not-men, Rod Fleming's World

18/06/2026

Sex between men and boys in the Islamic world

Originally posted 2022-06-30 15:03:00.

So-called ‘homosexuality’, as it is known in the Anglo-West is almost non-existent outside it, despite efforts being continually made to revise history. That is because in all other places and at all other times, sex between males was strictly limited to sex between men and boys or older youths and younger boys, and sex between men and catamites who had permanently adopted the appearance and social role of women — mukhannathun — or today, ladyboys.

The following chapter from Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800 by Khaled El-Rouayheb. The author’s footnotes are numbered in the text, my comments are italic in blue.

In the “homosocial” world of the early Ottoman Arab East, sexual symbolism was never far from the surface. Yet actual sexual intercourse between adult men was clearly perceived as an anomaly, linked either to violence (rape) or disease (ubnah).[1]

However, sex between men and boys was practically universal in the Islamosphere, which for centuries was far more relaxed about this than the Christian world.

Sexual relations between men and boys in the early Ottoman Arab East were almost always conceived as involving an adult man (who stereotypically would be the “male” partner) and an adolescent boy (the “female”).

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09/06/2026

Gender fluidity: canard or conundrum?

Originally posted 2017-01-30 10:14:50.

Gender fluidity has come much under the spotlight in recent years. It has been suggested that there are ‘thousands of genders’, that ‘gender is a spectrum of gradations’ and even that it doesn’t exist. Yet if you walk down the street in any part of the world, you will see two genders. So how can this be?

This baffling conundrum is what you get when people don’t do enough research. In fact, BOTH the binary model and the gender-spectrum model are valid; but their relationship is being wilfully misunderstood.

In large parts of the world, but best documented in South America and Asia, the principal gender division is not between men and women but between men and ‘not-men’. I have referred to this before and it was well described by Prof Don Kulick in his 1998 book ‘Travesti’.

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16/07/202515/07/2026

Homosexual, Bisexual and ‘Not-Men’.

Originally posted 2018-09-07 04:38:50.

Homosexual, Bisexual and ‘Not-Man’ are confusing concepts because they originate in different cultures. The modern Western concept of ‘homosexual,’ or as they prefer ‘gay,’ does not fit well with the older ones, which are still dominant in most of the world. ‘Not-Men’ is an older concept.

The term homosexual itself was coined by Karl-Maria Bengkert, alias Kertbeny, in 1869, along with heterosexual and bisexual. It refers to sexual contact either between two males or two females. Kertbeny also invented the term heterosexual. However, these definitions were completely new and bore little relation to terms and understandings that had persisted for literally millennia. Kertbeny’s approach was not universally adopted.

Another description, which appeared around the same time, would be Sexual Inversion. This can be Innate (congenital,) or Acquired. However, there is evidence that the Acquired form is actually a latent or otherwise suppressed form of the Innate. This may account for the variation in apparent nature and prevalence of this form. In England, the term was popularised by British physician and sexologist Henry Havelock Ellis. He co-authored the groundbreaking book Sexual Inversion (1897) with English historian and activist John Addington Symonds, which was the first objective medical textbook on homosexuality in the English language.

These two perspectives were opposed to each other, since Ellis in particular saw homosexuality as a personality type, marked by characteristic sexual inversion, by which he meant the adoption of feminised behaviours on the part of males and masculinised ones on the part of females. This was a holistic view which asserted that inverted sexual and social behaviours were the natural result of particular personality types.

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