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Hebephilia debate continues

Posted by DanielRumanos on 2020-March-05 09:16:52 EST, Thursday
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[From.the Paraphilia Research blog]

Two new papers discussing hebephilia have appeared in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. In “Hebephilia: A Postmortem Dissection” philosopher Patrick Singy expands upon his previous analysis of the hebephilia debate, rejecting several arguments for classifying hebephilia as a mental disorder while affirming that it is ultimately a political decision.

In “The Imperialism of Historical Arrogance: Where Is the Past in the DSM’s Idea of Sexuality?“, classical scholar Simon Goldhill argues that it would be historically and culturally ignorant to classify hebephilia as a disorder.

First, the age of marriage and the age of sexual attractiveness were normatively defined by menarche in ancient Athens (the city for which we have most evidence (Davidson, 2007; Dover, 1978; Halperin, 1990; Lear & Cantarella, 2008; Winkler, 1989, 1990). That is, medical sources as well as social ethics argue that marriage as soon as possible after menarche is required for reasons of health and desirability. A virgin on her wedding day is the icon of erotic attraction (Oakley & Sinos, 1993)—indeed so familiarly recognized as such that when Aphrodite, the goddess of desire herself, wishes to seduce the shepherd prince Anchises, she appears on the mountain-top precisely as a virgin in her wedding gown. The Hippocratic treatise On the Diseases of Virgins outlines symptoms that plague young girls if they start to menstruate but do not marry and have intercourse (King, 1998). […] Most scholars agree that 14–15 was the usually expected female age for marriage, 25–35 for men.

Even more strikingly, there is a vast amount of literature, not only from Athens but from throughout the Greek world until late into the Roman Empire, which establishes that the young male at the point of puberty—‘‘when the down first appears upon the cheek’’is the standard definition—is a privileged object of sexual desire for men within Hellenic cultural norms.

In summary, Goldhill writes, “it would seem that for Blanchard and his supporters [of the hebephilia diagnosis] a whole culture and its norms would need to be determined as diseased.”

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