Pederasty

Pederasty, as idealized by the ancient Greeks, was a relationship and bond between an adolescent boy and an adult man outside of his immediate family. In a wider sense it refers to erotic love between adolescents and adult men. The word derives from the combination of pais (Greek for 'boy') with erastis (Greek for 'lover'; cf. eros). In those societies where pederasty is prevalent, it appears as one form of a widely practiced male bisexuality. In antiquity, pederasty as a moral and educational institution was practiced in Ancient Greece and Rome. Other forms of it were common, and also found among the Celts (as per Aristotle, Politics, II 6.6. Athen. XIII 603a) and among the Scythians (as per Herodotus 1.105). More recently, it was widespread in Tuscany and northern Italy during the Renaissance. Outside of Europe, it was common in pre-Modern Japan until the Meiji restoration, in India until the British colonization, amongst the Aztecs prior to the Spanish conquest of Mexico and in China and Central Asia until the early 20th century. The tradition of pederasty persists to the present day in certain areas of Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Middle East, North Africa, and Melanesia.

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The word first appears in the English language in the Renaissance, as p?derastie (e.g.: in Samuel Purchas' Pilgrimage.), in the sense of sexual relations between men and boys. The modern restriction of that definition to the sexual component of such relationships is due on one hand to the primacy of sexological discourse in contemporary western culture, and on the other to the demise of pederasty as a social institution. Thus in its contemporary sense, pederasty figures as a sub-category of what some sexologists term ephebophilia, the attraction of an adult towards adolescents, regardless of sex. Nonetheless this medicalization of desire is not widely accepted, and these categories do not figure in any international catalogue of mental dysfunctions.

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Sexual expression between adults and adolescents is not well studied, and since the 1990's has been often confused with pedophilia. Such relationships raise issues of morality and functionality, agency for the youth, and parental authority. Though they have been deemed beneficial by, for example, ancient philosophers, Japanese samurai and modern writers such as Oscar Wilde, today many disapprove of them and claim that they have a negative effect on the psychological development of the youth. A study contradicting both positions, authored by Bruce Rind and others, was published by the American Psychological Association in 1998.

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Ancient Greeks: REDIRECT Ancient Greece...

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