Re: Third lecture, supplemental

A few more notes on this remarkable effort to stigmatize boylove as a phenomonen of "southern" Europe, that is, a racial contamination STOP IT! This guy is literally contending that Northern Europeans are superior to Southern Europeans because they fucked animals instead of boys. All in an effort to discredit Trumbach’s claim that men in Britain before 1700 desired both boys and women, and man boy sex was the dominant form of male-male sexuality. Instead he contends that man-boy sex was a “southern” phenomenon, thus discounting Rocke’s evidence (by far the most probative) based on its origin. But let’s suppose northern Europeans really were fucking their goats in preference to their boys. How would we explain that? Oh yeah. The Reformation. Which Malcolm blithely discounts. And why would England in the 18th Century develop the modern version of age-matched homosexuality, in the form of the Molly houses? Because European industrialization started in England and then spread across Europe. Industrialization undermined traditional tolerance for – even erotic idealization of -- man-boy relationships. The Reformation accommodated the received religion to the demands of capitalism. This began in England and spread. It made the world we live in today. So Malcolm compares England under the pressure of emerging industrialization to southern Europe at time when these pressures were much less severe. But it's obvious that industrialization spread from England across Europe, transforming all sexual relations, including between men and boys. The Molly houses were not a phenomenon of regional difference, they were a phenomenon of historical development. Protestantism is a huge force for the oppression of boylovers. More sex policing is a major thing the Reformation stood for. And of the varieties of Protestantism that developed, the one that founded US imperialism is likely the most dedicated to sex policing. We lead the world in sex policing, and it’s nothing we should be proud of. Malcolm discounts Shakespeare! The existence of a boylove theatrical tradition, in which the climax was the marriage of a man and a boy (though by convention playing the part of a girl), means nothing to him. And already by then the Puritans were raging against Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and the next thing that happened was the English Civil War, with its compromise outcome between monarchy and republicanism. Malcolm: Change in the kinds of policing action that generates the statistics that we can now use. (50:55). But that’s exactly the point. Protestantism (or at least Puritanism) promoted sex policing. That explains (he actually says this!) the change in sex policing after the English Civil War. Yet he infers a change in behavior from this evidence. Sudden emergence. That has always been the great weakness of the Trumbach hypothesis. Why suddenly in 1700? The short answer is the English “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. Forty years after Shakespeare’s boylove theaters were closed by the English Civil War, a monarchy was restored, and it accommodated the erotophobia of the Puritans who had rebelled. The erotic thrill of boys dressed as girls was exchanged for (a poor substitute) that of girls dressed as boys. Despite the fact that, to the extent they represented republicanism, the Puritans lost the English Civil War, they won the war against sexual liberation. The Molley houses were, as Trumbach portrays them, retreats from a culture of boylove very similar to Florence – still the source of the most relevant evidence, which no northern European evidence flatly contradicts. As Malcolm quite properly concedes, any inference that northern European sexual behavior varied substantially from Florentine depends on highly questionable assumptions. And to what would it ultimately be relevant? Say southern Europeans fucked boys not sheep, what do we do with that evidence? Northern Europeans also fucked boys, even if Puritan culture sometimes coerced them into settling for sheep. Greek love never died. It was persecuted by authoritarian governments. hugzu ;-p