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The Time for Paternalistic Pederasty Has Passed
Posted by Pharmakon on 2024-December-31 12:29:32, Tuesday|
Paternalistic Pederasty: An Idea Whose Time Has Passed Sick Rose writes here: [W]hat are "youth" supposed to be "liberated" from? People with a legal and cultural obligation to take care of them who, being human beings, may make mistakes from time to time? Diogenes writes here: In a sane society, parents would approve of adult male lovers (not any adult male lover, of course - they may rightly disapprove of particular would-be erastes), because they would realise the immense value that such a relationship can have for their son. How much agency did Greek boys have in choosing their lovers in the context of institutionalized pederasty? Plato perhaps idealizes, but the long discussion in the Phaedrus of what kind of lover a boy should choose seems to assume considerable youth agency. I would be interested in Edmund’s thoughts about this. I suspect fathers had something close to veto power, or at least a boy choosing a lover over his father’s objections would be flaunting the conventions of the institution. (Mothers doubtless had opinions as well, but in terms of the conventions it would have been the father’s role to approve or object.) Diogenes suggests parental veto might be appropriate in a contemporary revival of pederasty. Sick Rose reminds us that to the extent the customs of pederasty survived first Christianization and then the industrial revolution, they involved “spaces where boys could be boys away from the shadow of the longhouse,” spaces sometimes “run and supervised by people like, um, ‘us’ -- men who cared about boys AS boys, who would sacrifice most anything for the boys under their care.” He attributes the decline of this late form of pederasty to feminism: Was there an erotic motive? Sure. And that turned out to be the lever that the longhouse overlords used to destroy us and deprive the boys we love of boyhood. The model of pederasty SR and Diogenes defend can perhaps fairly be called paternalistic. This is both literally accurate, in that it sees an important role for fathers, and appropriate in the more general sense that a boy’s adult lover is expected to play a somewhat paternal role, that is, to provide the kind of support and guidance we hope a father would provide. The ultimate standard for evaluating the relationship under this model is whether it is good for the boy. It is hard, and not necessary, to argue against this standard. Still, it is possible to suggest the model has certain drawbacks. It does not specify in whose opinion the relationship must be beneficial for the boy. Ideally, of course, everyone’s opinion, but such unanimity is not to be expected in every case. What if the boy has one opinion about what is best for him and the adults in his life – parents and possibly the prospective lover – have a different view? Paternalistic pederasty has at least some tendency to assume it is the adults who know best. Maybe in many cases they do. But the problem with applying this standard to a sexual relationship can perhaps be illustrated by the following anecdote. When I read the Phaedrus in college, our professor was concerned that some of us might be put off by the homosexual context. That context was a major attraction of the text for me, but this was the early 1970s and gay liberation was new and controversial, so I am sure he was right to be concerned. As a corrective measure, he suggested that anyone made uncomfortable by Plato’s evident erotic interest in boys just read the text as if Plato was talking about women instead. This concession to homophobia, however, clearly created more problems than it solved. While gay liberation was then new, feminism had been on a roll for a while. To most of us in the class, the mentorship Plato was envisioning between a boy and his adult lover seemed offensively condescending as a model for an adult male-female sexual liaison. In effect, it turned Plato into an apologist for one of the least appealing manifestations of patriarchy, the assumption that a man is likely to know better than a woman what is best for her. If this is offensively condescending in a sexual relationship between a man and a woman – and it is – what is it in a relationship between a man and a boy? How does what we would properly critique as sexism in the former case not become ageism in the latter? The advocate of a paternalistic model of pederasty can point out disanalogies between the two situations. But I think they are closely related enough that two important dangers of the paternalistic model should provoke our concern. First, it may underrate the capacity of a boy to be the best judge of his own best interest. (And, to the extent boys may lack that capacity, it may be because they grow up in a world that makes too many of those decisions for them, and the only possible way of correcting that situation may be to empower them to make more decisions for themselves in the hopes that they will benefit from that experience.) Second, it may overrate the capacity of adults to be the best judges of a boy’s best interest. In particular, Plato’s very convincing account of how this can under ideal conditions work very well notwithstanding, it may seriously overrate the capacity of the boy’s prospective lover to set aside his own best interest, or at least his own interest in fucking the boy, in favor of the best interest of the boy. Plato is acutely aware of the degree to which the suitor’s lust for the boy can compromise his judgement. He analogizes the situation to a charioteer with two horses, one of which is mindful of the driver’s authority and the other of which keeps agitating to go off on his own. One reason the feminists of Sick Rose’s “longhouse” may be suspicious of pederasty is that many women have first hand experiences with what Plato calls the “dark horse” of the male libido. I have called the pederasties of the past “paternalistic,” and as best I can tell most of them were, to greater or lesser extents. If pederasty is to be revived in the future, I think it needs to be less paternalistic. It needs to humble itself, and be less certain that it knows what is best for boys. It needs to become more respectful of boys, to acknowledge their considerable capacity to make good choices for themselves, and to encourage them in the exercise of that capacity. And it needs admit that the “dark horse” of male lust has done much damage in the world and women are not irrational to fear its consequences for their sons. Respect for the sexual agency of boys is not alien to pederasty. The long arguments of the Phaedrus aim to influence a boy’s choice among prospective lovers, but seem to me to mostly assume the choice is his alone. Rocke’s account of Renaissance Florentine pederastic practices include rape and prostitution but mostly give an impression of flexible and recreational liaisons among willing or eager boys and young unmarried men. The Uranians of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries were often too inhibited to do more than long plaintively for the prohibited pleasures unless the boy (who was often in quite late adolescence) took the initiative, and the Japanese tradition is likewise replete with accounts of men at the mercy of the whims of the objects of their desire. These are the historical examples I am most familiar with. To them I can add only my own few experiences, cases in which I probably should have been more concerned about what would be best for the boys and less inclined to just meet their demands whether reasonable or not. But despite my lack of evidence that actual pederastic relationships have been too paternalistic in the past, or even that such relationships are regularly too paternalistic today when they are able to occur, I still think our discourse about them needs to shift in the direction of greater emphasis on the sexual agency of the boy and less emphasis on our own personal or political opinions about what boys in general, or any particular boy, ought to do, say, or think. I believe this was the emphasis advanced by NAMBLA in the period in which I was involved with the organization. I understood it to be defending man-boy sex primarily as a freely chosen relationship between, if not equals (since any two people differ in many respects), then persons equally entitled to choose their own pathways through life. That’s why the second principle of the three I identify below as central to our movement is “boys decide.” Any pederasty of the future, I contend, will have to more rigorously incorporate this principle to be viable. hugzu ;-p
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