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I was surprised to learn spartan society had pedophilia built in similar to a mentor system. Will Durant wrote about it, but I never hear anything in pop cultur
by ldbooth 5y ago
I was surprised to learn spartan society had pedophilia built in similar to a mentor system. Will Durant wrote about it, but I never hear anything in pop culture except the warrior bit.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- lrem 5y agoWasn't that all of ancient Grece?
- barry-cotter 5y agoTwink and bear has a long history. > The word eromenos describes an adolescent boy who is the passive (or ‘receptive’, ‘subordinate’) partner in a homosexual relationship (usually between males), opposite to the word erastes (to love, the older and active partner) in Ancient Greece. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eromenos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eromenos
- foldr 5y ago‘Twink’ doesn’t really connote a passive role though (you can be a twink and a top). Similarly for ‘bear’. Twinks can also be post-adolescent. So I don’t think ‘twink’ and ‘bear’ are very good translations of these terms, which are based on quite a different conception of gay relationships than the one we have now.
- barry-cotter 5y agoHappy to concede that it's more vague gesturing at "Look, a similar thing was happening 3,000 years ago and is happening today" than the same thing but it's not like it's unrecognisable.
- foldr 5y agoI wouldn’t connect gay ‘tribes’ with sex between adolescents and adults. Twinks aren’t canonically underage or in relationships with older men.
- moonglade 5y agoI loved Durant. Mary Renault, The Last of the Wine. You won't regret it.
- ldbooth 5y agoChecking it out from the library, many thanks for the rec.
- gremloni 5y agoIt’s a little hard to believe all the men were gay. Is being gay a choice?
- ceejayoz 5y agoWhat I wear is a choice most of the time, but at my wedding, it was traditional to don a tuxedo, so so I did it. Being gay is about what you’re attracted to. Fucking a fleshlight doesn’t mean you’re attracted to them, after all.
- gremloni 5y agoSo then most of these mentors were not fucking the boys as the author claims.
- ceejayoz 5y agoNo, that doesn't logically follow. It means if they were, it wasn't necessarily about attraction. (We see this phenomenon in many rapists, incidentally.)
- gremloni 5y agoI don’t see why a preference for domination/power imbalance doesn’t count as attraction. At that point, attraction to the same sex definitely counts as homosexuality.