As a woman, I feel free to protest that men today are pilloried for something that was rational and honorable in Greece at the height of its civilization.

The thing about looking at a past civilization at its peak is that you have to understand that just beneath all that exterior splendour lurks all of the rot that is about to destroy it.

What happens when degenerates are fucking little boys instead of women? They stop having productive relationships, and the boys they corrupt grow up to corrupt other boys instead of persuing women. The birth rate is one of the foundational building blocks of society, and degenerate boy-fucking is just one of the many ways of destroying it.

“In our time all Greece was visited by a dearth of children and generally a decay of population, owing to which the cities were denuded of inhabitants, and a failure of productiveness resulted, though there were no long-continued wars or serious pestilences among us…. For this evil grew upon us rapidly, and without attracting attention, by our men becoming perverted to a passion for show and money and the pleasures of an idle life, and accordingly either not marrying at all, or, if they did marry, refusing to rear the children that were born, or at most one or two out of a great number, for the sake of leaving them well off or bringing them up in extravagant luxury.”

Polybius, living through the end of Hellenistic Greece.