Weeell, yes and no. And the subject is inherently difficult to speak of because it’s very difficult to dissociate it from our own moral and conceptual notions re:a very touchy subject. No pun intended.
First things first : yes, no paedophilia, as the whole thingamabob was and/or evolved from rites of passage into adulthood so at worst it was a late-teenage years thing.
But even so, and while I did deliberately overstate the case to challenge “common knowledge”, it’s really true than in a majority cases the social construct that people commonly refer to as the basis of “them ancient Greeks were gay !!” is quite likely not to have been sexual at all, in spite of it being deliberately constructed as a sort of seduction ritual between the older, manly man and the young, devilishly handsome kid.
In cases where it was sexual, it’s quite likely it was not genital-sexual. For one of the protagonists. By which I mean, TL;DR : no butt stuff. The erastes buggered the eromenos between the thighs instead (this because taking it up the bum was a big no-no even then. Unmanly stuff, stuff slaves were for and such ; whereas the erastes/eromenos relationship was really more about an older guy teaching a young’un what it meant to be a strong manly duder and showing him the hetero ropes, as it were. No homo.).
Regardless of the technicalities, one must probably hasten to add that these relationships were always consensual. You could absolutely tell the erastes to fuck right off, and there apparently was no stigma attached to that - he was the mocked/socially punished one in that case.
At least that’s what can be guessed at going by written accounts (which naturally only represent a narrow part of Greek society, seeing as the lower strata couldn’t read or write) and artistic representations (which may or may not be representative). And of course, there was no such thing as a unified Greece back then, since every city-state had its own traditions and customs.
But beyond that, and as with every bit of history up to and including them bits we live in, there’s no such thing as certainty, only well-supported hypotheses.
Nah, they probably weren’t. There’s, like, a million scholarly books on the specific subject. Don’t rely on clickbait.
That’s solid advice even beyond historical trivia BTW.
Woah, hold there, tiger :). Don’t make me say what I haven’t. Intercrural was more common within the specific bounds of the erastes/eromenos relationship. Which is what has been “corrupted” by popular culture into the common notion that ancient Greeks were gay. But wasn’t the norm. My point is that 1) this very specific relationship was more or less orthogonal to modern gay sex when it comes right down to it and 2) it wasn’t “a Greek thing” so much as an antiquated “Greek aristocracy tradition” thing. So those customs were observed by maybe 10% of the population in the classical era, if that.
But beyond that specific custom it’s true that ancient, pre-Christian mores (Greek and Roman both) were less gender-discriminate outside of marriage*. I mean, when you get down to it, a slave’s a slave ; and a hole’s a hole. And holes are fun ! ;). So long as the socially dominant male was on top, everything was hunky-dory.
even within marriage it was almost expected for the husband to go on about - so long as he had children with his designated wife, and he wasn’t fucking anybody else’s designated wife, and nobody *else *was having sex with his designated wife, random omnisexual fucking was fine and taken in a spirit of “boys need to be boys”.
All the more paradoxical that back then the dominant stereotype was that *women *were terminally sex-hungry and exhausting men with that shit. Go figure.
According to your article there, the “penalty” is to…have your talk actually talk place without any disruption whatsoever. ZOMG CREEPING SHARIA!!!11!!eleventy!!
Anyway, I’ve decided that for every dumbass “Look at how much I hate Muslims! LOOK!” post that Haberdash makes, I’m going to provide a link to a valuable scholarly book, article, or other work on the subject of Islam that I own and have read, in the hopes that it will serve as a useful source of actual knowledge regarding the subject, as a counterpoint to the sucking black hole of anti-knowledge that is Haberdash’s interminable bigoted idiocy.
First up, D. A. Spellberg’s Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of 'A’isha bint Abi Bakr. This excellent book uses the various traditions and histories of my namesake to examine both how exegetes, scholars, and historians have have viewed 'A’isha both as a representational figure, and as a source of traditions and learning in her own right, as well as to explore how the various views of 'A’isha have reflected how Islamic attitudes towards gender and politics have themselves changed and differed over the centuries and within Islamic communities.
As a bonus, this book is much less expensive than a lot of other scholarly works, making it very accessible for those who would simply like to learn more about the subject but don’t really want to pay college-textbook prices just to satisfy their curiosity.
Because we live in a free country and not a Muslim one. But Muslims did try to censor this speaker. The article also discusses the screening a film about honor killings which they succeeded in having cancelled.
More questions:
Why are you so dismissive of the phenomenon of Muslims censoring anything they don’t like? Is it because you support it? Have you been one of the people demanding the silencing of anything that invades your safe space?
Are you allowed to leave the house without a male relative if it’s to make threats against a Muslim reformer, or are there no exceptions?
No, they didn’t. They exercised their own rights of free speech to protest. And she was allowed to speak at Duke despite those protests.
So if you’re upset about the fact that they dared to protest in the first place, even though Nomani’s talk actually took place and wasn’t “censored”, then it’s not Muslims that have a problem with free speech, but you.
And it also discusses other screenings which were protested and yet not canceled. That’s how this whole “free speech” thing works, Haberdash.
Because the claim that there’s a “phenomenon of Muslims censoring anything they don’t like” is a giant steaming load of bullshit.
No, using government actors such as public colleges to legislate against speech is not what “free speech” is. It’s the opposite. I wouldn’t expect a Muslim to understand this. Part of the issue with the 2012 “Innocence of Muslims” protests is that the Muslim world literally does not comprehend that speech from a citizen of a country can exist without being sponsored by the government of that country.
Now that it’s clear you don’t know what “censorship” is and think that trying to prevent speakers and films from being heard is acceptable “free speech,” it makes more sense that you can claim to believe this.
If I lived in a country governed by you or your religious compatriots, I would be murdered. Even people in countries where you are merely present, such as France, are at risk. So, yes, by repeatedly defending Muslims who act in this manner, you have done much more than demanded I be silenced.
Better hope your father or brother don’t find out. They might do what Muslims usually do to female family members who defy the rules.
Next up is Jonathan A. C. Brown’s Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World, an inexpensive and easier-to-understand introduction to the topic of hadith than his far more academic (and far more costly!) work The Canonization of al-Bukhārī and Muslim: The Formation and Function of the Sunnī Ḥadīth Canon. If you’ve ever been curious as to what hadith are and what role they play in Muslim scripture, this book clearly but exhaustively explains their history and the history of how and why Muslim scholars use them in Islamic jurisprudence, the various methods by which those scholars judge their authenticity (and what it means for a hadith to be “authentic” or “inauthentic” and how that affects their usage in jurisprudence), the problems and benefits of using hadith in modern Western historiography, and the various implications, debates and arguments about all of this both within and outside of the Muslim community over the centuries.
Public colleges have not “legislated” against speech (and they aren’t “government actors”).
Didn’t you even read the article you posted? Nomani’s talk at Duke happened!
We’ve already established that you know precisely jack shit abut Muslims and “the Muslim world”.
Is this “censorship”, Haberdash? Do these students hate free speech or have no idea what free speech is?
So the reason you’re so full of hate towards Muslims is this paranoid, pants-shitting fear of yours?
I see.
I guarantee you that there are Muslims living not too far from where you live right now. And, despite your colossal jerkassery, you are under no risk from them whatsoever.
I just visited my brother and his wife last month, where we went out to celebrate my birthday. My parents couldn’t make it, because they were traveling to visit my uncles and cousins, but they came to visit me here earlier in the month.
Now that we’ve established that the Muslims on this board don’t know what the words "speech, “public,” or “censorship” mean, here is yet another example of Muslims censoring speech at a public university:
David Commins’ The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia is a brief but excellent history of how the particular brand of puritanical Islam practiced in and aggressively spread by Saudi Arabia went from a heretical backwater sect on the fringes of the Ottoman Empire whose leaders were executed after an unsuccessful attempt to take and keep control of Mecca, to the oil-wealth-funded prime purveyors of Islamic fundamentalism in the world today. Of special note is its depiction of how the Saudi royal family, right from the very beginning of the alliance between Muhammad bin Saud and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in the mid-1700s, has been ironically both the restraining force on and beholden to this fundamentalist force over the years.
Sexual Ethics And Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur’an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence, by Boston University professor Kecia Ali, is (despite its title) not really so much about her own reflections on the subject of sex, gender, and related issues in Islam (though don’t get me wrong, it is that) as it is a really good general survey on attitudes both traditional and modern towards them within the Muslim community. Ali explores these issues in chapters covering things like marriage, divorce, same-sex relationships, female circumcision, and the age of ‘Ā’isha, concluding each with her own analysis of them from the perspective of whether and how a specifically feminist system of sexual ethics can be constructed within an explicitly Islamic framework.