"}It\u2019s interesting how gay relationships in Edo-period Japan are always described as \u201cage-structured\u201d which is like, KINDA a euphemism for pederasty but it\u2019s also complicated. It was kinda similar to Sparta in that it was considered very \u201cacceptable\u201d for a young trainee samurai to bottom for his master. But that was just the conventional version of the relationships, like from what I\u2019ve read there was a fair deal of switching (vers samurai rights!) and also often there would be kinda the outer image of age-structuring but \u201cyoung boy\u201d was essentially just a role you\u2019d inhabit in the relationship so you could have a guy that is 35 bottoming and inhabiting the \u201cboy\u201d role indefinitely despite aging out of being a boy. Or the \u201cyoung boy\u201d role could even be inhabited by a man that is actually older than the top. It was basically more the idea that tops are supposed to be fatherly and dominant and bottoms are supposed to be vaguely feminine, submissive, and boyish. Like it\u2019s just an interesting history because they kinda perfectly mapped out their sexuality onto the warped-ass class system of the feudal state they lived in… I mean relationships between men and women had stuff that was even more fucked up id imagine tbh. And I\u2019m sure normal gays existed but tbh it\u2019s interesting how they\u2019re never remembered, it\u2019s the age structuring that ppl focus the most on which betrays a bit of homophobia I think. But whatever, I know it WAS pretty damn common esp with lords and higher ranking samurai so yeah
isn\u2019t that similar to the other common way of interpreting homosexual relationships, so common that it\u2019s a trite cliche: so which one of you is the man and which is the woman? (because everything in the universe can be divided into one of two binary categories that are isomorphic to gender, obviously).