How the ancient Greeks were male supremacists and pedophiles (not gay)

“There is nothing about male homosexuality which inherently defies or contradicts male power and dominion.The real issue is not whether men screw boys or girls, but their cultural investment in the warrior ideal, the value which is placed on the “masculine” characteristics of aggression, toughness, ruthlessness, and violence. Where this ideal is paramount, you have what Eva Keuls calls phallocracy: “…the concept denotes a successful claim by a male elite to general power…In sexual terms, phallocracy takes such forms as rape…and access to the bodies of prostitutes who are literally enslaved or allowed no other means of support. In the political sphere, it spells imperialism and patriarchal behavior in civic affairs.”

The Theban Greek tradition in which paired male warrior-lovers fought and slept together, and the Attic Greek tradition in which men’s deepest and tenderest love was often reserved for teenage boys, were wholly consistent with imperialist expansion, militarist hero-worship, and the enslavement and imprisonment of women. So was their predisposition to public nudism. The men of ancient Athens “habitually displayed their genitals, and their city was studded with statues of gods with phalluses happily erect. The painted pottery of the Athenians, perhaps the most widespread of their arts, portrayed almost every imaginable form of sexual activity.” The public display of naked statues, phallus-images in stone and wood, and paintings depicting graphic sexual (and often violent) activities did not particularly improve women’s position nor reduce military conquest.

Prostitution (both “straight’ and “gay”) was not only legal in ancient Athens, but completely institutionalised, with a portion of State income deriving from the brothel tax. A handful of exceptional women achieved wealth and pleasant notoriety in the trade; most remained sex peons, until old age rendered them worthless – at which point, without even the grudging support of a patriarchal clan, they died of starvation and illness. Since girl children were unwanted except for strategic marriages, the excess of daughters was disposed of by one of two methods; immediate infanticide or exposure (leaving the baby outdoors in either a remote or public place). The girl babies who were left on public streets were gathered up and raised by the brothel owners, so the system was as neatly self-perpetuating as our own. (In our system, the girls who run away from sexually abusive fathers and brothers are usually in their teens, so the whoremaster is saved the expense of raising them and can put them to work immediately).

So much for those who assert that violence and militarism can be attributed directly to sexual repression and State censorship; that public nudism, open prostitution, and free access to sexually explicit material, must inevitably pacify and civilise men. They would do well to study the ancient Greek city-states.

But that was in the ancient world. Surely we all know that modern Fascism is puritanical, anti-sex, and ragingly homophobic? Perhaps.

The Nazis are the paradigm of 20th century fascism. Though they eventually got around to collecting and destroying male homosexuals along with the other “genetic undesirables” to be purged from the New Order (funny how Bush kept using that same phrase), earlier in the movement there was a strong homosexual faction in the Party. Modeling their aesthetic and philosophy very closely on that of ancient Greece, these Supermen romanticized military heroism as well as the beauty and vitality of young men. The most visible of these men, SA leader Ernst Rohm, was sufficiently active and powerful to challenge Hitler for power and party leadership, which led to the bloody putsch known as the Night of the Long Knives; soon thereafter, male homosexuality was officially forbidden in the Third Reich and the nightmare began for Germany’s queers.[…]

The mere fact of homosexual activity among its officials and soldiery would not have impeded the military and social programs of the Third Reich. It might have been kept a Party secret, known only to initiates (like the details of the Final Solution) so as to spare the limited consciousness of the bourgeoisie – but it would have been in no way inherently contradictory to the general plan of conquest and empire.

It is sissiness that frightens, enrages and offends the men of the phallocracy, not queerness per se. “As in China, Byzantium, and medieval Persia, homosexuality…was mainly devoted to the expropriation of the bodies of people of inferior rank, which meant slaves and commoners of both sexes, by the powerful androcentric ruling classes of the ancient empires. Aristocratic men could indulge themselves with any form of hedonistic amusement that struck their passing fancy.

Male homosexual activity of certain kinds is institutionalised into warrior culture, not only in ancient Greece, but among, for example, the Azande of the southern Sudan and the Sambia of Papua New Guinea. In each of these cultures young boys are the sexual partners and servants of young men, eventually themselves graduating to warrior status and acquiring boy-brides or servants of their own.

Among the Sambia, the boy apprentices are required to fellate as many young warriors as possible every day so as to assimilate into their bodies the semen which the Sambia believe to be the strength and courage of maleness. “Among the Sambia and similar Papua New Guinea societies, the solidarity forged in the men’s house, the training for hardness and masculinity, the sharing of life-giving semen, have their payoff on the battlefield.” The fact that the men of the Sambia are careful in later life not to have intercourse too often with their wives, so as to avoid the polluting powers of women and the “wasting” of precious semen, gives some indication of the status of women in this warrior culture.

There are cultures, however, including our own, which do not permit the “insertee” in a gay male sexual bond to outgrow this status and become a “real man” – there are many men in America who believe that screwing another men only proves one super-masculinity, but that permitting oneself to be screwed (as the colloquial uses of the word show) degrades one permanently to the status of a non-man; an object, or a woman. The infamous “Tail Gunner” Joseph McCarthy and his aide Roy Cohn, who so viciously and persistently persecuted America’s gay men in the 1950s, were known to have had sex with men; but by their own standards that did not make them queers; it only proved that they could and did fuck queers as a means of asserting their maleness, contempt, and domination.[…]

In summary, there is nothing automatically progressive about male homosexuality; it is perfectly compatible with male supremacy. The only truly subversive model of male gayness is one which rejects violence and the encoding of established power in the sexual relationship. Bonds of affection, tenderness and sex between males of approximately equal age and power are profoundly disturbing to the phallocracy; so are men who refuse to be “men.” But the consumer model of sex, the master/slave, man/boy, top/bottom, john/hooker model of sex, has long been comfortable and familiar within male supremacist and warlike cultures, whether here and now or far away and long ago.”

– the section,”Armed Camp: Gay Male Militarism” from Unleashing Feminism

“The Greeks thought that homosexuality was more pure than heterosexuality, because one of the main purposes of heterosexuality is the option of reproduction. The Greeks considered heterosexuals desire for only this to be greedy, where as homosexual love is more about true love for the other person, not just the desire to reproduce. Also, because homosexual love isn’t the dominant culture. It’s different.”

kropotkitten:

What is this ahistorical bullshit?

The “Greeks”, aka in this instance the wealthy Athenians, thought that women were literal vessels for creating children.They didn’t even marry Women, they usually married 13 year old girls, cause wealthy Athenians didn’t marry until they were in their 40s and didn’t marry for love, they married for reproduction and to get a head domestic servant in the bargain.Which is ironic given that OP acts like the dudes having sex with other dudes, again there was no such identity of homosexual back then, was romantic and marginalized and that so-called dominant heterosexuals were greedy and married only for reproduction, when in reality it was the wealthy dudes who both married for reproduction and had sex with other rich dudes all while degrading the Greek peasants who did marry for love and had children.

There were no such thing as hetero or homosexuals, those words were invented in the 20th century. They didn’t view sex differently depending on who they had it with because one wasn’t “dominant”. The dominant sex culture was wealthy dudes fucking each other and raping boy sex slaves and making ignorant people today think they were so high-minded and progressive for doing it. You people are literally using wealthy rapists and misogynists as ahistorical propaganda for social justice and it is disgusting and embarrassing.

You could also read the op’s logic in the misogynistic light of “fucking breeders, ammi right?”