xunxar 
biclaudia Follow
xunxar [21:50] fair trade tin hat factory: is this a safe space
[21:50] noorth by northwest: Yes of course
[21:50] fair trade tin hat factory: ok great
[21:51] fair trade tin hat factory: so you know how daniel keeps bringing up how armand is super tall. and like. physically effeminate.
[21:51] noorth by northwest: Yyyyyyyyyes?
[21:53] fair trade tin hat factory: i keep coming back to this barbaro diary and thinking about “his kind…were accustomed to use, like women”, which could mean nothing! it could just be racist! but a 6ft+ beardless and long-limbed indian guy sold into sex slavery as a child in the muslim world at the turn of the 16th century is… kind of giving eunuch, isn’t it?
[21:57] noorth by northwest: Oh
[21:57] noorth by northwest: Oh no
[21:57] fair trade tin hat factory: yeah
[21:58] noorth by northwest: I’m never going to be able to unsee this now Marina
[22:04] noorth by northwest: …how functional do you think he is? Some eunuchs could sustain erections
[22:06] fair trade tin hat factory: GOOD QUESTION. i guess we know he isn’t null bc of marius. thx marius
[22:06] noorth by northwest: :/
[22:07] fair trade tin hat factory: “blood fat cocks” = at least a semi? louis WHY didnt u give us a guided tour of your boyfriend’s dick
[22:07] noorth by northwest: Too busy making fang size metaphors tbh
biclaudia
wait, sorry, explain to me like i’m 5 why armand being tall would be evidence he’s a eunuch. wouldn’t that make you shorter?
xunxar
great question! prepubescent or midpubescent castration interrupts the signals that your body typically gets during puberty that tells your growth plates to fuse, so eunuchs were known for being very tall (often in excess of 180cm, which was much less common historically because difficulty meeting nutritional needs leads to stunted growth) and long-limbed, along with other physical traits depending on the age at which they were castrated! prepubescent castration is associated with narrow shoulders and wide hips, midpubescent with broad (masculinized) shoulders but wide hips. eunuchs also tend to have a typically “feminine” weight distribution, with fat sticking to the thighs and lower belly. this is sometimes accompanied by breast development.
everyone’s body is different, so these aren’t hard and fast rules, and it’s also definitely not impossible for a non-eunuch to have hit Armand’s approximately 182cm (6’) even in the medieval period… buuuuuut even today the average height in Delhi for men is 165cm (5’5”) with only 1% of people breaking 182cm, and it certainly seems reasonable to assume an enslaved child would have experienced periods of malnourishment!
slave-purchasing manuals tend to apply broad strokes racial/ethnic stereotyping about what purpose a particular enslaved person should be set to, and Indians and Nubians are identified by Egyptian writers of our period as well-suited to the “production” of eunuchs; meanwhile, Indian writers and foreigners describing their travels in India, including Marco Polo (“all those who are taken prisoner by [Indian merchants] are straight away castrated, then sold”), describe a thriving industry in eunuch-making, including the abduction of freeborn Indian children for the purpose of castrating them. “intact” Indian children were known to be cheap, while eunuchs sold at a high premium, so there might have been economic factors at play in why this was such a strong market
and you totally didn’t ask but while we’re at it, three “types” of eunuchs were “produced” in India during our period, called by Abul Fazl (1551–1602) sandali (sandalwood), badami (almond), and kafuri (camphor). sandali are “total” castrates, that is, they’ve undergone both orchiectomy and penectomy. with badami “part of the penis was left functioning”, which is not well explained but I suspect means orchiectomy without penectomy, because with kafuri the testes are crushed or twisted so that they are destroyed without being removed (a method of eunuch-making that was developed in Imperial Rome to slip through a loophole in the criminalization of more traditional castration methods). if Armand is actually a eunuch we could rule out sandali thanks to Claudia and a few portraits likely of Amadeo with clearly visible, circumcised(!) phallus, but afaik there aren’t any paintings that could confirm or deny the presence of balls. (what a sentence.)
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