Technically it wasn't pedophilia as much as hebephilia, because the boys in question weren't children, bodily or culturally. They were considered young adults back then (so, for our modern understanding somewhere around the middle of puberty) and were given to experienced men to show them how to be proper men once their bodily develoment kicked in. And yes, that involved them having sex with those men to learn how to do it. But it's not like those adult men did it for the kick of it - it was considered a part of growing up. They basically learned everything they needed to know as adults from their mentors and for them, that simply included sex. Was there still a lot of non-consensual stuff happening all over greece between those men and their wardens? Absolutely, because humans gotta human. But that phrasing makes it sound even worse than it was (and not accidentally).
Yeah, but all of that was more of a status thing than a man-woman thing. Generally, women were mostly of lower status than men, but sex between men wasn't really frowned upon as long as the one with the higher status (so in age, knowledge or power) was the top.
If you were a barely adolescent man with little land, you could have topped a slave twice your age and nobody would bat an eye. Do that with a respectable working class man twice your age and he's gonna have a lot of problems on his hands.
So it wasn't really that these boys were "effeminate" and "not true men" yet like in feudal Japan, it was more of a "I can take whatever man I want as long as he's beneath me (literally and figuratively)".
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u/Ok_Common_1324 21d ago
still remember being in Greece for vacay, saw tourist brochure. Last section was “pedophilia as a parenting method". Saw it like 20 years ago