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Davidson, James:
Jones, Peter, How gay were the Greeks?
Peter Jones reviews The Greeks and Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece by James
Davidson;
Telegraph (UK), December 27, 2007
Homosexuality was 'a complex public phenomenon, essential to understanding Greek
politics and philosophy, warfare, art and society', rather than a bit of after-hours frottaging somewhere out on Lycabettus Heath.
Davidson, James, Mad about the boy;
Davidson, James, The Guardian, November 10, 2007
Plato wrote that same-sex lovers were more blessed than ordinary mortals. But then he changed his mind, describing the act as 'utterly unholy' and 'the ugliest of ugly things'. So why were the ancient Greeks so confused about homosexuality, asks James Davidson.
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About: ·The Greeks and Greek Love by James Davidson, Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
2007. |
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Comment 1 by Ipce member A
"I find it reprehensible that this reviewer is allowed to overlay this modern errant "abuse" concept on this classical phenomenon
[...]" |
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Comment 2 by Ipce member B
"My own anthropological take on this is that the 'slave-chaperones', otherwise known as
pedagogues, were not there to protect boys but to keep order." |
Malón, Agustín, Onanism and Child Sexual Abuse;
A Comparative Study of Two Hypotheses;
Journal Archives of Sexual Behavior,
February 18, 2009
In the last three decades of the previous century, a social anxiety
emerged regarding child sexual abuse (CSA), with the appearance of news
reports, stories, data, self-proclaimed experts, and legislation
relating to a type of experience that today is a staple of the media,
the professional literature, and, of course, the collective imagination.
This public and media preoccupation, usually tinged with alarmism, would
come to be sustained by scientific claims that characterized all erotic
relations between minors and adults as pervasively, inevitably, and
intensely harmful
[...].
A study of the origins of this current phenomenon brings us to
developments in the Western world, especially in the United States, in
the second half of the twentieth century.
[...]
These analytical perspectives
ultimately allows us to compare CSA in a socio-historical context with
others of past epochs, such as the obsession with anti-onanism of the
eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, because in both cases it was
a matter of a scientifically articulated cultural narrative in which
childhood and eroticism were joined together in an equation of
harmfulness as well as individual and collective suffering.
[...]
The failed hypothesis of Onanism and the faulted and failing hypothesis
of CSA are ultimately intertwined. The second is heir to the first in
that the historical continuity and parallelism are self-evident [...]
Pain, Andrew, Twenty years on from the Cleveland Child Sex Abuse
Scandal; Evening Gazette, July 8, 2008
TWENTY years ago the Butler-Sloss report on the Cleveland Child Sex
Abuse Crisis was published. Here the Evening Gazette takes a look back at the crisis which rocked Teesside, speaks to some of those caught up
in the crisis, and looks at the results of the Butler-Sloss inquiry.
Thorstad, David, Man-Boy
Love Then and Now: A Personal-Political Appraisal.
[This article first appeared in NAMBLA Journal 7 (1986). It was written
in 1984 and appears here with a few changes.]
SIX YEARS AFTER THE FORMATION OF
NAMBLA, many in the media [...] till express surprise that
man-boy lovers have organized to raise public consciousness about their
relationships. To some, this proves the inherently degenerate nature of
gay liberation. To others [...] the existence of the man-boy love
movement threatens their desired image of respectability. They wish it
would go away. Both groups seem unaware of the fact that the boy-love
movement is not new; it played an important role in the early gay
movement in Germany from the late nineteenth century until the
extermination of the movement with the triumph of Nazism.
Thorstad, David, Homosexuality
and the American Left - The Impact of Stonewall.
[The following article appeared simultaneously in Journal of
Homosexuality, vol. 29, no. 4 (1995) and Gay Men and the Sexual History
of the Political Left, ed. Gert Hekma, Harry Oosterhuis, and James
Steakley (Binghamton, N.Y.: Harrington Park Press, 1995), 319–49.]
Most left-wing groups have had trouble dealing with the taboo against
intergenerational love, although a few have taken a libertarian stand on
the issue. |