Pederastic relationships have been documented in many cultures throughout our history including, Greeks, Romans, Thracians, Celts, Plutarch, Melanesian, Koreans, Persians, Islamic, and the Japanese (Percy, 127). The most common understanding is ‘age structured homosexuality.' The word derives from the combination of ‘paides', Greek for "boy", with erasteio, Greek for ‘to long for' (Dover, 492). " The difference between pedophilia and pederasty is that pedophilias exploit a child's immaturity. Pederastic relations can have widely dissimilar manifestations – they can be spiritual or materialistic, lawful or transgressive, chaste or sexual, loving or commercial – the direction of a person's inner sexual-object orientation is neither described nor contended"(Percy, 12). Therefore the cultures that have practiced pederasty believed it to only be beneficial, seeing no negative effect on the phycological development of their youth.
The first culture to institutionalize pederasty......

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Title: Pederasty
Approximate Word Count: 1256
Approximate Pages: 6 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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