Nicole Orsini
Men Acting like Women: Threat to Masculinity in Juvenal’s Satire 6
A great source of strife and anxiety to men, since the beginning of time, has been threats to their masculinity. Men are taught to be as masculine as possible because being effeminate is one of the most humiliating things that could happen to a man; they have to be as far from any womanly traits as they possibly can be. When a man’s masculinity is threatened, he immediately becomes aggressive, as is the case in Juvenal’s Satire 6. In this specific satire, Juvenal addresses how threatening an independent, educated woman is to a man, and how the man immediately resorts to insults when he feels as if a woman is acting outside of her feminine boundaries. Therefore, Juvenal’s satire is not merely criticizing female bodies, but male ones as well. Juvenal attacks the lack of men who are masculine inside and out through his outwards attack on over-educated women. In this paper, I will address how Juvenal’s Satire 6 is actually about effeminate men bred through a lack of virility in 2nd century Rome, and not just a woman’s sex drive.
First, we have to establish what Juvenal believes gives a man virility. Throughout his Satire’s he continuously refers to the good old days of Rome when men were actually men, when “proximus urbi / Hannibal et stantes Collina turre mariti” (6.290-291). During these warlike times, men were overly aggressive and powerful, but in Juvenal’s 2nd century Rome, men were becoming increasingly more feminine. He characterizes these men in terms associated with females, therefore further removing them from the idealistic version of a man and is “stigmatized and incurred the shame of being subordinate (and thus effeminized)” (Gold 378). Juvenal’s satires, therefore, build off of this lack of masculinity. Because men “fear feminization above all humiliations” (Foley 10), his attack on virility is especially traumatizing and powerful. So, Juvenal believes that the ideal, masculine man is aggressive and unconcerned with anything but war, and anything less begins to drift into femininity.
Juvenal makes it obvious in his Satire 6 that the increase in luxury and a long peace in Rome had made its inhabitants weak and not as warlike and aggressive as Romans should be. He believes that “nunc patimur longae pacis mala, saevior armis / luxuria incubuit” (6.292-293), that the Romans are suffering from their long peace and that the presence of luxury is worse for the Romans than wartime. Juvenal also mentions that “turpi fregerunt saecula luxu / diutiae molles” (6.299-300), that the wealth of Rome had made his generation weak. In a satire about women, these lines seem to attack the lack of masculinity in Rome. His anxieties are seemingly about men’s sexual inadequacies and “the breaking down of the neat, clear code system that purportedly existed back in the days of the Punic wars” (Gold 382), more so than the longstanding promiscuity of women that has always played a major role in Roman literature. Also stemming from this breakdown of Roman morals and masculine superiority is a “failure of Romanness, or even a profound doubt about how valid such concepts were in the first place” (Nappa 130). The collapse of the robust Roman man was the collapse of Roman values, and Juvenal feared this deeply.
Next, we have to establish the good old days Juvenal continuously reminisces for. Back in these times when “nec vitiis contingi parva sinebant / tecta” (6.298-299), when their small houses and modest lifestyles did not allow for pleasure or sin. In 2nd century Rome, the line between masculine and feminine activities began to blur as men had less war to focus on and homelier business to attend to. This meant that a man’s conventional aggressiveness was no longer suitable to the modern lifestyle, and they become “defined by their bodies and their sexuality – normally female attributes – and not by their social status as Roman male citizens” (Gold 381). Once Roman poverty was no longer an issue and luxury was the norm, “nullum crimen abest facinusque libidinis” (6.294), and many men were a part of these crimes of lust. These men, who seemed to have fluidity in their gender, were condemned by Juvenal because they did not evoke the image of a “real man” that was present in early Republican Rome. And as these types of men became more and more prevalent in late empirical Rome, “their disgrace not only shows them individual for what they are, it also taints everyone else” (Nappa 124-125). Even though Satire 6 focuses on the unbounding lust of modern women, it also critiques the destruction of the true Roman man after modernity.
Furthermore, Juvenal attacks the inadequacy of men through the presence of higher-educated women. This type of woman challenges a man’s authority, making herself more present and more important through her education, and making “cedunt grammatici, vincuntur rhetores” (6.438). Throughout this section of Satire 6, Juvenal says that the woman might as well be a man because she acts like one, which is also an attack on masculinity. This example of an educated woman being criticized for being smarter than a man is a “displacement of male anxieties onto women” (Gold 382). Juvenal undermines a woman’s education, which he even says is more than he himself knows, by saying that “nec curanda viris” (6.455), what she knows is of no concern to a man. This in itself reveals a sense of masculine inadequacy, as the woman in this case is not inferior enough; women are not being attacked because of their “congenital unsuitability or inferiority in those subjects – rather, they should not be studying such things because of the embarrassment and annoyance they may cause their husbands” (Nappa 129). Juvenal is focusing on the fact that female empowerment is actually a threat to the real Roman man, who is now facing inferiority in areas he used to monopolize.
Above all else, Juvenal’s Satire’s were created as an attack against weak Roman men. Specifically, in Satire 6, the presence of women merely emphasizes the fragility of men. Juvenal praises the men of early Republican Rome and shames the effeminate men of late Rome, all under the guise of feminine satire. He attacks women and marriage not to criticize the two, but as a warning to men against marriage because their “vision of women and all that is associated with them presents a challenge to his manhood and even his selfhood” (Nappa 200). He blames women for ruining the institution of marriage because they are no longer choosing “real” Roman men; in this sense, women are stripping men of their masculinity, and therefore their identities. Juvenal saw women as a means of ruined masculinity, which was not only a threat to manhood, but to the Roman state itself and all that it stood for.
Works Cited
Foley, Helene P. “The ‘Female Intruder’ Reconsidered.” Classical Philology, vol. 77, no. 1, Jan.
1982, pp. 1-21.
Gold, Barbara K. “’The House I live in is Not My Own’: Women’s Bodies in Juvenal’s Satires.”
Arethusa, vol. 31, no. 3, 1998, pp. 369-386.
Juvenal, Satires. 2nd Century AD.
Nappa, Christopher. Making Men Ridiculous: Juvenal and the Anxieties of the Individual.
University of Michigan Press, 2018.