Very interesting -- thank you.

Your point about the mistake in assuming that the "suppression of age structured male-male sexuality (is purely) a phenomenon of the mid to late 20th Century" is both well taken and well supported. Indeed, a case could be made that it is the central ethical problem of pederasty. Boys are generally (not always, but often) easier to exploit than grown men and that provides temptation to those whose ethical/moral sensibilities are defective. (It's not just a matter of boys being smaller and lacking the "human capital" if you want to call it that -- networks of relationships; survival skills -- of mature men but also what can happen to a boy emotionally when he falls in love with his AF who then dumps him when he enters puberty.) Since it is an ethical problem that transcends any particular age or culture, it's fascinating to read how the issue was dealt with in other places and other times. Plato himself was obsessed with it and we know that the Romans dealt with it by making free-born boys "off limits" to pederasts, leading to widespread naked exploitation of slave boys that in turn was a central reason why the early Church condemned male homosexuality (adult-male-on-adult-male scarcely registered outside a taste for what we would call transwomen; male homosexuality was essentially indistinguishable from pederasty in the conceptual universe of the time save for the taste, as noted, for femmes.) Hope this discussion can widen into other eras/other times. I recall reading about a 14th century Japanese treatise arguing that boys in Buddhist temple schools should learn to put up with the attentions of monks; that monks deserved relief from sexual tension and it was the boys' place to provide it in return for the instruction/ guidance they were getting. Not an argument calculated to go down well even for the more priapic among us today, but the fact that the writer felt he had to make it indicates the degree of unease at the time about the possible sexual exploitation of boys. SR