the sex act and by doing so against his will (as a result of his attempt to defile, so to speak, the local woman) is stripped of his dignity which has subsequently been transferred to his conquerors. “[T]o penetrate phallically is to dominate, subjugate, and ultimately to humiliate” Pederasty in Pre-modern Middle East (1500-1800 CE) According to literature that can be dated as far back as the 1500s to present day is where we can find evidence of, pederasty, or amorous and sexual relations between men and adolescent boys. To an unknown extent this has been prevalent over various periods of time . Pederasty is easily confused with pedophilia; the latter is characterized by a sexual attraction to children who have not yet begun pubertal development. Some too draw a distinction between what might be called a biological definition of childhood and a socio-legal one. The former characterizing childhood in terms of the biological distinctions present in that stage in relation to other stages of development (infancy, adolescence, adulthood, etc.) and the latter characterizing the child in terms of both the prescribed sociological and legal distinctions. Pederasty is a phenomenon that can be found historically in places such as Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome , China, and Japan. Such inclinations and behaviors are found in the Middle East as well . During the pre-modern period (1500-1800 CE) there was a widespread conviction that beardless youths were a temptation to adult men as a whole, and not merely to a small minority of deviant. “Traditions warning against the temptation posed by beardless youths were numerous, some of them attributed to prominent religious figures of the early Islamic period, others to the Prophet Muhammad himself. One tradition related that the Prophet prohibited men from gazing at beardless boys, and another that Muhammad himself had seated a handsome young member of a visiting delegation from the tribe of Qays behind him so as to avoid looking at him.” Such an attraction, or behavior, was not equal in all regions of the Middle East, nor did it survive through all pre-modern time periods. Still, though its presence is salient. "Mālikī scholars of the early Ottoman period repeatedly confirmed that a man would negate his state of ritual purity if he touched with lust the skin of a beardless or downy-cheeked youth, since they fell under the category of that 'which is normally the object of