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Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

“The "fruit machine" was employed in Canada in the 1950s and 1960s during a campaign to eliminate all gay men from the civil service, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and the military.”

This is very interesting considering in ancient Greece it was the opposite. Having soldiers being gay was said to improve morale and make the soldiers fight better, as their partners was fighting together with them. More information on the subject here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_the_militarie...

Seems we're constantly in a pendulum in terms of sexuality, what's ok or not.

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I have always wondered if the pendulum is really about sexuality at all. It could be that we just become more or less authoritarian. And certain groups are just a victim of that swing.

The labels we give to sexual orientation are mostly a political and cultural construct, and different societies draw the lines of propriety and transgression in different places.

But those lines seem to be re-drew every few decades. It's hard to tell what currently is considered sexual deviancy be permitted in the future.

In many ways each generation is a referendum on and criticism of the previous, and there is something of an anti-establishment pendulum effect involved in many shifts from culture to counterculture. The anti-progressive and anti-feminist movement in tech culture now seems to be an example of that, as is each new wave of feminism and LGBTQ+ activism.

Many of the traits in society or identity that we believe to be static (especially when viewed from outside) or axiomatic turn out to be more complex and more fluid than they initially seem.

Things related to this seem to be religion and the state of the economy. One factor in the acceptance of gay people is that christianity is much less powerful nowadays. Also, when the economy is doing badly it seems popular to find a scapegoat and that can be the gays or the jews or some such minority. These two things may not be unrelated. It seems that well-fed and reasonably happy humans are much less prone to religion.

Unlikely. When people talk about homosexuality being acceptable in ancient societies they leave out the fact that it was acceptable for barely pubescent boys to be the receiving partner for adults. So are we going to head down that route in another decade or two when we become even less authoritarian?

>So are we going to head down that route in another decade or two when we become even less authoritarian?

Stupid as it is, anti-gay extremists do make that argument, that the cultural acceptance of homosexuality is a slippery slope towards the eventual normalization of pedophilia and even bestiality. That can be seen as an argument pro Christian authoritarianism of a specific political bent.

In many ways, it is the very opposite: the "egalitarian" model of homosexual relationships was itself a new development and a desirable outcome of the gradual "cultural acceptance" of homosexuality. You can see this even with very recent developments such as same-sex marriage. The polar opposite to that is the ancient, Graeco-Roman model of homosexuality (but also found today in many parts of the non-Western world, and even reflected e.g. in stereotypes about sex in prisons) as simply an exertion of male-on-male dominance and power. (Though, to be fair about it, ancient "fornication" wasn't different either! This is the underlying rationale for why a number of ethical traditions in the Classical world, including Christianity, condemned both sexual practices in very similar terms - both were incredibly far from anything that could be considered "egalitarian" or, in even more modern terms, respectful of "consent"!)

In the early phase of the german ecological/anti-authoritarian party "Die Grünen" there was actually a scandal involving pedophilia (see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A4dophilie-Debatte_(B%C3%...).

So there is this one data point of correlation.

Homosexuality is no more equivalent to pederasty than heterosexuality is to pedophilia.

Yes which is why it's halarious when people say that in ancient Greece homosexuality was acceptable.

But looks like you and X other people can't read and feel very defensive about something that no one has actually said.

> Having soldiers being gay was said to improve morale and make the soldiers fight better, as their partners was fighting together with them.

Which is interesting because one of the most coherent arguments against women fighting on the front lines is that if they got injured or captured, the male soldiers in their unit would get themselves killed trying to rescue them.

This was also practiced (somewhat pederastically) in Japan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_Japan#Militar...

Alexander had his Hephaestion. Look how far he went.

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