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Fun article. I was wondering why McClay was so excited about a possible tenuous connection between the Cretan pederastic mock-abduction (PMA) and Dionysiac mysteries. But apparently it helps prove that the ladies-and-slaves’ frolics were superior to anything the chaps did, so it’s all good. But there was one moment when I almost woke up. He wants to equate PMA to the Dionysiac mysteries, specifically the initiate’s death and rebirth into a new and illustrious state. So he says of PMA: The ‘rape’, with its temporary reversal of sexual and gender roles, deprives the adolescent of his identity as a child (a ‘death’) in preparation for his ‘rebirth’ as a man, husband/father, and citizen.40 The pattern of ritualized death and rebirth, with the instrumental inversion of sexual norms, corresponds with the pattern of Dionysiac initiation. Where to start? I thought these bean-counters were meticulous with terminology? Where the fuck does this ‘rape’ come from? Strabon’s Ephoros-derived account paints exactly the opposite picture. After the two months of the man-boy cohabitation, “The boy…gives his opinion of his time with his lover, whether it has happened to please him or not, for the custom gives him this prerogative, in order that, if violence has been used against him in the course of the abduction, he have the power at this point to avenge himself and escape.” McClay tells us that the ‘rape’ “deprives the adolescent of his identity as a child (a ‘death’)…” Is this an academic article or the latest Jeffrey Epstein press release? He really thinks these ancient rituals were drawing on modern beliefs about pederasty for their symbolic meaning? Because pederasty had, if anything, the opposite meaning back then. But he's not done yet: “…the instrumental inversion of sexual norms…” Buddy, pederasty was a sexual norm, that’s sorta the point. This custom was unique but only in the use it made of pederasty, not the fact of pederasty itself, which was widespread and accepted. Seriously, this important paragraph describing PMA is a crock of mendacious, anachronistic shit, isn’t it? |