Pederasty

• 1. Introduction

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  Pederasty is a word that Plato's Symposium handed to the modern world. It joins a Greek root meaning boy to a word for lover, the same family as eros. Late Latin borrowed it directly from Plato's classical Greek in the 16th century. English first met it during the Renaissance, spelled pæderastie in Samuel Purchas's Pilgrimes. It named sexual relationships between an adult man and an adolescent boy, though some authors also apply it to female relationships with a similar age gap. Several premodern societies accepted the practice openly. In most countries today, the local age of consent decides whether such contact counts as child sexual abuse or statutory rape, and authorities treat it as abusive. How could one practice be honored in one era and prosecuted in another? Who held the power in these relationships, and who bore the harm? And why do people still invoke the ancient world when they argue about it?

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• 2. The Greek Ideal

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  In Archaic and Classical Greece, the older partner in a pederastic pairing was the erastes, and the younger, usually in his teens, was the eromenos. The bond joined a socially powerful man to a less powerful youth. One scholar called the custom "the principal cultural model for free relationships between citizens." Even so, certain social groups viewed it with concern and disapproval.

  Crete and Sparta figure in one theory of its origin. Some scholars see pederasty there as an initiation rite tied to entering military life and to the religion of Zeus. The Homeric epics give it no formal place. It seems to have emerged in the late 7th century BC, alongside athletic and artistic nudity, symposia, delayed marriage for aristocrats, and the social seclusion of women.

  Xenophon has Socrates draw a sharp line between a man who sells his favours to anyone and a man who forms a love-attachment with someone "truly good," whom Greeks regarded as "perfectly respectable." Kenneth Dover and Michel Foucault read both Xenophon's Socrates and Plato's Socrates as opposing pederastic intercourse while urging chaste relationships. Those writings helped make pederasty a matter of open debate. Idealization appears to have been universal in the Archaic period. Criticism began in Athens, as part of a Classical reassessment of older customs.

  Athenian law, for instance, treated both consent and age as factors in regulating sexual behavior. Scholars still debate how far pederasty reached, since local custom and individual inclination probably varied. Enid Bloch argues that many Greek boys may have been traumatized, because the custom exposed them to what Greek men counted as the deepest shame. She also reads vase paintings of a boy standing perfectly still as a man reaches toward him as signs of a youth "psychologically immobilized." Another vase shows a young man or boy running away from Eros, the god of desire.

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• 3. Rome's Borrowed Custom

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  The Romans had a phrase for it: mos Graeciae, or mos Graecorum, meaning "Greek custom." It covered a range of behaviors Romans regarded as Greek, sexual practice among them. Roman society tolerated same-sex intercourse only inside an unequal relationship. A male citizen kept his masculinity as long as he took the active role. The proper partner was a prostitute or a slave, nearly always non-Roman, and adolescent partners were called catamites.

  In Greece, paiderasteia had been a formal social relationship between freeborn males. Rome took it out of context and refashioned it as a luxury product of a conquered people. It came to express roles built on domination and exploitation. Masters often gave enslaved males Greek names regardless of their ethnic origin, and the boys, or pueri, whom the poet Martial loved had Greek names too.

  Effeminacy, or poor discipline over one's attraction to another male, threatened a man's "Roman-ness." Critics could dismiss it as "Eastern" or "Greek." Fears that Greek models might corrupt the traditional social codes called the mos maiorum seem to have prompted the Lex Scantinia. That law is only vaguely documented. It tried to regulate relationships between freeborn males and to protect Roman youth from older men imitating Greek pederasty.

  Theologian Edith Humphrey offers a gentler reading of the Graeco-Roman ideal. She says it involved erotic love of teenage males, not children, at the age a young woman would be given in marriage. In her account the older partner was frequently only slightly older than the younger one.

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• 4. Faith and Prohibition

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  Emperor Justinian I banned all forms of homosexual intercourse within the Roman Empire, regardless of age. The shift in attitudes reached literature. In the 6th century, Eratosthenes Scholastikos wrote an epigram, numbered 277 in the Greek Anthology, declaring that he could love only women and that he loathed the "hateful hair that begins to grow too soon" on pubescent youths. Covert forms of pederasty nevertheless persisted across Europe after the edict.

  In 1323, a court sentenced a French subdeacon named Arnold of Verniolle to lifetime incarceration on a diet of bread and water. Florence recorded over 3,000 convictions for sodomy between 1432 and 1502, and almost all of those relationships involved pederasty. Hilarius, an English-born Latin poet studying in France in the early 12th century, wrote poems admiring adolescent boys. Medieval Jewish poets, mostly in al-Andalus during the Golden Age of Jewish culture in Spain, explored the same theme.

  During the Islamic Golden Age, pederasty remained common in upper-class and artistic circles despite an official religious prohibition. Literature of the period assumed that most men felt desire for both women and boys aged fourteen or older. Poetry and art treated homoerotic themes without shame or public outrage. This informal acceptance led European intellectuals to link pederasty and other forms of homosexuality with Islam and heresy.

  Wahhabism and Khomeinism, two fundamentalist movements, grew and became part of government. They call for the death penalty for all consenting homosexual acts, and social acceptance of pederasty ended. No modern Islamic society or group tolerates pederasty today.

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• 5. Customs Beyond Europe

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  Among the Zande people of Congo, E. E. Evans-Pritchard recorded that warriors routinely took boy-wives between the ages of twelve and twenty. These boys helped with household tasks. The practice had died out by the early 20th century, after Europeans took control, and Evans-Pritchard learned of it from elders. The Nyakyusa of Tanzania traditionally approved of relationships between a man and a boy. Yet precolonial Nyakyusa culture punished rape, and consensual relations between two adult men, with fines. Gold mines in South Africa under the apartheid regime formed another setting. Men there kept younger males as "wives" for extended periods, even though same-sex relationships were illegal.

  The Warlpiri people of Australia traditionally designated every initiated boy as the "boy-wife" of his future father-in-law. Initiation occurred between the ages of 9 and 12. Among convicts sent to Australia in the 18th and 19th centuries, boys and young men often sold themselves into prostitution for better provisions and living conditions. English convicts engaged in same-sex intercourse at a higher rate than Irish convicts. During World War II, American servicemen housed at local YMCAs also sought out local men and boys who used those facilities.

  In New Guinea, the Simbari people incorporated pederasty into the ritual initiation of boys into manhood, taking prepubescent boys away from their mothers. The Keraki practiced a similar custom. The Kaluli held ceremonies called bau a once every several years, believing the contact improved boys' growth and maturity. Women were told nothing, and the men used a special code language to hide the rituals. In the Nggela Islands of the Solomon Islands, most men traditionally had sexual contact with multiple boys aged seven to eleven. In Malakula in Vanuatu, many men held boy-wives, and members of the lower classes did so more often than the chief caste.

  Bacha bazi, from a Persian phrase, describes men who buy and keep adolescent boys, called dancing boys, for entertainment and sex in Afghanistan and historical Turkestan. German folklorist Ingeborg Baldauf studied it among northern Uzbeks and published Die Knabenliebe in Mittelasien in 1988. She argued that a significant share of Uzbek men in the northern provinces took part at some point, as dancers or as patrons. Boys were expected to know Chagatai literature, music, singing, dancing and good manners. Patrons had to spend lavishly to outdo rivals, and some ruined their families doing so. Swedish diplomat Gunnar Jarring heard in Andkhoy in the mid-1930s that boys were kept in a cellar for a few years to learn dancing, because women were never allowed to dance.

  China accepted pederasty for significantly longer than Europe did. The novel The Carnal Prayer Mat discusses relationships between men and boys, and scholars often pursued boy actors in the Peking opera. Qing dynasty laws banned all extramarital sex, but they rarely led to prosecution. Illustrated novels such as Pleasant Spring and Fragrant Character kept depicting the theme openly. Westernization efforts in the Republican era and then the Cultural Revolution suppressed it. In 1997, the Communist Party relegalized same-sex intercourse with an age of consent of 14.

  Before the Meiji Restoration, Japanese accounts of Buddhist monasteries, samurai circles and kabuki theatres all noted relationships between adolescent or pre-pubescent boys, sometimes called wakashu, and older mentors. Ihara Saikaku's The Great Mirror of Male Love is perhaps the best-known collection of art and literature on those relationships.

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• 6. Victorian Revival

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  In 1858, William Johnson Cory published Ionica, a collection of poems that, according to scholar Linda Dowling, let an Oxford cult of "boy worship" surface. Nineteenth-century Europeans admired the Greeks and began applying Greek ideas to their own lives. Victorians studied Plato and his concept of pederasty. John Addington Symonds wrote the essay "A Problem in Greek Ethics," and Oscar Wilde wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray. William Hurrell Mallock's The New Republic mocked Oxford figures including Walter Pater and Wilde, and Dowling's 1994 study Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford traces these currents.

  Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, known as the Labouchere Amendment, expressed the opposing view, which condemned pederasty as a degradation of the youthful soul. The law shaped how the public and mainstream media discussed the subject. Its most famous use was the prosecution of Oscar Wilde, in which The Picture of Dorian Gray served as evidence. The conviction labeled Wilde a "sodomite" in the eyes of the law and sent him to prison.

  The late-19th-century Decadent movement, a circle of European writers and artists, also used pederasty to assert a non-conforming identity. From it emerged a coterie known as the Uranians, who produced poetry and art centered on the theme. Their work was often not explicit. Henry Scott Tuke painted nude boys without showing genitals or physical contact between them. Uranians wrote chiefly to share work among themselves, and they described pederasty as "erotically and aesthetically superior to heterosexuality." Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, published in 1912, appears on lists of later literature in this vein.

  Sandra Boehringer and Stefano Caciagli argue that Ancient Greek and other ancient societies existed "before sexuality." In their view, a preference for a gender or age did not stamp a relationship with a label, though groups could still disapprove or legislate against it. Nineteenth-century European pederasty lacked community acknowledgement. It also lacked the expectation of asymmetry in age and social status that Greeks had treated as an aspiration.

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• 7. Closed Worlds

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  At Eton College and Harrow School in the 19th and 20th centuries, pederasty between older and younger students was common but officially forbidden. The fagging system let older boys choose a younger boy to carry out their orders, and that system fed the culture. Older students often forced younger ones into sexual acts. Mutual romances also occurred. Alexander Thynn, 7th Marquess of Bath, recounts several at Eton in his memoir Top Hat and Tails (Strictly Private). Schoolmasters universally prohibited such relationships, citing antisodomy laws and the cultural climate. Students could be expelled or beaten, but not imprisoned. Eton even kept older and younger boys apart during nude swimming to prevent them.

  Aboard British naval ships in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, adolescent boys were routinely recruited, and various forms of pederasty took place, both consenting and nonconsensual. In earlier centuries the penalty could be execution. Later it became lashes and expulsion from the Navy, for the man and for the boy if he consented, or for the man alone in cases of rape. Surgeons occasionally inspected boys' bodies for signs of pederasty.

  A pederastic subculture existed among working-class laborers, hobos and unhoused men in the United States and Canada in the early 20th century, though it was illegal. Accounts describe relationships that typically involved small-scale prostitution rather than trafficking. Authors of the period blamed the men's isolation from women. They had no modern understanding of pedophilia or sexual orientation to draw on.

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• 8. The Modern Verdict

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  In Ecuador, the age of consent is 14, yet adults can face statutory rape accusations in some circumstances for sex with anyone under 18. Countries and US states differ widely. Several allow consensual relations between adults and older adolescents, while others prohibit all sexual relations under 18. Modern authorities forbid adult sexual activity with minors below the age of consent because of the psychological and physical harm. Studies link child sexual abuse with depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety.

  Stop It Now!, an American organization working against sexual abuse, defines child sexual abuse as "sexual touching between an adult and a child." It also includes sexual behavior such as looking, showing or touching to meet the adult's interest or needs. Non-contact abuse covers exposing minors to pornography and placing them in situations involving nudity, outside naturism and traditional ethnic practices.

  Pedophile advocacy groups hold the opposite view. They support relegalizing sex between adults and minors, or lowering the age of consent where it sits above their preference, and they see such relationships as harmless. Members often call themselves "boy lovers." They sometimes point to Ancient Greece to justify relationships between adults and minors.

  Archive of Our Own and the Nifty Erotic Stories Archive host fiction with pederastic themes by pseudonymous authors. Users of Archive of Our Own occasionally flag these stories as "offensive." Stacey Lantagne, a volunteer on the legal committee of its parent group, the Organization for Transformative Works, answered: "The OTW's mission is to advocate on behalf of transformative works, not just the ones we like." That statement leaves the question of what online archives should shelter openly contested.

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