Now that I’m back and rested, I had the opportunity to pick up and read the July 28th issue of The American Conservative. This is a great paleo-conservative magazine edited by Pat Buchanan. In this particular issue, there’s a wonderful article written by Peter Wood under the heading “Sex & Consequences — An anthropologist vindicates the traditional family.” In it, Professor Wood discusses various societies that are built around either polygamy or male homosexuality. Ultimately, according to Professor Wood, they end up male dominant societies.
Here’s an interesting observation on homosexual societies: “When such relations are subject to cultural elaboration they almost always fit into a pattern of initiation into secrets, male exclusivity, and a low status for women. Why this should be so is a complex question, involving both biology and the underlying nature of human society. A short answer is that heterosexual marriage is shaped by the complicated interplay of marital sex, pregnancy, childcare, and the sustained dependence and interdependence of husband, wife, and children. Male homosexual relations, because they are sterile and because they channel relations of male dominance, are built on a narrower base of sex, subordination, and control.”
Another interesting observation: “The link between homosexual desire and erotic interest in children is especially contentious. Gay activists and their supporters frequently point out that most child molestation is perpetrated by heterosexual males. And they emphasize that homosexuality had no necessary link to pedophilia: a great many gay men are primarily interested in other adult gay men. I grant both points, but we are also left with the stubborn empirical fact that societies that have indeed institutionalized something akin to ‘gay marriage’ have done so in the form of older men taking adolescent boys as their partners. To imagine that we could have gay marriage in the united States without also giving strong encouragement to this form of eroticism is, in light of the ethnographic evidence, wishful thinking.”
All the rest of it aside (which means that I may or may not agree with the rest of it — the article doesn’t appear to be available on the website), identifying sexual interest in adolescents in homosexual societies is pretty difficult without also asking about marriage ages.
What does Prof. Wood count as homosexual societies? If he’s including ancient Athens, then the boys for sex and the girls for marriage were indeed pretty much the same age. I dunno about anyone in New Guinea, but sexual attraction for ancient Greeks was pretty much aimed at ‘cute’ and ‘smooth’, which meant that prepubescent boys and women up to about 20 were the dominant topics of love poetry.
I sense a slight inaccuracy: attraction to adolescent boys is not pedophilia. (Rather, it’s ephebophilia). Still illegal and immoral, but categorically different from pedophilia.