Re: Scholar blows up 'queer theory' -- attn. Edmund!

At 16:10 Malcolm says: "This is not a desire of the male for a masculine object of desire." And his perspective appears (perhaps subsequent lectures will not bear this out) in an important sense dismissive. Boys were just substitute women. This is logically fallacious. It does not follow that because boys (and boys alone, rather than all males) were objects of desire, that they were substitutes for women. It merely shows they were an alternative to women, which is not dismissive. To be sure, some men may have seen them as a substitute to be used only when women were not available, but there is abundant literary evidence that many men thought them a superior alternative. A perception that they had some physical characteristics in common with women does not change this, though it may help explain why so many men found the two tastes quite compatible. It is historical nonsense to suppose that men in the old societies that most appreciated love with boys only wanted them because women were unavailable. Quite apart from the fact that most men spent most of their lives married, female prostitutes were very widely and cheaply available and resorting to them carried none of today's stigma. Florence sponsored more female brothels in the explicit hope of luring men away from boys, but it didn't work. www.amazon.com/dp/1481222112