Re: The Time for Paternalistic Pederasty Has Passed

I'm not invested in any particular model of how pederasty would operate in a more tolerant society; these things are not up to me anyway. My main point I wanted to make in the post you quote from was that any society which accepted pederasty would accept it because it could see that these relationships were beneficial to boys. And no society is likely to accept pederasty in which parents don't regard it as beneficial. So the attempt to bypass parental approval is not a workable strategy, quite apart from the question of whether we would welcome the apotheosis of neoliberalism. But you know, your whole strategy is so riddled with contradiction, it's difficult to know where to start. You say that we shouldn't be paternalist, and then in the same paragraph you say that “male lust has done much damage in the world and women are not irrational to fear its consequences for their sons.”! Oh gosh; lock up your sons! This is the voice of MeToo, the world in which mild flirting is conceptualised as “grooming”. Is it likely that society will come to accept boys' “considerable capacity to make good choices for themselves” when it comes to sex, even as it thinks that adult women (let alone kids) are manipulated by men and that women are “not irrational” - so, presumably, they're rational - to fear the consequences of male lust for their sons? Is it likely that a pro-pederasty culture will arise on the basis of an ideology that takes as an axiom the evil, predatory nature of male sexuality? I don't understand why you look to America (of all places!) for a better society anyway. You don't seem to understand the sheer weirdness of American society. I mean, I understand that you're American and “There's no place like home” (or, as the Israeli version goes, “There's no place like someone else's home”), but still....