Re: How so?

"... the onset of facial hair spelled the end of a boy's sexual desirability." To whom? While there may have been exclusive pedophiles among ancient examples of homosexuality, it paints a very broad brush to say what had made a boy no longer attractive. To men in general. One could fill volumes with quotations from Greek, Roman, Arabic, Persian and Turkish writers who wrote about what made boys stop being attractive (most facial hair, as SR says, but also bodily hair in the wrong places) and who were confident a consensus of other men shared their taste. "At one point, he notes that the overwhelming majority of surviving Ottoman love poetry from the period concerned boys, not women." That's interesting, but one must wonder to what extent women in the muslim world were allowed to be literate enough to appreciate a good love letter. Love poetry may well not have reflected women's taste, but Malcolm and SR's point is surely that among the Ottoman men in general for whom it was written, the love of boys was a more appealing subject than the love of women. www.amazon.com/dp/1481222112