Is it really a conundrum?

"If all this is true -- and an ever-growing body of scholarship supports it -- then we are confronted with a conundrum: how is it that what we see around us so contradicts the historical record?" I can't see the conundrum here at all. As I think you've implied, there are both genetic and cultural influences on an individual's sexual interests. Genetically, almost all men are designed to be potentially attracted to both women and boys, but variation between individuals is also genetically inevitable. So a few unusual men will be only ever interested in women and a few only in boys, with almost all men on a spectrum somewhere in between. Culturally, if a man is brought up to believe that the best thing he can do is to love both women and boys, then, as long as he doesn't belong to one of the tiny genetic minorities I've mentioned, he will have no difficulty doing so. Hence the historical situations you describe. But if a man's culture teaches him that loving boys is evil and disgusting, then, unless he belongs to the tiny genetic minority that can only love boys, or the allied minority next to it on the spectrum (which merely has a strong preference for boys), then in most cases he will remain dumb to the appeal of boys or not let himself think about something that can only have negative consequences for his self-composure. Hence, in classical Greece, most men were inevitably attracted to boys (thanks to social encouragement) and in the modern anglosphere only a tiny minority (your friends who can't like women) are so attracted (almost everyone with a serious heterosexual option having been put off). Where is the contradiction you mention? Isn't it what one would expect? Personally I think the most important lesson to be drawn from this in trying to understand what pederasty is about, is that men today who are exclusively attracted to boys are definitely not representative of the historical majority who have liked boys, and should therefore be wary of using their personal feelings to explain the broader phenomenon. www.amazon.com/dp/1481222112