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You really need to read this book, and others like it. There's no controversy around the records, Rocke was just the first to work systematically through them. There are similar books on Rome, Greece, the Middle East and Japan. They were mainly published in the 90s, during a brief lessening of hostility to such research. I think the evidence might surprise you. 2/3 of all males in Florence were recorded as having engaged in man-boy sex. To claim this isn't evidence of "markedly different desire, or patterns of sexuality" is not serious. Rocke supplements the court records with deep knowledge of the culture, giving a very reasonable picture of how pederasty operated. Attitudes towards pederasty were similarly scornful among Greek proletarians Ancient Greek attitudes not different to today's? Similarly scornful? Again, I can't take the claim seriously. What are you basing this "scorn" on? Aristophanes? A playwright making jokes about a common practice, gunning for the sort of laughs we get from jokes about masturbation - ie, a common fact of life? Kenneth Clarke's Greek Homosexuality definitively dealt with the very great differences back in 1978. |