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This debate will not be productive. It is clear that pederastic relationships are not the same as modern day homosexual relationships. You can shroud the concep
by jules 14y ago
This debate will not be productive. It is clear that pederastic relationships are not the same as modern day homosexual relationships. You can shroud the concept all you want by applying an overdose of cultural relativism, but that doesn't make them the same. For example even though what adulthood is may not be clear to you, evidently it was clear to the Greeks since relationships with boys were OK but relationships between adult men were not. I believe the Greeks themselves looked at the body of the boy: if the boy was getting bodily hair, then he was no longer fit for a socially acceptable pederastic relationship. Of course there is a gray line. Every concept has grey lines. That doesn't mean that the concept (like "adulthood") doesn't exist.
Gender is actually a good example to illustrate my point. You claim that gender is based on cognitive processes, and I agree. That doesn't mean that there are not extremely strong biological influences on gender. You focus only on outliers, and ignore the bulk evidence. Gender is clearly strongly bimodally distributed and highly correlated with biological factors.
- einhverfr 14y agoBut whether they are the same or not is not the question. The question is the extent to which one is informative on the other, in cross-cultural and trans-historical studies. If we ignore the rest, I suppose we could say that only in the US is homosexuality biologically determined but that would be silly wouldn't it? Simply put, you can't talk about trans-historical and cross-cultural patterns if you limit the discussion to homosexual relationships in the form they exist in the US today. That's tautologically true. So if you limit it that way, it's a fancy way of avoiding any cross-cultural/trans-historical analysis that could be meaningful.