Anonymous5: @Anonymous: lol that somebody is still parroting this 70's-ass basic bitch post-victorian understanding of what the ancient greeks "liked"
you should try actually studying a topic meaningfully sometime before you spout off about it, instead of just going by vague impressions you glean from what people say on the internet
first of all the age difference in the greek practice of pederasty is widely overstated- it wasn't systematized by age, and any age ranges that are given are broad estimates made more than a millennium later. even so, the youngest erastes was likely younger than the oldest eromenos. the eromenos would not be younger than a teenager and could in factbe into his 20's, and the erastes could in fact be in his teens himself, but no older than 40. because the distinction between them wasn't necessarily age, but maturity, and not sexual maturity, but social and emotional maturity- somebody older and more experienced with the world taking somebody more youthful and inexperienced in under his wing and tutelage with the expectation that he'd do the same (not unlike a knight and squire, or a samurai and his apprentice). the sexual component wasn't part and parcel with the institution, the impression that it was was largely a product of the modern west's incredibly weird preoccupation with sex coloring our interpretations. we don't actually even know how often a sexual relationship even occurred because that aspect of it mostly just appears on vases, which are a pretty shitty way to preserve meaningful cultural information.
but even putting that aside, outside of the practice, broad negative attitudes toward adult male homosexuality in ancient greece is pretty much one huge [citation needed] for victorian and post-victorian historians projecting their own attitudes based on tenuous and suspect connections and conjecturing and extrapolating wildly (WILDLY) away from actual original-source evidence-based research. recorded negative attitudes, such as they were, were pretty much exclusively mockery, ie not firmly negative, and even so exclusively targeted at the receiving partner in anal sex (meaning not intercrural, not oral, not mutual masturbation, not frottage, which would be a pretty odd thing to be so specific about if your attitude is *supposedly* one of general negativity towards just the idea of men fucking each other in general) supposedly under the belief that it feminized them, but even THAT understanding is actually extremely questionable, making pretty deliberate oversights of known exceptions (like the sacred band of thebes, or how athenians four centuries following the Iliad often explicitly sexualized the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus even though Homer himself had been pretty coy about that (almost as if, a society that existed for more than four centuries was not monolithic in its attitudes for that entire timespan and they were projecting their own then-contemporary values onto their history... which, yes, would mean that they were much more open to the idea, not entirely unlike how our own attitudes have shifted and allowed a reexamining of what previously had to, in our culture, be left implicit)) and being, on its surface, broad and reductive (and conforming to post-victorian sensibilities) in a way that accurate anthropological descriptions of a civilization's social attitudes seldom are, but moreover and more importantly based mostly on classicist Kenneth Dover's personal understanding that the character of the unnamed kinsman (mnesilochus) in Aristophanes' play "Women of Thesmophoria" was meant as something of an audience surrogate in his verbal mockery of Agathon for being the receiving partner in anal sex, which ignores 1) that the kinsman's over-the-top machismo was itself likely meant in mockery, as following his derision of the idea of allowing oneself to be "feminized", the character himself is subsequently shaved, dressed as a woman, captured and subsequently held captive, and his needing to be rescued constitutes the bulk of the play, 2) that Aristophanes was primarily a *comedian*, not a tragedian or a philosopher, and a pretty bawdy comedian at that. Thesmophoria only had cultural-historical significance applied to it due to it being one of the few surviving texts following the loss of the overwhelming majority of texts from classical antiquity in events like the burning of the library of alexandria. the little we know of Aristophanes outside of the author function of his comedies (which is to say outside of the interpretive) comes from depictions of him by his contemporaries, such as in Plato's Symposium, which, unlike Thesmophoria, is not a satire, and in that text Aristophanes is actually depicted giving one of the most passionate, poetic and artful speeches in *support* of homosexuality that we have from the entire era, which can likely be taken as representative of his actual views because the entire point of the symposium is that Plato writes himself coming in at the end to make a speech that shuts up everybody else's inferior ideas about love (which he believed was noblest when it was beyond the physical, including abstinence from solo masturbation because he was a big dork) and 3) that Agathon was a fucking *real person*, a contemporary and rival of Aristophanes whom Aristophanes was much more likely to be mocking directly rather than as a surrogate for an entire class of people. Agathon is, in fact, also depicted in Plato's Symposium, but unlike Aristophanes is shown doing little more than recounting the details of a banquet held in his honor following the creation of his first drama... almost as if the man was known in his time to be preening and self-congratulatory, and Aristophanes' satire of him was centered on his ego, not his lack of masculinity for being the receptive partner in anal sex (an attitude which, again, is all but explicitly refuted by the way that the character whom voices those attitudes is treated in the texts.)
tip your waitress
you should try actually studying a topic meaningfully sometime before you spout off about it, instead of just going by vague impressions you glean from what people say on the internet
first of all the age difference in the greek practice of pederasty is widely overstated- it wasn't systematized by age, and any age ranges that are given are broad estimates made more than a millennium later. even so, the youngest erastes was likely younger than the oldest eromenos. the eromenos would not be younger than a teenager and could in factbe into his 20's, and the erastes could in fact be in his teens himself, but no older than 40. because the distinction between them wasn't necessarily age, but maturity, and not sexual maturity, but social and emotional maturity- somebody older and more experienced with the world taking somebody more youthful and inexperienced in under his wing and tutelage with the expectation that he'd do the same (not unlike a knight and squire, or a samurai and his apprentice). the sexual component wasn't part and parcel with the institution, the impression that it was was largely a product of the modern west's incredibly weird preoccupation with sex coloring our interpretations. we don't actually even know how often a sexual relationship even occurred because that aspect of it mostly just appears on vases, which are a pretty shitty way to preserve meaningful cultural information.
but even putting that aside, outside of the practice, broad negative attitudes toward adult male homosexuality in ancient greece is pretty much one huge [citation needed] for victorian and post-victorian historians projecting their own attitudes based on tenuous and suspect connections and conjecturing and extrapolating wildly (WILDLY) away from actual original-source evidence-based research. recorded negative attitudes, such as they were, were pretty much exclusively mockery, ie not firmly negative, and even so exclusively targeted at the receiving partner in anal sex (meaning not intercrural, not oral, not mutual masturbation, not frottage, which would be a pretty odd thing to be so specific about if your attitude is *supposedly* one of general negativity towards just the idea of men fucking each other in general) supposedly under the belief that it feminized them, but even THAT understanding is actually extremely questionable, making pretty deliberate oversights of known exceptions (like the sacred band of thebes, or how athenians four centuries following the Iliad often explicitly sexualized the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus even though Homer himself had been pretty coy about that (almost as if, a society that existed for more than four centuries was not monolithic in its attitudes for that entire timespan and they were projecting their own then-contemporary values onto their history... which, yes, would mean that they were much more open to the idea, not entirely unlike how our own attitudes have shifted and allowed a reexamining of what previously had to, in our culture, be left implicit)) and being, on its surface, broad and reductive (and conforming to post-victorian sensibilities) in a way that accurate anthropological descriptions of a civilization's social attitudes seldom are, but moreover and more importantly based mostly on classicist Kenneth Dover's personal understanding that the character of the unnamed kinsman (mnesilochus) in Aristophanes' play "Women of Thesmophoria" was meant as something of an audience surrogate in his verbal mockery of Agathon for being the receiving partner in anal sex, which ignores 1) that the kinsman's over-the-top machismo was itself likely meant in mockery, as following his derision of the idea of allowing oneself to be "feminized", the character himself is subsequently shaved, dressed as a woman, captured and subsequently held captive, and his needing to be rescued constitutes the bulk of the play, 2) that Aristophanes was primarily a *comedian*, not a tragedian or a philosopher, and a pretty bawdy comedian at that. Thesmophoria only had cultural-historical significance applied to it due to it being one of the few surviving texts following the loss of the overwhelming majority of texts from classical antiquity in events like the burning of the library of alexandria. the little we know of Aristophanes outside of the author function of his comedies (which is to say outside of the interpretive) comes from depictions of him by his contemporaries, such as in Plato's Symposium, which, unlike Thesmophoria, is not a satire, and in that text Aristophanes is actually depicted giving one of the most passionate, poetic and artful speeches in *support* of homosexuality that we have from the entire era, which can likely be taken as representative of his actual views because the entire point of the symposium is that Plato writes himself coming in at the end to make a speech that shuts up everybody else's inferior ideas about love (which he believed was noblest when it was beyond the physical, including abstinence from solo masturbation because he was a big dork) and 3) that Agathon was a fucking *real person*, a contemporary and rival of Aristophanes whom Aristophanes was much more likely to be mocking directly rather than as a surrogate for an entire class of people. Agathon is, in fact, also depicted in Plato's Symposium, but unlike Aristophanes is shown doing little more than recounting the details of a banquet held in his honor following the creation of his first drama... almost as if the man was known in his time to be preening and self-congratulatory, and Aristophanes' satire of him was centered on his ego, not his lack of masculinity for being the receptive partner in anal sex (an attitude which, again, is all but explicitly refuted by the way that the character whom voices those attitudes is treated in the texts.)
tip your waitress
Outside NOW!