Was pederasty real? If so, how did it become so accepted in major classical and medieval cultures such as the Romans...

>human nature
Doesn't exist. Holy shit Veeky Forums is disgusting.

>this brainwashed
8 years, cuck

>myth

Mohemmed fucked his child bride because he was a child rapist. There's no mention of him fucking his slave children, but he certainly did because he- sorry GOD- revealed that it is a-okay to rape your slaves, and there is no age of consent in Islam (the only rule is, if the baby is too small to take your cock without serious harm, then you have to rub one out between it's thighs instead).

>Any good sauce on this?

Read any of the constitutions that have survived, gay sex of any kind was deeply shameful but fucking the boy you're supposed to be educating was a serious crime that ruined both your and his reputation forever.

>Do you think the idea of pederasty as inherently sexual has been pushed by modern day homosexuals as a way to legitimize their own behavior with the idea that it was normal in the past?

I don't want to blame queers for this, there has certainly been a concerted attack on the reputation of the Greeks especially as being a nation of queers, but this comes from cultural Marxists in general, not just the gays.

As is well known, to define it simply as a "homosexual relationship" (as was customary in the past) would be to falsify reality, attributing to the Greeks a concept which did not exist in their world. Today, it is generally accepted among scholars that an adult man in ancient Greece could, with little or no risk of social disapproval, express sexual desire for another male, so long as the desired male was an adolescent (pais), whom the adult loved within the context of the socially codified and positively valued relationship which we call pederastic. This kind of relationship took place, then, between an "active" adult and a "passive" boy, though by "activity" and "passivity"—this is an important aspect of the question—the Greeks understood not necessarily and not only sexual roles, but also and above all intellectual and moral roles.
The couple composed of two individuals of the male sex, in other words, was socially and culturally accepted if it was "asymmetrical"; but not in the sense, often wrongly understood, of a couple in which only one person (the adult) experienced desire and sexual pleasure and the other (the boy) was merely the object of it.
The "asymmetry" consisted of other inequalities within the relationship. The first and most decisive of these (from which the term "pederasty" derives) was the difference in age between the adult "lover," called the erastes, and the adolescent "beloved," called the eromenos. This difference brought with it another important element of assymetry: the adult transmitted to the boy, who obviously did not already have it, his experience in every field, assuming in their encounters a formative role at the moment in which the boy—a potential citizen—prepared himself to become an actual citizen, able to exercise his civil and political duties.

how can people not see the beauty of these sweet shotas?

no religions have "ages of consent" you mongoloid. that's a MODERN CONCEPT. T

You're looking at historical events though a modern lenses, while also refusing to accept human nature.

People had different needs from marriage. It wasn't romantic love, it was to have children to ensure the political strength of their dynasty. People have always been disgusted by pedophilia because that's our nature. That's why it didn't seem weird to anybody that Mohammad would marry a 6 year old. Because hes marrying her for the explicit purpose of securing an alliance with her clan and to strengthen his dynasty. He'd literally be putting those goals at risk because he'd be damaging her ability to reproduce if he abused her. He'd also fucking lose all of his legitimacy desu if he were a pedophile. even back then.

>He'd literally be putting those goals at risk because he'd be damaging her ability to reproduce if he abused her.

She herself talks in her diary about how Mohemmed fucked her when she was still a child, it's not a myth or a slander to say Mohemmed was a child rapist.

It really wasn't. For most of history people married and died young. People who lived a long time had things figured out; they were healthy and could pass those skills on to the young.

Pederasty is a sort of back and forth for much harsher and crueler times. The older person gains sexual gratification, the younger person gains the skills required to survive. It's just the teacher/student fetish taken to the extreme.

People don't comprehend the level of poverty that ancient man lived in. Almost everyone lived on farms, lived and died young. Famines happen about every five years as the weather isn't that reliable; most of what you have is built by your own hand. Imagine that - maybe you'll get a hoe head from a black smith, or a pot, but that's a generationally precious tool. Many would still use digging sticks or tools of stone, wood, and bone to do their work. Metal was simply too precious and expensive. Your mom made all of your clothes.

The pederasts traditionally represent the wealthy, educated city dwellers that lived in a state of utter opulence compared to the common man. They didn't have to till the fields until they died old and broken, or pump out an endless flood of kids to keep ahead of disease. They could afford simple tools and books and items. But even so, they were always at risk of dying from disease. Until surprisingly recently (about the time germ theory came about, not coincidentally) cities were population negative. More people died in them than were born in them.

To the parents of this children allowing their child to get butt-banged on occasion was a tiny sacrifice to make next to a life spent toiling on the earth, living off of only what you could make with your own hands and dying young. It provided a pathway to a life of (relative) plenty and comfort. The knowledge and skills someone trained by a great Greek teacher could use produced Alexander the Great. That's the power of education.

They saw it as a net positive.

lol wtf are you talking about? "Diary"?

Do you even know what year this shit was happening in?

Oh, I should add - almost nobody in the ancient world had money. You COULD NOT buy an education unless you were part of the upper class; you might not see more than a handful of coins in your lifetime. Most commerce was done by trading goods and services or on a system of credit.

The oldest service traded in return for goods or favors is a person's own body. Prostitution is older than mankind itself; even other primates participate in it in their simple animal fashion. When it's literally a choice between death and sex people typically choose sex (if they can). And if your child is going to grow up in poverty or possibly die - would you prostitute them to save their life? Is that amoral if you don't really have another choice?

Those doing it weren't just maliciously evil either. They knew only the earliest fragments of medicine and they got much of it wrong. If anything they probably considered trading mere sex for valuable coins and education to be a charity. They legitimately didn't know they were doing damage. Not that it matters much - they had actual slaves walking around. Violent death was quite common and some people simply weren't seen as human. When most children died in childhood of violence or disease or famine some other cause - well, what is the value of their lives? After most of your siblings die growing up, after you watch a hundred children die - how much do you still care about them? For some of them, probably not very much.

Pederasty was not a modern issue. It was an issue alien to us because we simply cannot imagine the incredibly harsh and cruel life people lived. Child mortality rates are low, people are well educated and almost everyone is literate. Everyone has money and feeding yourself is something everyone is expected to be able to do. Famines are rare; diseases are controlled. There are roads and goods you can buy to improve your quality of life. You can just pay to go to college now. We are not them.

Quality post

Except for the "everybody died young" bullshit, unless we're counting 60s as "young."

wrong retard. most people died before well before 60. 60 was just the endgame.

People who lived past childhood tended to last until some major health issue or an accident did them in, 60-80 wasn't unheard of and that's when then-untreatable things like heart attacks begin. But most people did die as children. When people say that the life expectancy of certain eras was 40 adults didn't live shorter lives, children just died in droves.

I remember some reporter that committed suicide a while back. He'd been to africa and seen starving children and did nothing to help. Just hundreds of kids dropping like flies, dying of famine and abandoned. He'd simply seen so many dying that he didn't even feel a thing when he snapped a picture of some girl starving to death. The difference between then and now is that now it's an extreme rarity and a tragedy, then it was about once every five years when the regular famine rolled around.

You have lots of kids to get past disease and get workers on the farm, the oldest key to getting lots of food and success. But when weather was bad and crops were poor (or failed due to bugs, disease, or assholes destroying it) people died. Old people had knowledge and skills to pass on. Teens could work, adults could work. Kids cannot and they deal poorly with poor nutrition. That regular starvation is why those that did survive were so much shorter than we are.

They lived lives arguably worse than animals even when they lived.

>no religions have "ages of consent" you mongoloid. that's a MODERN CONCEPT. T
At the same time Mohammed was putting his dick in 9 year old the Byzantines considered the age of adulthood to be 16 for boys and 15 for girls

Do remember that pederasty was by no means ubiquitous in Roman, Greek or Japanese society. It came and went out of vogue as time went on, and the Romans especially considered it pretty disgusting more often than they considered it acceptable.

Flatly wrong. For most of recoded history (barring major events like famines, major wars, epidemics etc) people who made it to "adulthood" (15-20) could expect to live, on average, ~40 more years. Making it into your 50s was common and making it into your 60s was far from rare. (I'm sure you know what "average" means - it means that half of them died younger than that and half of them lived longer.)

>When people say that the life expectancy of certain eras was 40 adults didn't live shorter lives, children just died in droves.
Not sure if you meant to reply to the other guy, but that's exactly my point.

I'm the guy you were replying to, so I was simply saying I don't think you were wrong.

I got no problem with your description of poverty (it would be better to add time and places). But I think you oversimplified how modern people began to see prostitution and pedophilia as evil.

I think it was when more and more people began to become rich while others were still poor, that this became an issue. My guess is in 19th century London.

I think it also has to do with the theory that prostitution ruins the family that provided prostitutes and it therefore drags down the whole society. A theory that attempted to explain why some people stay poor forever.

>But I think you oversimplified how modern people began to see prostitution and pedophilia as evil.

When you discuss complex issues like this you can get in a very technical argument with another similarly educated person that only the two of you read. You could also just do what I did and break complex issues down to simple versions of themselves so less educated bystanders watching the conversation understand it. I'd rather that bystanders get the proper "mental shape" of the time even if they don't get the detail.

You're probably right that modern attitudes about prostitution and sex are from England, primarily in the Victorian era. That's also why it's so very widespread when it was viewed as more morally grey in the past. Ultimately however I think it's a result of the invention of monotheism and the concepts of good and evil.

Good is everything that is pleasant and fun and evil is everything unpleasant and bad. There is an ultimate judge of good and evil. All suffering is a result of the evils of man. Thus you must look for everything unpleasant and bad and declare it evil so they have a clear cause for their suffering.

This morality hasn't changed, only softened. "Addicts do it to themselves." "She brought it on herself, dressing like that." "Well what did he expect walking in that neighborhood?" Simply put a tool that is sometimes unpleasant and often used by the poor to survive (prostitution) became the cause of their ills. Less common today but common once was a situation where a prostitute is murdered or a child prostitute dies of an STD. "God is punishing them for their wicked ways. Repent, or burn forever and ever in the lake of fire at the end of the world."

It was a way for humanity to prohibit certain unpleasant behaviors and beliefs in order to sustain society. But hatred of pedophilia is neither universal nor present everywhere even now. Take for instance one of the uncensored views of a culture like the Marquesas Islands.

cotd

"Those Marquesan Islanders, made famous by Herman Melville’s captivity narrative, Typee, stand out as especially exceptional. When European ships began to arrive in these remote Pacific islands, they were often met with swarms of young girls attempting to climb aboard to have sex with the sailors. Though our knowledge of the Marquesans is limited, it appears that, for them, virginity—or chastity—was not a social construct. But Marquesan life was no sexual free-for-all. These islanders were part of strictly hierarchical tribal groups governed with their own elaborate kinship obligations. The sexual openness of Marquesans shocked and sometimes appalled Westerners, as did Marquesan full-body tattoos. The sexualization of young girls was notable. Older women stretched the labia of little girls to make them more attractive. Both boys and girls were initiated into sex at a very young age by older adults, and the children became avid participants.

"Behind this exotic surface, the Marquesans were governed by strong rules on rank and privilege, sexual segregation, and birth order. Only a woman of high rank could have a second husband, for example, and he was a commoner subordinate to her. Men and women ate separately. And, as in Europe, the oldest son inherited family property. Sex for the Marquesans was not outside of meaning. It was fraught with meanings, some of which are now obscured behind the shroud of a dead culture. But the general picture is clear, and it is the usual thing: Attraction. Pleasure. Attachment. Reproduction. Fulfillment. To which we can add power, prestige, danger, purity, control, and the other relational overlays that typically attach themselves to sex. But there are also culturally specific meanings that were never easy for outsiders to comprehend and that have now been lost to history."

In other words they accepted pedophilia but had their own alien restrictions within their own culture. They were not unique.

The ancient world didn't have people dying young, it has hilariously high infant and child mortality rates. If you made it through your teens you'd like for decades after.

Countless past civilizations have lived and died in the past that had totally different views on pedophilia. For us having sex with anyone under the age of consent is statutory rape and utterly vile. It causes major damage to their psychology and future.

Yet there is the pedophiles unicorn - a supposedly consensual relationship between adult and child that causes no harm. Yet that is impossible in our culture because we view sex as a matter of personal, sacred choice and an extension of one's own agency. Children cannot have that agency and make their own decisions so it is impossible for them to consent to sex at all. It is universally rape for us, and rape is considered one of the greatest evils there is. Rape of a child is considered far worse than that. So the rape of a child (which is all sex between adults and children in our culture) is simply the most vile crime there is even if if looks like a unicorn.

Simply put because we view sex as something that must always be something decided on by adults with full consent pedophilia becomes naturally evil. There is no good pederast.

The future is going to bring some very tricky issues, though, and I wouldn't be entirely surprised to see things in the future that the Marquesans would recognize. What happens when we inevitably have trans-children who are mentally adults? As absurd as that sounds, digital uploads of people could look like whatever they wanted. Will we prohibit them from making porn or having sex? What if they alter their mental state to be more like kids? Likewise, if one can download the experiences and knowledge of another, is a child that downloads someone else's adult memory of consensual sex a victim of rape? If a child can instantly download a college education, language skills, and the memories and experiences of adults, is it entirely a child? Should they be allowed to have sex if they want to even if they're physically children?

Society changes. We may not like it.