Недооформленный пост для себя - потому что не забочусь о читателях.
(c) Пьер Леоне Гецци, карикатура "Кастрат Фаринелли в роли женщины"
Some male commentators satirized castrati as effeminate, with the intention of making them as powerless in social and political terms as
women were supposed to be at this time. In theory at least, castrati were not allowed to desire women, nor were they thought to have any
sexual feelings towards them. However, the eighteenth-century press enjoyed spreading rumours that castrati were not really what they
purported to be. As far as gender went, many questioned they were men at all, but neither could they occupy some indeterminate sex or
gender of their own. Society depended upon the binary division of man/woman, male/female, so castrati were routinely suspected of in
fact being either biologically female, or ‘intact’ men fully in possession of their genitalia. Farinelli, for example, was at one time rumoured to
be pregnant, and to be masquerading as male only to conceal his/her licentious sexual behaviour. The anonymous author of an obscene
poem on this subject invited further fantasies: the author envisaged which groups in society would be most dismayed by the discovery that
Farinelli was really a woman. In one camp was ‘Clarinda’, an archetypal frustrated female fan, who loved the castrato because he did not
threaten her with pregnancy, and was therefore dismayed to find the object of her love was not in fact male (‘Her lovely Eunuch to a Woman
turn’d, | For whose secure Embrace so long she’s burn’d!’). Such women who preferred castrati, the author suggested, ‘refus’d athousand filthy Men’,
because they did not have the stomach for a relationship with ‘real’ members of the opposite sex. Their only other options for physical gratification were with their
‘beastly’ lap-dogs, or with a lesbian lover (hence ‘Clarinda’ could ‘only stroke her Parrots and her Cats, | Or else with Squire JENNY play at f—s [flats]’,
a coded reference to lesbian sex, which would have been well known to consumers of eighteenth-century erotica).In the other camp of disappointed fans
were decadent men like ‘Lord Epicene’, dedicated to sensual pleasures including lust for members of their own sex. The shock of Farinelli’s alleged pregnancy
was that these men had been lavishing presents, not upon a male beloved, but upon a ‘girl’. Such men, of ‘new-improv’d, uncommon Views’, it was said
‘Are fainting, dying at this fatal News’. Other commentators at the time may have accepted that Farinelli was not a woman, but neither was he regarded as fully male.
In the face of so much female adoration, one male author wrote urging Farinelli: ‘Exert thy Reason | like a Man appear’.
In similar vein to Farinelli’s suspected pregnancy, Senesino (Farinelli’s contemporary) was rumoured not to have been castrated at all,
but to have been an unscrupulous and fully functional Lothario who took advantage of his ‘safe’ reputation as a castrato to inveigle himself
into private sexual liaisons with numerous women. Senesino, one author claimed, ‘is no more an Eunuch than Sir Robert Walpole’.
Warming to his theme, the author continued in gossipy fashion, ‘nay, I am told, there are no less than four of the waiting Girls at the Opera now pregnant by him.’
"The Castrato and His Wife" Helen Berry - Oxford University Press, 2011 - p. 84
Еще одна карикатура, показывающая маленькую, по сравнению с не переставшим вовремя расти телом, голову Фаринелли
www.magnoliabox.com/art/669182/thou-tuneful-sca...
Эта же черта, высмеиваемая в облике Сенесино
www.magnoliabox.com/art/559847/berenstat-cuzzon...