Why is there so much rape in ancient Greek mythology?

[Masturbator]

rape is ancient sport at this point

 

[Karen of Human Resources]

It did though. It was not proper for a man to fuck other men beside his male slaves. If he did, it was expected that he would be their mentor and that the only sort of sex they would have were handjobs and this weird shit you can see in their art where the dude would thrust his dick between the other guy's thighs. Anally fucking a freeborn male was considered weird and potentially illegal depending on time and place. Two older dudes fucking was considered weird because it meant one of the guys was being immature and still wanting to be "mentored." Men who broke these rules were called out all the time for it by political opponents.

You're partially right, but it does fit under what I laid out.

What you're talking about, mentoring and intercural sex did happen. Specifically, it happened in Athens between the higher classes of men.

A key reason intercurral, that is "cock rubbing between thighs", took place here was despite the inequality of age these males were still ultimately the same class. It was a step down from making a male submit to penetrative sex, but even this was not seen as a valid excuse by the entire Greek world. We have graffito mocking the Athenians for this in other parts of Hellas.

There were a number of localised exceptions. Obviously, things like the Sacred Band of Thebes come up that weren't found elsewhere. Sparta for instance appeared, judging from the mocking contempt of their rivals, didn't seem to really see unmarried male peers engaged in sex as badly as others did.

This is not to say this was "good", and that individual people did not have a preference and most were not entirely heterosexual. More that they didn't base an entire permanent identity on who or what they shoved their dick in. In a society where access to women was more restricted unless you could afford slaves, prison gay did happen too. Anyone who has been to Turkey for an extended period of time has probably caught wind of this.

This isn't to say everyone accepted homosexuality either, it was a fairly common source of ridicule. Being a social inferior called upon for sex could, and often was, deeply humiliating, but the culture understood on some level that this was "how it was".

A social inferior being sexually submissive did not carry anything near the same level of taboo as a superior being submissive too, that is also overlooked.

In some ways, the Greeks were more permissive than the Romans that came after. They may have had it, and records of it just didn't make their way to us, but Roman's had negative views on non-penatrative sex within marriage (chiefly oral and handjobs) that we havent got records of their predecessors voicing.

It wasn't quite Catholic "all sex must lead to procreation within a marriage", but you can certainly see it as a step in that direction.

[Not saying I necessarily agree with this bit] this is why some classics academics and more edgy liberal theologians have argued that the "taboo" in the bible was not so much "its wrong to like boys" so much as "90% of man on man action is violent, unwanted and predatory". Which...In all truth, it probably frequently was.

Not that I'm saying "Duh ur reading the bible wrong". Don't know, don't care. But it is a widely held, though of course not universally accepted, assessment on pre-modern Mediterranean sexuality.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

The preoccupation with rape in ancient Greek mythology is likely the consequence of the way that the ancient Greeks viewed sexuality as an extension of an individual's power. It didn't matter to them if the participants were male, female, adults, children, humans, gods, or even animals; what mattered was which participant was the dominant party, and which the submissive one.

So Greek society was an open air, mixed age, sex, & species prison, essentially?

 

[Space Police]

Every critique of homosexuality in Antiquity was a critique of certain types of homosexual relationships like the aforementioned anal sex with teenage freeborn men.

When the Bible forbids male homosexuality, it's specifically forbidding anal sex. Since the dawn of time, anal sex was always meant to be a humiliating and demeaning act, and even up until the past 20 years most gay men thought gay guys who were into anal were gross, scat-adjacent "brownie queens". There's nothing wrong with being gay and pursuing gay relationships in God's eyes as long as you're not a degen about it!

 

[ArnoldPalmer]

thats not rape in the mithology just some surprise sex

They hardly showered; shat in corners and had rotting teeth. Rape was for all intents and purposes, foreplay for them.

"Rape" is a social construct

Bingo. You're using a word from the nowtimes to describe something we could presume was commonplace and not probably all that weird back then.

 

[Drain Todger]

Throughout most of her story a mans role to pursue even through initial rejection was implicitly understood and accepted by both sides. You have tons of instances where women are carried off in war and are fine with it. To the point where the word rape had a much less negative more descriptive connotation in the olden days as you can tell by all the old timey stories and paintings titled "the rape of x".

It's only in the past century or two that the way the gods pursued women started to really be looked on negatively for the reasons we have now. And only in the past couple decades that they've been seen as horrific crimes that disturb modern people far more than they probably ever disturbed the ancient Greek women actually being chased around as a whole. And a lot of the examples on the list aren't even traditionally considered rape and were just put there by Wikipedia using 21st century definitions where it's rape if you don't get verbal permission every 10 minutes.

This is actually true.

The biggest difference between the modern world and antiquity on this matter is the completely different conceptualization of rape. The idea of rape as a crime against an individual woman and her dignity as a sapient being did not exist.

The crime of raptus, in ancient Roman law, was basically a property crime of kidnapping, not against a woman, but against a woman’s male relatives (or owner, if a slave). In short, it was a crime because you were carrying off another man’s property. The word was synonymous with abduction. The fucking part was implied, of course, but not stated outright. It was just kind of treated as a matter of course that bandits who dragged off all the women of a village would eventually stick their dicks in them. The sculpture The Rape of Proserpina, for instance, depicts an abduction, and not forcible intercourse, the latter being perhaps an implied consequence of the former.

It is quite literally only in the past century or two that we redefined rape as the violent and mentally disfiguring crime of forcible intercourse against an individual woman with her own psychological wellbeing to worry about.

So, when people ask, “Why is there so much rape in Greek mythology?” the first thing they should think about is the sheer gulf between our concept of what rape is and what theirs was. It’s massive. If you tried explaining the modern concept of rape to an ancient Greek man, as a crime against an individual woman’s dignity and autonomy, his brains would leak out of his ears.

 

[Space Police]

So, when people ask, “Why is there so much rape in Greek mythology?” the first thing they should think about is the sheer gulf between our concept of what rape is and what theirs was. It’s massive. If you tried explaining the modern concept of rape to an ancient Greek man, as a crime against an individual woman’s dignity and autonomy, his brains would leak out of his ears.

Yeah, in most mythology (even primary sources) it comes across as kidnapping. It's not graphically-detailed humiliation fetish porn like you'd expect nowadays.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Why would you even want to fuck someone’s thighs? Does that actually feel good?

 

[grump]

The biggest difference between the modern world and antiquity on this matter is the completely different conceptualization of rape. The idea of rape as a crime against an individual woman and her dignity as a sapient being did not exist.

So, when people ask, “Why is there so much rape in Greek mythology?” the first thing they should think about is the sheer gulf between our concept of what rape is and what theirs was. It’s massive. If you tried explaining the modern concept of rape to an ancient Greek man, as a crime against an individual woman’s dignity and autonomy, his brains would leak out of his ears.

Women too. If you went back in a time machine asked ancient women who was carried off as war booty or whose husband had given her a bit of 'surprise sex' if they wanted to abandon their new family a good many of them would have looked at you like you were a 3 headed alien. Atheists love to blow minds with the Deuteronomy verse of how rapists are forced to marry their victim, unable to comprehend how this was seen as a win for the woman. People today put a lot of pride in their supposed superior sense of nuance compared to the intolerant ancients. But are terrified of coming to the realization of how even some of what are considered the most serious crimes today are seen and felt vastly differently even by victims depending on the society and culture.

The social more to look on sex crimes (on women) as the most serious crime possible and must be dealt with the way we do now is perhaps one of the most sacred tenets of modern western society. Comparable to the top commandments of other societies. Even suggesting that past societies may have thought differently can get you big blowback.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

So Greek society was an open air, mixed age, sex, & species prison, essentially?

Not sure about Athens, but Sparta was.

 

[Drain Todger]

Deuteronomy verse of how rapists are forced to marry their victim, unable to comprehend how this was seen as a win for the woman.

Yes. The thing is, everyone was dirt poor back then, and most women did not have any kind of independent income, so a rapist being forced to marry his victim meant he had to share his very limited resources with her. It was heavily frowned upon to just “fuck and run” and leave a single mother behind to support children.

If you went back to Athens and tried explaining the modern view on rape to a philosopher or politician or something, his reaction would have nothing to do with rape. He’d say some variation of, “You treat women as the social equals of men who have something to lose in the encounter?! What the fuck?!” right before his brain melted and he collapsed on the spot.

 

[Trump's Chosen]

The crime of raptus, in ancient Roman law, was basically a property crime of kidnapping, not against a woman, but against a woman’s male relatives (or owner, if a slave).

That's because the word raptus means to snatch or to carry off...

 

[Yamaha YM2612]

First, it's not mythology

2nd, it's because the Greek gods were demons and nephilim. There's a book from like 300bc or there abouts called "lineage of the gods" that explains just that

The full blown demons left heaven (Greeks called these the titans), the titans all had a bunch of incest sex which lead to the birth of the Olympic gods like zeus and company, who spread paraphilias to humans. This is where the nephlim like hercules, etc

This is corroborated by the bible and other cultures world wide

Demons come down and rape human women to create hybrids and essentially mock God

but demons are retarded and don't realize God can (and did) literally just un-exist these abominations

The purity of human genes is God's top priority