Reason’s Hit & Run blog has the strange story of how WorldNetDaily, that early bastion of populist conservatism, managed to pressure a publisher to drop a book on ancient same-sex relationships, based on the abstract of a single chapter:
WND apparently regarded the chapter in question as propaganda for pedophiles because it suggested that hybrid lover/mentor relationships between ancient Greek adults and adolescents might not have been horrifically scarring to the latter.
First, even if that claim is totally without merit, it’s troubling to see a publisher bullied into withdrawing a book because a scholar advances a controversial thesis. Wouldn’t it be better to let it run and rebut the argument rigorously?
Second, the erastes/eromenos relationship was a relatively formalized one that (subject to the usual social restrictions) was understood by that culture as a normal part of the transition to adulthood. While that doesn’t make it healthy, that’s a sufficiently different context from a furtive bad touch from dirty Uncle Ernie that any comparison to pedophilia in the modern sense would be strained at best.
Good point, I’d say. I’ve long been interested in the categories and periods of life created by modern Western life – adolescence and delayed marriage mostly – and how our relational conceptions of what is right and what is wrong, to the point of criminality, has changed so much over millennia. It’s a historical argument I’d be interested to hear, not necessarily because I’d agree with it, but to learn how we got from there to here. If this book can’t find another publisher, I hope it remains online somehow and builds an audience, to teach publishers not to get so jumpy about controversial works.
I’m a tech journalist who’s making a TV show about a college newspaper.