Female External Chastity Control in Roman Antiquity

[Robert Pinkerton]

In the thread Building CBs (several years ago at the now-defunct lockmeup.com site), Susan remarked en passant about the Belt in Roman antiquity. There are a few hints in the literature that external chastity control was practiced there. Unfortunately, "Roman antiquity" is a very broad time-frame, from the founding in 753 BCE to the tall of Trebizond (Trapezius), ca 1460 CE (?), some 2,213 years, and my sources do not narrow it down.

As to the Belt, Esar Levine (in his Chastity Belts, New York [Panurge: 1931], pp 42-43) quotes Pierre Pierrugues' Glossarium Eroticum Linguae Latinae in reference to a "modesty belt" for slave girls, calling it a subligar or subligaculum. (My old high school Latin dictionary said that a subligaculum was simply a breechclout, worn as we wear underwear today.) I recall a reference or two to the Belt in ancient Rome, in articles now lost from "mens'" magazines of the late 1950s and early 1960s, probably dubious at best, giving the impression of briefs or shorts of stout saddle leather laced skintight. Other than the Levine reference, I have found nothing else in the literature that I have. If anyone else here has a citation to something even partially solid, I would be delighted to see it.

As to (female) infibulation, Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine], by George Gould MD and Walter L. Pyle MD (originally Philadelphia: 1896; reprinted in facsimile by the Julian Press, third reprinting New York: 1962), page 753, definitely report its use for preservation of premarital virginity -- presumably in free daughters. Paolo Mantegazza, in his The Sexual Relations of Mankind, p. 117, says that ancient Romans used infibulation with actresses. In an article in a display magazine called Expose, a piercing personage in the BDSM/fetish-interest subculture, Fakir Musafar, said: "... Romans also infibulated most of their household slaves, female and male, and sometimes even their daughters if they were priestesses in the Temple of Diana." (October 1981. I assessed this C-: C for plausibility against the background of more solid sources; minus for debit against credibility inherent in the character of the source, a Flynt publication, hence presumably oriented toward blatancy and sensationalism.) Also see < http://www.bme.freeq.com/ritual/981115/slave.html >: This is not BDSM/fetish-interest quotation-marks "sadism," but outright sadism, over the top.

(One of the problems with material about external chastity control, that originates from the BDSM/fetish-interest subculture, is contamination by wish-fulfillment fantasy: How much of a given practice actually took place in a given time and place, and how much is hopeful exaggeration, making the practice seem more widely-spread than it really was, or a maximalist construal of minimal evidence?)