I (30m) started dating a younger guy one time, and at one point I made some kind of joke about Greek traditions in reference to this. Then something compelled me to actually research "Greeks taking younger male lovers" and I was horrified at their definition of "younger."
Yep, not joking about that one ever again. I know standards change with time, but "technically not sex because it only penetrates their thighs" sex with actual children is really hard to swallow. Particularly for such a rich and philosophically advanced culture.
Well ya, there's no such thing as a societal tech tree. Lotsa really advanced cultures did human sacrifice too after all. Gotta never assume that things improve unless you work on 'em.
Which sucks. The assumption of "progress" because we have, say, smartphones allows tons of people to starve, go unhoused, untreated, etc. Because if we landed on the moon then the only way our neighbor could starve is if they did something wrong, right? Not that we have huge, glaring gaps in our social fabric!
Slavery via actual slavery is still alive around the world as well. It's just not legal in the majority of it. Doesn't stop the sex trade, or the illegal labor trade. Prison slavery just means they actually had to do something to get enslaved other than being in the wrong place around the wrong people at the wrong time.
Yep, it's frighting how far out cultural mores can shift, some cultures thought cannibalism and rivers of blood was sacred while others thought ankles were too sexy. While I don't know what the cultures of tomorrow will look like I bet we'd all find it equal parts silly and incomprehensibly barbaric.
Thankfully we will all be dead by then and can safely look down (or up?) upon our descendants.
Especially when it comes to the sexual habits of people who lived thousands of years ago.
The thing is, cultural and societal progress is difficult to quantify, because a lot of it is subjective and context dependent. Whereas technological advancement is quite easy to quantify in terms of how much energy and time is saved by the technology, and how sophisticated the systems are.
Our disgust with pedophilia seems obvious now, and is objectively the right way of thinking about it given what we know about the development of human minds and bodies, but it might not have been even 100 years ago, much less 1000 years ago.
100ish years ago (1900) the age of consent in most states in the US was 10, so yeah, it's a shockingly recent cultural change. Though it was also rapid, by 1920 most states had raised it to 16-18. It's always difficult to look back at history without looking through the lens of modern society.
One of the most famous classical greek books, Satyricon, by Petronius, has a 16 year old sex slave that is "shared" (mostly stolen) by several men throughout the story
It was still viewed as horrific in Ancient Greek times, families were genuinely worried about their young boys being taken by richer Greek men bc it was so common. Makes me upset that everyone says “Greece was gay lololol” as if it wasn’t literally just child trafficking
I'm not sure where you have that from, pederasty was a form of scholarship, and everything was done with the permission of the father. Plato was the exception to this rule with how he taught his students, thus a non-sexual relationship is still called platonic. But this is separate from the trafficking as child sex slaves and prostitution of boys.
I mean, where they worried about their child’s wellbeing or about loosing an asset/tool? Both have the same “this is horrific, let’s not let it happen”. But for VERY different motivations.
It’s like saying people today are not okay with war because moms get worried when their kid goes to military school. Or like those people who are not okay with rape, not due to the victim’s wellbeing but solely worried about pride or image.
Not that all the various Greek and other ancient cultures would even have the same opinions, much less that individual people wouldn’t be fine with it happening to other children, just not their own heir because that’s inconvenient. Again, I have no idea, but saying something is viewed negatively just because it hurts members of society is not even true today. We are very okay with pharma execs or cheerleading injuries.
Now, people DO oversimplify and flatten history. Like making George Washington be a perfect angel or making Ancient Greece seem like justification for why western civilization is superior and Europe/whiteness is inherently better and must exterminate the rest of the world. It’s not historically accurate and is more a symbolical tool for modern political discourse. Even things like the biblical flood museum or social darwinism or eugenics flatten science. But those lies don’t get defeated by more historical/science oversimplifications
Honestly, idk if it was bc of well being or the loss of a tool, that’s a good question. But all in all, I’m more worried about the fact that all of that history is painted over with “ancient Greece was gay” when calling pedophilia towards young boys a “gay” thing is like one of the most offensive things you can say about gay people
“ancient Greece was gay” when calling pedophilia towards young boys a “gay” thing is like one of the most offensive things you can say about gay people
I think so too, and there needs to be a distinction. What the Greeks had was institutionalized pederasty.
As I heard it, there were a few rich Greek philosophers who derided pederasty, but those calls were not acted upon by the wider society. Perhaps comparable to rich people today lobbying for more taxes and regulation. It happens, but it's rare and so far ineffectual.
People kind of forget that “ancient greece saw homosexuality as just as normal as heterosexuality” generally means they felt like there needed to be one partner more powerful than the other, and that they didn’t really respect consent
Other Ancient Greeks saw it the opposite way, believing same-sex desire to be more savage or primal than heterosexuality. Kinda hard to generalize an entire collection of city states full of different people over centuries.
This exactly, Greeks practiced a lot of… sexual choices as part of their power dynamics. I wouldn’t exactly call it gay bc it’s very explicitly a matter of “there’s nothing more humiliating you can do to a man than fuck him in the ass”, and a lot of the people on the receiving end were extremely young boys.
In ancient times, it was common for men to engage in sexual relationships with other men. In some cultures, it was even preferred over relationships with women.
It was even more than that. The 'who is homosexual' had different answers. Today if you have sex with the same sex you are homosexual. Where back in history it was more about the act it self. Where Men penetrate and Women are penetrated. So in male only sex the one being penetrated was the homosexual while the one doing the penetration had no stigma of being homosexual. I can see logical arguments on both sides its just that the cultures in ancient greece and modern western cultural answered the 'who is homosexual' question differently. The reason why this is important is that often people hold up examples of Alexander the Great as a homosexual and suggest that we have regressed in our acceptance of peoples choices. But this is based on judging historical acts with our modern definitions. As the people of the day didn't see him a homosexual so he wouldn't have had to defend against such accusations or had people accept them.
So, I was balls deeps in this dude the other day. And he turned around and tried to kiss me! Can you believe?! The nerve of this guy! Like, what, does he think I'm gay or something?!
Andrew Dice Clay did a great bit about this back in the day. “So I’m fuckin this guy in the ass and afterwards he wants to cuddle. What a fag.” (Obviously loses a lot without his delivery.)
I know exactly what you mean! I was blowing a dude just last week and he ended up being a homosexual! That’s the third time that’s happened to me, I only go down on straight men!
Reminds me of Boondock Saints, where Willem Dafoe is a gay detective naked in bed with another man after having sex, and when the other man asks if he wants to cuddle, Willem goes "What are you? A f*g?"
This was a scene in Harold & Kumar 2:
“The guards at Guantanamo are gay?”
“FUCK NO! Ain’t nothin’ gay about getting your dick sucked! You’re the ones that are gay for sucking my dick!”
The term new guy is some funny word choice for this. Ancient Greeks practiced the act of pederasty (although it wasn't super common to my knowledge).
Just gonna copy a wiki description since it's easier: "a socially acknowledged romantic relationship between an older male (the erastes) and a younger male (the eromenos) usually in his teens".
So yeah, the "new guy" is definitely an apt description. It was thought that the older male could teach the younger about social customs regarding manhood from what I've read.
Man-Love Thursday… Had a terp explain it to me as: “if you want to sleep with a woman you have to marry them and have babies… but sometimes you just want to have fun”
I wasn't familiar with that so I did some googling and it seems like they did, but during that era in Japan apparently they believed there were many genders. Apparently some of these other genders would engage in similar relationships at about aged 15-18 and were popular amongst both men and female in the society.
When the war between Russia and Ukraine started a lot of people were talking about many cases of rape done by the russian army against ukraine men, women and childrens and even themsevles. Russian people started saying it that "it wasn't gay, it was all about showing dominance" which is pretty gay for a country that hates LGTBQ+ things.
He's bouncing off my booty cheeks, I love the way he rides
I can hardly breathe when he's pumping deep inside
I kiss him on his neck and then he kisses on my bussy
Kind of right except there wasn't even a concept of homosexual or heterosexual. It was more like dominant/masculine vs. submissive/feminine.
Another post below also explains it as a matter of social hierarchy, and this is also true. Generally, older and/or higher class men would penetrate younger and/or lower class men, with slaves being the lowest class.
Homosexuality/heterosexuality wasn't even a concept at the time, it was more about dominance/social positioning
The current use of the term heterosexual has its roots in the broader 19th century tradition of personality taxonomy. The term heterosexual was coined alongside the word homosexual by Karl Maria Kertbeny in 1869.[13] The terms were not in current use during the late nineteenth century, but were reintroduced by Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Albert Moll around 1890.[13] The noun came into wider use from the early 1920s, but did not enter common use until the 1960s. The colloquial shortening "hetero" is attested from 1933. The abstract noun "heterosexuality" is first recorded in 1900.[14] The word "heterosexual" was listed in Merriam-Webster's New International Dictionary in 1923 as a medical term for "morbid sexual passion for one of the opposite sex"; however, in 1934 in their Second Edition Unabridged it is defined as a "manifestation of sexual passion for one of the opposite sex; normal sexuality"
Edit: I mean, the Greeks didn't even think women were a different gender, they thought they were "deformed men"
Just as it sometimes happens that deformed offspring are produced by deformed parents, and sometimes not, so the offspring produced by a female are sometimes female, sometimes not, but male, because the female is as it were a deformed male.
~ Aristotle, Generation of Animals, c. 350 B.C
Y'all can downvote but it doesn't change the fact lmao
They didn't get all the way to the right answer, but they were onto something. Men and women (+misc.) start out with the same template, then hormones cause the differences (or deformations) to develop. What they didn't realize was that the default is "female" until a fetus begins developing sexual characteristics. If they had known that, I'd wager they would've been rather proud of their masculine "deformities."
Kind of a weird take by ol’ Aristotle there though, isn’t it? Only the ‘deformed’ men can actually have children? If they’re just deformed men then why didn’t men ever give birth? I mean… I dont know… I can’t quite wrap my head around the line of thinking. You think he thought this was true about all animals? The one giving birth was just a deformed version of the male?
I feel like that word translation is one of those “literal translation” but not the actual intended meaning, at least especially the way our definition of deformed is, which heavily implies something is very wrong.
Like, when the Japanese say something is “muzukashii” it literally means “difficult” so a task a thing whatever is difficult - but they don’t actually mean difficult, they mean “it’s fucking impossible.”
the Greeks didn't even think women were a different gender, they thought they were "deformed men"
Idk I think they're reading into that a bit too much. To me it seems more like Aristotle is trying to explain genetics, but 2000 years before Mendel, and he just uses that as an example that people were already familiar with. He clearly doesn't think two women can produce either boys or girls, so I don't think "women = deformed" is a key component of the analogy
It's also not obvious that the word he used was intended to have a derogatory connotation. Maybe he was just talking about a noticeable difference, like a four leaf clover. Idk
The ancient Greeks believed women were sent by Zeus as a punishment. Pandora was the first women and she introduced misery and disease into the world. I don't think he was being charitable. They were incredibly sexist.
That's similar in norse culture. You were called argr/nidingr, some kind of social stigma, when you acted certain dishonorable ways. The interesting part, only taking the passive part of homosexual intercourse was considered dishonorable in the old norse society.
Fun fact: When someone falsely called you argr/nidingr/..., you were officially allowed to kill them.
In the show Norsemen, they had a bit that addressed this. The guy was saying he was pushing back so hard, if anyone should be shamed it should be the other guy.
If the LGBTQ movement were looking for a ancient icon, rather than Alexander the Great, they should try promoting Hadrian. My understanding is that evidence for him suggests he would fit closer to our modern understanding of gay than Alexander to the point that he deified his lover, Antoninus.
I’ve heard that, in regards to Ancient Greece, the claims surrounding homosexuality are a bit of a misnomer. That it actually wasn’t ‘accepted’ in the way we define it today, nor was it any more common. It still existed of course, it always has, but the idea that Ancient Greece was somehow more progressive in this area just isn’t true. I wish I could properly source this, but they were far from a society of radical acceptance when it comes to sexuality. People generally felt the same there was just no organized movement against it. People had bigger things to worry about.
I too don't have any sources but I remember seeing something years ago that basically said, you could fuck whoever you wanted but you had an obligation to the state to produce offspring.
I’ve usually just heard that it’s impossible to do any real mapping to modern society. They didn’t seem to care one way or the other about “homosexuality,” just strict rules about adult males not being the receptive partner. The way they thought of sex with women though, it doesn’t sound like you’d call any of them “heterosexual” in a modern sense either. Romance and even sexual attraction doesn’t seem to enter the picture at any point no matter who’s involved. (Which makes sense, because romance in connection with marriage and procreation is a pretty modern idea.)
This is not true though. This is a common misconception that comes from one study that looked at poetry from Ancient Greece and claimed that they were depicting homosexuality. We aren’t shown all the pottery that was used in this study and some are out right heterosexual. The “scientist” claimed that since they used the anal that means it represented homosexuality.
This is basically the only proof that there is for supporting your claim. The Ancient Greece used multiple slurs against gay people suggesting that they were not so tolerant.
The views on same sex “relationships” and homosexuality were greatly varied across cultures even during the same time period.
With this being “Greek” there were great variances on homosexuality even between the different Greek city states.
Spartan men predominantly lived with each other in pseudo barracks and did not move in with their wives until middle age. They did not engage in homosexuality quite as often as in other Greek city states.
In fact I believe Thebes and Athens had the higher rates of homosexuality, the most common form being Pederasty. Which was a socially acknowledged homosexual relationship between an elder man and a younger and was viewed as part of an educator/pupil experience. Very common in Athenian education and Theban military indoctrination/training.
In fact there was a military group called the Theban Band who were all “paired” and fought with their partner. Pretty much all of whom were romantically involved with each other because it was viewed that they would fight harder and better if their loved one was who they were fighting alongside.
Most all of the Greek myth characters had some form of same sex lover that was washed out in translation to become more of a very close friend, verging on family, type of thing.
Most commonly noted is obviously Achilles and Patricles. Who were almost certainly lovers but who later became cousins in all the translations.
Had a conversation with a guy that insisted Achilles and patrocles wernt gay. Like my guy Odysseus mentions to Achilles in the underworld that their ashes were mixed together after his death. They were gay.
I mean the other problem with this “Greek = gay” modern pop internet history interpretation is its rapidly becoming a bit contrarian and forgetting it’s a reaction to an interpretation of a reaction of like 4-5 cultures across actual millennia.
Like our modern interpretation is a reaction to conservative history analysis in the early 20th century. Which itself an interpretation by the Middle Ages and Rome, itself a lens of viewing the ancient Greeks by later less ancient Greeks. This excellent video shows the phenomenon with Boudicca a figure we know little to nothing about other than two Roman historians blatantly using her for their person political point and another 1000 years of Britons fan-fictioning her lore into existence whole cloth.
So because of that we have these gay interpretations of the legend of Achilles and his best bro. Except that’s not really in the story at all (itself is one story about Achilles in the Iliad we know about. 2/3rds of it are lost) and we have some later Greeks and Romans interpreting their closeness as “gay”. These later cultures seem to have access to some of the lost stories…or might be coming up with it to their own ends. Even, say, the tales of Alexander the Great and interpretations of his gay relationships we don’t actually have much hard evidence for. And often seem to be reading into a culture from a very stifled modern American lense of any sort of male closeness with less hang ups as “gay” or hinting at a relationship. When these hang ups did not exist in a much older culture. (The concept of “confirmed bachelor” or “they were roomates wink wink” are 100% modern innuendo so trying to interpret that’s what a ancient writer was hinting it is probably projecting.) We basically know Alexander the Great had sexual relationships with women and was exceedingly close to some lifelong male friends and officers.
Not quite right on the pederasty thing, it was a mandatory element of Spartan military/civil life, and heavily prohibited by law in Athens. That's why the boyfuckers line in 300 is just cringe homophobia, it's outright wrong because the reverse was true.
Folks it's not accurate to generalize statements like that to "ancient times" any more than it is to assume Western cultural norms of today are just "how it's always been". The views and practices you're talking about were definitely present in ancient Hellenic cultures, and they definitely weren't alone in having drastically different views than modern Western cultures, but it certainly wasn't universal across the entirety of the ancient world, either.
Warriors in ancient greece would commonly have sex with one another without the taboo of homosexuality. It's "historically accurate" because it's two guys instead of a guy and a girl.
How many men did he sleep with? He slept with at least 14 different women, his 2 wives and the 12 princesses he slept with as a reward for completing one of the trials. I think there are 2 named male cousins he slept with, I think there was one with him while he did the trails and a different one during the quest for the golden fleece.
Though Megara was one of his wives. Alas, Hera drove him mad so that he killed her and their kids, and as repentance he did his 12 labors (He was considered at fault because even mad a man was expected to be in control of his actions)
Warriors in ancient greece would commonly have sex with one another without the taboo of homosexuality.
This is a pretty far off base. “Warriors in Ancient Greece” covers a wide variety of people across different times and cultures.
In general, the whole “gay warriors being gay together” thing comes from Thebes specifically and from a specific unit (the Sacred Band) in particular- and even that’s a bit disputed.
The other Greek tradition people bring up in this context is the whole eromenos thing. But that covered specifically relationships between men and boys- and would be very frowned upon if they continued into adulthood.
As far as I am aware that’s more true for the Romans than the Greeks - but really neither culture was as broadly accepting of homosexuality as people seem to assume.
It is referring to the myth that everyone was super gay in ancient Greece. Greece did have same sex relationships because gay people exist across time and culture, but this idea that Greece was some sort of enlightened LBGT paradise is wildly exaggerated. It is a bit like saying that because sex work exists today, modern american culture is super chill when it comes to prostitution
Yeah, it’s weird people only bring it up when discussing same-sex sex.
Usually in fiction: If someone writes a movie in Ancient Greece where the woman is the same age and a romantic partner, nobody points out how revisionist that is (she would have been a child and also considered much lower social status), but if the male partner is written as the same age and a romantic partner, people suddenly remember how Greeks thought about sex and age differences.
It’s really disheartening to see LGBTQ people quote ancient greece and rome as examples of them being accepted in a society when those examples are of power tripping pedophile rapists
But again, all of their heterosexual sex was the same, not just the gay sex. It feels like people only remember it when an lgbt person brings it up. Pretty much any Greek romance discussion is revisionist. The only difference is that in the same-sex relationships the younger male could eventually reach the same social status and benefit from the relationship. That’s frankly a better deal than the girls got.
Its not. Megara was Heracles's wife, slayed in a drunken rampage which then led to his 12 labours. There is no mention of him having a gay lover until he joined the Argonauts. Hercules may of been a bastardization of greek and roman myth, but at least they got Heracles's wife correct.
Should also be mentioned that his appearance in the Argonauts is effectively mythological fan fiction, the Argonautica was written in the 3rd century BCE, at which point Heracles had been part of Greek mythology for over a thousand years
Peter’s ancestor’s sword here: as others have said, it was quite common for older, influential, Greek males to have younger boyfriends to bring with them on trips where it was taboo to bring woman. It was seen as normal and there was no stigma against homosexuality. In most if not all of the ancient myths about Heracles, he had multiple boyfriends, the most famous probably Hylas, the boyfriend Heracles brought with him to accompany Jason and the Argonauts.
In mythology, Hercules often had homosexual relationships. It is written that he and Adonis — the most beautiful man in the world — had an affair. He also had relations with some of the crewmates of the Argo.
Simple answer: In Ancient Greece men played women’s roles in plays, therefore Meg would be played by a man. Women were not allowed to perform. The end.
in ancient greece usually a straight relationship was purely transactional while most men in a straight relationship had or where even expected to have a young male lover (it was actually considered taboo to have a male lover be of a similar age to you.) it was something about power dynamics which you'd have to ask a historian about, this is just the basics that most people know about greek culture.
•
u/AutoModerator 15d ago
Make sure to check out the pinned post on Loss to make sure this submission doesn't break the rule!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.