Symposium VS Boy Scouts

Symposium is one of Plato’s most famous poems. It has many different outlooks on life and different characters that believe different things. The second Eulogy in the poem is Pausania’s speech. Pausania believes there is a heavenly love and a common love. The common love is lust and desire. This kind of love is between human beings. Heavenly love is love of the divine. In this story, this is homosexual love. Wisdom was something valued in this time. The men would have sex with the younger boys in exchange for wisdom. People who are attracted to common love are the ones that are attracted to bodies instead of minds. It is directed towards boys instead of girls in order to avoid “abusive violence.” The poem also talks about the men becoming pregnant. We know that this is not possible, but it was a deeper metaphorical meaning. Regardless, it was odd that men being pregnant was implicated. It makes us questions what the boys thought during the time. Did they believe they were exchanged pleasure and wisdom – or was it done against their own will? Men having sexual relations like this today is forbidden and these people are known as pedophiles. Plato quotes, "He who loves touches not walks in darkness."

There was an article published 9, 2017 about a Boy Scout leader who was accused of sexually abusing boy ‘hundreds of times.’ Christopher Malcom is now in his 30’s, but he was the victim. He claimed that he was being sexually abused for 5 years, starting when he was only 11-years-old. Corcoran, 49, was sentenced in June to seven years in prison for child pornography and at that time was still waiting for the sentence for molesting the boy. Malcom and two unnamed former scouts are suing the Boy Scouts of America. There was a plague of sexual abuse that was going on all around the country at the time and the parents were not warned or advised to take safety precautions. Corcoran pleaded not guilty to the actions, but it ended up being proven that it did in fact happen in which he ended up in prison. Unlike the story, Corcoran knew that he was doing wrong because he denied that he had done it. We do not know his intentions other than that he is messed up in the head. If this was during the time that the poem was written, it would have been totally normal. His intentions also would have been defined as trading sex for wisdom. Corcoran was not seeking to gain any sort of wisdom. Things have changed greatly over time and even reading these poems in the modern days makes us cringe because we could not imagine a man believing that it was acceptable and beneficial to have sex with a boy.

In today’s time, there are still sexual attractions between men and men. There was a time that it was unheard of but it seems to be a growing popularity which is sad. Hopefully we will not have to ever see a day where it will be acceptable for men to have sex with boys.

https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-na-boy-scouts-child-sex-abuse-20190515-story.html

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