The potency of the eunuch

‘Castrati were even said to know the ‘secret des Lesbiennes’ when it came to giving women sexual pleasure, cheerfully making up for their cruel loss with improvised dildos made of wax.’

Helen Berry’s The Castrato and His Wife, a broadly biographical study of a castrated Italian opera singer named Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci, describes the sexual potency a eunuch could pose, or at least be considered to pose, in eighteenth-century England. While castrati (castrated men) were hardly rare in Italy at this date — it was estimated that 4,000 Italian boys were castrated each year to keep their voices juvenile for operatic training — in London they remained a curious, if not entirely rare, exotic import. Samuel Pepys wrote that he did not ‘dote of the Eunuchs’. For other Englishmen, and even more so Englishwomen, however, they were a source of fascination and were often considered with high regard.