Wiki says the Greeks had mostly intercrural sex with boys; fondling, and pushing their genitals between the boy’s thighs.
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Wiki says . . .QUOTE]
That Wiki article (Pederasty in ancient Greece - Wikipedia) indicates that even as to the “official” position on pederasty, you’d apparently have to wade through a bunch of different regions, eras, kind of revolting details of the nature of man-boy contact (or, in some cases, lack of contact), and ancient and modern jack-off (sorry) theorizing, in order to figure out what the Greeks really thought at the time.
Reading that headache-inducing, dense stuff kind of reinforces (for me) my earlier comment that I don’t much care what the ancient Greeks thought about it (even if you could figure out one answer to that) – I’ll just go with my baseline assumption that any erotically-themed relationship between grown men and boys is not a Good Thing.
Really fixed title.
The damage done by sexual abuse is necessarily psychological. For instance, there’s nothing inherently harmful in fondling a little boy’s genitals.
If it’s psychological, it has to be perceived negatively by the “victim”. For instance because he knows/perceives that he’s involved in something wrong, or because he feels used.
But this can’t apply to pederasty in ancient Greece (I’m referring here to the classical relationship between a young and an adult free citizens. Sexual relationships with a slave would be a completely different story).
The relationship isn’t socially perceived as wrong. It’s normal, expected, even lauded above, say, a relationship between an adult man and an adult woman.
The young partner isn’t used or abused. He’s a free young man and nobody, nor himself, nor his respectable family would allow such a thing to happen. His adult partner isn’t an abuser, but a lover and a mentor, and deserving of respect and/or love, or else this relationship wouldn’t take place to begin with.
To sum up, it isn’t a secret shameful abuse story between a shady grown man and a manipulated kid. It’s an open, respectable relationship, under the watching eyes of everybody between a respectable adult and a free young man no longer considered a child. And this changes everything.
IOW, no, I won’t believe that these relationships were damaging. At least not anymore than any other relationship (and I would even suspect, probably less so, because a small, very regulated community like the citizens of Athens wouldn’t be a good place to pull dirty tricks on a partner, contrarily to our modern, permissive and anonymous societies).
I would need very strong evidences to believe the contrary. And to even consider the idea, I would need to be shown how, why and what way they could be damaging. “Very superficially similar, but actually completely different, relationships, taking place in the completely different cultural and social context of our modern society are often damaging, so all such relationships must be, by nature, damaging” won’t do the trick for me.
Really? I’ll pass that over. But there could well be something very harmful in a grown man sodomizing a young boy’s rectum.
What if the relationship began because the older man was driven by not much more than lust? And what if the young man picked up on the fact that the older man was motivated only by the desire to use the younger man’s body; that the older man did not, for instance, have much interest in the younger man’s callow intelligence, conversation, and interests (which is pretty likely – it’s as if I found myself down at the arcade trying to feign a deep interest in the Jonas Brothers or Magic: The Gathering). What if the young man came to the conclusion that this was no relationship of equals, and felt bad about being used as effectively a spooge receptacle? I can’t think of many exemplars beyond fatherhood (and other family-based allegiences or proxies therefor) where significantly older men seek the company of significantly younger men for purposes that are other than lust-driven. Does anyone really believe the old dudes in these Greek arrangements were motivated, principally, by altruism and a love of mentoring? I can’t see it.
Why is it OK - because Plato says so? Then how do you account for the attitudes exhibited in Aristophanes’ Clouds? Be vary wary about making sweeping claims about “Athenian society”! Which part of society are you talking about? There’s no evidence that it was accepted and lauded above heteronormative relationships through the entirety of the Athenian citizenry, let alone the rest of the population (who are historically silent).
I think you can make a pretty good argument either way for whether a pederastic relationship is inherently harmful.
I’ll be back, when I’ve gone through my sources.
Oh! And I would add that this issue is going to be clouded by the current paedophile scare, and by the current hysteria about it, and the general assumption that everything that can be construed as a sexual assault against a child is both an unimaginably horrible crime and will necessarily result in devastating, enduring, psychological damage, without even stopping to wonder about the extent of the damages, what kind of damage we’re talking about, what would cause them, why they’re happening, and even if and how often they will happen. This is generally not even open to discussion.
The mere fact that a previous poster immediately advanced the idea that someone holding the position that pederasty in ancient Greece probably wasn’t harmful is likely to be a member of NAMBLA secretly lusting after little boys, when we’re in fact discussing very specific mores in a society that disappeared a couple thousand years ago shows that there is currently only a very slight possibility of holding a cold-headed debate about anything connected to paedophilia.
I think being a cultural relativist is almost as bad as being a pedophile, which probably about sums up my position. 
That was me, and I’m afraid you’ve misquoted me a bit. What I actually said was that NAMBLA members defend pederasty on grounds that some ancient Greeks would have found persuasive (a true fact – both seem to cite the beautiful opportunity for a wiser older friend to nurture a pristine youth) and that ancient opponents of the practice may have voice disapproval using rationales that we would use today (decadence). Yes, the societies and players are different. Human nature, human reactions, are not – the way they are tolerated, or not tolerated, is what changes.
Oh, the other point I made, which is that current-day actual pedophiles (as we would regard them) have indeed used insincere (as far as I can tell) psychological or historical analogies to justify what was clearly nothing more than lust for little kids. That’s fact, too.
Your first paragraph is true, but as a subset of the self-evident statement that it is impossible for modern Westerners, with their particular set of priorities, to ever think exactly like people from another time with another set of priorities. Most modern people have reached a working consensus that older men should not be having interaction sexual in its nature with teen or younger boys. As with all working consensuses that seek to generalize from experience, dogma, evidence, no doubt there are exceptions around the edges of the “adult sexual interaction with non-adults is bad” bright line. Most of us are okay with sacrificing that gray area in favor of a bright line rule that we think generally protects kids.
But the Wiki article suggests that there is plenty of academic discussion (itself not agenda-free) about what varying Greeks thought about various practices – I do not agree that the entire debate (if the debate is over what they thought then , not what we think now) has been stifled by the current climate.
I don’t account for it because I’m not aware of it.
However, I looked up, and the very first (Warning : PDF. Short one, though) document I found about this issue is precisely a criticism of the idea that Aristophanes is attacking pederasty, arguing that he only targets effeminate men, and besides, that in his plays and in other plays, attraction to young boys is presented as a widespread feeling outside the ridiculed elite.
We can play countering discourse all day long - like I said, you can make arguments either way, simply out of a lack of reliable information.
ETA: more to the point, what is your evidence (primary source) that it was *not *harmful? I think you’ll find that there is no evidence - and there isn’t any that it was, either. Really, it all boils down to your perception of history.
Also: the reference you cited deals with what Foucault called “the antimony of the boy”, that is, once penetrated, does the boy retain the stigma of penetration into adulthood (or any sort of sexual identity)? It address whether a pederastic relationship as an *eromenos *translate into male adult effiminacy (that is, what the Greeks would call a kinaidos), rather than address any issues of harm; Lear argues that there is no association, against Hubbard (with whom at least I am somewhat familiar).
OK, fine. But, until I’m shown evidences that arguments similar to ours (as opposed to, say, “too much sex is bad for you”, or “anal penetration is a shame”) were used, I’m not going to assume so, because we’re talking about a completely different society, with completely different values and assumptions.
Also, I’m not sure if you’re saying that decadence is currently a mainstream argument against paedophilia, but if so, I certainly don’t think it is. A lot of people are quite happy with being decadent (wild sex, one night stands, divorce, etc…), and oppose paedophilia on another basis, namely the harm done to children.
Precisely, I disagree with that. I don’t think for an instant that a 14 yo in ancient Greece (or his parents) had the same “human reaction” re the concept of entering a relationship with sexual overtones with a 30 yo man as a today’s 14 yo would have.
Even though they might be self-serving, I’ve no particular reasons to assume they’re insincere. It’s obvious that a pedophile has much more reasons than the average joe to both think thoroughly about the issue, and to arrive at a conclusion that serves their interests, but it’s doesn’t mean they are trying to misled deliberately or that the argument is unsound. Or else, we would have to reject all self-serving arguments out of hand, and a lot of arguments are self-serving.
As for lust, I’m going to disagree too in two ways : first, being motivated by lust isn’t in itself wrong, barring a general condemnation of almost all human relationships. Second, my understanding is that paedophiles can be divided into several categories, one of them being “sincere pedophiles” (don’t know what the proper word would be) who are solely attracted to kids (as opposed to opportunists), and are attracted to them both sexually and emotionnally. Those aren’t motivated only by lust.
That’s what I have a problem with. This consensus is valid in our society, functioning with our mores. It’s based on sound reasons, but one cannot just assume that those reasons would make sense anymore in a different society.
One would have to show that sexual interaction between a young teen (in this case, we should limit ourselves to 12-14 yo boys, or something like that, because younger than that, we’re out of the scope of Greek pederasty, and older than that, it’s accepted in our societies) is inherently harmful, regardless of the sexual mores, of the social perception of this kind of relation or of sexuality in general, etc… And I think it would be very difficult to make such a case.
Right. But if we want to generalize to a different society, we must state why they must be protected, what they’re protected against exactly and then wonder if these reasons would apply to this different society.
I still think it’s quite difficult to argue about this, at least outside academic circles.
Let’s assume you share my opinion about adult men having sex with 13 yo back then in Greece, that you intend to vote Obama, that you’re in favour of gay marriage, and that you don’t believe global warming is going to happen. Isn’t there one of these issues you would be more reluctant to argue about with, say, your co-workers? Don’t you think that discussing the former would have a fair chance of some of these co-workers thinking “must be a perv”. Or that there’s a fair chance your argument would be met by a mere “That’s just very wrong, period! There’s no discussing about it!”, and zero reasoned arguments?
Except I don’t think it is fact. If you look at some of Wilde’s poems, there does seem to have been something more than empty sex there.
The question isn’t “does anything go providing that it’s part of someone’s culture?” but “was this particular practice harmful in this particular society?”.
The former leads to “Aztecs used to sacrifice people, but that was OK because it’s their culture”, while the second is more related to “little kids shouldn’t see boobs on TV, so these women in Amazonia should rather put on bras right now”.
Incidentally, does anyone know if there is any 19th century pederastic poetry written in the voice of the boy? If so, I’d be interested to read it.
(For anyone interested in 19th century use of Greek pederasty in current movements, John Addington Symond’s *A Problem in Greek Ethics* is usually touted as the definitive text. I’ll admit I never did much more than skim it very lightly as it is long and boring.)
Then, we can’t assume that it was harmful. All we can do is agreeing to disagree.
The way you are going about arguing it however is from the cultural relativist/post-modern view, i.e. that we should only analyze cultures based on what they thought of themselves, without thought as to whether that is even knowable. No matter how you slice it, the evidence for this opinion within 4th century Athens is ultimately unknowable, since unfortunately Plato doesn’t leave us with interviews of eromenoi: all we have is historical/philosphical discourse, which is boring, tiring, and ultimately useless.
ETA:
Yeah, pretty much.
It doesn’t address the issue of harm because I posted it in response to your mentioning of Aristophanes, not as an argument about whether or not it caused harm. It seems an apt response to me, except if you’re stating too that Aristophanes attacked pederasty on the basis that it caused harm. Your statement, as far as I understood it, was about pederasty being criticized by some, and about it not being necessarily widespread or well-accepted amongst the Athenian citizenry.
Olive oil is a very versatile substance.