this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2025
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Can we stop trying to hold ancient cultures to moral standards of today?
Imo it's important to continuously compare traditional and modern cultures.
We should criticize ancient slavery, genocide, racism, bigotry, child marriage, women/girls as property, etc etc.
Why? Unless somebody is trying to hold them up as a standard to aspire to cough MAGA cough, what do we gain from looking down and sneering at the horrible moral standards of the past?
I can see the relevance if we were having a discussion about said morals, in which case bringing up the past as an example has some point to it. But not when we're just looking at a random historical artwork.
Ah, i misinterpreted your comment. You're speaking with an intent of judgement. I was intending more of a comparison for the sake of education and discussion side.
Another thing, to go back to the post: do we even know if the women/girls in the original artwork were sexualized in this piece? In many cultures it was normal to not be fully covered and in fact an exposed body having sexual connotations is fairly modern.
Yeah, fully agree with you on those aspects
I think recognizing that child trafficking and exploitation isn't solely an aspect of the modern world is a step in the right direction towards understanding ancient cultures. The powerful and wealthy who would have had the resources to create these frescoes would have reasonably been the end consumers of these victims of pederasty.
I'm with you there. It's more the reinterpretation of them as fully developed adult women (of ridiculously short stature) that I'm finding upsetting.
That's an interesting perspective I hadn't considered!