THE CONVENIENTLY FORGOTTEN HISTORY OF BOY-RAPE

With all the church scandal recently involving pedophile priests you'd think it was a modern invention. People are shocked and outraged, (rightly so) but once again their ignorance of history leads them to think that firing, fining & imprisoning those responsible will magically make the problem go away, a quick fix. One has to admire the church's cunningness in whitewashing the history of boy-rape. Always insisting is just a few 'bad apples' and then blaming the acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle as the cause of all immorality in the world. A quick review of history will show that pederasty was once not only common but institutionally promoted by none other than the religious leaders of their time. It was perpetrated not by gay men but by straight men including their own fathers. It wasn't about love or sex but power and control. Let me make myself clear, I do not condone nor accept pedophilia, what pisses me off is how the church is trying to deflect the issue and thus guilt by shifting the topic to 'those immoral homos'.

Pederasts past and present use boys for sexual purposes to make up for the traumas of their own childhood, "the male child representing his ideal self, whose youthfulness protects him from annihilation (death anxiety)." The boy is the smooth, maternal breast, the penis is the nipple, and raping the boy is an act of revenge toward the mother, showing that the pederast is in total control, dominating the boy to overcome his sense of emptiness and abandonment. As one pederast put it, "I want to hold him in my arms, control him, dominate him, make him do my bidding, that I'm all-powerful." The pederast's sexual targets are so interchangeable that he often seduces hundreds of boys in his lifetime. The sexual use of boys is not to be thought of as "a lack of impulse controls" or even as "only a different object choice" as most historians claim; pederasts are driven not by their sexual instincts but by their overwhelming anxieties.

Domination rather than tender love was in fact the central aim of all sexuality until modern times. Raping boys was by far the preferred sexual activity of men; it was considered more "according to nature" than heterosexuality, "an ordinance enacted by divine laws." Pythagoras, when asked when one should have sex with women rather than boys, replied: "When you want to lose what strength you have." As one historian of sexuality put it, "The world was divided into the screwers, all male and the screwed, both male and female." Because the boy represented the ideal self with whom the rapist merged, he must be without hair: "I like the smooth surface of the young boy's body, I don't like hair on it, I can't stand it..." So as soon as boys reached puberty, they were felt to be useless for sexual purposes, and all pederastic poetry mentions the first hairs terminate the boy's attractiveness. According to graffiti and poetry, the boy is most often raped anally. Lucilius compares sexual relations with boys and women: "She bloodies you, but he on the other hand beshits you." While the vagina is "castigated in invective as smelly, dirty, wet, loose, noisy, hairy, and so on...no such feeling seems to have been applied to the anuses of pueri." Boys' anuses were called "rosebud", sometimes compared to the sweetest of fruits, the fig, other times again equated with gold. The only precaution taken was to depilitate boys' anuses, says Martial and Suetonius. Indeed, as Martial put it, men must only penetrate the anus of boys, warning a man who was stimulating a boy's penis: "Nature has divided the male into two parts: one was made for girls, the other for men. Use your part." Boys were far preferred over women; Propertius vowed, "May my enemies all fall in love with women and my friends with boys."

It was important that the boy not experience pleasure, only "pain and tears...of pleasure he has none at all." In particular, "initiatory" pederasty was always anal, involving a fantasy of "the intrinsic spiritual value of sperm, one needs to ejaculate into the boy's anus in order to make him a man." Parents taught boys in antiquity to "Put up with it: not as a pleasure, but as a duty." Physicians were regularly expected to provide ointments and other lubricants for anal penetration of boys and they were asked to repair the rectal tears and other injuries that were the usual results of the rapes.

Pederasty was widespread in preliterate tribes around the world, from the "customary pederasty" of Australians and the sexual use of berdaches in North and Central American tribes-where boys were dressed as girls beginning in infancy for raping-to the "boy-wives" of Africa. All early civilizations practiced boy rape and even had boys serve as temple prostitutes, including the ancient Hebrews, Sumerians, Persians, Mesopotamians, Celts, Egyptians, Etruscans, Carthaginians, Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Aztecs, Mayans, etc. The rape was expected to be violent; men were expected to take along with them when going out in the streets "scissors, to make a hole in the trousers of the boy and a small pillow to put in the boy's mouth if he should scream..." Tutors and teachers often raped their pupils along with beating them; as Quintilian warned, "I blush to mention the shameful abuse which scoundrels sometimes make of their right to administer corporal punishment.

Fathers in Greece chose the penetrator of his boy, often obtaining gifts or favors in return. Aristophanes shows one father in Birds complaining to another, "Well, this is a fine state of affairs...You meet my son just as he comes out of the gymnasium, all fresh from the bath, and you don't kiss him, you don't say a word to him, you don't hug him, you don't feel his balls! And yet you're supposed to be a friend of ours!" Pedagogues were hired to guard boys against rape by unapproved men, but the pedagogue might assault the boy himself. Boys in Greece were blamed if their failed to find a pederast for themselves; every boy was expected to have one.

Greek and Roman soldiers brought boys along with them on campaigns to use sexually. Slave boys were often furnished to guests for sexual use. Doctors prescribed sex with boys as therapy. Boy brothels and rent-a-boy services were widespread, and pederasts chosen by the father could even sell his rights to rape a particular boy to another man. With the number of boys prostitutes worldwide still in the millions, it is not surprising that every city in antiquity had its boy-brothels; in Rome, boys could be picked up at the barbershop or at the exit of any of the games. All men, even when married, were expected to have sex with boys. "Almost all of the great democratic leaders of Archaic Athens were...pederastic." Wives found it hard to compete with their husbands' boys. Juvenal says wives were "always hot with quarrels...bitching away...about his boy-friends," and Martial describes a wife yelling, "Bumming a boy again! Don't I have a rump as well?"

A few early Christians began to object to using boys sexually. John Chrysostom complained about fathers taking their boys to banquets where they were made to perform fellatio on men "under the blankets," recommending that boys be placed in the care of monks at the age of ten to avoid seduction. But most medieval authors gave the pro-pederast advice of antiquity, with medical books recommending sex with boys as "less harmful [than] sexual union with women [which] leads more quickly to old age..." The reason men in medieval times waited until their 30s to get married was because they routinely used young boys for sex until then; in Florence, for instance, only a quarter of the men in the fifteenth century were married by the age of 32. Since over a third of most households had servants or apprentices, sexual relations between masters and male servants were even more common and even acceptable than between masters and female servants. Tutors and teachers in schools were expected to use their students sexually, and those who protested that it was a "vice so inveterate [and] so strong a custom" that it was "hardly likely to be discouraged" were thought odd.

But placing boys as oblates into monasteries only made them available for rape by monks, who could not keep their hands off them. One abbott wrote about an infant boy brought to the monastery by his father:

...the man turned the child over to me altogether, and I received the baby with pleasure and joy and a clean heart. [But] when the boy got older and had reached the age of about ten...I was tortured and overwhelmed by an obscene desire, and the beast of impure lust and a desire for pleasure burned in my soul...I wanted to have sex with the boy...

Sex with boys was the central obsession of monks beginning with the early anchorites who went to the desert; Macarius saw so many monks having sex with boys in the desert that he strongly advised monks not to take them in. But the need was too strong, and even rules such as those requiring boys to have escorts when going to the lavatory did not prevent monks from routinely using their oblates sexually. So many monks raped their novices that there was a common saying, "With wine and boys around, the monks have no need of the Devil to tempt them." Priests also commonly used confessions to solicit sex with boys, but early Christian penitentials assessed penances only for the boys, since they were blamed for their own rape. Peter Damian said in the eleventh century that sex with boys in monasteries "rages like a bloodthirsty beast in the midst of the sheepfold of Christ with bold freedom" and suggested both the man and boy be punished as accomplices for a "sin against nature."

So acceptable was pederasty in medieval times that parents continued handing over their boys for sexual use to friends and others from whom they expected favors. Bernardino of Siena condemned parents as "pimps" of their own sons, saying the fathers, pederasts themselves, were the ones most responsible, taking money or gifts from their sons' rapists. Boys were so likely to be raped in the streets "a boy can't even pass nearby without having a sodomite on his tail" that Bernardino urged mothers, "Send your girls out instead, who aren't in any danger at all if you let them out among such people...this is less evil." Mothers, too, colluded in the seduction of their sons. "When a boy started to mature sexually...his mother gave him a bedroom to himself on the ground floor, 'with a separate entrance and every convenience, so that he can do whatever he pleases and bring home whomever he likes.'"

When beginning in the fifteenth century some more violent pederasty disputes began being handled by courts, the huge number of cases prosecuted revealed that every place boys were gathered, from schools and monasteries to taverns and pastry shops-were "schools of sodomy" where pederasts gathered to violate boys. In Florence, according to the thorough analysis of court records by Michael Rocke, "in the later fifteenth century, the majority of local males at least once during their lifetimes were officially incriminated for engaging in homosexual relations" with boys. Since many pederasts were never incriminated in court, since courts were reluctant to try any but the most violent cases of boy rape, and since pederasts past and present usually rape dozens of boys each, these early court statistics reveal as nothing else the universality of pederasty in history. If the majority of men were hauled into court for cases in connection with their pederasty, the number of boys actually being raped must have been nearly everyone.

As more parents evolved into the intrusive and socializing modes of modern times, they were more and more reluctant to hand over their boys for use by pederasts. Tutors began being monitored to see that they were not pederasts, and reformers began to warn that servants too often "take liberties with a child which they would not risk with a young man." Some suggested that public female brothels should be encouraged as "the best chance of keeping men away from boys." The rape of boys in British public schools, "with the full knowledge and collusion, even the approval, of their elders," nevertheless continued into the twentieth century, where every older boy and even teachers had a younger boy as their "bitch" to use sexually. Only slowly in recent decades has it become acceptable to defend children against sexual attack, and only in the most psychogenically advanced nations has the rate of sexual abuse of children dropped to only half of the children born.