Re: The Time for Paternalistic Pederasty Has Passed

"How much agency did Greek boys have in choosing their lovers in the context of institutionalized pederasty?" If we're talking about adolescent boys, I don't find it hard to imagine that parents back then were any less helpless at exerting decisive control than today. So I think the question of whether fathers had a role in such decisions, official or not, misses the point. There may have been cases, as today, where the parent tried to put their foot down, either because the boy's choices were exceptionally bad or because the father was exceptionally disapproving. But as much as we like to say that adolescence is a modern invention, I tend to think that adolescent boys in ancient Athens were just as liable to push whatever boundaries their family or their society had set back then as today. The question is not so much about how much control parents have or should have over their own children. The power they wield today over adult-child relationships is primarily through the state. Taking away that power often presumes that something must replace it and I don't think anything should, at least not on an institutional level as the paternalists would like. But deinstitutionalizing BL relationships would have the effect of not just taking away parents' biggest weapons; it also means that without the distance provided by institutions between enforcer and target, whatever role the parent wishes to take on would have to be based on interpersonal knowledge and means. Parents would be closer to the situation while also having only informal means for intervening. If you start throwing in institutions like the Boy Scouts, I can't help but think that paternalist BLs are romanticizing a bit. Whatever license BLs might have had in the old days are not viable in today's world in which the demand for institutions to be more transparent and professional is more palpable than ever before. The days of the good ol' boys club where institutions could act as a cover for informal relations are simply over and this is true in non-pedo cases as well. I think the future of BL lies in the strictly informal world where boys and BL neighbors hang out on their own time and in which the security of those relationship rest upon the same vicissitudes as any other informal relationship. When you look at the way institutional platforms for even just adult-adult relationships have waned, I'm not too optimistic for institutional progress for adult-child relationships. And I doubt there's ever going to be a Grindr for kids (at least not openly). Can the informal sphere provide a fertile ground for well-rounded adult-child relationships that are not overcome by Plato's specter of lust? I don't know if it should need to, but the strength of informality is that everything is handled on a case-by-case basis. Mistakes happen and they don't need to be made into big ones with a one-size-fits-all approach. Sometimes you need to make a mistake to learn something and sometimes lust isn't a mistake at all.