga praetexta (a white toga with a purple border), to mark them out as future viri. When they were in the public baths, they wore a necklace called a bulla, which often featured one or two of those phallus-shaped fascini, to signify their status while naked. This is in direct contrast to the Greeks, whose attitude to sexuality was generally quite similar to the Romans’, except where pederasty was concerned. The Greeks saw pederasty as a rite of passage, the way a boy became a man. An older man (the erastes, “lover”) would choose a boy between twelve and seventeen as his eromenos (beloved). He acted as mentor, teaching the boy about arete, the Greek manly virtues, including courage, strength, fairness, and honesty. The Greeks appear to have been a bit conflicted about this, both idealizing the pederastic bond and also trying to regulate just what lovers were allowed to do with each other. No penetration was supposed to occur, for example. The erastes was supposed to limit himself to intercrural (between the thighs) intercourse, as shown on any number of Greek vases.

  The Romans saw no dilemma. They were sure that pederasty with slaves was right and with freeborn boys was wrong. Penetration would destroy a boy’s pudicitia, making it impossible for him to develop into a vir, into a useful citizen of Rome.

  cinaedus = one abused against nature, past all shame, a wanton dancer, also a fish

  catamitus = a boy hired to bee abused contrarie to nature, a Ganymede*

  —John Rider, Riders Dictionarie, 1626

  Romans had nothing but derogatory words for men or boys who allowed themselves to be penetrated, and two of the worst were catamitus and cinaedus. These are Greek loanwords, suggesting that penetrated men were thought to be not just less manly but less than fully Roman, practicing what the culture would have preferred to see as “foreign” vices.

  As with stereotypes of gay men today, cinaedi were supposed to have distinctive, feminine mannerisms. They took too much care over their appearance, depilating their legs, chests, and other parts of their bodies, anointing themselves with sweet-smelling lotions, and applying makeup. They sometimes wore women’s clothing, and performed female activities such as spinning wool. Scipio Aemilianus, a famous general of the Republic who presided over the destruction of Carthage (a “real” man, in other words), described what he saw as the disgusting habits of cinaedi: “a man who daily is adorned before his mirror, covered with perfumes, whose eyebrows are shaven, who walks around with his beard plucked out and his thighs depilated … who wore a long-sleeved tunic.” The long-sleeved tunic was a Greek fashion and would have prevented the wearer from being scratched by the rough hairshirt-esque wool of his toga. Manly Roman men toughed it out with only a short-sleeved tunic under their togas, or better yet, nothing.

  The most surefire way to identify a cinaedus, however, was that he “scratched his head with one finger.” It seems to me that scholars have enjoyed themselves mightily figuring out what this means. Some believe that the finger in question must have been the middle one, the digitus impudicus, already known as a sign of aggression and disrespect, from its resemblance to the erect penis. The cinaedus scratched his head with it to broadcast his desires to others in the know. Other scholars argue that the gesture is simply effeminate, that the cinaedus was so concerned about his coiffure that he wouldn’t risk disturbing it by scratching with more than one digit. The finger aside, Romans had a stereotype of the effeminate man that in many ways resembles the one we have today.

  The cinaedus or catamitus is not “gay,” though, however much he may look it. He is passive. He does not penetrate, the only “normal” thing for a man to do, so now all bets are off. Romans thought him likely to indulge in all sorts of head-scratchingly deviant behavior, with men and with women alike.

  fello = to suck

  lingo cunnum = ?

  —Thomas Thomas, Dictionarium, 1587

  Now we come finally to the worst of the worst, the most obscene, most offensive things you could say in Latin. The worst insult you could throw at a Roman was that he practiced cunnum lingere. This was deemed the most twisted of all deviant behaviors, the very height of abnormality. Following close upon it on the list of things virtuous Romans didn’t do was fellatio, and to be called a fellator was almost as bad as to be accused of cunnilingus.* What was so wrong with performing oral sex in the Roman Empire that it gave rise to the worst of Latin insults? Rome had a strong taboo against oral-genital contact (unless you were on the receiving end). Oral sex befouled the mouth, the “most sacred part of the body.” A mouth that has perfor
med oral sex was dirtier than the genitals themselves, more shameful even than those parts perverted by penetration. An epigram by Martial sums up this attitude, prevalent in Roman discourse: “Zoilus, you spoil the bathtub washing your arse. To make it filthier, Zoilus, stick your head in it.”

  Both performing fellatio and being anally penetrated were deviant (passive) sexual behaviors, but it was worse to fellate someone. Martial makes this point too:

  You sleep with well-endowed boys, Phoebus, and what stands on them doesn’t stand for you. Phoebus, I ask you, what do you wish me to suspect? I wanted to believe you a soft man, but rumor denies that you are a cinaedus.

  Phoebus is soft (mollis)—effeminate, passive—and his penis is not erect, so he can’t be a fututor, pedico, or irrumator (a penetrator of vaginas, anuses, or mouths, respectively). Nor is he a cinaedus (“pansy,” also a fish). There is only one thing left—he must be a fellator, even lower on what we might call the scale of humiliation.

  A man who performs fellatio is not “gay”—he is just as likely to lingere cunnum. These acts are two sides of the same coin: “They are twin brothers, but they lick different groins. Say, are they more like or unlike?” These are both passive sexual activities—neither the fellator nor the cunnilingus is penetrating anyone. As we’ve seen, a normal, “active” man will desire to penetrate women, boys, and men; a man who enjoys a “passive” activity such as fellatio will be passive with respect to women too, and to be passive with respect to women means to perform cunnilingus.

  The flip side of fellatio is irrumatio—that is what the fellator’s active partner is doing. But what is the flip side of cunnilingus? What is the woman doing? In Roman culture, women were supposed to be sexually passive by nature. They don’t have penises and so can’t penetrate anyone (except the tribades, of course). With cunnilingus, the man is taking the passive role, so the woman must in some sense be taking the active role, performing the female equivalent of irrumatio. She is fucking the man in his mouth. This was horrifying to ancient Romans for two reasons. It was “unnatural”—women were not supposed to be the active partners, even by implication. And it was completely emasculating. It was bad enough for a Roman man to be penetrated by another man, but by a woman—that was shame almost not to be borne, and too powerful an insult to pass up.