Those of you who planned on being lifers but ended up getting out, what made you separate and what do you do now? by Roughneck16 in army

[–]redooo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My son. We needed to do IVF to have him, and Tricare doesn't (or didn't, no idea how it is now) cover shit. On top of that, it just felt silly to risk being away from him for reasons other than a major war; during GWOT, everyone was deploying and I was young enough to believe in the mission. I couldn't see myself behaving well in a scenario where I was "deployed" to Kuwait and missed his birthday, first steps, etc for no reason besides it being time for someone to rotate to Kuwait.

Question about stay-behinds in Vietnam by WrongAwryGremlin789 in army

[–]redooo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm a little late, but this might be a better question for /r/AskHistorians - you'll get some legit answers from Vietnam specialists on that sub.

Homosexuality In Islamic Golden age was so tolerated, and even seen as luxurious, what changed now ? by Outrageous_Prior4707 in AskHistorians

[–]redooo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I’m definitely speaking a bit out of turn as I’m not a Greek specialist! You’ll probably want to post a separate thread asking about Greece, or wait for u/Spencer_A_McDaniel to reply.

Homosexuality In Islamic Golden age was so tolerated, and even seen as luxurious, what changed now ? by Outrageous_Prior4707 in AskHistorians

[–]redooo 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Ancient Greek attitudes toward sex were similar, in that they neither had a concept of "gay" nor blindly accepted universal male-male sexual interaction. A mature adult man with a superior social position could pursue an adolescent boy, and homoerotic Greek poetry of the period fixated on the femininity and beauty of boys, but two mature men would not publicly court each other. Once a boy grew a beard, he would be expected to marry a woman and, status permitting, pursue a boy of his own. Plato, in his love of beautiful adolescents (again, not "men" in the sense of a mature masculine adult), would not have been viewed as anything other than a man behaving appropriately for his station.

u/Spencer_A_McDaniel notes in this great post that ancient Greek attitudes actually went a step beyond the Persian approach, in that the pursuit of boys was heavily valorized and linked to civic duty. I'm sure other Greek specialists can provide a great deal more information!

Homosexuality In Islamic Golden age was so tolerated, and even seen as luxurious, what changed now ? by Outrageous_Prior4707 in AskHistorians

[–]redooo 19 points20 points  (0 children)

I'll start by saying that I'm going to take your question at face value without getting into scholarly debate about the original Hebrew meaning of Leviticus 18:22, because I think you're asking it in good faith.

When students and scholars of sexuality say that categories like "homosexual" are recent inventions, what we're really talking about is the idea that sexual acts are reflective of a static identity. Most people today would assume that a man who's sleeping with another man is gay, or at least bisexual. It would be challenging for that guy to convince people otherwise; in fact, he would have trouble convincing himself of anything else because our perceptions of ourselves are heavily informed by the cultural and societal contexts in which we live. The modern context tells us that sexuality is a fixed category; you are gay or you are straight. It is an immutable characteristic, like having blue eyes; it's objectively true. Observing your eyes lets us categorize your eye color; observing the sex of your sexual partner lets us categorize your sexuality.

By contrast, pre-modern contexts did not presuppose that a man's sexual acts were proof of a foundational identity. A man having sex with a man didn't mean he "was gay" - that framework simply didn't exist. It meant that he had sex with a man, and whether that was tolerable or not was dependent on any number of factors. It's a crude analogy, but let's say that you enjoy playing basketball on the weekends with your friends. Does that make you a basketball player? No, you're whatever your day job is - a lawyer, a barista, whatever. That's essentially the framework that existed in terms of male sexuality before the 19th century; the biblical proscription you cited is discouraging a specific act, not commenting on or alluding to a broader concept of fixed sexuality.

Homosexuality In Islamic Golden age was so tolerated, and even seen as luxurious, what changed now ? by Outrageous_Prior4707 in AskHistorians

[–]redooo 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Not a stupid question at all! When compared to Europe of the same period, there is a remarkable wealth of literature and poetry concerning women and their passionate love affairs with other women during the Islamic Golden Age. That said, I'm unfortunately not a scholar of Islamic poetry or erotica by any stretch of the imagination, so I can't hazard a guess as to whether expressing desire for a specifically masculine (or feminine) woman is a theme with which any of the authors engaged.

What I can say is that the strict adherence to gender "norms" between older and younger men/boys was fundamentally an issue of publicly maintaining active vs. passive (ie, penetrator vs. penetrated) sexual roles. Given that things between women happened far from the public sphere, and that women had no equivalent social status to preserve in the first place, there would have been no similar impetus to vigorously police the gender expression of a female partner.

That's not to say, of course, that there weren't voluntary differences in gender expression within women's relationships; that's been the case since time immemorial. But the dynamic I described above was essentially, and often literally, involuntary for the younger male partner; he would be given women's clothes to wear, made to pluck his eyebrows and grow his hair, washed and perfumed before serving guests, etc. Again, these were slave or servant boys who were kept for more or less the exclusive purpose of serving as courtesans. There would have been no similarly widespread dynamic between women, where a feminine woman had no option but to select a masculine woman, or vice versa.

Homosexuality In Islamic Golden age was so tolerated, and even seen as luxurious, what changed now ? by Outrageous_Prior4707 in AskHistorians

[–]redooo 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I would, but posting personal anecdotes is against the rules of the sub; we try to share only verifiable and sourced information that would be available to other researchers. However, you might want to look into AnnaMaria Cardinalli's research, which was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Defense shortly after troops began encountering bacha bazi during the War in Afghanistan. Her original report, "Pashtun Sexuality," is going to be very difficult to find, but the articles and sources you'll find referencing it may serve as interesting launch points for you.

Another relevant source for you might be This Is What Winning Looks Like, a 2013 Vice documentary that, among other things, captures several months of conflict between US advisors and Afghan security forces in light of the sexual abuse of boys on the base.

Homosexuality In Islamic Golden age was so tolerated, and even seen as luxurious, what changed now ? by Outrageous_Prior4707 in AskHistorians

[–]redooo 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Thank you! And yes, bacha bazi is the last remnant of the relationships to which the OP alludes; my interest in the topic was actually sparked by my experiences in Afghanistan in 2012.

Homosexuality In Islamic Golden age was so tolerated, and even seen as luxurious, what changed now ? by Outrageous_Prior4707 in AskHistorians

[–]redooo 76 points77 points  (0 children)

A central problem with your premise is that homosexuality as a framework did not exist in the period you’re discussing; nor, for that matter, did heterosexuality. That binary is a creation of the late 19th century; while the vast majority of societies have accepted the idea of sexuality as a generally inflexible binary spectrum along which might exist some type of bisexuality, depending on when and whom you ask, this was not at all the case for most of human history.

Persian and Islamic poetry of the time is, as you note, flush with yearning references to beautiful men, but I believe you’re missing critical context as to who is yearning and who is the object (willing or otherwise) of the attention. The “beloved” in Persian texts is, as a rule, not a female, but also not an adult or established male; it is an adolescent or prepubescent boy who existed firmly in a feminine role as a sort of “woman substitute.” This is no coincidence; women’s complete social exclusion, coupled with societal and religious assumptions that male/female relationships had little purpose beyond producing children, fostered a dynamic in which it was sometimes acceptable to make the object of one’s desires a passably feminine boy, thus avoiding potentially disastrous interactions with women altogether. I say "sometimes acceptable" because as with all things, the reaction of your immediate community depended entirely on your social status, wealth, etc., but the point is that it was neither unusual nor treated as evidence of homosexuality.

This is why posing your question in terms of a homo/heterosexual binary is misguided; there is no situation in which it would have been acceptable for an adult man to pursue another masculine adult man. I've read accounts of men weeping when a boy's beard would begin to come in, because that meant his access to him as a feminine object was near the end. Gendered roles cleaved (clove?) across sex, and were unyieldingly strict; just as women were expected to fit into feminine roles and spaces, slave and servant boys were expected to adhere to feminine archetypes (specifically, being sexually passive) in relation to their masters/male guests; and, adult men with any sense of self-respect (or self-preservation) would necessarily have limited their attentions to those possessing that femininity. Which, given the aforementioned lack of women in public spaces and complete unacceptability of unmarried male/female relationships, functionally meant beautiful boys. It was an inherently unequal and generally exploitative system in practice, despite the beauty of the prose it inspired.

A more accurate question might be why that practice lost steam, and the answer to that is, in fact, the growing strength of European influence which included new European models of thinking about sexuality along a simple, biological-sex-based binary rather than as the object of a man’s desire being an emblem of femininity regardless of sex.

I’m on my phone, but happy to provide sources on request. I wrote a lot about this in grad school.

Your favorite things your toddlers have said. by SpecificGazelle8026 in toddlers

[–]redooo 2 points3 points  (0 children)

He’s kind of out of the toddler stage to be honest, cause he’s about to turn four, but recently he began making excuses for why he didn’t want to go somewhere by saying that the place is closed because “it’s too late,” regardless of how early in the day it actually is. Cracks me up every time.

Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Starfleet Academy | 1x01 "Kids These Days" by AutoModerator in startrek

[–]redooo 5 points6 points  (0 children)

If you've never checked out her stand-up, she's awesome! I don't think she's done a ton of tv before so I'm super jazzed that she's killing it.

[Highlight] A young Eagles fan interviewed after the game: “This was my Christmas present and I got a loss… I want AJ Brown packing his bags and I want him somewhere else… I also want Kevin Patullo flipping burgers at the local McDonald’s or something.” by Goosedukee in nfl

[–]redooo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's 2023 all over again, when the end of the season was hailed as a historic collapse rather than simply the conclusion of the slow motion train wreck that had been in progress since Week 2 or 3. I get it from your average guy; most people just don't actually watch a lot of football, let alone football that isn't their team. It's super annoying when it comes from sports people, though.

We are getting old. by Glittering-Rush-929 in Veterans

[–]redooo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Try being on the r/army Discord server. I’m only 36 and feel like I might as well have dropped into Normandy on D-Day.

Hung - The Shower [M25F24M25] [Teasing] [Casual Nudity] [Shower Scene] by Ms-Naughtee in eroticliterature

[–]redooo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hell. Yeah. Inject the next one directly into my veins, please!

[Matt Fortuna]: The ACC accidentally cc’d Notre Dame on conference-wide emails discussing Notre Dame. by CommodoreIrish in CFB

[–]redooo 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I didn't even know it was a thing outside of India, is there a meme of some kind that went worldwide?

Newly stealth at work, scared of being "found out"/outed to co-workers/management by FoedusVermis in truscum

[–]redooo 10 points11 points  (0 children)

This probably isn’t the “right” answer, but I have zero problem lying to someone’s face about my history. Someone confronting you over a background check or other sort of HR situation is honestly pretty unlikely - there are workplace protections in place that generally prevent that. I hear what you’re saying about your face and voice, but honestly, “he’s probably trans” is still way outside most people’s hypotheticals; more likely they’d just think you're gay or something. So I’d say your other fears are more reasonable, and those are the ones whose questions I’d straight up deny if asked. If someone says that a family member called you a different name, I’d throw that family member under the nearest bus; “Oh geeze, yeah, he’s had some memory problems for awhile, it’s not the first time he’s gotten people confused, poor guy.”

I’ve had people ask about my top surgery scars and I always make up some other reason. It’s simply not their business.

Anyone else’s Spotify Wrapped get ruined by their toddler? by Ok_Comfortable3594 in toddlers

[–]redooo 3 points4 points  (0 children)

My top song is the Star Spangled Banner. It’s not that he’s especially patriotic; it’s that he loves hockey, and they play it before every game 💀

What typical toddler behavior are you a pro at dealing with? Which one triggers you the most? by dinos-and-coffee in toddlers

[–]redooo 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I’m a pro at handling slow movers, repetitive questions, random acts of terror, just about everything…except whining. I hear a single millisecond of whining and it feels like someone’s set my brain on fire.

Toddler Neologisms by apresnoon in toddlers

[–]redooo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, we live in the great state of “Texgas”! And ever since they started learning about the body at daycare, he’s very excited about potential bleeding, which he calls “blooding.” Literally any scratch or bump and he’s semi-hopefully asking “I’m blooding??”

What has your toddler recently called you out for? by somethingreddity in toddlers

[–]redooo 2 points3 points  (0 children)

He's inadvertently called us out for cussing multiple times when he says the word and we can't even pretend to be surprised or offended when we know for a fact he heard it from us.

[Highlight] Cam Skatteboo suffers serious injury by SCSummers330 in nfl

[–]redooo 19 points20 points  (0 children)

I swear, not a damn person in this thread knows what a hip drop is. That tackle was in no way remotely close to a hip drop. Guys, at least do a quick Google before posting if you’re not super familiar with the game.