I would like to applaud the overall levelheaded tone of this discussion, and all participants herein. It is so nice to see real discourse, whatever the topic.
Huerta88, you write beautifully, and clearly.
I’m tempted to throw a spanner in the works with some personal anecdotal information, but I think I’ll just be good this time. 
One thing I do wonder about is to what degree men having sex with little boys is portrayed as being relatively commonplace in ancient Greece. Modern estimates of homosexuality are around 5% of the population, yet in historical discussions it often sounds like the Greek men almost preferred boys.
I wonder if we could get a little more insight by looking at literature of other cultures that had similar behaviours? I know this occurred more recently in
Japanese culture than the Greek exemple, so there could perhaps be more surviving literature on the subject?
Not to put words in **clairobscur’s ** mouth, but I didn’t read her argument as morally relativistic at all. It had to do with the fact that cultural context can determine whether or not someone suffers psychological harm from something. For example, high suicide rates among US homosexuals indicate that a homosexual orientation is, in a sense, psychologically harmful–but it is harmful *because * of the cultural context of moral condemnation and intolerance toward homosexuality. Presumably, in a more tolerant culture, homosexual orientation would not be correlated with things like higher suicide rates. Similarly, if Greek culture were in fact tolerant of pederasty, then the psychological harm done to boys as a result of pederasty would be correspondingly reduced.
In this context, of course, evidence as to whether such relations were tolerated or ridiculed would have a bearing on the cultural context of Greek pederasty, and give us some information about psychological harm.
I do agree that trying to argue the “pro” side in a “Resolved: pederasty isn’t that big of a problem” debate, outside of academia, would be a dicey proposition today.
Most of us have reached a pretty firm conclusion on this point. N.B. that this is not just based on received cultural mores – there is an aspect of common sense to the fact that older people don’t have that much in common with younger people, and that throwing sex into the mix complicates and very readily perverts, the equation. Heck, I had moments in my late twenties, dating girls in their very early twenties, when I had to ask myself some pretty frank questions about whether I’d be seeking out their company for their conversation alone, or for the companionship they offered, or if they weren’t taut and nubile. The conclusions I reached were not very flattering or ennobling.
Yes, I agree with you that discussing, let alone advocating, the Greek rationale for how they operated (noting that various Greeks had various rationale) subjects one to a lot of pitfalls.
The Wiki article seems to indicate that some homosexual activists allege that there has been a systematic purging of the record w.r.t. Greek pederasty. Their slant appears to be that this is another “heteronormative” whitewash designed to quash the Classical history and acceptance of homosexual relationships. Others (even other homosexuals, such as Foucault) seem to focus on the “little boy” aspect of pederasty, and don’t necessarily see it as a particularly promising poster child (as it were) issue for “gay liberation.” (If I understand Foucault’s analysis in a nutshell, his “problematizing” of pederasty was based on the power differential). These are naturally hot-button issues today, in an era in which we see the vast number of victims of pedophile priests, for instance, turning out to be little adolescent boys, often lured by the same sort of would-be Platonic mentors, suggesting to some that homosexuality and chickenhawk-affinity are correlated.
No one’s mentioned this yet, I think, but another not-so-P.C. aspect of the Greek version of pederasty (and of other elite homosexual subcultures, such as the Ernst Rohm/SA cabal) is an implicit or explicit belief that, naturally, to any sophisticated thinking man, a young man is the only ideal consort, given that women are incomplete/empty/unclean/weak creatures.
I’m fairly sure any catamite of Herakles lived to regret it. Or, just as likely, didn’t live long enough.
According to the myths, Hylas was kidnapped by a nymph who fell in love with him, and never found again. Iolaus, though, married Herakles’ wife Megara, and had a daughter, from which the early kings of Corinth were descended.
I was more referring to the tendency of ole Alcides to kill people carelessly, or in fits of rage he blamed on his stepmom.
This is precisely what I was thinking of. Greek society took it as an article of faith that women were fundamentally inferior to men. It seems uncontroversial to me to suggest that growing up in a society that constantly re-enforced the perception of someone as weaker, dumber, and generally less valuable would be damaging to that person. But that was the mainstream, culturally accepted view of women in Greece. No one in that society would have viewed the women as beind damaged by this perception, because the damage being done was considered normal and even desirable by the society. It’s possible that the practice of pederasty in ancient Greece had a damaging effect on the children similar to what we see in modern victims of child molestation - but that the ancient Greeks didn’t preceive these effects as negatives.
On the other hand:
Boy Scouts? Big Brothers of America? School teachers? The Greek practice was couched in terms of mentoring the youth, which is not at all uncommon in modern society, although we do tend to emphasize a different skill set.
This conclusion isn’t, in fact, as universal as you say. I’m going to give the example of female teachers having sex or a relationship with their students. Legally, they’re in the wrong. Based on our general assumptions, they should be almost universally scorned socially. Not only are they having sex with minors, but worse, with minors under their authority.
But reality is very different. They tend to get lighter sentences, much less flak, but more importantly, there are a lot of people ready to openly defend the position that this isn’t nearly as bad as a male teacher/female student relationship. You can see it in the general public, in the media (I remember a magazine I read once running at the same time a “danger! (male) pedophiles are everywhere” article and an “look how uptight Americans are” (about the sentencing of some female teacher), and even here on the SDMB. There’s no lacking of threads about such a situation where while some posters pointed at the double standard, others stated that this double standard was justified. Plus some adding something along the line of “Look how hot she is! I would have felt lucky if it had happened to me in high school”
So, we can see that even within our society, there isn’t such a thing as a “pretty firm” general agreement about adult/ teen relationships. Always bad is quite mainstream but female adult/male teen being not that bad is an acceptable position. And if what is good for the goose is good for the gander, then male adult/female teen logically shouldn’t be deemed as obviously wrong, even though it generally is. And I am not even considering homosexual relationships.
Besides this example, still regarding the fact that the general agreement isn’t as clear cut as it seems at first glance, there’s the issue of the age of consent. Most people agree that it is arbitrary. For instance, a teen often has to be 18 to give consent in the USA, but 15 is good enough over here. Even though it’s going to be frowned upon, I (I’m 43) could have a relationship with a 15 yo without even risking a slap on the wrist. Neither the law nor apparently the general public seem to be assuming that such a relationship would necessarily be harmful (or else, people would be clamoring for the law to be changed). And assuming that I would would be involved in an homosexual relationship with said 15 yo, it seems to me it would be pretty close to Greek-style pederasty. And even though most people would look down on me, they wouldn’t throw the book at me.
So, you might argue that this conclusion (about age difference) is common sense, it still isn’t universally accepted as being true (once again, given the thread topic, we’re not talking about having sex with 5 yo) even within our society. I would then argue that if, on top of that, you change completely the society and its cultural assumptions (for instance, was a 14 yo perceived as a “kid” in ancient Greece, by himself, and by others?), it’s becoming even more difficult to assume that your conclusion is indisputable.
I’m going to answer the rest some of your other points in another post, because this one is already quite long.
Maybe you thought they weren’t ennobling, but it’s not like being attracted to young women is abnormal. If some car maker wants to sell a high-end vehicle and target men in their 50s, are they going to display a 50 yo woman next to the car in their adds? Doubt it. Being attracted to young babes is essentially universal and quite normal. It’s not like sexual interest has no part in our choice of a potential partner.
However, I think it’s quite outside of the realm of our debate. I doubt anybody would have started a thread about whether old Greek philosophers having sex with 20 yo women was harmful for the girls (and actually, I would argue that if someone was harmed in Athenian society, it’s way more likely to have been women, given the shitty status they had).
I’m really not even remotely qualified to have an opinion about the issue of purged records, even though, on the face of it, it doesn’t seem a necessarily outrageous claim.
However, I came to be sceptical about the claims and writings of homosexual activists, having heard or read many things that seemed an attempt to show that everybody remotely famous and his dog was actually homosexual, not very different from claims by black activists that some historical figure or another was actually black. They often seemed to be intent on justifying homosexuality by pointing at famous/admired figures. Fortunately, it seems to me that during the recent years, such statements became much rarer, I suspect because less homosexuals feel the need to “justify” their orientation.
I have such a book somewhere, with a large part devoted to Greek pederasty IIRC, and it probably would be appropriate to check it while participating in this thread, but I’ll probably be too lazy to try to dig it up.
Maybe, but I think we shouldn’t take this into consideration because it would amount to say “Let’s censor ourselves, for otherwise, we could give ammunitions to bad people”. Said priests aren’t operating in the same context, or in the same ways as Greek erastes (when was the last time you heard a priest lauding in public his altar boy lover?).
As I mentioned above, the status of women in Ancient Greece (or for that matter most ancient civilizations except maybe the Etruscans, but the Athenians arguably have been worst than most from this point of view) is indeed IMO vastly more problematic than the issue of pederasty amongst free men.
Well, by accounts, he did kill one of his catamites/eromenoi…Iphitus, who he threw off a wall.
Here’s my take on this issue. I think that in our societies that have been (and still are to an extent) very repressive towards homosexuals and have been totally lacking in presenting an homosexual relationship in a positive way, and on top of that have considered anything except strict monogamy as not socially acceptable, the number of men (or women, whatever) who have been involved in homosexual relationships has been (and still is) artificially reduced to the bare minimum of people who are completely entrenched in homosexuality, and have no interest altogether in heterosexual relationships. That would be most of these 5% (or whatever other figure someone else thinks is more accurate)
However, even amongst us, remove women (for instance in jails) and suddenly the homosexuality rate increase a lot, and if despite it being still perceived negatively, showing us than a non-insignificant number of supposed heterosexuals aren’t completely adverse to homosexuality, despite the stigma.
Now, let’s climb in the time machine and go back to Athens. Let’s assume further, despite these points being disputed in this thread, that there’s no stigma attached to homosexuality. Since you’re born, you never heard of having an homosexual relationship being a bad thing. Not only that, but the perception of free women is such that loving a man might be more “manly” than loving a woman.
Now, like in our modern jails, remove all women from the scene (apart from slaves, that you might pick as a sex toy, but aren’t going to consider worthy of your affection). They’re nowhere to be found in the public sphere. You aren’t going to interact with them socially. They won’t ever be present when you hang out with or visit your friends. You aren’t going to meet any during your leisure time. Finally, you being married isn’t in any way preventing you from being involved with men at the same time (while having an affair with a free woman would be a very big no no). I’m pretty certain that in such circumstances, the percentage of men being involved in homosexual relationships would skyrocket.
Now, allow me to go anecdotal. As a teen, I was mostly undecided regarding my orientation, with however a preference for girls. The more time passed, the more I erred towards heterosexuality. I would say I’m… maybe 97.5% heterosexual. Me being involved with a man at any point in the future, is, if not completely unthinkable, at lest very unlikely. I never even had sex with a man. I definitely am not in your 5%. But if I had lived in a society such as the one I described above, I suspect I might have had much more homosexual relationships than heterosexual ones.
Actually, if homosexuality was or had been much more accepted and widespread, I might be now a full blown bisexual, even in our current society where there are plenty of women available. The two first serious shot I had at having a relationship, or at least some form of sex, have been with boys. Both time, it was prevented by well-meaning third parties (one of these interventions still piss me off to this day. I really liked him. And, boy, was he hot! But I digress).
If they hadn’t been prevented, since I never had dated a girl at this point, I would have begun my sexual (and possibly emotional) life with boys. And that might have been sufficient to have me switch to the other side. I don’t know. Since I’ve been progressively less and less attracted to men, maybe I would have been progressively less and less attracted to women if I had not established intimate connections with them later, if I’ve been hanging out mostly with homosexual men, etc… I would be, maybe, in your 5%.
To sum up, I think that though 5% (or 10%, or whatever) might be a valid figure for active homosexuals + closeted homosexuals with zero interest in women, I believe that the percentage of men with a potential for homosexuality is much higher, and would be even higher in a society with a very different perception of homosexuality and offering much more opportunities for homosexual relationships.
But what are these damaging effects exactly and more importantly, what causes them? For, if these causes were absent in Athens, there’s no reason to assume that any damage could result. I listed many reasons why this kind of relationship were completely different from a priest/altar boy relationship nowadays (no negative connotations, no secrecy, etc… I’m not going to rewrite what I already posted).
In particular, regarding your post, the fact that women, who were if not utterly despised, at least put down, has no relevance to the issue of young men, who weren’t. In the case of women, you’re showing objective evidences of a situation that would be hurtful for anybody. But in the case of the Greek boys, you’re not giving any such evidences, so we’re left with “they had sex with older men”, which, lacking evidences that sex with older men is inherently hurtful let me think “meh… they also had military training and ate a lot of olives”.
You’re also using the world “children”, and I’ve an issue with that too, as I already mentioned. Were they considered children? Were they considering themselves children? Is it conceivable that they were expected to show more maturity than we demand from teens nowadays? I also pointed out that there are teens in our societies who have reached the age of consent and would probably have qualified as eromenos in Greece. The little brother of one of my exes, a closeted homosexual at the time, went to London when he hit 16 specifically for the purpose of seeking out older guys (and it’s not like he has been the only teen ever, male or female, interested in older partners). When people think of Greek pederasty, some at least probably have in mind some creepy old philosopher. But what about this attractive 28 yo Athenian warrior who has women and homosexual men drooling when they go to the movies?
So, what kind of relationships should we assume is likely to be damaging? Does my ex’s brother count? Does the 28 yo hot Athenian warrior count? Personally, I would be more worried about the little brother (going to a foreign city to hook up with random strangers) than about the boyfriend of the Athenian warrior (whose relationship with a well know person is taking place under everybody’s eyes). However, the former (little brother) isn’t apparently considered now to have a sufficient potential for damage to be banned by law. Yet, I should somehow assume that the latter would have had such a potential then?
I keep reading about “child molestation” in this thread and it just doesn’t match with the reality of Greek pederasty. These were not “little boys.” They were teenagers–youths–who were the same age as girls entering marriage within that society. Men entered adulthood at a later age than women, but they were most definitely treated by their culture as on the cusp of adulthood. Secrecy and shame were unlikely to be associated with the relationships. The father’s approval was required and love and mentorship were actively encouraged.
I imagine the damage of pederasty under these conditions was roughly on par with the damage inflicted by an arranged, early marriage. Potentially devastating, but of a fundamentally different nature than anything the average American could relate to.