Farrelly – Wax or be damned
The rise of the pretty boy makes Elizabeth Farrelly wonder where have all the real men gone?
In the ancient cult of the earth goddess Cybele Mater Magna, young male devotees would fall into a frenzy, grab a sword and, in a dramatic public gesture, emasculate themselves.
Some versions have the freshly made castrati run through the streets, choosing the family whose honour it will be to support them by tossing their severed gonads onto the doorstep. But what is generally agreed, from Ovid to Lucretius to Catullus to Pausanius, is that the now genderless youths, known as galli (or, in Greek, galloi) lived and dressed thereafter as women, becoming Cybele’s priestesses, presiding at her worship and at ritual orgies in her honour.
This story might have nothing more than shock value, were it not for the obvious and unexplained feminisation of contemporary men. As Mal Meninga noted with disgust after a recent bloke-survey, “the nation’s iconic hard Aussie blokes are a dying breed. We’ve become a nation of pansies.”