i really really despise the fact that we now refer to the children who were forced to has sex with grown men as "twinks" and "femboys", and how men online joke about how they need to go back in time and get an ancient greek "femboy" and like at this point people actually believe ancient Greece was a gay paradise. They were children it was a pederast culture. yeah there were some queer couples and figure in ancient greek history but holy shit its not this insane white gay paradise fantasy white reactionary queers have, its even more annoying when white queer woman (literally called SAPHICS, as in sappho because everything in modern queer culture is greek themed) fantasize about lounging around eating grapes and having sex and not having a job and being free like woman weren't actual property. NO hate to you RNAi this is just such a huge pet peeve of mine. Like there are so many cultures where being queer was common and sometimes celebrated, there have been so many queer kings and leaders throughout asia, africa, the americas basically the entire world. But white people cant relate to that so they have to construct this fantasy where they have a culture with a non pedophilic rich queer history on the level of POC that they can long to return too, but they dont have one because they came from an especially cold shitty and homophobic part of the world. sorry for the inarticulate rant but this is just indicative of my least favorite thing about the (white) queer community. fucking everything is through the lens of whiteness. I keep thinking this is something people my age will grow out of but they refuse, i run into these people every time i try to meet queer people my age, if anything people have gotten more reactionary queer ancient greek fantasy is now a genre of books and white queers treat them as history books the exact same way white men treat their stupid reactionary power fantasy "historical fiction" books. its not less weird and reactionary just because your queer if anything its worse. and dont get me started on the "achelians" god i just want to banish white people somewhere they cant bother me. sorry again RNIa this has nothing to do with you.
i mean it bothers me too when people even use the word 'gay' to refer to hellenistic sexuality ( i toss around horrid terms like 'ultrapatriarchy', patriarchal normative bisexuality, so i shouldn't really blame them for keeping it simpler) but you're going a bit too far in this analysis. the exact form and extent of pederasty isn't actually very well known. we've got some very well known and authoritative-sounding sources like plato making a case for a read like yours, but the provenance of these sources must be interrogated. can we really say for certain the intense focus plato put on boyishness was the rule everywhere? even just for athens at large, for just the ruling class? some examples for homosexual/social activity in the hellenistic world are definitely adult---the sacred band of thebes, hephaistion x alexandros. to be clear this is only a critique of your characterization of ancient hellenistic culture at large;
i 100% agree its fucked to adopt & identify with the sources we do have, even if it's not for certain every younger partner in an ancient greek homosexual relation was a child, the very explicit character of the powerful pursuing the relatively powerless is super-fucked. shit wouldn't be cool if all the youths were 'of age'. and the biggest blindspot, as you point out, is always regarding women. both in the casual non-acknowledgement that every 'gay' character in this period would've been socially obliged to have been hetero married, and the brushing aside the intense misogyny in fucking everything from back then. it's so neat to hear people to gush about how 'gay' achilles or alexandros were when their ""conquest"" of and enslavement of women is explicit.
to be clear this is only a critique of your characterization of ancient hellenistic culture at large
this is a good critique i was heavily generalizing an entire society. its these more nuances looks at history that i want in the first place so thank you.
That's why I chose that title.
Idk why this reply didn't appeared in the inbox
ive been missing a lot of replies today myself. also yeah I saw your title so i directed my annoyance more to the maker of the meme. no hard feelings ♥️
thanks ShimmeringKoi (great name by the way) ♥️ . its a small thing, but sometimes the overwhelming whiteness of queer spaces gets to me. but maybe its my fault for not seeking out black and poc queer spaces online and irl enough.
Thank you comrade, this was informational. I've witnessed my share of "achelians" as you describe them. The rhetoric I've seen is basically "The historians lied to us about Ancient Greece, it was actually so queer!" ignoring all the slave aspects of that point in time, constructing their own little utopia, which as you mentioned is reactionary in many aspects
"The historians lied to us about Ancient Greece, it was actually so queer!" this is what really grinds my gear a group of primarily white people denouncing "mainstream historians" and professors in favor of constructing their little uptopia as you said, that they long to return to, in any other context is seen as reactionary and white supremacist adjacent this song and its following trend are particularly bad. Ive seen and talked to so many people who claim that "you cant trust experts because they are only in it for the money" and that "social media like insta and tic tok are actually more reliable than people with degrees because academia is classist." these people are anti intellectual reactionary's and i feel kinda crazy sometimes for having a problem with it.
