Androphilia

From Homolexis Glossary

The rarely used term androphilia serves to focus attention on those homosexuals who are exclusively interested in adult partners rather than adolescents and children. In our society such an object choice would seem self-explanatory, a feature inherent in the definition of homosexuality itself. Yet other societies (such as ancient Greece, China, and Islam, as well as many tribal groups) viewed age-graded differences as the norm in same-sex conduct. For these cultures androphilia ranked as a minority preference, one that was often disparaged. Because of the prevalence of androphilia in modem Western culture, its assumptions are sometimes unwittingly or deliberately imported into other settings; some discussions of homosexual behavior in Greece, for example, tend to gloss over the fact that it was predominantly pederastic (though not pedophile in the narrow sense of attraction to prepubertal boys). The relevant trope is Youth and Age.

In the early years of the present century, the great German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld offered a three-fold classification of homosexuals: (1) ephebophiles, who prefer partners from puberty to the early twenties (in current usage, from about 17 to about 20); (2) androphiles, who love men from that age into the fifties; and (3) gerontophiles, who seek out old men. Contemplating this scheme from the standpoint of an individual of, say, thirty years of age, it is evident that the first and third categories of sex object constitute differentiation, the second relative similarity.

The shift to dominance of androphilia, in which the two partners are of comparable age, occurred only with the rise of industrial society in Europe and North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Mediterranean countries the shift remains incomplete, and in much of the world it has barely begun or has not happened at all. Some scholars who have sought to explain the new pattern (sometimes termed the “modern homosexual”) key it to a change in heterosexual marriage, which led the way by becoming more companionate and less asymmetrical. Others note the rise of the democratic ideal; demographic changes such as increased life expectancies; and changes in the social treatment of youth which made youngsters less available as sexual partners. Nevertheless, the dynamics behind this fundamental transition remain historically mysterious, constituting a major challenge to any attempt to draw up a reasonably comprehensive history of homosexuality.