And now for something really different, as they used to say on Monty Python’s Flying Circus: a guest blog with satirical verse grounded in the classics. Just to get the ball rolling, here is a stanza of introductory doggerel from me:
Is buggery our birthright?
No, let’s keep a boy’s arse tight,
Says our guest blogger today,
Delight in his body but not in that way!
Andrew Calimach is a Romanian-American author and descendant of the Calimachis, an old Moldavian ruling family. His research into the homoerotic domain of Greek mythology was published in 2002 under the title Lovers’ Legends: The Gay Greek Myths. The work was widely reviewed, nominated for the 2003 Lambda Literary Award, and later published in Bucharest as Legendele iubirii. He was a friend, neighbor, and coreligionist of the poet and boy-lover Allen Ginsberg; both of them were students of the Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Andrew’s articles have appeared in THYMOS: Journal of Boyhood Studies, in E.R.O.S. journal, and other publications. Over to Andrew:
Blaming the Greeks for our folly
What does my long poem (part of which appears below) about the Greeks and buggery have to do with the struggle to liberate the way we think about the sexuality of adolescent boys in encounter with adult men? I mean it to show that this is a topic that has occupied men’s minds for over three thousand years. Oddly, the old lessons have been forgotten, and we are engaged in doing the very opposite of what the wise heads of old advised. We are following a path diametrically opposite to the one that led to a brilliantly successful tradition of ethical boy love that lasted a millennium or more.
Though their point of view was mostly pre-scientific, the Greeks reached a conclusion very similar to the position that most medical professionals hold today, namely that anal sex is a very risky proposition. What we today frame in epidemiological and traumatological terms, and what we constrain by means of legislation, they phrased in terms of honor, and constrained by means of ethical teachings. Cultured Greek gentlemen despised any form of penetration of one male by another, while admiring and pursuing loving erotic relations short of penetration between men and adolescent boys. Today we live in a world the Greeks would see as topsy-turvy, where buggery is casually accepted, but erotic relations between men and adolescent boys, even though partially legal, are frowned upon. Might there be a causal link here?
Why am I making my argument in verse? First, it is a way to leap over my instinctive wordiness, probably the result of a youth misspent reading all the novels of Jules Verne, that paragon of non-laconic speech. Secondly, it is an attempt to inject a bit of humor into an overly serious discussion. Finally, how else to make accessible an argument that starts with the classics and ends with the dystopian future (to say nothing about the dystopian present) without putting to sleep 99% of the audience?
What am I versifying about? To be precise, it is about the big lie that the Greeks buggered boys en masse. Who cares? We should all care about that, as it is one of the cornerstones of the edifice that has become the gay world of today, one that does not serve the best interests of those boys who feel that touch of desire in their hearts and have no choice but to fall into either the gay or the straight camp. Should they fall into the gay camp, they would be hard pressed not to end up buggered or buggering. Not that we should go back to hanging sodomites. It is just that presently there is a presumption that buggery IS gay sex, and the big lie about the Greeks is one of the foundations of that juggernaut of cultural conformism called “being gay.”
Who did the big lie start with? The professors, of course, who, like the rest of us, have their own emotional baggage and personal agendas to color their perspective on the Greeks, and what they teach the rest of us about them::
What is the cause the bookish philologue
Holds that the Greeks were by their bent abusive?
And wherefore the hoary pedagogue
Strains to persuade us that they were intrusive?
Does search for truth inspire these academics?
Does love of learning lead them the Greeks betray?
For some it’s pure bigotry systemic,
While others in plain sight argue pro se.
The straights of dominance accuse the Greeks
While the gays flail desperately for a foil.
Antiquity, they preen, of abuse reeks,
Unlike us modern wags, so don’t recoil. . . .
What were the Greeks really like?
Men who rough plough and sword first cast aside
And to the Alps of knowledge strove to stride,
Stripped off their robes and showed themselves undressed
And naked exercised and learned and taught,
Not by some primitive impulse possessed,
But so that by their eyes truth naked might be caught.
Thus out of vision grasped by men farsighted
The flames of art and science first ignited.
From their hands mute stone first stirred to life;
From their stages theater laughed and cried;
Their minds, searching to end brute toil and strife,
To tame men’s savage ways, a subtle path descried.
That path was love, yet not love reproductive,
But a new love, of supermen productive,
And friendships firm, that made strong tyrants quake.
Thence modern man was born, from this found truth:
Man callow lives and dies, lest through man’s love awake.
Thus Greeks their glory won, through man’s love for a youth.
In wise men’s hands this love was no rank scourge
For it was wrought in the same genius forge
Whence came all truth that Hellas yet does teach.
Heart’s primal path it blazed, two bloods to bind,
Yet well limned honor’s boundaries not to breach,
Guarding body pristine, while ennobling the mind. . . .
Who says so? The Greeks themselves, whose comments indicating that they viewed anal sex as abuse I proceed to quote below, with proper footnotes (on my website) for those who are curious and interested. Am I fool enough to claim that the Greeks never buggered boys? Not at all. My only claim is that they knew the difference between ethical love and abusive passion, both of which coexisted then, as they still do today.
Aesop man’s greed and foolishness did skewer,
Here fabled Zeus helped him to ford a sewer:
“Fair goddess Shame defied the Olympic king
And warned that she would fly from men, unchained,
Should Eros from behind try entering.”
Shameless such men by Aesop were ordained.
Hear now Plato, whom Ganymede inflamed
And verses penned his boyfriends, not some dame.
His peals of laughter roll from the tomb’s night
Mocking those men who restraint lack in bed
And his sharp words chide them in black and white:
“Why lurch you on all fours to mate like quadrupeds?”
“You men fancy yourselves of noble stock?
You’re nought but piglets scratching ’gainst a rock.”
Thus Socrates, whom boyish charms entranced.
Thus, since our world was new, the blame in fact
Was not sweet love that man for youth advanced
But the blind urge to barge up his digestive tract.
Plato, when forging man’s ideal laws
Hymned love of lads unmarked by vulgar flaws.
The Spartan foes and myth-weaving Cretans
He put in pillory to make example:
“They sow their seed on barren rocks, like cretins,”
Though well he knew those tribes debauch did not sample.
Speak, O captain of philosophy’s seas,
Futtering males you dubbed mental disease.
Yet, Aristotle, your loves’ names fill a book!
Yet, jibed you, only blind men crave not beauty!
How then, in youth, for lover Hermias you took,
And your acolytes embraced as sacred duty?
“Only such men are ill who their beloveds hurt.
A male to top? That’s tantamount to chewing dirt.
But moderate men have leave to taste love’s pleasure.
My son, Nicomachus, exampled my views:
After my death, his life my own did measure,
When my friend Theophrastus for lover he did choose.”
The amphitheater of the Athenians
Thrums still with their laughter and opinions.
Upon its stage of comical reflection,
That oafish lout who his loved boy belittled,
Aristophanes netted for his collection,
Pinning that insect under the tag, “dung beetle.”
Speak, old Aeschines, you fiery orator,
Athenian lads you courted and adored.
But you knew chaste from vicious love of boys.
Before all Athens, one you named a whore:
Timarchus, his honor squandered as men’s toy,
You brought to ground for flinging open his back door.
And say you more, in this Areopagus?
The ancient lore of love would you teach us?
Then pray, make known to all, what kind of man
A woman makes of his beloved male?
“Two stains mark out for us that noisome clan,
Brutal are they, uncultured too, beyond the pale.”
And Plato drains his cup of wine to add:
“Lovers divine can be, as well as bad.
When looking for a tender friend, chase not
Some stripling, seek one who‘s old enough to think.”
And Xenophon the crucial point has wrought:
“You must have leave from the boy’s sire, in ink.”
There is more to recount about the views of the Greeks regarding the undesirability of buggery, and the poem leaves no gravestone unturned, but here I shall skip ahead to address the present gay reality, that liberates the anuses of a few while imprisoning the hearts of the many:
There is no freedom nor shall there ever be
Till boy with boy hand in hand can be free.
The few flaunt license, the rest in shame hide.
To say “It gets better” is a sad lie,
See youth after hurt youth leap into suicide,
Their parents want to know, how many more must die?
Thus pressed, the ranks of these eclectic
Protest, “The feeling is electric,”
And pledge to Socrates allegiance.
In vain they claim to hang with that Greek cat,
They’re just Romans flying a flag of convenience,
Loath to hoist their own “Asinus asinum fricat.”
Like the feeble who lonely solace find
Beguiled by poppies that entrap the mind
These wights cling fast to thrills they deem a treasure.
The learned trade the pleasant for the good,
And just as reason deems opium a fool’s pleasure
The Greeks to shun this folly understood.
Wrath told leads me past anger into sadness
To muse upon the random ways of madness.
How blind belief in this dead end of lust
Has robbed all men of love that might have been.
Instead up rise hard walls of fear and disgust
And young and old esteem the tender touch unclean.
Homophobia is not in the past, it is more rampant than ever, and much of it is driven by instinctive disgust at practices that are inherently unclean. Of course, that disgust is partly a projection, since at least half of the men who bed women at some point turn that woman over and have with her as they would with a boy. Does that disprove the dynamics of hate against men who love men or who love boys (of legal age of course)? I think not. Nonetheless that homophobia, which is ultimately self-hate, may well destroy us all and the world with it. Hence the end of the poem, forgive the gloom and doom please:
Sage Aldous must be turning in his grave,
For he was right, this new world is not brave.
To mimic boys gay men now depilate.
You should be proud your hearts yearn for the young,
But lest you rightfully be thought a renegade
Turn wisdom’s river to flush out Augean dung.
A better man would keep anger within,
But I… I would not know where to begin.
Long I’ve laboured ’neath this burden not mine
And paid with loves lost for gay lib’s shrill chant.
It’s too late now to tell where lies the boundary line
Between that which I am, and a prisoner’s rant.
But no one wants to hear this dialectic
Why, my gay pals wax downright apoplectic.
Dear friends, you’ll have no more need of gay pride,
—Look, nor history nor sense offer refuge—
All that you need do is cast your gay shame aside:
Cease drowning mankind under buggery’s deluge.
The lid of time swings shut, the Greeks are gone,
Upon our orb we’re once again alone.
From modern heights we disdain Greeks as rakes
Against whose sins our mores pretend defense.
Yet, in our haste to rise above their mistakes,
We’ve killed what made them great, and saved what gave offense.
And therein the irony does lie
Keep the bathwater, let the baby die.
But for this murder we’ll all pay the price.
Male love repressed morphs into brutish need
From glut of couplings we then multiply like mice
Till pillaged Nature break beneath the human breed.
Nor ask why leering dawns this new dark age,
This maelstrom of materialistic rage,
When in our hearts this unvoiced void does gape,
When mangled Eros hobbles on one leg,
When man’s reduced to matrimonial ape,
And his sole destiny? Filthy lucre to beg.
So here you have a summary of a poem that is itself the summation of the article preceding it, that sets out the argument in its full panoply. Its title is Pinning Anal Sex on the Greeks: A Millennial Slur”. For those interested in reading it, you will find it at my Academia.edu page in its totality. Comments and replies are welcome (to acalimach@gmail.com ) but to keep my own workload to manageable dimensions, kindly submit them in verse.
TOC adds: Alternatively, or in addition, comments in prose may be submitted to this blog in the usual way!
Perhaps I should also take this opportunity to say that thanks to sterling work by David Kennerly I now have user-friendly compressed audio versions of my interview with Testimony Films, originally commissioned for Channel 4’s The Paedophile Next Door. I expect to be providing a link shortly, with further comments. The sound quality is good and the interview remains uncut.
In March 2015 I posted in Agapeta an article about Calimach’s essay and poem, titled “Anal sex, the heteronormative fantasm against heretical love”. Generally sympathetic to the ideas of his essay, I nevertheless opposed the use of the word “buggery”, as the word “bugger” (in French “bougre”), of medieval origin, designated heretics, both in the religious and sexual sense.
From what I have read, it seems that the ancient Greeks condemned men not behaving as men, for instance those accepting being sodomised. But it seems that they condmned also oral sex, both fellatio and cunnilingus, as unmanly.
>But it seems that they condmned also oral sex, both fellatio and cunnilingus, as unmanly.
I doubt the surviving literary sources have all that much to say on these topics though.
I will conclude here, since I intend to take the argument in a slightly different direction. But conclude I will, since this thread is old now and there is no point in flogging it further, to an ever diminishing readership countable on the fingers of one hand.
In response to Edmund’s dismissal of Ferrari’s recent scholarship, all I can say is, “What else could you possibly have said?!” To have seriously responded to her depiction of Laius as the Greek paragon of the bugger would have taken your argument into intellectual territory, and that would have been a dangerous place indeed for your contentions. I will say nothing else about the form and substance of your comments, I think you have indicted yourself far more thoroughly then I ever could have done.
That brings me to my final point here. There are any ways in which a man can relate to his own pre-thought reaction to the beauty of an adolescent boy. I will suggest that most men these days react with denial or aggression. Some, not that few, react with passion. Of those, a certain number will resort to action, and engage in a love relationship with a boy. That common characteristic,however, is not enough to lump these all into one “community of boy lovers.” Rather, they should be further divided into two groups, the selfish and the altruistic. Certainly, in ancient Greece those two sub-divisions existed and were recognized as such. Today is no different.
Thus, of those men who actually become “erastes,” some will pursue their own desires at the boy’s expense, while others will put the boy’s best interests first. Among the first group are those likely to use the boy sexually regardless of what is good for him. They will penetrate the boy, all the while explaining that they are giving that boy great pleasure, and otherwise inseminating only good qualities into him. The second group will do no such thing. They will engage physically with the boy only as far as that can be done without ANY possibility of harm, physical or psychological.
In contrast with the mentality prevalent on the internet today, that these two groups are natural allies, I will suggest to you that they are not. The two groups are at odds with each other, and are actually dangerous to each other. The selfish lovers have brought ignominy and contempt upon the altruistic ones, and the altruistic ones, if they should open their mouth, which they do only rarely, expose the intellectual dishonesty and fundamental abusiveness of the buggers.
When critics of pederasty accuse such men of engaging in an “abuse of power,” it is the buggers they are thinking of, and they are correct to make that accusation. When they blame pederasts for “unequal relationships” again it is buggery that they are blaming, and again they are right to do so. Not only is there no point in making common cause with men who want to “lower the age of consent” in order to bugger children, it is suicidal.
This is not to say that the Edmunds of this world should become the new scapegoats. Not at all, They deserve friendship and compassion as much as, and even more, then everyone else. But thoughtful people should not be fooled by specious arguments, no matter how smoothly delivered, nor be misled into joining their campaign to “liberate” the anuses of pretty adolescents.
I’m afraid it’s time for calling a spade a spade, having made endless pleas for courtesy.. I point out to everyone here that I have repeatedly pleaded with this bigoted little authority on nothing that I would readily and humbly capitulate to him if he could produce one feeblest bit of evidence to support any of his historical fantasies. Again and again he has copped out and responded with insult and bluster rather than even attempting to address any objections made to his unfounded assertions. I am dumbfounded by the deference accorded to him here, beginning with Tom’s swallowing in his introduction the American nobody’s absurd pretensions to be some sort of Moldavian aristocrat, whatever that could mean or should imply. I am not sure which is greater: my contempt for the bigot or my self-contempt for going along with everyone else in appearing to take him seriously. I suggest Tom has made an inadvertent mistake in allowing this pathetic creature space to spout hateful nonsense entirely lacking in the sort of hard evidence that generally makes his blog so valuable. Please say frankly what you think because if the consensus is against me, I shall at last understand this is not a place I should ever have come. I should make clear, in case it is not already, that I am entirely open to debating the likely role of sodomy in Greek pederasty. I really would accept being proved wrong by any of the logical interlocutors here, whether Jack, A., David Kennerly, Dissident, feinmann0, James, Linca, etc., but the lack of obvious distinction drawn between them and this arrogant, intellectually and morally contemptible Andrew is making me feel sick With apologies to those who think one should never let oneself be shown to be upset.
It’s *almost* time for me to weigh in, I think. I’d rather hear a response from some others first, though, preferably including Jack et al. who are named above.
“I really would accept being proved wrong by any of the logical interlocutors here, whether Jack, A., David Kennerly, Dissident, feinmann0, James, Linca, etc., but the lack of obvious distinction drawn between them and this arrogant, intellectually and morally contemptible Andrew is making me feel sick”
I’m not here to prove you wrong. Actually, I cautiously take your side here. I’m no expert on the classics (far from it) and defer to you and Andrew to know what you’re talking about. However, I find Andrew’s debating tactics to be less-than-civil, which I’ve expressed in other comments following along with this debate (at least one of which WordPress managed to lose).
I think your demand (explicit mention of anal-penetration in primary sources) is reasonable. I suspect that there are other forms of evidence that you might accept if brought forward but this seems like the simplest and most logical line in the sand. I agree that it has not been provided, so I default to suspecting that it does not exist. This doesn’t matter too much to me since I’m neither an activist nor one with a Special Interest in classics. (I peg you as the second but not the first.)
I’d say Andrew’s most recent volley of insults is completely uncalled for. Your response to him may have been a bit over-the-top but, well, I’m in no position to judge. I’ll let someone else cast the first stone.
I cannot have an opinion on ancient Greek practices and society as my knowledge in this is limited, at best. I have no familiarity with original source material from that era. I rely entirely upon classics scholars, or those who claim to be such, for clues to practices from those periods. As such, I am exquisitely vulnerable to their misdirections, if they take a mind to so misdirect me.
For me ancient Greece, as well as a number of other times and places, speak to a vastly better conception of, and tolerance for, man/boy love, affection, pedagogy, mentorship and sex. Of that I think there is widespread agreement and I can comfortably, and publicly, assert that that is so.
Even so, I’m sure that, were I to become expert in individual of those cultures, I would also find much which is culturally jarring or even morally indefensible by my (contemporary) standards. Without expertise, however, we can still readily identify aspects of Greek culture which are now incompatible with contemporary, and nearly universally-embraced, values, such as an intolerance for slavery. I think state-sanctioned distinctions between women and men or other status distinctions made in law are now most likely irreversibly extinct, too.
Regardless, I have tended to base my own morality, not upon what had been codified in any age, but upon my own sense of reason. At least, to the greatest extent that reason is available to me given that I do occupy a particular time and place. But those practices distant from my own but which support my present day preferences are certainly welcome and will be put to good use.
My opinions on penetration of the posterior are that it, like all other physical and sexual behavior, exist within a biological and epidemiological sphere as well as one of individual liberty.
If there is a moral dimension to this practice, it is informed entirely by an adherence to standards arising from those spheres.
This is quite distinct from how the practice is conceived of by today’s society, however, when the subject is children or adolescents.
This is a separate problem from either the individual liberty or the health concern. And this is where things get messy.
I’m acknowledging the problem here, not climbing up to the pulpit to pronounce what shall become, henceforth, acceptable discourse, let alone practice.
But I am saying that there is a problem, at least of perception, and is likely one of the bigger problems we have from a public-relations angle.
It may sound ludicrous but I would suggest that polling data would tell us a great deal.
I certainly understand Edmund’s earlier clarification of his role as a writer and historian which is different from my own as an activist and do not suggest that political expedience or contemporary conformity to social standards should play a role in his scholarship.
As for Andrew’s arguments, I find them too doctrinaire, illiberal, and intolerant even while seeing that he does identify sodomy as socially problematic when the subject is intergenerational relationships.
But as for discerning in anal sex a fundamentally malevolent and unforgivable quality? I am sufficiently rebellious to find arguments based upon past social opprobrium to be unpersuasive in convincing me how a practice should be innately regarded.
Leave out the spiritualism, the supernatural and the symbolic and just give me the biomechanics (and emollients, for heaven’s sake!) and the germ theory of life as well as the laws which secure the rights of the individual.
Given my own complicated ambivalence, I can see why Edmund and Andrew’s feud has not been resolved by this exchange and, correct me if I’m wrong, it appears to have gotten much worse and intensely personal.
I’m hoping that this will be my last word on the subject. It’s become a real pain-in-the-ass!
Thanks for explaining your thinking, which I well understand. My only problem with it is that it leaves untouched Andrew’s deliberate and intellectually dishonest conflation of two issues.
One issue is how we should regard the role of sodomy in pederasty, which itself turns into two issues: what has been experienced as its intrinsic value or lack thereof, and what is politic for activists to say about that today. Both are highly debatable. The last point I’ve largely conceded to you and Andrew while making it clear it is not my concern. I can readily understand anyone who disagrees with me on the first and only hoped for constructive exchanges on it.
The other issue is entirely different and far more important in evaluating these exchanges. It is a question of honest historical assessment, in this case of Greek behaviour. You may legitimately not give a damn about the truth for its own sake, but what should concern you if this debate has any meaning for you at all is that Andrew has demonstrated a total disregard for honesty. He has deliberately and persistently made allegations he knows very well to have no basis in reality, and whenever they have been challenged he has replied with nothing more than bluster and character assassination.
I repeat, why is this indulged? Even Dissident, while convincingly demonstrating the wretched man’s bigotry calls him “brilliant”. I am dumbfounded. He is nothing of the sort. Nothing he has said has shown him to be anything other than a thoroughly pretentious little man and a deeply prejudiced, boring old fart. What is he supposed to be brilliant about? It is a point hard to argue without writing a long essay, but I’ve become tolerably certain he is illiterate in Greek. So why has this ignorant bigot been given space?
Some may very well say for freedom of speech, which I can most readily agree with in principle, but then I must ask those of you who have been around here from early days why we are no longer allowed to hear from the likes of Gil Hardwick, whom I found to have vastly more moral integrity, however tactless and upsetting they could be?
Edmund, Alexander’s Choice, http://www.amazon.com/Alexanders-Choice-ebook/dp/B00AR3MTIQ/
Perhaps I should not have allowed Andrew’s last post, which really was gratuitously offensive. I thought, Edmund, that you would give as good as you got in return — which you did, with interest — and that would be the end of the matter. Alas, it’s now carrying on, and there is a serious threat that the atmosphere will get worse unless I call a halt, which I now do. As for those who are no longer here, I would refer everyone to my recent anniversary blog.
[TOC WRITES: The following may be a replacement of a post sent earlier that was inadvertently trashed. If I have already posted such a replacement, please forgive any duplication. Following complaints of comments going missing, I’d rather duplicate than make the opposite mistake.]
Hi, Andrew. I’m a GLer, not a BLer, but I try to keep abreast of all issues regarding intergenerational relationships, whether man/boy, man/girl, woman/girl, etc. I’m also interested in the rights of *all* MAPs, not just GLer’s, and the rights of *all* youths, both male and female.
For one thing, I can understand that committing an act of buggery against a boy who has not yet reached pubescence could come with degrees of physical risks for the boy. I won’t argue with you there, as I feel much the same regarding an adult man having full blown vaginal intercourse with a pre-pubescent girl for the same reasons of demonstrable medical safety relating to actual biological development. The same would go for an act of buggery, of course.
But when you say something like, “If you were the father of a 12-year-old-boy, would you want an adult lover to bugger him?” that sounds like a highly moralizing statement, as if you are more concerned with matters of decorum based on the individual tastes of people not involved in the intimacy themselves, rather than actual safety issues. Your “modesty” comment elsewhere in reference to a hypothetical boy partner of a hypothetical man seems to further bear this out. The age of 12 is clearly in adolescent territory, and I’m not sure that safety issues which apply to adults would be different from an adolescent, who has developmentally reached the point of young adulthood.
As a heterosexual hebephile, my own sexual interests are more low key than that of a typical adult, and I would be happy to forgo full intercourse with a pubescent or young adolescent girl in favor of simple kissing and petting if the law allowed it, and to avoid buggery of her altogether. However, it’s true that different girls, much like different boys, will want different things. So I would argue that if it’s in pubescent or adolescent territory, and the main concern is issues of “modesty” or decorum, then what two consenting partners may prefer is most important, not what members of the public might think. Further, many young women are interested in being buggered, and I can personally attest to this, as when I do date, I date young women of legal age. I would personally have no problem with experimenting with the buggering of a young woman of legal age if she felt it pleasurable, and I would take the utmost care in doing it safely.
In regards to moralism and different tastes being mistaken for empirical concerns: When I once revealed to my grandfather – who is very old school in his thinking – that I had given cunnilingus to women of adult age whom I had dated, he went out of his way to tell me how disgusting he thought that was, and how back in his day no man would ever admit to doing such a thing or risk all of his friends pointing fingers at him when they saw him. So my other male friends and I used to aggravate him after that when we were all together by each pointing at one another whenever he would see us. So I would prefer to have boys decide for themselves what they want, and to do research to make certain that it’s highly unsafe to commit acts of buggery on a person of a certain degree of biological development.
Just thought I’d share this,with the brilliant minds that hover this forum.
We need to here more from people like this,who are not afraid(Or to old and decrepit to give a fuck!) to tell It like it is.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/chris-denning-interview-what-should-i-do-live-my-whole-life-on-my-own-i-wasnt-prepared-to-do-that-9929395.html
YEA! for Denning. May God bless him always,
Linca
Hello my friend,
The safety issues implicated in buggering a boy go far beyond those in a relationship between adults. They involve predisposing that boy to dangerous behavior in childhood, and to carrying that burden into adulthood. That was well understood by the ancients, who asserted that being buggered as a boy led to the taste for it being perpetuated into adulthood. There are also implications about that boy’s self image, social relations, family relations, long-term health issues such as cancer, and perhaps others that do not come to mind right now.
I do not know what you can possibly mean by calling the putative twelve year old a “young adult.” He is a child and will remain so for quite a long time still. Exactly how long is hard to say, maturity comes not to us all at the same time. Physical maturity seems to come between the late teens and the early twenties. Mental maturity is anyone’s guess, and for some comes quite late indeed in these coddled times. It certainly came late for me, which was both a blessing and a curse.
You call me “moralizing” because I presume to trump the “tastes” of a twelve year old who is looking to get sodomized? My judgement as an adult trumps his. That same twelve year old will surely manifest a “taste” for taking the car keys and going for a ride at night with his buddies. What do you suppose my reaction to that will be?
A large part of the difficulty with discussions about the sexuality of children, especially when adults are involved, is precisely this kind of extremism that presumes that if it might be OK to permit some things to some children, we should therefore permit all things to all children. It is at that point that we enter the vicious circle of lunacy in which we are now all trapped.
Finally, though I have sympathy for your attractions as long as you exercise them ethically and compassionately, I have to say that I see no parallel whatsoever between a relationship involving a man and a very young girl, and a man and a boy of the same age, say twelve, since that age is above the age of consent in some locations, and I do not wish to be drawn into discussions about relationships with youths below the age of consent. A woman and a girl, perhaps, a la Sappho, but not a man and a girl. Same-sex inter-generational relationships are simply in a separate category from cross-sex inter-generational relationships.
Hello my friend,
Hello yourself, Andrew.
The safety issues implicated in buggering a boy go far beyond those in a relationship between adults. They involve predisposing that boy to dangerous behavior in childhood, and to carrying that burden into adulthood. That was well understood by the ancients, who asserted that being buggered as a boy led to the taste for it being perpetuated into adulthood.
But why is this “dangerous” behavior?
There are also implications about that boy’s self image, social relations, family relations, long-term health issues such as cancer, and perhaps others that do not come to mind right now.
Why would buggering be “bad” for self-image unless society created aspersions on it? That type of “harm” would be sociogenic, like slut-shaming of girls and women. That sounds like the wrong party is being blamed for the problem.
What do family relations have to do with a private sexual act between two consenting partners unless it would bother them to know what was going on in their family member’s private intimate life? That’s like saying I should never have sex with a woman “doggie style” if we both find it a pleasurable position because it would bother her dad if he knew about it. I think that would be *his* problem, not ours, and I wouldn’t proceed to tell him anyway, since it wasn’t something he needed to know anyway!
And buggering can cause cancer of the colon? I’d like to see reliable medical studies that back this up.
I do not know what you can possibly mean by calling the putative twelve year old a “young adult.” He is a child and will remain so for quite a long time still.
I can call it that because it’s biologically/developmentally apt, and because various studies – including those conducted by Robert Epstein, author of “The Myth of the Teen Brain” and his book Teen 2.0 – have put paid to the myth that a young adolescent is a “child” from a developmental standpoint.
In all honesty, Andrew, it sounds to me like you are making value judgments based on personal feelings and beliefs and considering them objective scientific assessments.
Exactly how long is hard to say, maturity comes not to us all at the same time. Physical maturity seems to come between the late teens and the early twenties. Mental maturity is anyone’s guess, and for some comes quite late indeed in these coddled times. It certainly came late for me, which was both a blessing and a curse.
One cannot hold themselves as the standard blueprint for all in any particular group, e.g., race, gender, age. Yes, these are coddled times, but again, that is a societal problem of extending childhood and forcing young adolescents to share the legal status of actual children (i.e., third-class citizens with few if any civil rights recognized, and forced into economic dependence on adult caregivers), thereby making it as much a concept that an actual biological/developmental reality.
You call me “moralizing” because I presume to trump the “tastes” of a twelve year old who is looking to get sodomized?
Yes, Andrew, I am, because truth to tell, you are imposing your own tastes upon another due to the fact that you do not approve of those others making a certain personal decision that you disapprove of.
My judgement as an adult trumps his.
Bingo. That, to a youth liberationist, is an ageist statement, and it explains why you differ so greatly from others here who do consider the rights of a youth to be valid even though the law currently does not recognize that. We call for change, you do not. Fair enough. But I do consider that a prejudiced attitude, and that is why we must agree to disagree on the crux of this matter.
Now given your statement, I should mention this: If we are to truly believe that the judgement of an adult should trump that of a youth in all cases, and that the adult invariably “knows better” as the common narrative goes, then it can be argued that the hypothetical adult partner knows “best” when he says it’s okay to do the buggering with his hypothetical 12-year-old partner. Or does the anti-sex choice always trump the pro-sex stance when it comes to adult decisions? If so, then I do honestly believe that is a flagrant case of moralizing.
That same twelve year old will surely manifest a “taste” for taking the car keys and going for a ride at night with his buddies. What do you suppose my reaction to that will be?
Whatever the mainstream reaction would be, to be honest.
But there is a big difference between going mindlessly joy-riding in a vehicle that you don’t legally own and didn’t secure prior permission to use, and didn’t pass the required tests for utilizing, and which constitutes an act of stealing; and making a personal decision that you can learn about via study and proper education. Or, if one prefers, passing the Epstein-Dumas Test of Adulthood that Epstein proposes for youths who may seek to prove their merits for emancipation as individuals. I don’t believe that was a fair example/comparison.
A large part of the difficulty with discussions about the sexuality of children, especially when adults are involved, is precisely this kind of extremism that presumes that if it might be OK to permit some things to some children, we should therefore permit all things to all children.
To be frank, Andrew, I don’t see any position more extremist then that of blanket prohibition based on a specific set of proprietary moral stances. I don’t think anyone here, and certainly no youth liberationist I know of or support, would ever suggest that what goes for one young person should, in effect, go for all of them. That is why we call our stance pro-*choice*. The *choice* suffix is very important there, since it clearly suggests that what may be good or pleasurable for some does not, and should not, count for all.
It is at that point that we enter the vicious circle of lunacy in which we are now all trapped.
The vicious circle of lunacy I currently see us all trapped in is one of blanket prohibition, which leads to kids being arrested for sexting even each other, for putting “sexy” pics of themselves up on socnet sites, or for expressing their sexuality in almost any conceivable way; which, in turn, leads to witch hunts, greatly increased societal surveillance, oppressive laws of myriad sorts, and the widespread hatred of MAPs as a form of collateral damage.
Finally, though I have sympathy for your attractions as long as you exercise them ethically and compassionately, I have to say that I see no parallel whatsoever between a relationship involving a man and a very young girl, and a man and a boy of the same age, say twelve, since that age is above the age of consent in some locations, and I do not wish to be drawn into discussions about relationships with youths below the age of consent. A woman and a girl, perhaps, a la Sappho, but not a man and a girl. Same-sex inter-generational relationships are simply in a separate category from cross-sex inter-generational relationships.
Here we go with that again. Let me say, off the bat, Andrew, that I find it majorly problematic that some (though far from all) BLer’s, and yes certain female GLer’s, find an excuse to be prejudiced and to “other” fellow MAPs with specifically heterosexual tastes, just as the mainstream gay/lesbian community did to BLer’s – and of course, MAPs in general – over the past few decades. It makes me want to shout, “Doesn’t any oppressed minority group *ever* learn?” Making the same mistakes as previous oppressed groups have, and marginalizing sub-groups based on who they are attracted to (or *not* attracted to, as the case may be) is not a complete step forward. We need to stop this nonsense if we are truly going to move forward as a united front, and to create a better world for *everyone*, not just those with certain specific “approved” tastes.
You see, Andrew, I do see a parallel between heterosexual and homosexual – and bisexual – MAPs, and it’s this: We are all oppressed for our attractions. We are all pilloried by society for allegedly having attractions that are “inappropriate” or “immoral” or which some larger group finds offensive. This is the same parallel that mainstream gays had until being embraced by mainstream liberals to a large extent. Nice to see you can support female GLer’s as having tastes that are equally valid to homosexual BLer’s. It’s a shame you cannot see the same with MAPs of heterosexual inclinations.
Personally, Andrew, I honestly see you as a brilliant man who nevertheless allows your personal tastes and perspectives to color your views of many things. Please accept that in the spirit it was intended, which is food for thought, as it was no way intended as a cheap ad hominem.
Three cheers for that whole comment!
“passing the Epstein-Dumas Test of Adulthood that Epstein proposes for youths who may seek to prove their merits for emancipation as individuals.”
Wait, what? This is a thing? Where do I get it?
Never mind. I found it. My average competency score is 93% and the area where I scored lowest is (obviously) interpersonal skills. So, I’m basically an autistic adult 🙂
I found it too. It’s certainly an interesting idea. The main problem I see with it, and any similar pencil-and-paper test that may be devised, is that it would be very easy for a reasonably bright but mentally immature and practically incompetent person to fudge it, lying where applicable and elsewhere guessing the ‘correct’ answer without really believing it or giving it much thought. The world is full of teenagers who absorb large amounts of information, spit it back out on test papers and then forget most of it immediately afterwards, and who parrot ‘underage drinking is bad’ at school and then spend the weekend getting wasted with friends. Heck, the schools themselves teach kids how to game tests, telling them, for instance, that ‘always’ and ‘never’ questions on the SAT tend to be looking for a ‘No’ answer.
When faced in a formal setting with a question like “Driving a car is a complex skill that requires training and practice. Do you agree?” no kid with half a brain is going to mark No, but that doesn’t mean they won’t sneak their parents’ car and go out driving recklessly. As for “Can a woman become pregnant throughout her menstrual cycle?”, well, no, actually, she can’t, but I bet that is not the ‘right’ answer, because the schools teach kids differently. It’s a convenient risk-minimising shorthand: you usually can’t tell exactly when a person is ovulating, and that’s the take-away message they want to send; they don’t want to explain luteal phases and all the rest of it to a classroomful of bored or snickering adolescents (now here is where a pencil and paper test would be useful: make ’em learn it and fail ’em if they don’t). Also, the Fertility Awareness Method is less likely to work well for adolescents than for adults because it requires a regular menstrual cycle and a certain amount of patience and consistency, so they don’t want the kids going off and trying to use it.
I think some sort of practical test would be a lot better. Mind you, Epstein does says that his test has been empirically validated. I will have to look into how. Maybe there is more to it than I’m seeing.
“I found it too. It’s certainly an interesting idea. The main problem I see with it, and any similar pencil-and-paper test that may be devised, is that it would be very easy for a reasonably bright but mentally immature and practically incompetent person to fudge it”
That was also my immediate reaction. Of course, I had no incentive to lie on the test so I got an accurate score. However, if I were actually being graded, no way I’d have let the examiners know what a socially-incompetent fuck-up I am 😛
“that doesn’t mean they won’t sneak their parents’ car and go out driving recklessly.”
Well, in my case it does because I never violate a rule I agree with. All my friends are shocked by the fact that I’ve never lied to my parents. I’m pretty sure this is autism-related….
“As for “Can a woman become pregnant throughout her menstrual cycle?”, well, no, actually, she can’t, but I bet that is not the ‘right’ answer, because the schools teach kids differently.”
Actually, I put the biologically correct answers to all the sex questions and got a perfect score in that segment, so I think they prefer accuracy over conforming-to-the-syllabus.
“Fertility Awareness Method is less likely to work well for adolescents than for adults because it requires a regular menstrual cycle and a certain amount of patience and consistency, so they don’t want the kids going off and trying to use it.”
Simple fix: tell the kids it’s boring and lots of hard work and here have some free condoms….
But they would also have to stop telling kids condoms have microscopic holes in them that sperm can get through. Seriously, it’s done in some parts of the US.
I think there may indeed be more to the test than you’re seeing, A. To some extent, kids who take the test may be on their honor. However, if they know the right thing to say, it can be argued they know the difference in truth, even if they have the intention to go against what they say. Further, once they receive their emancipation, they will be allowed degrees of responsibility that will make it incumbent that they do not keep acting demonstrably “immature,” because now this will no longer be expected of them. I will grant that this test isn’t perfect, but I think it’s a lot better than the blanket prohibition we have today, and a good compromise for those who insist anyone under Age X not just be given the benefit of the doubt, as is given to almost everyone above Age X.
I’d still prefer a series of practical tests, though: can you open a bank account, can you get up on time for work, etc.: show us you can do it, tell us that you want to, and we’ll let you. I do agree that we need something more flexible and case-by-case than the blanket prohibition we have today. I was recently reading an article by Heather Corinna, the founder of Scarleteen.com, in which she talked about her adolescence. She says that by the age of sixteen she was paying her own way, managing a wide range of social relationships, having lots of sex with lots of partners and doing an excellent job with safer sex and contraception. She would have been a perfect candidate for ’emancipated minor’ status or some equivalent, and she came perilously close to really needing it: her abusive stepfather wanted to have her put in an institution, and institutionalised she would have been had a (male) counsellor not spotted what was happening and arranged for her to live with her father instead. She says that she thinks if she’d been institutionalised she’d have ended up killing herself.
I took the test and found it interesting. It looks like I missed one answer in several of the categories. There were several questions where I am sure I understand the issue very well but still didn’t know what answer the test makers expected. A decent variant of this would have practical components testing such things as the ability to stay calm in stressful situations, and to resist temptation. The embarrassing thing would be how many 12-year-olds would pass a decent test and how many 30-year-olds would fail. I suppose it could be like the citizenship tests, which most naturalized citizens couldn’t pass.
The “Can women become pregnant throughout their cycle?” question has parallels to my answer to “Can an adult engage in a sexual relationship with a child safely?” Yes from the point of view of metaphysics, no from the point of view of epistemology.
It would probably have to use different types of stressful environments since they affect different people differently.
Hard problem under a time limit: Fine by me.
Loud noise all around me: Absolutely crippling.
Delivering an impromptu speech to a large crowd: Psh. Easy-peasy.
Having a face to face conversation with strangers: Oh God save me!
Brilliant response Dissident!
I appreciate your support, Feinmann0; thank you!
“There are also implications about that boy’s self image, social relations, family relations, long-term health issues such as cancer”
Citation Needed
Particularly on that cancer claim. Would this be in any way related to the research on abortion causing cancer?
“My judgement as an adult trumps his.”
*Quietly fuming*
Liberty, liberty, liberty, liberty
I feel inclined to give you the entire collected works of John Stuart Mill….
“That same twelve year old will surely manifest a “taste” for taking the car keys and going for a ride at night with his buddies.”
Besides the fact that this is not a guarantee (I for one am far too boring for that), I think it overlooks the critical difference between doing something to yourself and infringing on other people’s property rights. The latter isn’t bad because it’s “disobedience” but because it harms others.
Seriously: J S Mill is required here.
“we should therefore permit all things to all children. It is at that point that we enter the vicious circle of lunacy in which we are now all trapped.”
Where do you live where this “lunacy” of perfect liberty exists? How much for a ticket there?
“Same-sex inter-generational relationships are simply in a separate category from cross-sex inter-generational relationships.”
Citation Needed
I second Tom: cool! On a vaguely related note, I once saw a graffito that proudly proclaimed J’AI FAIT JOUIR TA COPINE 5 FOIS (I made your girlfriend come 5 times).
>When I once revealed to my grandfather – who is very old school in his thinking – that I had given cunnilingus to women of adult age whom I had dated, he went out of his way to tell me how disgusting he thought that was, and how back in his day no man would ever admit to doing such a thing or risk all of his friends pointing fingers at him when they saw him. So my other male friends and I used to aggravate him after that when we were all together by each pointing at one another whenever he would see us.
Cool!
So as not to respond to Edmund in ever more skinny sausages, I will do so here. You think that adultery is the “sins of a woman”? Everyone commits adultery, Greek men included. They had a penetrating punishment for such men, having a radish shoved up one’s fundament. The role of a woman is to be penetrated, that was Timarchus’s sin, and the reason he was thus feminized by Aeschines.
As for why the jury “would not be disgusted by a fellow citizen selling himself as a prostitute,” of course they would. But Aeschines took the argument beyond the aspect of the material gain (room, board, etc) that T. received, and into what he actually did, or allowed to be done to him. At 137 he also brings that up: “to hire for money and to _indulge in licentiousness_ is the act of a man who is wanton and ill-bred”. There are two crimes here, my dear.
As for your request for explicit references, I think the closest you will come to that are the various references in my poem. They are not explicit of course, they are however very clear allusions. The texts we have are too refined to be that gross, but that does not mean that we should be rubes and not penetrate through to their real meaning, so to speak.
I have to say, Edmund, that I have a lot of sympathy for you. You have painted yourself into a corner, defending not boy love itself, for which many good arguments can be made, but defending the buggery of young boys as a summum bonum. It may seem that way to the man on top, and it may even be enjoyable to some boys, but a bit of analysis will show it to be a practice that does not only put the boy at risk, but that coarsens all of society, and ultimately puts all of us in prison. All of us men, I mean, since I hold that the liberation of buggery is the poison that killed the easy masculine camaraderie of former decades and centuries. It was a camaraderie that accommodated much, between man and man, and between boy and boy, and between man and boy too. All that is gone, and we live in a sterile alienated world in which casual masculine affection between one male and another is impossible. How many men and boys do you see walking arm in arm, or hand in hand? And yet all friends could be thus with friends, and not that long ago they really were thus, without having to be brazen, and without risk of being mocked. So as I look at you standing there on the barricades, waving the flag of boy-buggery, I can’t help wonder whether you are at all embarrassed, and whether you have ever considered that you might have fallen into a trap, an essentially homophobic trap that traps males who love other males into the very worst enactment of that attraction, to their great detriment, and ours.
Andrew, someone could write in any language about birds singing in the rain and you would interpret it as evidence of disgust with buggery. I give up definitively on getting through to you on this subject as I’m afraid I really have to say you are not pervious to the plain meanings of Greek or English or any other reason where it is concerned. It goes way beyond mere special pleading, which I could hope to address fruitfully through logic. I therefore return to my default position of avoiding direct exchange on this one subject in the hope of continuing to have the occasional much more valuable exchange on others, as we have in the past.
Your second paragraph I have only skimmed through as it based on a fundamental misunderstanding. I am not an activist. I don’t expect to change the world or accomplish any of the things you presume about me. I would always remain silent about your crusade except when you misrepresent Greek history. My interest in pederasty is limited to what history and literature reveal about its true nature. If a few reasonably open-minded people gain some insights as a result of what I find and write about, then that is a big bonus. If not, too bad. I would never campaign like you because I realise doing so successfully involves doing things like you are doing, either distorting or blinding oneself to the historical evidence for a political or personal end.
To everyone else, rather than believe anything Andrew or I are saying, if you are interested in the Greek truth and have time, please look up for yourself the primary sources Andrew has referred to (here and in his essay), almost all available online. They are pretty straightforward. One medical observation by Aristotle aside, you will find without exception that there is no reference in them to sodomy, plain or veiled, even though it is frankly referred to elsewhere in Greek literature. If you don’t have time or you would prefer a widely respected scholar’s summary of the most probable Greek homosexual practices, please read Kenneth Dover’s Greek Homosexuality. Failing that, all the writings on the subject by Thomas Hubbard and William Percy are also excellent and trustworthy, and widely reviewed as such.
Edmund, Alexander’s Choice, http://www.amazon.com/Alexanders-Choice-Edmund-Marlowe-ebook/dp/B00AR3MTIQ/
Edmund, forgive me if I take your response with a very large grain of salt. You claim to be “not an activist”?! You contradict yourself..
Just the other day you treated us to a full-throated hymn to sodomy, lauding “the extreme psychosexual thrill to the boy of submission to penetration”, an act that, as you purport, leaves the lover “empowered with an overwhelming sense of responsibility and need to protect.” A bit too late for “responsibility” or “protection”, meseems.
You insist that boy buggery is “the normal and most expected sexual act between men and boys in non-WEIRD societies.” I suppose that makes the cultured Greeks, the Azande, the Albanians, the Sufis, and all the other non-buggering pederasts who ever lived and loved (the majority of them, if the statistics are true) all weird.
You declare that boy-buggery “offers the only means of physical union between males, the equivalent in emotional and bodily sensation to coitus, the supreme life-giving act,” a statement that is as false as it is unimaginative.
And as if we did not have enough supremacy already, you proclaim that “For a boy it is also the supreme act of sexual trust.” “Trust betrayed” would be a more accurate formulation.
And of course you published that lovely “Alexander’s Choice” for which you conveniently attach the Amazon url to the end of each one of your posts, the better for those readers inspired by your prose to be able to rush out and obtain it. But in that book you present a boy of fourteen who makes himself available to be penetrated. How is that not an activist thrust? How can your work fail to instill in some readers an urge to penetrate boys, especially as you target a vulnerable audience of men who are attracted to boys and who lack a culturally sanctioned ethical structure for their relationships? You must be channeling the ghost of Peyrefitte!
I do not blame you, on the other hand, for throwing in the towel as far as proving that educated Greeks were tolerant of buggery. You took on an impossible task. The only question that remains is why you took it upon yourself to do so. If I may venture a reason, I’ll say it was because on some level you recognize that educated boy lovers still admire the Greeks and imagine themselves as emulating them. Thus the Greeks are still important enough for their example to confer legitimacy, in the eyes of cultured people. In this case, their example, their writings, and their teachings as encoded in their pedagogic myths of male love, say the very opposite of what you would like, and totally de-legitimize your dogma.
The myth of Laius, in Greek eyes the “first bugger,” is just one bit of evidence among many. Take a look at Professor Ferrari’s monograph, “Figures of Speech: Men and Maidens in Ancient Greece.” On page 144 she writes; “And why should Laius be cursed and his race perish if all he did was to invent a kind of love for which gods and men alike showed considerable enthusiasm, both before and after the fact? What Laius inaugurates is not “paiderastia” but an eros that is called contrary to norm, “paranomos”, and unlawful, “athemitos”, anal intercourse. As a perversion of conjugal sex, his impious act incurs the wrath of Hera, who inflicts on the Thebans the scourge of the Sphinx when they fail to punish him. Because he has sown his seed where he should not, where it would not grow, Laius himself is afflicted by a curse that denies him the benefits of lawful copulation, children who will continue his line.”
If Tom is interested, I would be glad to offer him for a future blog post my restoration of the myth of Laius and Chrysippus, a more developed version of the one that appears in my original work, “Lovers’ Legends” from 2002.
Your opinions and your feelings are your own business, Edmund. I am just sorry for the impressionable boys and young men who will read your book and come away with the belief that the kind of behavior you depict, the fruit of your adult imagination, is how a boy and a man should behave with each other.
Andrew, I am not throwing in any towel. In so far as you insist on aggressively promoting your illusions about Greek sexual practices in public debating spaces where some people may not realise they have no basis in historical reality, I will feel bound to urge people to look for the truth in the primary sources and their most respected modern interpreters, while sincerely regretting that this puts me in the path of your crusade.
All I said about stopping and now reiterate is I shall not directly debate this one topic with you any further because I have found you are literally impervious to reason or logic where it is concerned (hence, for example, the fantasies repeated here ad infinitum about Laius, where you simply ignore what anyone else says in reply). My experience is there is no possibility of any evidence making any impression of you or even eliciting a closely-argued response. I sincerely regret it for you because I fear your obsession with buggery is like a cancer that is eating away at what would otherwise be a lifetime of good scholarship, but it is pointless for us to discuss it. We can engage constructively, but only on other topics.
From a scholastic or literary point of view, I find the most worrying thing you keep doing is berating me for representing the Greeks or the 14-year-old protagonist of my novel participating in sodomy, not simply because this does not accord with how you would have liked them to behave, but at least as much because you believe what I am saying is undermining your efforts to make pederasty more palatable to today’s public. Have you thought through the implications of this? It implies that even if you thought I was right about the Greeks and realistic about my protagonist, you would wish me to lie about them for political purposes. I think that if I did so my study of ancient Greece would be historically worthless and my novel worthless as literature.
As I’m afraid you do with the Greeks, you are presuming a lot about me and my novel which you cannot know and happens not to be true. That I am not an activist is the key to why I think it pointless as well as inherently wrong to misrepresent the historical and psychosexual roles of sodomy: I do not believe anything you or I write will make any difference to the current predicament of pederasty. I wrote the novel I did, not to try to change the world, but because I found quite spontaneously that it was something I could easily write about from the heart. My ambition was that it would be a good and emotionally honest story. I wanted literary, not political, success. It is written for anyone who might be interested, and, contrary to what you assume, it so happens that old boys of my school have been a larger audience than men attracted to boys (because they are easier to identify). The only point in writing it was for it to be read, so, having Tom’s explicit permission to do so, I don’t apologise for ending my posts by bringing it to the attention of the potentially interested.
Please can we now drop sodomy as a subject of direct debate? There is so much that is more worthwhile. If not, can we please at least not make it personal? I wish you well, as always, and your books success.
Edmund, Alexander’s Choice, http://www.amazon.com/Alexanders-Choice-Edmund-Marlowe-ebook/dp/B00AR3MTIQ/
Hello Edmund,
To keep things simple, please explain to me and any other die-hard reader who may still stray into this space, why you still insist that I am mis-representing the Laius myth when I state that the Greeks regarded him as the ur-bugger, when I just cited Gloria Ferrari, a reputable academic, supporting that interpretation. I hope that you will not wave Dover’s half-century old screed as “counter-proof.”
Fine, Andrew. Let’s make this the final test before dropping the subject. You have reiterated ad infinitum that Laius’s crime was to bugger Chrysippos. I have rejoindered ad infinitum that though our Greek sources had at their disposal words clearly meaning buggery, they never used one of them in referring to Laius’s crime, which was explicitly stated to be forcible abduction for sex. Hence we do not know Laius was believed to have buggered him any more than we know the lovers you admire did not bugger their eromenoi. So please, either finally come up with such a reference, in which case I will bow my head and concede defeat, or have the honour to do the equivalent and give up engaging me on this. Yet another reference to an unspecified sexual act which we depend on your imagination to see as buggery will not measure up.
I am entirely unashamed not to have heard of “Gloria Ferrari” and have no intention of trying to enlighten myself on this trivial front, never having imagined you as unique in your desire to impose this peculiar interpretation of the sources. I expect you are at least as famous as her and have no reason to lean on her for authority. The lapse of time since Dover wrote could not be more of a red herring, since we are talking about a subject on which practically all the primary sources have been publicly accessible for hundreds of years. What I suggest will or at least should matter here to others is his relative repute on the subject, which I think they will easily find largely unassailable if they should investigate.
Now, please, please can we restrict ourselves to more constructive subjects of debate? I wish your literary endeavours success even when I disagree with some of their content. It is only in arenas of public debate such as this that I feel impelled to ask other participants to measure your assertions against the primary sources.
Edmund,
Thank you for the references. I am making note of them now.
Linca
Andrew, you have apparently invested a great deal of time and effort in portraying the horrors of buggery on this blog; what I don’t see, however, is a description of what you mean by “true” or “acceptable” boylove. Maybe you think that pederasts and their LB’s should confine themselves to taking a walk in the park, going to football matches and no more than that?
Sugarboy, it may be that there is an optimal approach to love relations between men and adolescent boys. See my article discussing the Greeks and the Azande, “In the Jungle the Gentlemen, in Town the Savages” here: https://www.academia.edu/7349252/In_the_Jungle_the_Gentlemen_in_Town_the_Savages
My education on this topic came as a result of my work on the Greek myths of male love. It was during that process that I realized they formed a cohesive body of ethical teachings on such relations, and I realized that one essential element was the triangular nature of the relationship: the boy, the father, and the lover. The other essential element was the moderate form of the sexual aspect. I did not expect either of these characteristics, they surprised me and they set me to thinking about the implications.
Nonetheless, I won’t presume to pontificate on what men should do with the boys they love. It is enough that I have brought up the one thing they would be wise to avoid.
As a side note, after having labored mightily to find and restore the nine myths for “Lovers’ Legends” and then eked out two more for the planned second edition, another two have fallen into my lap just in the past month or two, both real gems, and authentic myths, not just literary flights of fancy like the stories of Ampelus and of Euryalus. One is already up on my Academia page, the story of Promachus and Leucocomas. It is proof that the Greeks did not just prescribe how the lover should behave, they also had good advice for the boys, and it is NOT what you would expect.
I think the most important point is being missed in this debate, even by the always fair-minded A., Jack and David Kennerley, who have all, despite no personal interest, given accurate reasons why many men and boys have enjoyed the sodomitical act. I seem to be so far out of tune with everyone else here that perhaps I should shut up and go away. It is perhaps anyway academic since every kind of pederastic act is outlawed, and I couldn’t personally care less what gays think they should or should not do in bed. I’ve decided, however, first to have one go at presenting my different point of view.
My beliefs are that sodomy has been the normal and most expected sexual act between men and boys in non-WEIRD societies, and that the reasons for this extend far beyond the physically pleasurable sensations that boys can experience in their prostrates or men from their climaxes. While I have nothing against pleasure, I believe pederasty has a much more serious role in human happiness than being a mere form of the recreational sex that is so fashionable now, otherwise I wouldn’t bother to speak up for it. Sodomy is at the heart of this. The real reason it matters is emotional: it offers the only means of physical union between males, the equivalent in emotional and bodily sensation to coitus, the supreme life-giving act.
This point applying to all homosexual sodomy may seem obvious to many, but my next point, which applies forcefully to pederasty and not to gay sex, is much more rarely spoken of. My main authority for it is “Phallós. A Symbol and its History in the Male World” (original Danish 1969, translated into English 1972) by Danish psychiatrist Thorkil Vanggaard. I don’t have it at hand, which is unfortunate as he presents his argument more forcefully than I can and with reference to studies.
To get Vanggaard’s point, one first has to understand that traditional pederasty has been overtly and intentionally unegalitarian, premised on benefits to the boy of accepting the protection and mentorship of a wiser and stronger male. Ideally he has only done this when he (and preferably his parents) are sincerely convinced of the man’s worthiness and loving commitment to the boy’s good.
What Vanggaard described convincingly was the extreme psychosexual thrill to the boy of submission to penetration, it physically mirroring and symbolising his broader acceptance of his lover. For a boy it is also the supreme act of sexual trust and felt as such by his lover who is thus empowered with an overwhelming sense of responsibility and need to protect. Sodomy matters because of these intense emotional consequences, and underlines rather than undermines the idealistic pederasty Andrew wishes to advance. I strongly suspect Hadrian sodomised an eager Antinous and Aristogeiton an eager Harmodios because all four knew instinctively that otherwise their bonding would be but a pale shadow of what it could be.
Edmund, Alexander’s Choice, http://www.amazon.com/Alexanders-Choice-Edmund-Marlowe-ebook/dp/B00AR3MTIQ/
“I seem to be so far out of tune with everyone else here that perhaps I should shut up and go away.”, umm … not everyone Edmund. For me, you have added the human, real-life dimension to the topic. All too frequently, the agenda of the boy in a man-boy relationship is totally ignored, and instead, the debate focuses on the stereotypical image of an ogre trying to shove his massive cock into the tiny orifice of his mortally terrified child victim.
Fascinating. Most interesting and thought-provoking post I’ve read for some time. (And yet another must-read book, dammit!)
Interesting to ponder what you say in relation to today’s lesser interest in sodomy (for which I think the anecdotal evidence is fairly clear). The potential for positive pederastic relationships today is fairly limited – certainly they can’t attain the full society-building qualities of tolerant eras. A man and boy today would have to carefully remove themselves from society, rather than mesh the relationship’s inherent mentoring aspects with the social good. The deeper emotional currents of sodomy are effectively cut-off from men and boys living in “criminal” secrecy – the act has become a double-edged sword – hence a decline in interest, an unwillingness to do it just the hell of it.
The love-making in Alexander’s Choice got around this problem by having Damian and Alexander drift into an Etonian time-machine where they COULD reconnect to old truths.
Of course it could also be that, like it or not, we’re all egalitarians now.
You have very eloquently and ably articulated a defense for the pleasures of the rear passage (sodomy and anal sex both sound so horrid to my ears!).
I take no issue with anything you have said (that I can recall) in your impassioned and powerful encomium and can attest to the act’s potential sublimity as an erotic experience.
Where I think that Andrew has a point is with the practical matter of society’s conception of it as necessarily a particularly violative and aggressive incursion of the penetrated party.
While Andrew believes it not to be a misconception, apparently, while I do, we both see it as highly problematic in the realm of man/boy PUBLIC relations and I suspect that it plays a particularly large role in the imaginations of those who hate us which would be, well, just about everyone.
There are greater health concerns than with other sexual behavior, on the one hand but none which cannot be greatly allayed through informed and diligent practices, on the other. Certainly, health and safety are more achievable now than they were in the ancient world.
But an argument for a boys ability to consent is more significantly encumbered by the greater potential for risk to his health (than other sexual practices that they might think of) as well as his (more likely) greater reliance upon the older partner to adequately safeguard his health. This, assuming the boy to be in the passive role.
The elements of consent, as with all other elements of a relationship, simply go without saying in our circle of friends here, though our many detractors deny that we respect such conventions.
Still, we are left with a very great challenge. One which might be addressed through a structured and chronologically staged regulatory approach which, while I would find it most disagreeable, would probably be vastly better than present circumstances.
Not that anyone is coming to us and saying “Listen, if you give up the butt-fucking, we’ll cut you some slack on the dick-sucking!”
Perhaps some of you might offer a simpler, more elegant, solution but, frankly, I can think of none.
I in turn find nothing to disagree with in what you have said, David.
Following you, I’m addressing the question of vocabulary first. I agree in disliking both words. I personally refuse to use “anal sex” as it is too dismally modern, medical and linguistically challenged. I don’t resist others’ use of sodomy and buggery, even while realising their mischievous intent, because they are at least historically resonant and also remind one that the objection to them has traditionally been religious rather than rational. My preference is to use the four-letter word in informal contexts and pedicate in formal, pederastic ones. Pedicate strikes me as neutral and old, is inspired by pederasty rather than gay sex and underlines its traditional role at its heart.
I do fully appreciate that in an age suffering both from an irrational horror of pederasty and a rational horror of AIDS, fear of pedication causing the latter may well be a powerful reinforcement of the former. Hence I agree Andrew’s message may indeed be politically expedient.
My outlook may be fundamentally different to most people’s here because I am not seriously motivated by a quest to win toleration for adult/minor sex, much as I find that object desirable. I consider both pedophobia and AIDS ephemeral, but well beyond our control. Whether they last twenty or two hundred years I have no idea, but when change does come I don’t think it will have anything to do with what Andrew, you or I have said, but will be caused by far larger and mostly unpredictable winds of change.
I am only here because there is an overlap in interest between Tom’s magnificent determination to challenge the dominant narrative concerning all adult/minor sex and my own humbler quest to find and celebrate the truth about pederasty. My allegiance is to that truth, largely to be found in the past and hopefully to be appreciated one day in the future, rather than to a hopeless political struggle for the present. Therefore, however politically foolish many here may regard it, I shall doggedly insist on the historical evidence that pedication has been the most common and emotionally powerful means of consummation of a form of love that has made a special contribution to human good.
Edmund, Alexander’s Choice, http://www.amazon.com/Alexanders-Choice-Edmund-Marlowe-ebook/dp/B00AR3MTIQ/
I just happened to be reading an old interview with Theodore Dalrymple whose comments on political correctness seemed to have application to what you’re saying here, Edmund. And makes yours a very worthy approach:
“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=7445
Never heard the term “pedicate” before – at first I thought you wanted to get a boy into a room and build an argument on him! (not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
[and it seems the spell-checker in this blog box agrees with me – if I hadn’t checked the checker I’d have just been forced into a non-consensual grammatical act.]
That is the same thing I thought when I saw “pedicate” but it sounds like such a cool word. I shall use it.
And what if, perchance, it’s the boy who want’s to build the argument 😉
I can imagine one such boy (well, “boy”) arguing for Utilitarianism and the maximisation of pleasure 😉
I actually have a serious aversion to most euphemisms because non-literal speech is a bit unnatural to me (autism, yet again). So I find terms like “pleasures of the rear passage” to be extremely abrasive while “anal-sex” is the smoothest in it’s forth-right nature. “Sodomy” and “buggery” are both acceptable substitutes (as is the new found gem of “pedicate”).
On one occasion, a group of friends were discussing sex and using a long string of cringe-inducing euphemism until I finally snapped and shouted: “It’s called a vagina! V-A-G-I-N-A, vagina!” This then became a running joke in my secondary school.
Thank you Edmund “Phallos; a symbol and its history in the male world” is on its way to me now. All 208 + 24 pages of illustrated plates Serious and necessary as we move forward to a better world for us all. Thank you for your leadership.
Linca
I miss Allen too, David, it is incredible that almost twenty years have gone by. And Peter Orlofsky too, gone. Last time I saw him was at Sky Lake, he dug his fingers into my back to give me a rub and then picked his way barefoot across the frozen gravel parking lot, wincing and grimacing at every step, grounding his unmanageable mind.
As for Allen, I have always been sorry that he died too soon to see my book on the pederastic Greek myths. I’m sure he would have liked it. I’m just as sure he would not have liked my point of view on anal sex. Do you know that poem of his about getting it on with a young guy in a business suit in Manhattan, and trying to rise to go to the bathroom in the middle of the fling, and the guy on top of him holding him down saying, “It’s all right, I like it dirty like this”?
James wants to know if I’m agin’ it just for kids or for everyone. The question I like to ask people is, “Imagine you are the father of a twelve year old boy. Would you want your son to get into a relationship with a man who will bugger him?”
Jack thinks my whole case is just an extrapolation from Greek manners. It is not, that is only part of it, and not the most important. And the fact that gorillas do it does not make me want to rush out and emulate the beasts. As for Mariotti, it has long fascinated me to see, in my many conversations on this topic, the most consistent argument for buggery is “It feels good.” Many things feel good, so does shooting up heroin, but that is not an argument to rush out and do that either. No Jack, I would not ban buggery, any more than I would ban cannibalism or necrophilia. I simply would teach young people that it is to be avoided, that it is a filthy, painful, and dangerous thing, as intelligent and desirable as trying to suffocate yourself while jerking off, another boon of modern times, from what I am told.
Edmund thinks my claim about the Greeks is nonsense. Let’s look at primary sources, pick one. Also Edmund, I have long been curious, your scene with the boy rolled up in the carped who offers his backside to his friend – does it spring from the authentic experience of a real boy, or from the imagination of an adult?
Kit, you’re a man after my heart,
‘Tis good that we alike do view
The uses of that nether part.
All that is left now is to pray
That face to face will man with boy
When rolling in that divine hay.
Yes, let’s look at every primary source. The onus is entirely on you though because I am not here making assertions about what they say; I am merely pointing out they do NOT say what you claim. Every single case you bring of “bad” pederasts who buggered or wanted to versus “good” ones who didn’t and didn’t want to comes from either your imagination, or perhaps your inability to imagine the Greeks not sharing all your tastes. Whatever example we take of pederastic relationships that were much admired by the Greeks, Harmodios and Aristogeiton perhaps, I readily admit we don’t know if the erastes buggered his eromenos, the reason being no Greek writer would have had the bad taste to make a public issue of such a private matter. We could have a nuanced debate about the likelihood of it, but that could only follow honest acknowledgement of the considerable uncertainty.
Incidentally, I sympathise very much with your determination to extol responsible, loving and self-sacrificing pederasty at the cost of the selfish indulgence of brute lust. I just find it rather arrogant to insist these good qualities must include sharing your personal physical hang-up. And I’m against anyone inventing historical evidence for any purpose.
“your scene with the boy rolled up in the carped who offers his backside to his friend – does it spring from the authentic experience of a real boy, or from the imagination of an adult?”
Andrew, I think you know this is a deliberately vulgarised conflation of two scenes. It is grossly unfair of you to expect me to tell everyone about the carpet or whether anything else in my novel is based on real experience in order somehow to defend the historical truth about the Greeks. I anyway never shall, though I will say I am confident my novel is emotional truthful and that every experience in it is similar to something that some people have been through.
I also think there should be a distinction between depicting specific sexual acts in a novel with the purpose of exploring the emotions involved and description of what real individuals have done, which I feel it would be better if people treated as private even when legally and socially tolerated.
Please believe me that I admire all you stand for except your crusade on this one issue, and intend silence even on that except where Greek history is misrepresented in a public space of this quality. There are some highly intelligent people here who may not have read the primary sources or want to.
Edmund, Alexander’s Choice, http://www.amazon.com/Alexanders-Choice-Edmund-Marlowe-ebook/dp/B00AR3MTIQ/
Edmund, I accept the onus of discussing the primary sources. Just please leave out the soft porn that Straton wrote for jaded Roman ears five hundred years after Plato wrote his symposium. As for vulgarizing your work, please accept my apologies. I was not aware of doing so and I would not do such a thing intentionally.
What is this, about ancient buggery, that “no Greek writer would have had the bad taste to make a public issue of such a private matter.”?! Have you forgotten Aeschines? That was a very public issue indeed. Not only that, his argument shows us that _the jury_ found it important and appropriate, since his argument carried the day.
As David here also points out, my “crusade on this one issue” and my “hang-up” is probably the main reason men who love boys are in the doghouse these days, and justifiably so if THAT is what they are after. Whatever may be said against buggery between two adults (and much can be said), it applies infinitely more to such and act between a grown-up and a child.
So, are you willing? That’s the main thing!
Then turn around. I like to see your back,
But I like to see your sweet bottom even more.
Don’t jump: the pain will ease;
It’s only at first. Once inside
You won’t feel my hardness any longer.
You see? It’s going better now …
Yes, that’s wonderful, that little twist.
Swivel with your hips, thrust your behind …
Oh, if you knew how this adds to my lust!
Now it’s turning you on, too. I hear you moaning.
Pain can also be lust. I see yours is hard …
Wait, I’ll help you … or do you want to do that yourself?
As you wish; I’ll do it gladly.
You’ll let me? Can I put it in deeper?
Well, lie half on me
So with my right hand I can better
Take your cock and fondle it,
And you’ll quickly give up your load.
Now, raise your leg, let me slide in deeper
To bathe you inside with my sperm,
To bless you, to baptize you. Do you feel the pressure?
Don’t moan that way: you’re driving me mad.
I’m nearly worn out, my little Ganymede.
You’ve wet my fingers, I see.
You’re spouting – a boy’s fountain. It spurts
With jets which nearly reach your shoulders.
Wait, now, it’s my turn … just a little deeper …
And now it runs and runs and runs …
Schult, P: “Poor Boy Blues”, Frankfurt Foerster, 1979.
If you can bring your [inexperienced] partner to the peak of pleasure without trampling on his modesty and without exposing him to physical risks, and without the danger of him becoming habituated to a sensation that has brought so much harm to so many, then how is it ethical to choose this path?
Good question! I simply hope that you also proselytise to the straights against vaginal intercourse. It is only fair and symmetrical.
BTW: I feel like “trampling on his modesty” is meant to appeal to an intuition which I completely lack because I am baffled. Could someone explain what “modesty” is supposed to mean in this context?
Andrew, I would be delighted to discuss primary sources from the purest classical period with you, including Aeschines. Perhaps you could get the ball rolling by quoting the sentence in which you imagine he denounced sodomy as opposed to the self-prostitution of a free youth (which I am guessing we would agree is lamentable)? I am both surprised and intrigued that you’ve chosen Aeschines as your exemplar, since, as you know, Kenneth Dover made his speech the centrepiece for understanding what Athenians found good and bad in pederastic practise, and he came in the end firmly down in favour of thinking sodomy was most likely practised between Greek lovers (of both sexes).
I don’t know whether your crusade could be politically effective or not in gaining sympathy for pederasty. I’m not countering it on the grounds of ineffectiveness, though I do fear it is like the VP message, a sacrifice of principle for the vain hope of unlikely and trivial concessions to justice and truth. But good luck with it anyway. For myself, I’ve foregone politics in favour of history and literature.
Having raised the subject of Dover’s Greek Homosexuality, I would like to make some remarks for anyone here who may be interested, but not yet well-read, in the subject. His book was helped in gaining credibility in a homophobic age by his well-known heterosexuality. To this he added that he believed he was able to write about the subject objectively since he was lucky enough not to be shocked by any consensual sexual acts. On these two foundations, and of course his evidently deep familiarity with all the great classical Greek texts, his book has been more widely respected than any other on the subject.
Yes, someone of any political or sexual persuasion ought to be able to think and write clearly about Greek homosexuality, but sadly I at least find this not to be true. I detect a whiff of personal interest in even the most erudite and fair-minded professors writing on the subject (Hubbard, Halperin, Percy etc.) as well as private scholars like Andrew, and I’m not pretending I’m immune either. Perhaps the subject of classical Greece is simply too emotionally compelling. The worst offenders seem to have been gay, such as James Davidson who in his utterly despicable The Greeks and Greek Love raged furiously against Dover for not pretending classical Greece was a perfect prototype for the sort of dystopia American gays are now intent on building. Unfortunately though, since Dover wrote it is also no longer possible for heterosexuals to study the subject objectively. To Dover’s claim of not being shocked by consensual acts, they would now add “between adults”, which is of course a fatal block to objectivity when the subject is sex between men and boys.
For these reasons, Dover’s book, despite some minor refinements he would concede himself, remains the definitive, trustworthy study after a generation, and is likely to remain so for an extremely long time.
This has made me doubt whether Andrew or I are really going to be able to add anything useful, but let’s see.
Edmund, Alexander’s Choice, http://www.amazon.com/Alexanders-Choice-Edmund-Marlowe-ebook/dp/B00AR3MTIQ/
Addendum, to A.: And I think it was Gide’s expressing a Callimachian aversion to partaking in what Peyrefitte felt to be the most intimate pederastic experience that caused the latter unkindly to imply he wasn’t a “true pederast.”
Edmund, the short answer is that Aeschines got a conviction against Timarchus on the legal grounds of his selling his favors for money (which has nothing to do with buggery) but in order to get that conviction he appealed to the emotions of the jury, a jury of five hundred Athenian men.
In 1.185 he describes Timarchus as a “creature with the body of a man defiled with the sins of a woman” one who “committed hybris against himself contrary to nature”: t? d? pa?? f?s?? ?a?t?? ?ß??sa?t?. Thus he appealed to the sense of disgust of these five hundred, disgust not at the selling of the favors, but at the nature of those favors. Do you really think that had he mocked buggery before five hundred buggers, that they would have sided with him?
You call my position “a crusade,” but I see myself rather as an observer to a dispute between two extremist camps. The boy lovers imagine that those who oppose them are ignorant, bigoted, and uptight, secret homophobes when not openly so. Perhaps a bit of humility is in order, perhaps boy lovers should realize that those who hate pederasty have a very powerful and rational argument, namely that they do not want their boy buggered by anyone under any circumstance, and for good, objective reasons. That is issue number one, and they are 100% right.
James here wants to know what I think of buggery between adults. This is not a topic that lends itself to facile answers. Please read my articles on this subject if you would like to know, and then let me know what YOU think, in article form, if you like. You will find my articles here https://www.academia.edu/7349252/In_the_Jungle_the_Gentlemen_in_Town_the_Savages and here https://www.academia.edu/4905297/Pinning_Anal_Sex_on_the_Greeks_A_Millennial_Slur
“In 1.185 he describes Timarchus as a “creature with the body of a man defiled with the sins of a woman” one who “committed hybris against himself contrary to nature”: t? d? pa?? f?s?? ?a?t?? ?ß??sa?t?. ”
What a splendid example of how you manage to see a reference to buggery where there is none! There is not one mention of buggery in the whole of Aeschines’s speech and it takes a monomaniacal obsession with the subject to see one. The nature of “the sins of the woman” are spelt out in the immediately following sentence:
“Which of you then, if he catches his wife in misconduct, will punish her? Who will not seem stupid, if he shows anger at a woman who does wrong according to her nature but uses as his adviser a man who had abused himself against nature.”
In other words, a woman’s sins were adultery, a sexual misbehaviour, not being buggered. Aeschines was telling the jury they would be illogical to be angry with their wives caught in sexual misbehaviour, but let Timarchus off the hook and continue to be a member of the body politic after his sexual behaviour. All that is said about his misbehaviour is that it was self-prostitution. Nowhere does Aeschines say this involved letting men bugger him as opposed to going between his thighs or using him sexually any other way. Nor is there a phrase in the whole of Athenian literature to suggest Athenian law drew any distinction between the sexual acts performed on a boy prostitute.
“Thus he appealed to the sense of disgust of these five hundred, disgust not at the selling of the favors, but at the nature of those favors. Do you really think that had he mocked buggery before five hundred buggers, that they would have sided with him?”
They were Athenians, not Andrew Callimachs. Why would they not be disgusted by a fellow citizen selling himself as a prostitute, a gross offence against their democratically-maintained laws. Since there is not a shred of evidence hinting he did mock buggery, which wasn’t against their laws, they had no occasion to take sides about the subject.
Can we please have one reference to an individual being disparaged for sodomy as opposed to an unspecified sexual act you arbitrarily choose to assume was buggery? Sodomy is explicitly mentioned not just in Greek literature, but in for example the rock carvings of Thera where men proudly proclaimed which boys they had penetrated, so lack of clear vocabulary cannot explain your failure to do so.
Edmund, Alexander’s Choice, http://www.amazon.com/Alexanders-Choice-Edmund-Marlowe-ebook/dp/B00AR3MTIQ/
“As David here also points out, my “crusade on this one issue” and my “hang-up” is probably the main reason men who love boys are in the doghouse these days”
Damn! So you’re to blame, Andrew – you bastard! (Joking!)
It’s one thing to consign buggery to purgatory for eternity – but if you start taking swipes at the divine Alexander from “Alexander’s Choice” – then the gloves come off!
Surely it doesn’t matter a damn whether the incident is real or imagined? It only matters how well it works in the novel, and I thought it was 100% believable for a kid like that in the situation he was in. I mean, a dash of stardust about it perhaps, but true romance is allowed a little of that, surely. You’re saying a 14yo couldn’t come up with such a stunt? Seems harsh.
“Many things feel good, so does shooting up heroin, but that is not an argument to rush out and do that either.”
Hi! I’m the local Utilitarian. It’s nice to meet you 🙂
“The question I like to ask people is, “Imagine you are the father of a twelve year old boy. Would you want your son to get into a relationship with a man who will bugger him?””
I’ve got two issues here:
1) This doesn’t actually tell me about your views for adults, which is what I asked about. -_-
2) I always feel like I fail at questions like this because they illicit no emotional response from me. I’m not sure if this is specifically an autistic thing, but I always look at something like this and wonder what was the purpose of the question.
“Would you let your child become a prostitute?”
*Inexplicably continues to be a liberal*
“Would you let your daughter have an abortion?”
*Inexplicably continues to be a liberal*
“Would you let your son get buggered by a grown man?”
*Inexplicably continues to be a liberal*
I don’t see why my meta-ethics should apply differently to people I know versus people I don’t. Choice is choice. Liberty über alles.
Well put, James. I get the same lack of emotional response on issues like this. But I think we’re atypical. My wife has been known to call me a ‘robot’.
I have given a prose reply to this theory elsewhere, so – in honour of the poster’s request – I will respond in verse.
When Ganymede, the son of Tros,
Would gambol on the fields of Troy
And Zeus himself used to disclose
His godly portion to the boy,
Did then the shepherd tempt the king
With visions of his rosy ring?
And did the Thunderer take root
Within the proffered pinky chute?
?? ?????t?! Gods don’t disport
In occupations of that sort.
I am assured that such techniques
Were unfamiliar to the Greeks,
Who never sought a bower of bliss
In that unnatural orifice.
When Hyacinth, the poets claim,
Would string the archer god along
And Hyakinthos had no shame
To worship that deific prong,
Did then Apollo’s lyre extol
The beauties of his lover’s hole?
Did Phoebus cast his shaft divine
In places where the sun don’t shine?
Did Herc and Hylus like to pack
The fudge along the old dirt track?
Did Narcissus expend his vainness
Trying to perceive his anus?
No! I tell you once again
The Greeks were not that sort of men.
Confusion seize these twisted minds
That are besotted with behinds!
It did not please the ancient Greeks
To pry open boys’ nether-cheeks.
They knew that nothing lies therein
Save opportunities for sin.
So let us all with earnest hearts
Avoid the dreaded nether-parts
And only use your arse to poo,
Just like Plato used to do.
Well, whatever else one might think, these verses are pretty darned good. It’s hard to see anyone wresting the laurels from Kit on that account!
This is a topic I don’t know much about, so hopefully people will correct me.
It seems that some attributes of the gay male psyche are borrowed from the typical female psyche (like finding men sexy) and others are not (like typically not requiring an emotional connection to want sex). I have figured that “tops” and “bottoms” refers primarily to position during anal sex, and was surprised to learn that “bottoms” are more common than “tops”, which I then figured might be another borrowing from the female psyche — a desire to be penetrated.
This would suggest that for gay men who are “bottoms”, anal sex would be actively a good thing. But if the vast majority of boys in man-boy relationships are straight and enjoy the experience (to the extent they do) as getting pleasure, then it would not be good.
I realize this might be full of stereotypes and misinformation. I welcome correction and references to written material on the subject.
“But if the vast majority of boys in man-boy relationships are straight and enjoy the experience (to the extent they do) as getting pleasure, then it would not be good.”
Why would it not be good? Harmful to the boy because it’s at odds with his male psyche?
The whole dynamic of a “straight” man being attracted to a “straight” boy (the majority of pederastic relationships in a tolerant society) rests on the boy’s adolescence being a transitional phase, no longer a child but not yet a man. The beautiful “bloom” a boy attains in early adolescence may well be a genetic adaption (along with other traits), mimicking female beauty to attract the adult male. A boy with this adolescent-beauty gene gets a mentoring/social-position/female-access advantage over the squat, hairy, proto-man adolescent who’s left to his own ugly devices.
I don’t know if the Rossman quote I gave earlier is true or not (re younger adolescent boys having a marked preference for anal sex) – but if so it could easily be a part of the genetic package designed to bring man and boy together in holy pederasty.
Having respectfully stayed out of this for a while, I shall jump in on a topic I do know something about. I’m not at all convinced that the female psyche necessarily includes the desire to be penetrated. Receptive anal sex is highly enjoyable for some males because, unlike us, you’ve got a prostate back there. But once more with feeling: the vagina, especially in its back two-thirds, is one of the *least* sensitive places on the average female body. Some women can orgasm from penis-in-vagina intercourse alone, but most cannot. PIV being viewed as the de facto kind of sex has more to do with a historically male-centric view of sexual pleasure than with anything else, I think. I recently saw the results of a survey (can’t find the darned link! I hope you trust me!) in which lesbians and heterosexual women were asked something like, “If you had to give up permanently either receptive intercourse [with hands or sex toys for the lesbians, naturally] or receptive cunnilingus, which would you give up and which would you keep in your repertoire?” About half the straight women and three-quarters of the lesbians opted to ditch the intercourse and keep the oral sex.
All this talk of pederasty has convinced me that I really must educate myself further on the subject, so, broke as I am at the moment, I will be ordering Michael Rocke’s Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence, which Edmund has recommended elsewhere (thank you, Edmund).
Peyrefitte was very unpleasant about Gide’s inexplicable failure to be interested in sodomising boys. Something about claiming to belong to a club of which he wasn’t really a member. This stuff gets some people in a terrible snit.
Anyway, love the verses, everybody. Bravo!
I understand that there is this meme saying that PIV intercourse is the peak experience for women as well as men, and that it’s often not true. And women have every reason to highly value having an orgasm, which often involves enhanced PIV or something different. But based on personal experience and surveys, PIV intercourse is inherently enjoyable by lots of women — something they actively want, even if it’s not sufficient for many of them. It’s hard for me to imagine a man finding anal receptive sex the physically most stimulating activity — I assume it is largely a psychological attraction.
“About half the straight women and three-quarters of the lesbians opted to ditch the intercourse and keep the oral sex.”
It’d be an interesting experiment: give those straight women what they’re wishing for – my guess is that after a while they’d begin to have this strange, inexplicable craving to be penetrated. I’m only saying that for one reason: without PIV there is no life – it’s a non-negotiable must-have. It would be odd if the human female didn’t, at any psychological level, reflect that billion year old imperative. Sure, a minority of people will heroically refuse the procreative essential, but it’ll always be a minority. I simply can’t believe 50% of heterosexual women would happily go without penetration all their reproductive lives. Leaving aside any conscious input of wanting a baby – at some primitive lusty level Nature would be insisting that a gal needs to get down to business.
Yeah, I’m sure most wouldn’t be all that happy about no PIV ever. They weren’t asked what they *wanted* to give up, after all — just what they’d give up if they *had* to choose something.
“my guess is that after a while they’d begin to have this strange, inexplicable craving to be penetrated. I’m only saying that for one reason: without PIV there is no life”
While I agree with your conclusion, sometimes a partner’s behavior is so reliable for his own reasons of adaptive fitness that the other partner doesn’t have to worry about it. For instance, most women (I believe) can’t directly sense an ejaculation inside, but in the environment of adaptation, the men could be relied upon to handle that part and have no reason to fake it. You can instead imagine that the SIGHT of an ejaculation would make a woman unhappy at some level. (To a large extent, “hold still” is adequate female behavior from the point of view of reproduction.)
In service of my original point, consider too erectile dysfunction and how it is often a source of distress to women partners. I imagine many of them are getting splendid orgasms from oral sex. They might be concerned indirectly that their partner is not being satisfied — but I think there is a more direct concern as well.
Damn, I yet again forgot to mention an important point: the roaring success of Bend Over Boyfriend and Bend Over Boyfriend 2, videos instructing straight couples on how the woman can anally penetrate the man with a strap-on and showing scenes of just that, surely has to indicate…something.
So a new Virtuous line in the sandbox then? Isn’t Andrew’s whole case based on an extravagant extrapolation from basic Greek manners? Kenneth Dover’s comparison of Greek Love to Victorian Romance was instructive. The ideal boy in ancient Greece, like the ideal maiden in Victorian London, was supposed to be a blushing, modest, quiet beauty. With both the newly-wed Victorian lass and the Greek eromenos, it would be unthinkable for the man to publicly allude to what went on in the bedroom. Of course, with the Victorian lass we have the squawling proof, while with the Greek lad we have a polite silence that allows people even 2500 years later to concoct the most fabulously perverse and unlikely scenarios.
By sheer arse-luck, I just happened to be reading Parker Rossman’s book “Sexual Experience between Men and Boys”. Rossman reports the finding of Italian physician Mariotti who examined hundreds of men and boys who were pederastically involved:
“He concluded that there is a vast difference between males in their capacity for sexual pleasure with each other, especially in the intensity of eroticism in various erogenous zones. The psychological factors were so complex as to suggest wide and unique varieties of experience; for example, some males find it quite painful to be sodomized and get no pleasure from it, while others have a physiological capacity and anal sensitivity that makes anal intercourse highly pleasurable and exciting to them. He found this to be especially true of many young adolescents, although in a high percentage of cases the capacity began to disappear by the time the boys were fifteen.”
So there’s plenty of scope for Andrew to create – a la the Equus boy – a thrilling religion based on a pathological fear of sodomy – really nothing more than another Judeo-Christian sect – but it galls a bit when he keeps insisting on trying to shove it up everyone else’s jacksie. I’m not sure it’s safe.
Ban buggery? Pah! Ban cats and blind puppies! Good Lord! Does Andrew’s theory have any cross-cultural support? From what I’ve read about China, Japan, tribal society in general – there’s no suggestion of buggery being off the pederastic menu. The medieval Persians got a bit antsy at times, but that was more an anti-homo thing Islam inherited from Judaism. Andrew’s obsession seems as narrow as it is intense.
Nature’s dirty fingerprints are all over this buggery business. Adult male gorillas can’t get enough of it with their adolescent favourites – although admittedly the great ape is so underwhelmingly hung the adolescent may well be none the wiser for it. Not so among the Keraki of New Guinea, where a boy could only become a man if a bloke was prepared to bugger him for a year (is there no end to a bloke’s arduous responsibilities in this daily round?). And Nature sure seems to have kitted out the male back door with a rather seductive array of bells and whistles. To the bugger-phobe, what a delicious piece of salivating Judeo-Christian design the prostate is – a complete Fall with one push of the horrifically rigged button.
And the clincher if not the clencher: what would England’s navy have been like if it had been reliant on just rum and the lash? No, it just isn’t right. We need sodomy.
(Just for the record, I’m personally not a big fan of buggery, which seems a reasonably common position for today’s pederast – and may be connected to today’s cultural forces, gender roles, etc. But I take my identification with the history of pederasty seriously, and Andrew’s attack on sodomy always pushes my button.)
“Cultured Greek gentlemen despised any form of penetration of one male by another, while admiring and pursuing loving erotic relations short of penetration between men and adolescent boys. … Who says so? The Greeks themselves, whose comments indicating that they viewed anal sex as abuse I proceed to quote below, with proper footnotes (on my website) for those who are curious and interested.”
In short, and with all respect to Andrew as a gifted poet and scholar, this is nonsense. Andrew has been crusading against buggery for a long time, and having enjoyed an otherwise thoroughly rewarding correspondence with him, I am reluctant to rejoin the fray with him on this one historical question we disagree on. I am doing so nevertheless because on Andrew’s own initiative last year, I read and commented (by email) on his article “Pinning Anal Sex on the Greeks: A Millennial Slur”. Having gone to considerable trouble to rebut his arguments point by point, it seems a waste not to give anyone interested enough in the truth the chance the read both sides of our debate. My reply was much too long to reproduce here, so I have sent it to Tom in the hope he will be kind enough to forward it to anyone who asks. In summary, I felt Andrew was making circular arguments without any evidence. As in reply he said “I will have to leave matters where they stand, merely commented on how different our positions were”, I would be fascinated to know what anyone else now thinks. (For completeness, I have also added to my reply the one brief extension to our debate, regarding Damocles).
For an excellent summary of how the Greeks really felt, I strongly recommend reading the whole of this by Jack Door: https://www.boychat.org/messages/1412280.htm based on a thoughtful appraisal of Kenneth Dover’s Greek Homosexuality and the texts he adduced as evidence. Here are just the main points:
“What’s not certain is exactly what sort of sexual activity took place within a good relationship. A man and boy in a good relationship would be expected to refrain from excess in their sex life, as in every other part of their life, but no specific prescriptions or proscriptions were laid down about sexual practice. While prostitution attracted overt punishment and condemnation, sex within a good relationship was left behind a veil of reticence, was neither explicitly admitted nor explicitly denied. It seems to me that the external social reality of the relationship effectively acted as the arbiter of a couple’s sex life. That is, if the couples conduct in society was exemplary, their bedroom life could safely be left in their own hands. No one in ancient Greece would have dared speculate publicly about exactly what Harmodius and Aristogeiton did in the bedroom. The social expression of their love said everything that needed to be said.”
To return to Andrew:
“Homophobia is not in the past, it is more rampant than ever, and much of it is driven by instinctive disgust at practices that are inherently unclean.”
I think Andrew is right here, to some degree at least, except in his judgemental use of “instinctive”, which implies that buggery, rather than disgust with it, is against human (and therefore apish) nature. The fact that most of the larger apes related to us bugger adolescent males suggests the opposite.
“It is just that presently there is a presumption that buggery IS gay sex.”
This echoes a series of remarks Andrew has made in book reviews and elsewhere suggesting that such popularity as buggery now has is “modern.” If by modern, the last generation or two is meant, I think he may be right. I recognise he would know better than me about “the gay world of today” and it strikes me that many more late 19th and early to mid 20th century homosexuals expressed antipathy to it than later ones. If however modern were taken to mean the last three centuries versus earlier, then I would strongly contend the opposite. The evidence from the Romans, Chinese, Japanese, Arabs and others who were less coy than the Greeks about the sexual practices of their men and boys points so overwhelmingly towards buggery being taken for granted as the normal means of consummation between men and boys as to justify calling the disgust of Andrew and others today a specifically modern and WEIRD fetish.
“the big lie about the Greeks is one of the foundations of that juggernaut of cultural conformism called “being gay.”
If it were a lie at all, it would be a trivial one compared to the much larger pretence of any kind of link between the Greeks and being gay today. They were just as disgusted aesthetically and idealistically by sex between hairy adult males with no pedagogical purpose as Andrew is by buggery.
Edmund, Alexander’s Choice, http://www.amazon.com/Alexanders-Choice-Edmund-Marlowe-ebook/dp/B00AR3MTIQ/
>Having gone to considerable trouble to rebut his arguments point by point, it seems a waste not to give anyone interested enough in the truth the chance the read both sides of our debate. My reply was much too long to reproduce here, so I have sent it to Tom in the hope he will be kind enough to forward it to anyone who asks.
I have put Edmund’s reply up as a Dropbox file. It can be read and downloaded from here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/44284820/Reply%20to%20Pinning%20Anal%20Sex%20on%20the%20Greeks.docx
Thank you Edmund, I look forward to reading your earlier rebuttals.
One thing to note here and which I am not sure that Andrew is taking into account, is the existence of certain ‘modern’ accommodations to hygiene and health (although they did, of course, appear in the ancient world, too) of, shall we say, aquatic irrigation as well as condoms (although no doubt THOSE are better today!). The ‘wet-and-wild’ approach to pre-penetrative preparation appears to be de rigueur amonst many, if not most, gay men, in my limited experience. And it makes perfect sense, of course. How could you NOT?
And the latex bits have also become entirely standardized since the horrors of HIV.
What we are left with here, it would seem to me, are issues of willingness and ability to accept the male member, with the first contingent, in part, upon the second.
As it relates to boys, well, again, while it wasn’t my “thing”, I can tell you that, while a minority (although increasing in expressed desire with age) there are boys who not only want to be receptive anal sex partners, but demand it (and surprisingly, many are STRAIGHT!).
The same is also true for boys who want to be “top” (and this desire on their part I DID tend to indulge).
So, given the acceptance of the use of a condom, I cannot condemn this practice in all circumstances nor should it be in my authority (or anyone’s) to forbid it.
Thank you Andrew! And for the opportunity to meet (again) a friend of Allen. I still miss him, his voice, his harmonium and even his occasional scoldings. So much time has passed yet he’s still ‘here’ and accessible for summoning, when needed.
The anal sex issue is so very fraught with peril, both real and apocryphal, socially-freighted and expeditiously symbolic. It is truly loaded.
I am forever contending, as a boylover, with the popular perception that anal penetration of boys is our animating and invariably ultimate goal, as in the ‘going around the bases’ model of sexual conquest. The public clearly is convinced that this must be our universal predilection, i.e. that we are all entirely driven to fuck boys. From experience, the numbers give unambiguous lie to this calumny.
The ‘fuck-assumption’ is clear in every scurrilous, venom-filled pronouncement we hear when the discussion is ‘pedophile priests’, for example.
And, let’s face it, it would be hard to sustain a ‘rape’ narrative diatribe were the boy-receptive anal penetration cliché not placed deliberately and centrally upon the table. Indeed, it’s tremendously useful for our detractors to assume that boy-fucking is the whole shooting match.
As an erstwhile master-fellator, first-class (if you will allow me), this has always been a source of frustration for me. [note to government agents: “erstwhile” means “former”, as in “decades-ago” and, in my case, long since fully adjudicated.]
So you are very correct to address it as an issue which has served to demonize us and as a practice which, in practice, carries potential for harm. Indisputably!
Where I probably differ is in my willingness (if I understand you correctly) to find anal sex acceptable given some fairly elaborate precautions as well as the requisite desires and mutual willingness and the developmental conditions necessary of its participants. I don’t automatically impute bad intentions to anal sex enthusiasts although they sometimes, undoubtedly, possess them.
There is much to be said for an ability to discuss sexuality thoroughly and completely. This thorough-going-ness has now achieved a very high level in contemporary society, at least when the subject consists entirely of adult participants (although I would be lying if I didn’t say that I find some of these disquisitions somewhat off-putting in their assiduous detail, at times).
Kids, not so much yet. But I think it’s coming. When kid’s sexuality is finally and fully acknowledged, and the extent to what they naturally get up to is finally discussed, then we will have a chance to discuss, at an essential level of anatomical specificity, the entire range of both sexual and affectional behaviors which are part of their natural – indeed enthusiastic – repertoire.
Until then, I think it is still worth conveying, in whatever communications we may undertake and which make their way to the culture at large, realistic portrayals of our relationships, or of those which we desire, with details sufficient to their fullest possible comprehension. Such unexpurgated details (when warranted) would tend to benefit understanding and work for, rather than against, a better conception of man/boy love, I am convinced.
I can honestly say that anal sex was never part of my own repertoire (with boys) and have known few other boylovers for whom that was not also the case.
But I also know that there are some significant number of boys for whom it IS part of their repertoire, and often in both roles, and it plays out between them if no longer so much with men (although this is one of those things no longer possible for me to know with certainty).
So it remains a challenge that defies, to my mind, either easy encouragement or outright dismissal, especially as a respecter of individual liberty free from the petty interference of the state as empowered by a critical mass of citizen-busybody asses as well as someone who identifies the welfare and autonomy of boys as of paramount value.
Thank you for your piece. It was very good!
I protest the claim that a youth spent reading Jules Verne is a youth misspent. How else can one spend one’s youth exploring the centre of the earth?
Are you anti-buggery in general or just with regard to minors? Do you believe anal-sex with minors is always a bad idea?
“how else to make accessible an argument … without putting to sleep 99% of the audience?”
I am the 1%!
Huzzah for the interviews! Three cheers for David! Can’t wait for those links.
On a random personal note: I was recently speaking to a gay man who started flirting with me. I played along for a while because it was funny. Eventually my age came up and he balked. Looked like he was warding off evil. Said there was no way he was going anywhere near a statutory rape charge. I pointed out that sodomy at any age is illegal here, which gave him pause for a moment since he’s accustomed to ignoring that law. In the end, he still said he wanted to steer clear of “jail-bait”. Didn’t mind since I don’t like guys anyway 😛
Maybe he would have been more amenable to it were it not buggery? 🙂
(Sorry for being so long)
“Eventually my age came up and he balked. Looked like he was warding off evil.”
This sort of reaction always amazes me. Instead of questioning the law, they instantly dismiss – aggressively – such trivial matters as their own capacity for love and lust. I tell ya, they shall reap the sterile whirlwind before long.
But it’s not even like there is a law to question here. That’s what I find weirdest. There’s no AoC for “homosexual acts” because they are completely illegal here. It’s almost as if he’d personally decided to generalise the (heterosexual) AoC to everyone…..
Well it must relate to the gay man’s fondest dream then: being an indistinguishable member of the inextinguishable middle class. Everything is so arse-about – it’s the pederasts who could build this joint a proper conservative base to go forward from. Who’s going to meet the challenge of a resurgent Islam? Gay suburbia or a spanking new Sparta?
“being an indistinguishable member of the inextinguishable middle class.”
Assuming this still refers to my own local situation: what middle class? 😛
“a proper conservative base to go forward from”
You’re a conservative?
“the challenge of a resurgent Islam”
Wow. OK. You’re definitely a conservative….
“a spanking new Sparta”
Do you think reviving Sparta is a good idea?
I think reviving Sparta would be a terrible idea. Now. But after IS snags a truck load of nuclear warheads It mightn’t be a bad option. I do think pederasty works well in a conservative setting – it has a scintillating, wildfire quality to it, so it needs containment. But I’d far prefer Athens to Sparta. My conservatism would be tolerant of all sexualities while frowning sternly on all incontinence.
Your situation intrigues me – you have no middle class? I didn’t know they had the internet on the moon?
That was a joke. There is a middle class but it is small and culturally very different to what a North American might expect. I don’t think it’s accurate in our context to suggest that homosexuals as a class wish to fall under the middle class and bourgeois norms and values. I don’t know if this is what they want in North America so I will defer to accepting that point.
An acquaintance recently told me a story from the early days of the Internet: she and a female friend, both twelve, were playing around in chatrooms one day and thought it would be funny to start a sexy chat with a guy whom they either presumed or knew was considerably older. They typed in things like, “What are you wearing?” “I’m taking my clothes off now” etc. etc. and he joined in. Then at the end they typed, “I’m 12. Do you still want to have sex with me?” Nothing further from him. Poor guy must have been terrified the police would break in his door any minute. Of course the two little girls thought it was hilarious!
Well, I’m actually over the hetero AoC so that’s not too much of an issue. Plus it was flirting, not cyber-sex.
Anyway: Interesting story. I feel very sorry for that guy….