In our culture, the most degrading thing you can do to another man is to violate him sexually–to render him helpless and vulnerable and powerless. The goal is to make him unmanly, in the stereotypical sense, and in fact to reduce him—symbolically—to something even lower in the hierarchy: a woman.
Who Me? I Couldn’t Be Homophobic, I Live in a Blue State! | The Body and the Brood
The Vikings had this concept called ergi (“unmanliness”), which was a SRS BIZNESS flavor of nīþ (“shame”/”taboo”); SRS BIZNESS as in “you could kill someone for accusing you of it”.
One of the key criteria for being argr (“unmanly”) was participating as the penetrated partner in sex; that was “women’s work”, not for men. I use the term “participating” generously, because the Vikings were also into shaming their defeated enemies — both men and women — sexually, by which of course I mean raping them. Being raped wouldn’t save a man from being considered a nīðing (as far as I can tell, the similarity between nīðing and “nothing” are etymologically coincidental, which is almost a shame).
Of course — because drag jokes are apparently timeless — most of the main male gods also frequently got up to acts of ergi: Thor cross-dressed; Odin practiced women’s magic (seiðr); and Loki mothered children, amongst other things.
This all being around circa 800 CE, I guess you could say there’s nothing new under Yggdrasil. Shame we apparently haven’t made any real progress in the last twelve hundred-odd years.
Source: bodyandbrood.com
