Interesting article!

[winterspel]

[Warning: Sexually explicit discussion of cultural customs in historical Japan found in the comments. Proceed at your own risk.]

Many thanks to icajoleu for forwarding this to me! :) I love that my friends keep an eye out for my crazy interests...this article is short but addresses a few different interesting ideas.

Harry Potter Loves MalfoyBy Jennifer

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Part 2

[riccichan]

The glorification of the androgynous, yet distinctly male, youth appears in various forms. Among the social stratum of the samurai, glorification of the male body was a tradition which developped even further when the samurai, who had been true fighters during the Sengoku Jidai (literally, "time of the thousand battling countries", 1477 until the beginning of the Edo period, 1603) were turned from warriors into bureaucrats by the ruling Tokugawa shogunate. Exchanging their swords for pens, the time for fighting, for honour in battle, for the display of strength, seemed to be over. They still followed the way of war (budô), but what had been a side effect of vigorous training in order to stay alive during battle, the trained male body, turned into a subject of fetish and adoration.

Another area from which a lot of fiction about love especially between young boys and older men comes, is that of the buddhist temple. In the so called "Chigo Monogatari" (Tales of acolytes), the common theme of the stories is that of a monk falling in love with a beautiful boy, they consumate their love, the boy falls sick and subsequently dies, the monk is completely lost in his mourning, the boy appears before him and reveals his identity as bodhisattva, the monk recognizes the error of his ways in getting too entangled in worldly affairs and gets one step closer to enlightenment. These stories are seen as a blatant attempt to account for the many incidents of monks (supposed to be celibate) having affairs with the temple's acolytes.
In a way, this also influenced the samurai, since most of their sons got their education at a local temple school.

Approximately a hundred years after the country had been united and was firmly ruled by the Tokugawa shogunate, there existed another special custom in Edo - the "brother bond". Officially this meant that an adult man acted as a "brother" for a younger man who wasn't an adult yet, by introducing him to society, gaining him favours and supporting him financially. But apparently, it also wasn't unusual for this bond to be of a sexual nature too, where the man was the active part, while the boy had the passive part (makes one think of the typical seme / uke dichotomy in yaoi, doesn't it?). When I read about this, it reminded me of the Greek pedophile, both phenomenons have a lot in common.
It is important to know, at this point, that in that time, you either were an adult or you weren't. There was no difference between children and youth. There also wasn't a specific time when you turned into an adult automatically. You could decide yourself when that time would be, and when you had decided, you shaved off your front locks (maegami) in a simple ceremony called "genpuku", thus attaining manhood.
As soon as the younger one in this brother bond had undergone genpuku, he was of equal standing now as his older "brother", and thus no longer available as sexual partner (except of course, if he wanted to). The "shu" in "shudô" stands for youth, and as an adult it was expected of him that he "graduate" the passive part. If he wanted to pursue shudô, it would now be as active partner in a "relationship" (which led to strange couplings like that of the fourty-year-old prostitute, who still had his maegami and thus played the role of the youth, penetrated by a sixteen-year-old "adult" who had undergone genpuku). But usually, the young man who had now become an adult was expected to have graduated the brother bond altogether and now look for a wife and start a family. His sexuality was never called into question.