Talk:Pigache

Rephrasing necessary?

As detailed at length in the archive, the version of the WP:DYK hook for this page that was edited and promoted to the front page eventually got pulled from the front page for a gestalt of poor wording, WP:UNDUE prurience / focus on homosexuality, and questions about if the WP:RS backed up the point or were being used in an overly WP:SYNTHy way. (a) If it was bad enough to pull, I've gone ahead and moved the DYK header to that archive to remove focus from it while keeping the record. (b) Most of the issues were about the hook's (re)phrasing and about the fact it wasn't explicitly phrased the same way in the article. The reviewer and promoter didn't mind, but enough editors subsequently did. Since the DYK is over, those points are fairly moot now. (c) The objections that are still important for the article as it stands involve

1) Whether the phrasing is unhelpfully ambiguous or confusing to modern readers.

The sources use phrasing involving the (semi)ambiguous term sodomy and the (unambiguous) term catamite. Since that's what's in the sources, I'm for keeping them in the article in place of "homosexual" or other 21st century rebrandings. Some people obviously disagree and we could have a consensus form to rephrase or to add a {{efn}} or something to provide context.

2) The other objections involve this sentence:

Orderic blamed the spread as caused by and contributing to the effeminate men (effeminati) and "foul catamites" (foedi catamitae) involved in the royal courts of Europe,[17] while simultaneously describing how most courtiers adopted the fashion to "seek the favors of women with every kind of lewdness".[22][23]

Myself and several of the editors involved view this phrasing as supported by Orderic, William, and Guibert; the church's pearl-clutching approach to the problem; and the secondary sources covering them. Based on the discussion about the hook, other editors like Sojourner in the earth object to the contributing to ... and ... part of that sentence. Orderic certainly does state the fashion—along with others like longer hair and more comfortable clothes—contributed to effeminacy but, particularly in light of Mills going out his way to hedge Orderic's complaint, those editors feel he's complaining that there happened to be a lot of gays enjoying the situation created by the new fashions rather than feeling that their numbers grew in any way as a result. (SotE, is that a fair read?)

In any case, even though everyone agrees there was a moral panic going on within the church and among the ecclesiastical historians, we might need to rephrase that bit or find more bulletproof sourcing for that part of the point. — LlywelynII 08:14, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

I'll try and explain my position by way of an analogy. Imagine an author in the 1950s writes: "These rock'n'roll musicians are corrupting public morals. The youth of today wear leather jackets, ride motorbikes, and vandalize public property." To me, your reading of Orderic is equivalent to saying "So-and-so believes that leather jackets contribute to juvenile delinquency", whereas I would interpret my hypothetical passage to mean that leather jackets and delinquency are symptoms of the same problem, not that the one is the cause of the other.

Here's how I understand the various terms in use here (based on what I've read since I saw the hook, as I've no prior knowledge of the subject). Catamites are men who have sex with men; that much, as you say, is unambiguous. Sodomites, for these medieval authors, are people who engage in "deviant" sexual behaviour, including but not limited to homosexuality. Effeminites are people who dress and behave in a certain way, but who do not necessarily engage in any non-standard sexual practices.

So it seems to me that Orderic starts off by describing the shoes, and says that they encouraged a new fashion among "frivolous men"; specifically, the fashion of wearing pulley-shoes. Then he says that the fashion spread to the nobility, and explains this by observing that effeminates (presumably identical with the "frivolous men") were the trend-setters of the time. Then he adds that because effeminacy was in fashion, catamites and sodomites were able to pursue their interests "unrestrainedly" and "shamelessly". This is something of a side-comment, and I don't think it means that he thought all effeminates were catamites. I don't see Mills as hedging but merely trying to explain this point.

In terms of how to phrase this in the article, my concerns would be addressed by the removal of the words and contributing to, or the removal of the words and "foul catamites" (foedi catamitae). I say or because I don't have any problem with saying that the shoes contributed to the spread of effeminacy; this is a plausible reading of Orderic and it's how Mills reads it. To return to my original analogy, we might say that the popularity of leather jackets helped the spread of the greaser subculture, but since not all greasers are vandals, we wouldn’t be able to say that leather jackets caused people to vandalize. In the same way, I don't think we have grounds to say that Orderic believed that pulley-shoes caused homosexuality, only that the two things were part of the same cultural trend. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 10:30, 15 August 2023 (UTC)