The web of suspicion, stigma, bureaucratic regulations and punitive laws that “protects” minors today from unauthorized contacts with adults has become a form of age apartheid as ugly and in-yer-face as the razor-wire fences thrown up across Europe to keep out refugees – and many of us, including one recent commentator here, might feel this web is much more effective than the fences.
Thwarted in his attempts to be sociable, never mind sexual, across the age divide, Sapphocidaire is sceptical there are many youngsters who would welcome relationships with anyone more than a few years older. I had responded to a post by “A”, saying “… I gather a lot of underage gay boys are now using Grindr to meet men.” Not true, insisted Sapphocidaire, saying gay boys online are for the most part actively hostile to paedophiles. The GYC was better years ago, “which is why it was shut down and then reintroduced with age constrictions by relative groupings”.
Yes, times have changed quite drastically, even within a decade or so. But was I wrong about Grindr? My information comes from someone who knows what he is talking about. This is Darren, a mid-thirties guy who introduced himself on Sexnet last year as a former rent boy from the UK, sexually active from 11 and a prostitute by 14 in the 1990s. Also a cypherpunk with a science background, he has latterly been working on some projects relating to sexual offending and sex offender laws, and says he has been “alarmed at the increasing ways in which homosexual youth are being dragged before the courts both as victims and offenders in recent times in the west”.
“As gay sex went online, the boys followed,” he tells us, adding that in the late 1990s gay.com allowed 13-year-olds to register.
The gay scene argot for inter-generational sex is called Daddies and Sons, apparently, although I don’t think there is any rule that it actually has to be a family thing! Indeed, if the term were meant to be interpreted literally, it would need to be Daddies and Granddads, because the younger party is supposed to be legally of age and hence old enough to be a Dad himself. But Darren assures us that there are 15-year-olds on Grindr who are looking for “daddy”. “Grindr,” he says, “includes daddy as an option in what you are looking for.”
Can we put numbers on it? Darren has attempted to, using an indirect method rather than contacting any of these youngsters, which would have been legally fraught with peril. He came up with a substantial figure but on reflection I am not convinced. The numbers looked low in relation to the huge area and population in question, and some of the “youths” may actually have been law enforcement agents.
For genuinely strong 21st century data (albeit pre-Grindr) on young gay boys willingly getting into relationships with gay men we need to go somewhat further afield, to North and South America, starting with Latin American communities, first in New York and then in Campinas, a city of over 1mn in south eastern Brazil. Common to both of these Latin studies is Alex Carballo-Dieguez, a professor of medical psychology at Columbia University and also a researcher into the prevention of HIV transmission. This research focus is highly significant. Funding institutions hate supporting any work that makes sex sound pleasant, especially where minors are concerned. An emphasis on disease and other dangers is much preferred.
The upside of this, however, is that when the main point of your research is HIV you are allowed to go where other researchers are forbidden, and to report facts honestly that would otherwise in effect be censored. This is because controlling and eradicating life-threatening sexually transmitted disease is a really serious business: even the influential moralisers who prefer to sweep the pleasant side of sex under the carpet know that fighting the spread of disease requires good data on people’s sexual motives and behaviour.
In 2002 Curtis Dolezal, with Alex Carballo-Dieguez as co-author, published a paper called “Childhood sexual experiences and the perception of abuse among Latino men who have sex with men”. The title is worth dwelling on. The first point is the reference to childhood sexual experiences, a term that does not predefine the contact as abuse. That is because the authors want to know about the feelings (or “perception”) of these guys themselves as they look back to their childhood: they get to say for themselves whether or not they think their early experience was abuse. Secondly, “men who have sex with men” are not necessarily gay, hence the precise but unwieldy term.
In this study of 307 Latino men in New York City, recruited from bars, dance clubs, parades, AIDS service organizations, community centres, public parks, etc., 100 of them (predominately gay) were found to have had childhood sexual experiences with an older partner (CSEOP):
If any partner was 4 years older and had sexual contact with the participant prior to his 13th birthday, the participant met criteria [for CSEOP]. One hundred men met our criteria for CSEOP. The median age of the first such experience was 8.5 and the partner was, on average, 9 years older.
The authors conclude that since a third of the sample reported childhood sexual experiences with an older partner, “these experiences cannot be considered rare or isolated occurrences for this population”. Asked whether they considered their experiences sexual abuse, 59 of the men said yes but a substantial minority, 41 said no.
Dolezal and Carballo-Dieguez also say:
Each participant was asked why they did or did not consider the event(s) to be sexual abuse. For those who did consider it sexual abuse, over half of the men referred to their age (e.g., “I was a child,” “I was too young,” and “A child doesn’t know what he is doing”). The next most common response had to do with volition (e.g., “It was done without my consent,” “It was against my will,” and “I was forced to do things”). The men who did not consider the event to be abuse also frequently referred to their volition, with approximately two thirds stating that it was consensual and that they were not forced into the situation. Several felt that they had actually initiated the experience (e.g., “It was my initiative,” “I was the one who went out for it,” and “I exposed myself in front of him and provoked him.” More common responses simply stated that they agreed to the encounter(s) (e.g., “I agreed to everything,” “I was consenting,” and “I was curious, I wanted to do it”).
One participant was 10 when he had sexual contact on 20 occasions over 3 months with a 25-year-old male neighbour. The events involved mutual masturbation and oral sex. The participant did not feel coerced or hurt and did not feel it was sexual abuse “because I seduced the neighbour.”
Carballo-Dieguez, who incidentally has worked with the renowned Theo Sandfort, also undertook the research referred to above in Campinas, Brazil. Published in 2011, this study of 575 participants (85% men and 15% transgender), showed 32% reporting childhood sexual experiences with an older partner. Mean age at first experience was 9 years.
So the prevalence rate and age at first experience were both very similar to the New York-based study. But the men’s perceptions were strikingly different. Only 29% of the participants who had had such childhood sexual experiences considered it abuse; 57% reported liking, 29% being indifferent and only 14% not liking the sexual experience at the time it happened. Although both populations were of Latin Americans, it looks as though the New York ones had been influenced to a far greater extent than their Brazilian counterparts by sentiment against “child abuse”, which is perhaps at its strongest in the US, the UK and the wider anglosphere.
I started out by exploring whether gay boys in contemporary society, with implicit reference to the English-speaking countries, are seeking out gay men for sex online. Inevitably, with hard data difficult to come by, I’ve had to rely on studies that nearly answer the question but not quite: the Latin research tells us about boys’ early experiences but without telling us much as to whether they initially knew they wanted sex with men and deliberately went after it or whether – as we must suspect given the early average starting age – they typically had no such clear agenda, and were found by the older partner rather than them doing the finding. Maybe, like Darren, most of them would soon have come to realise they were gay in any case, and would have sought out the gay scene in their early teens.
What we have stumbled upon by focusing on studies of gay men, though, may be something even more important than the original question. The most significant thing of all is not how relationships get started but whether any value is put upon them; and, if not, whether it is only the pressure of cultural hostility that is causing a negative evaluation.
Jessica Stanley and her colleagues surveyed the “age-discrepant childhood sexual experiences” of 192 gay and bisexual men living in Vancouver, British Columbia, who were recruited from a randomly selected community sample. This research team also took an interest in the men’s own perceptions. From the data, published in 2004, Stanley et al. were able to conclude that “Those who reported consensual sex with older partners described their experiences as neutral or positive, whereas those who were coerced had greater adjustment problems including difficulties with competitiveness, coldness, expressiveness, and general interpersonal problems.”
It’s what we would intuitively expect, isn’t it? But this sort of investigation is so rare it is worth trumpeting. I’ll conclude with another done in connection with AIDS prevention: Sonya Arreola et al., 2008.
This study examined differential effects of forced, consensual, and no childhood sexual experiences (CSE) on health outcomes among a sample of adult men who have sex with men in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New York. 2881 telephone interviews were conducted. Unsurprisingly, the forced sex group had the highest levels of psychological distress, substance use, and HIV risk. The report says:
Interestingly, the forced sex group and the no sex group were statistically indistinguishable in their level of well-being, while the consensual sex group was significantly more likely to have a higher level of well-being than either of the other two groups. This suggests that consensual sex before 18 years of age may have a positive effect, perhaps as an adaptive milestone of adolescent sexual development.
Crucially, the study acknowledges that children and adolescents have voluntary sexual relationships with men, even finding that the voluntary variety (34%) were more than twice as common as forced ones (16%) among those surveyed. Amazingly, a public education guide based on these and related positive findings was government funded, via the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Back to contemporary reality in the UK. According to Darren, “Grindr is a hideous app that has taken us right back to the days of cottaging”. He feels the present scene has not stopped adolescent initiation into the world of adult gay sex, but has constrained it to being a furtive, seedy, guilt-ridden business for both the younger and older party. Like “cottaging” in dingy public toilets, often the only way for gays to meet in the bad old days, it is a scenario for swift fuck-and-flee sessions filled with self-loathing and mutual contempt – no place for Kind people or the real boy love that a chico in Brazil might find.
Apps such as Grindr, and the more relationship-oriented Blendr, should enable people to come together across the age divide for friendship, relationships and love, as well as encounters of a casual but also respectful type. Alas, the countervailing pressure exerted by stigma and aggressive, hostile, policing mean that the good side – so strikingly shown to be a possibility in the research discussed above – is crushed out of existence and only the bad remains. Instead of Latin Lovers we have British Bum Bandits.
they claim they can diagnose “sexual trauma” in children by children’s drawings:
there is a study on CSA in the 19th century Mexico:
I don’t know whether you need it.
From the Conclusions:
I would go further. It looks as though justice may have been better served in 19th century Mexico than in 21st century UK. This is a quite unusual historical study and looks interesting.
[…] of young models, no older than early twenties and down to mid-teens. And as Filip pointed out in a comment here recently, studies have shown that the highest risk of sexual assault for females is when they […]
THIS POST IS FROM DISSIDENT, RESCUED FROM THIN-THREAD OBSURITY:
This is a response to A down below, regarding stats she gave us for legal adults singles sites like OKCupid, since the thread size was getting thin down there.
Thank you for more of this info, A. What do I make of all of that based on my personal experiences with legal online dating services, as well as a lot of personal experience in general? Sexual/romantic preference varies greatly among people of all ages, but there can be no doubt that societal expectations and a whole host of other social considerations have a strong effect on many people’s choices of who to contact if a variety of choices are laid out in front of them. For instance, many people who use these online services are weary of contacting someone too much younger, and if their attractions do not include an actual preference for younger people, they will often factor “social acceptability” and “what will my friends and family think?” into their choices.
In other words, if a heterosexual teleiophile male in his late 30s is surfing a singles site, and the pics and profile of a 22-year-old really woman catches his eyes, he’s probably much more likely to choose a 30-year-old woman whose pics and profile he also saw and liked, even if to a lesser degree than the 22-year-old, because he knows that the relationship with the 30-year-old will be more acceptable with friends and family, and they won’t be making comments behind his back about it, or give both himself and her a hard time based on the “age thing.” This is not to mention the fierce competition he will have with other men on this site for that 22-year-old, and if she has a profile and pics on a conventional singles site like OKCupid or eHarmony, chances are heavily in favor of her not being a gerontophile, and even if she does see profiles of older men she happens to find attractive, social considerations will likewise factor into her choices as well.
Hello Dissident-through-Tom,
I’m sure you’re absolutely right!
Gay men simply lack the kind of depth of feeling that real love ensues. They only obsess over “asses” and being bitchy to other men, in my experience. They also like to accumulate wealth, it seems. I would like to know the kind of emotions “Darren” catered to in the mid-nineties when he worked as a fourteen year old rent-boy. If it were gay men, I suspect he was just “a piece of young ass”. So, then, he could answer: what is the ideal age for gay men? I suspect it is between 17 and 19, generally speaking. The decade before him Rupert Everett was selling his body from sixteen years, so I can imagine, given his physique, he was more “twink” in appreciation by that age. For me, the difference between a boy of fourteen/fifteen and a twink of nineteen is simply huge, both emotionally and physically. Arriving in Compton Street more than a decade later at the age of eighteen, I saw no hint of boyishness on sight. Disappointed by the behaviour on display there and developing for forever my distaste for Gay men, I used to spend the whole night walking across London, starting out from King’s Cross and going down to St Paul’s, Tower Bridge and those areas, Jack the Ripper, in a deluded fantasy that I would find a boy who was looking for me. Then I discovered more interesting corners of the internet.
“According to Darren, “Grindr is a hideous app that has taken us right back to the days of cottaging”.”
But men were pushed into those circumstances in the first place. The whole notion of “coming out” is a totalitarian one. Homosexuality, as you know, used to exist on the degree of male relations. Yes, it seems it was overwhelmingly between an adult and an adolescent, but allowances were made for the gamut of sexual behaviour was it discreet. As I frequently like to repeat, contrary to the modern myth in which the church and religion is blamed for everything, the incorporation of the persecution of the homosexual into the structure of Western society was at the convergence of the medicalization of human sexuality and the feminist movement. Pursuant to the travesty of gay marriage as a way of gloating over the ruins of the traditional family, kids are to be made to be suspicious of all adults outside of the network of officially groomed employees of the state, and to even inform on their own parents. A consequence of the state interceding between all individuals now that the patriarchal family has been undermined in the name of “empowerment”. Too, by revealing all their private details over the world wide web, they are being led into a social media panopticon of false flashing colours, which was created by the Pied Pipers of silicon valley, whose roots are of course in the cultural revolution of care-free 1970s California, reminding us of the filthy creepers who work their evil in psychology and are employed by advertising agencies to make young children conducive to “nagging”. These are the real “groomers”. And when will THEY be punished?
So when, following the protests by Gays at their conventions, the bastard profession of fuckers known as the psychological establishment suddenly decided that male sexual relations was okay, and the terror techniques were simply shifted to a focus onto the minor attracted. All the therapy and shaming, and so on. Of course, it was also necessary for the snakecharlatan field of Queer theory to reshape all homosexuality in the past as basically egaliGaytarian in nature, and to whitewash individuals like Wilde and Whitman as all right.
As the whirlwind of freedom ( read: tolerance ) that came with revolution subsided into the tyranny of identity politics, with the revolved order asserting itself as the new “command generation” ( a term used back-way-when by hippies who knew the writing on the wall ), homosexual men-loving men actually emasculated themselves before their Lesbian overseers and found their slot in the liberal order as a procrustean sexual identity, their own heavily policed little cell in the panopticon fashioned in keeping with the psychosocial establishment, and known, in this Orwellian age, as “liberation”.
“Also a cypherpunk with a science background, he has latterly been working on some projects relating to sexual offending and sex offender laws, and says he has been “alarmed at the increasing ways in which homosexual youth are being dragged before the courts both as victims and offenders in recent times in the west”.”
Oh, it’s worse now, then. Having read lots of stuff on William Percy’s site about minors on registries and so on, I would have thought it had been worse in the eighties and nineties.
Yes, most of those boys if they are on the English bit are Stinson Hunter and his sad friends, so buyers beware!
“Gay men simply lack the kind of depth of feeling that real love ensues. They only obsess over “asses” and being bitchy to other men, in my experience. They also like to accumulate wealth, it seems. I would like to know the kind of emotions “Darren” catered to in the mid-nineties when he worked as a fourteen year old rent-boy. If it were gay men, I suspect he was just “a piece of young ass”. So, then, he could answer: what is the ideal age for gay men? I suspect it is between 17 and 19”.
Is there any study in the world that shows that homosexuals who are mostly attracted by 18-year-olds have less love for the persons they love than homosexuals who are mostly attracted by for example 13-year-olds? Anyway, I strongly agree with the words “what is the ideal age for gay men? I suspect it is between 17 and 19”. One study (Silverthorne et al. (2000): Sexual Partner Age Preferences of Homosexual and Heterosexual Men and Women. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 29 (1) 67-76) showed that for homosexual men the 18-year-olds were mostly sexually attractive compared with older persons. Sadly there are not many studies who show which age or which age range exactly is mostly attractive for homosexual men. Probably about 18 years. If this is true it would mean means that about 50 % of the homosexual men are mostly attracted by minors.
Thank you Filip! That is a study I saw once and have been looking for ever since. Full text here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12553950_Sexual_Partner_Age_Preferences_of_Homosexual_and_Heterosexual_Men_and_Women
192 participants, split equally into four groups, average age 33-34 years, range 18-52. For heterosexual men, “the greatest mean response was to 25-year-old and the lowest to 58-year-old female faces” whereas for homosexual men “the greatest response was to 18-year-old male faces and the lowest to 58-year-old male faces…The only signi?cant correlation between participant age and preferred age category within participants’ preferred sex occurred among male homosexuals, although all but 9 of the 48 homosexual men preferred the youngest two male age categories [~18 and ~23].”
Meanwhile, for heterosexual women “[t]he correlation between participant age and stimulus age preference was of a similar magnitude and approached signi?cance…the greatest response was to 32-year-old and the lowest to 18-year-old male faces” whereas for homosexual women “the highest responses were to 42- to 60-year-old [! ? !] and the lowest to 19-year-old female faces”. Interestingly, from the graphs it seems that the women were on average pretty lukewarm even about the photos they liked best, and the researchers refer to work by Thomas R. Alley which found that women’s attractiveness ratings are on average more variable than men’s, and also that female faces tend to be rated as more attractive than male faces; two papers:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232563595_The_Developmental_Stability_of_Facial_Attractiveness_New_Longitudinal_Data_and_a_Review
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232504977_Determinants_and_consequences_of_facial_aesthetics
The researchers also refer to a paper which, somewhat differently to their paper, found that while men did largely prefer women under 30, “men over the age of 50 did not rate women under 30 as more attractive than women aged 30 to 50 and women between the ages of 30 and 50 did not rate men of that age as more attractive than men under 30…the major result remains a systematic decline in perceived attractiveness between the youngest and oldest faces rated by men or by women.”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232551307_Effects_of_age_and_gender_on_perceived_facial_attractiveness_Reply
As for the real world, rather than the lab, one large 2013 study of a dating website with a 2:1 female:male ratio found that “a woman was twice as likely to respond to a man two years younger as she was to one two years older…older female users were even more likely to respond to messages from younger guys…42% of male users only consider younger women.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/16/young-women-date-younger-men_n_3606539.html I wish the article had given us the name of the study!
Very interesting!
Our host Tom O’Carroll wrote October 23th 2014 in SEXNET that it is an open question if “ephebophilia” or “teleiophilia” is the most frequent sexual age attraction of men. Indeed.
Several UK-USA-studies showed that women of about 17/18/19/20/21 years old have the highest “chance” to get raped or to become the victim of a “sexual assault” and the older they get the smaller is the probability to get raped or to become a victim of a “sexual assault”.
Sources: Felson et al. (2014): Sexual Assault as a Crime Against Young People; Ball, et al. (2008): Sexual offending against older female victims: An empirical study of the prevalence and characteristics of recorded offences in a semi-rural English county; Perkins (1997): Age Patterns of Victims of Serious Violent Crime. Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report (http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/apvsvc.pdf)
It seems to me that these studies show that the sexual age preferences of men show the typical normal distribution – a topic nearly never discussed in the scientific literature. The age mostly attractive for heterosexual men is in the age range 17 to 25 years, probably about 21 years. For homosexual men the age mostly attractive could be about 18 years. This shows that “pedophilia” does not exist in the real world. It is just a label for a social construct people have in their mind. If sexual age preferences like “pedophilia” would be biological categories people should tell us how many biological categories of sexual age preferences are there totally? 3, 4, 5, 10, 20, 50, 300, 1.000? I guess there are as many age preferences as people in the world.
Sadly there are very few studies about the latent structure of the sexual interest in children (first one it seems from 2011) and sadly they are usually or really always done with unrepresentative prison samples.
Two sources: Mackaronis u. a. (2011): The Latent Structure of Multiphasic Sex Inventory–Assessed Pedophilic Interest; Schmidt et a. (2013): Is Pedophilic Sexual Preference Continuous? A Taxometric Analysis Based on Direct and Indirect Measures
Thanks!
A recent Finnish study of 12,656 men and women aged 18-49 found that men of all ages tend on average to be most strongly attracted to women in their mid-20s, about 24-25 — which is round about peak fertility — while women in their late teens and early 20s tend on average to be most strongly attracted to men about four years older and older women tend on average to be most strongly attracted to men around their own age. Here: http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138%2814%2900111-1/pdf
If it is indeed the case that straight men tend to like mid-20s women and gay men tend to like late-teens men, or youths, that suggests there is a grain of truth to the ‘homosexuals are pederasts’ theory that gay activists have struggled against so hard for so long.
It depends what is meant by “attracted to”. Social attraction is not necessarily the same as sexual attraction: men may have very good reasons for wanting to date with women in their twenties, and see them as suitable partners for having a child with in modern society; but that doesn’t mean they are sexually aroused by them as much as by slightly younger women. To get a good idea of the arousal factor we really need to measure erections in response to varied age stimuli, by using images or stories. But the Abstract of the Finnish study mentions only “observations” taken from the study populations, not lab measurements.
Yes, it was self-report, not phallometric, as were the others I linked. Good point.
Though when I said peak fertility I didn’t mean the age when women are likeliest to give birth but the age when they conceive most easily. Generally it’s early to middle 20s. The Finnish researchers made much of the connection.
The researchers also made much of the finding that men in their late teens and early 20s also tended to report being most attracted to women in their mid-20s. Which is a bit surprising, and, as you say, given that it’s self-report, it’s a bit hard to know what to make of it. I wonder what, if anything, MILF porn has to do with all this. Some women in their 30s and even 40s who are trying online dating do report that they have been surprised — though far from displeased! — to be approached by much younger men with MILF fantasies.
Christian Rudder, president (or he was in 2014) and one of the founders of OKCupid, has reported from extensive data gathered from the site on the ages that users of the site aged 20-50, and grouped by their own age, say they like. E.g.., of all the 46-year-old heterosexual males on OKCupid, what is the age the biggest single number of them rate as attractive? Of men seeking women, a majority of the age groups plumped for 20 (you can join the site at 18). Quite a few liked 21 even better, but in no case was the age favoured by a particular year grouping older than 24. However, older men didn’t often actually contact women more than 10 years younger than they were, and Rudder has told the New York Times that 35-year-old straight men on OKCupid typically search for women 24-40 but rarely contact anyone older than 29. (Here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/technology/okcupids-unblushing-analyst-of-attraction.html?_r=1).
Straight women in their 20s were most likely to rate as attractive men a year or two older than they were. In their 30s, it was men exactly their own age or a year younger, and in their 40s, men a few years younger.
Rarely contact anyone YOUNGER than 29!
This is a response to A down below, regarding stats she gave us for legal adults singles sites like OKCupid, since the thread size was getting thin down there.
Thank you for more of this info, A. What do I make of all of that based on my personal experiences with legal online dating services, as well as a lot of personal experience in general? Sexual/romantic preference varies greatly among people of all ages, but there can be no doubt that societal expectations and a whole host of other social considerations have a strong effect on many people’s choices of who to contact if a variety of choices are laid out in front of them. For instance, many people who use these online services are weary of contacting someone too much younger, and if their attractions do not include an actual preference for younger people, they will often factor “social acceptability” and “what will my friends and family think?” into their choices.
In other words, if a heterosexual teleiophile male in his late 30s is surfing a singles site, and the pics and profile of a 22-year-old really woman catches his eyes, he’s probably much more likely to choose a 30-year-old woman whose pics and profile he also saw and liked, even if to a lesser degree than the 22-year-old, because he knows that the relationship with the 30-year-old will be more acceptable with friends and family, and they won’t be making comments behind his back about it, or give both himself and her a hard time based on the “age thing.” This is not to mention the fierce competition he will have with other men on this site for that 22-year-old, and if she has a profile and pics on a conventional singles site like OKCupid or eHarmony, chances are heavily in favor of her not being a gerontophile, and even if she does see profiles of older men she happens to find attractive, social considerations will likewise factor into her choices as well.
I tried putting this at the top, I dunno how it ended up down here. Grrrrr to WordPress!
Need a study to locate your own dick?
No need to “rise” to this one, Filip! 🙂
No need to publish that “comment”, Tom. Thank you for your respect.
Mind you, regarding the developmental plasticity of sexual orientation mentioned in the Finnish study, when I was trawling round the internet collecting my list of AOAs I found many comments like these, all from men (some slightly paraphrased):
“I started out strictly attracted to boys 10-13, but the upper limit has moved up with time and I can now be attracted to young men of legal age. A 12-year-old with no body hair is stil my sexual ideal, though.”
“When I was 20 I was only attracted to boys 6-16. Now, 20 years later, the lower limit has remained fixed at about 6, but the upper limit has moved up to 25 or even 30, depending, and I’ve had some satisfying relationships with young men.”
“I liked boys my age and younger as a boy. In my 20s I knew I still only liked teen boys. These days, though, I can even find a handful of guys in their 30s attractive.”
“About 10-13 but it’s sometimes gone older as an attractive boy has gotten older.”
“I’m attracted to girls 10-14 but I can be attracted to an older girl if I knew her when she was younger.”
“Normally I’m only attracted to boys 6-14 but as one of my young friends got older the upper limit went right up to 17, but no older. The same thing has happened with several other YFs over the years.”
“I love my young friend so intensely that I’m still attracted to him even though he’s now 14 and well into puberty.”
“Normally I’m only attracted to boys 8-12 but if I’m strongly attracted to a boy then my desire to perform fellatio on him can last through his early teens, after some pubic hair growth, but fades away by the middle or late teens.”
“12-15, but the upper limit stretches a bit for boys I have known since they were young.”
“I still have a low-grade attraction to a 29-year-old I was in love with when he was 12-16.”
“Normally about 8-13, but I remained physically attracted to my young friend, whom I met when he was 6, up until he was 18, at which point the girls took over and I had to step aside.”
“Usually 15 TOPS but I’m still in love with my 18-year-old young friend of six years.”
“If I’m sexually attracted to a boy the attraction can follow him way up into his late teens, but I don’t think I could ever fall for anyone over about 15.”
(Of course, only the first three are true examples of developmental plasticity. The rest are some other phenomenon.)
If the same thing happens to some teleiophilic (or should we say epheboteleiophilic?) men, as it very likely does, that would help to explain how some of them — though, clearly, far from all — can feel at least some attraction to older women or men when they get too old to attract the hot young things, or can at least keep enjoying sex with their ageing but beloved partners.
>Of course, it was also necessary for the snakecharlatan field of Queer theory to reshape all homosexuality in the past as basically egaliGaytarian in nature, and to whitewash individuals like Wilde and Whitman as all right.<
I like that word "snakecharlatan", with its neat evocation of the snake-oil salesman and also the venomous hidden danger of a "snake in the grass".
Have to agree with the charlatan theme too. And the queer theorists are slippery as snakes: they seem to be saying something significant, but then slyly slither into obscuration!
Having said that, the essence (to use a very non-queer word) of queerness, both as a sexual identity and an academic "discipline", is precisely its "queer" quality of being hard to pin down, and its refusal of the rigidities and rigours that make such a discipline, well, disciplined.
The politically correct gay mainstream, by contrast, is all too stridently clear in its dogmatic denunciation of adult-minor relationships.
Queer theory actually stands against this, insofar as it is clear enough to stand for anything (which usually it isn't, alas!). This can be seens from its origins:
"Queer theory was originally associated with radical gay politics of ACT UP, OutRage! and other groups which embraced 'queer' as an identity label that pointed to a separatist, non-assimilationist politics. Queer theory developed out of an examination of perceived limitations in the traditional identity politics of recognition and self-identity. In particular, queer theorists identified processes of consolidation or stabilization around some other identity labels (e.g. gay and lesbian); and construed queerness so as to resist this. Queer theory attempts to maintain a critique more than define a specific identity. Acknowledging the inevitable violence of identity politics, and having no stake in its own ideology, queer is less an identity than a critique of identity."
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer_theory ]
Note that word "assimilationist" above. It is the assimilationists who are keen on gay marriage. They want to imitate the mainstream world and normalise gayness by being just the same as straights.
Queer theory is utterly different. It has subversive potential. It introduces us, for instance, to the idea of the queer child, as in
"Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children" (Steven Bruhm & Natasha Hurley (eds) ; University of Minnesota Press; Mineapolis; 2004).
From the blurb for this book:
Our culture has a dominant narrative about children: they are (and
should stay) innocent of sexual desires and intentions. At the same
time, children are officially, tacitly, assumed to be heterosexual.
Curiouser is a book about this narrative and what happens when it takes an unexpected, or queer, turn—when the stories of childhood must confront a child whose play does not conform to the ideal of child (a)sexuality.
[ https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/curiouser ]
So glad you wrote these studies up. I had read most of them some time ago and thought they deserved more attention than they were getting. I’ll seize the opportunity to recommend again Rigoberto González’ Butterfly Boy: Memoirs of a Chicano Mariposa, in which he records that he was having full penis-in-vagina sex with the little girl next door, daughter of Bible-thumpers, in Mexico when they were both about 8, and started having sex with adult men, many of them married, in California when he was 14.
Greg Louganis, in his memoir Breaking the Surface, tells a surprisingly similar story: PIV with a female friend, at her suggestion, when they were both 12, and Louganis not yet able to ejaculate; a relationship with a man more than 20 years older when Louganis was 16. Louganis enjoyed sex with this man and, even more, the cuddles and affection the man gave him, but writes that he’d have preferred to go out with a boy his own age. At that place and time, though, there was no way for him to meet other gay boys. I suspect that many quite broad-minded and well-meaning gay people would say that with the advent of gay youth groups and out middle-schoolers the need for such relationships is becoming a thing of the past, and that that’s really a good development.
But this fails to account for the existence of the many gay boys who actively prefer men, which is hardly surprising, since they are going to grow up to be man-lovers, not boy-lovers. There is a charming blog called My First Gay Crush, in which gay people, mostly men but also some women, describe how their hearts first fluttered and loins first stirred over some actor or singer. Though some say that their first crush was a heartthrob youngster their own age or only a little older, a majority of both men and women report that they first crushed on celebrities who were their 20s, 30s or 40s. Quite a few of these infatuated kids were young enough at the time to have been almost certainly prepubescent.
Here http://www.just-well.dk/CrimeWithoutVictims/holger.html a 55-year-old gay man says: “I don’t know what I would have done in those six years, from when I was 12 until I was 18, if I hadn’t had the chance to meet men older than I was myself. In other words, I had a very good time with paedophiles, and for the rest, I don’t think there should be a fixed age of consent. If there is a need on both sides I don’t believe the law should interfere.” This despite his having had plenty of opportunity for nookie with coevals: “I had relations with several boys in my class, but I was more interested in adults.” His experiences included falling deeply in love at age 13 with a man in his late 20s.
Here http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2866104/ we read that “Jonah reported that when he was in 8th grade [age 13-14], AOL was launched and ‘that’s when I started looking in chat rooms’. He shared that he would enter these spaces and say ‘ “Hey I’m this young”…I was just honest when talking with them and trade pictures’. He related that most of these partners were in their mid-20s and that it was ‘slim pickins’ because he had to find someone who was ‘comfortable doing what I was comfortable doing, which was usually only receiving head’ “. Very sensible and responsible of him. He seems to have had a good, erm, head on his young shoulders. Meanwhile, “Orlando too reported that he started looking for older men on the Internet when he was 13 or 14 because he ‘didn’t want anyone my age’ “.
To return to the Latin theme, in her book Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies Anne Lawrence refers to Don Kulick’s book Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. She quotes Kulick as saying that the travestis’ “childhood [is] recalled as a period of erotic play with other boys and attraction to other males” and adds “Kulick described three travesti who stated that their sexual attraction to males had begun at age 7 or earlier.”
Always good to have individual human stories, not just dry stats. Thanks “A”!
It is a shame that data appears to be absent from societies where consensual adult-child (boy) intimacy has been tolerated historically, and where the concept of mentoring is embraced as a positive rather than excluded through fear of stranger danger. I am thinking here, mostly, of old Asia. After all, Asia contains twice as many people to that found on the Continents of Europe and the Americas combined.
I’ve been meaning for a while to read Gary Leupp’s Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan and also Bret Hinsch’s Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China. As you say, current research seems sadly lacking.
Not on the subject of boy-love specifically, but interesting nonetheless: papers from the TransgenderASIA research centre: http://www.transgenderasia.org/research.htm
Also in the queue is Khaled El-Rouayheb’s Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800. Extensive material about pederasty.
A browse through the Wikipedia article on this book shows that it occupies a key battleground area in the struggle against what has become gay PC orthodoxy. One short quote is indicative:
“El-Rouayheb explained that pederasty, or a structure with an older male and a younger male, was the Ottoman standard of homosexual conduct. It was considered strange for one adult male to desire to have relations with another adult male.”
Note also how queer theory comes into the reckoning:
“Boisvert argued that the book tries too hard to dismiss the idea that men in the premodern Middle East were in love with one another; he wrote that ‘Despite this dogged commitment to queer theory, this is on balance a trenchant, insightful, and even brilliant book. But one cannot help wishing that it were not so dismissive of the passionate longings of the men it seeks so diligently to understand.’ ”
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Homosexuality_in_the_Arab%E2%80%90Islamic_World,_1500%E2%80%931800 ]
Thanks, hadn’t seen that. Will have to move the book some way up the queue!
On May 13th 2016 Bruce Rind and Max Welter published in Archives of Sexual Behavior a new study (see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27178172) using the Kinsey sample:
“Reactions to First Postpubertal Male Same-Sex Sexual Experience in the Kinsey Sample: A Comparison of Minors With Peers, Minors With Adults, and Adults With Adults”
The authors “examined first postpubertal male same-sex sexual experiences in the Kinsey same-sex sample (i.e., participants mostly with extensive postpubertal same-sex behavior), comparing reactions across the same age categories.”
Positive reactions were assessed based on the question, ‘‘Did subject enjoy first homosexual experience, ’’which had these response options: 1=no; 2=little; 3=some; 4=much.
Positive reactions (4=much) of the minors who had the first experience with an adult:
x-11 years and adult: 100 % (n=13)
12 years and adult: 61.1 % (n=18)
13 years and adult: 80.0 % (n=20)
14 years and adult: 71.4 % (n=28)
15 years and adult: 68.4 % (n=19)
16 years and adult: 50.0 % (n=8)
17 years and adult: 56.3 % (n=16)
Total 70.5 %
Positive reactions (4=much) of the minors who had the first experience with a peer:
x-11 years and peer: 85.3 % (n=34)
12 years and peer: 75.6 % (n=82)
13 years and peer: 90.2 % (n=82)
14 years and peer: 80.9 % (n=89)
15 years and peer: 80.0 % (n=45)
16 years and peer: 82.1 % (n=28)
17 years and peer: 82.4 % (n=17)
Total 82.2 %
Thanks, Filip. This paper looks like a “must read”.
This is indeed a good and welcome report, but it still beggars the mind as to why so many of these studies are man/boy-centric, with so much less concern for studies of man/girl liaisons, let alone woman/girl experiences, etc. It seems for any studies involving intergenerational sexual experiences involving girls and adults, we still have to rely almost entirely on the fantastic and bold studies by Allie C. Kilpatrick in Long-Range Effects of Child and Adolescent Sexual Experiences: Myths, Mores, Menaces and Chapter 7 of Sharon Thompson’s important book Going All The Way: Teenage Girls’ Tales of Sex, Romance and Pregnancy. Why do I continuously bring this up? For two main reasons:
1)The trend continues still, despite the fact that GLer’s have been quite active in Kind politics for about 15 years now; 2) I’m frankly concerned that this lop-sided research trend is used as excuses by some BLer’s not to work in unified fashion with GLer’s for the emancipation of all younger people, often using the excuse, “well, sorry, Diss, but there simply isn’t enough data out there on man/girl relationships to justify us working to emancipate girls as well as boys, yadda yadda yadda…”, which translates into: “there most definitely is sufficient data, but since most researchers seem not to be concerned about it, then the few good samples of data out there can be readily ignored by those whose agendas are suited by ignoring it.” This too often results in divisions between pro-choice BLer’s and GLer’s, with each sub-group of MAPs consigned to work separately, while adding further fuel to anti-choice GLer’s, who use a similar excuse to ignore what data has been compiled on man/girl relationships.
I entirely concur with this lamentation!
I feel you, Dissident. Boy do I ever.
Those of us looking for such information often have to do our own digging, I’m afraid. Occasionally you come across something good, such as this story, in which the girl seems to have been keen as mustard to get things started and keep them going: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/6214256/Lesbian-teacher-took-schoolgirl-lover-15-on-gay-pride-march-in-Paris.html
A recent discovery of mine is Noelle Howey’s 2002 book Dress Codes: A Story of Three Girlhoods: my Mother’s, my Father’s and Mine. It doesn’t deal with anything intergenerational, but it’s a fascinating read for anyone interested in the sexual experiences of young girls.
The father in question was a quiet, bullied boy who secretly dreamed of wearing girls’ clothes. His own father was a devotedly loving parent who worked at a hated job to support his family while drawing and wood-carving in his spare time. The mother was a robust, sensible girl who wanted to help people — she became a speech and language pathologist — and was once interrogated at school by the FBI due to her father’s communism. Their daughter, Noelle Howey herself, was keenly interested in sex well before puberty — she records that she began menstruating at about fourteen and a half. Quite early on she became fearful of rape, thanks to a lurid paperback she sneak-read and to adult warnings that “boys are only after one thing”. Partly in order to work out her anxieties and partly just for fun, she started weekly sessions of a sort of junior dominatrix game called Boy-Girl (heteronormativity strikes again) with a friend of hers, a little girl the same age. “I felt like a fraud. My mother still thought I was the angel I had always been: like most adults, she probably thought that children didn’t have sexual feelings. How many after-school specials had I seen in which some girl who was really old — sixteen or seventeen — would be talking about whether she was ready to do it or not? Here I was, all of ten years old, tying my friend to a bedpost and tickling her privates with the pink hair of my Strawberry Shortcake doll. This was a secret. I had never had a secret before, and I wasn’t sure if I could keep it.” And indeed, over a year later, some time after the friend put a stop to Boy-Girl, young Noelle couldn’t stand it any more and poured her heart out to her mother “about the nakedness and the rolling around and the fingers and the kisses and how good it felt and how sorry I was…” The mother, who had encouraged her child to read books on puberty and looked the other way when she pilfered The Joy of Sex from her nightstand, was reassuring, telling her that as a child she’d practised kissing with other little girls and “everyone does it”. Howey wasn’t convinced: “It *is* wrong. They tell us in school that you shouldn’t have sex until you’re old, like sixteen, or married or something. I did all this stuff when I was nine. I’m worse than anyone. I’m like one of those girls in the ninth grade [age 14-15] who are already pregnant.”
At twelve, Howey tells us at the very beginning of the book, she had two favourite games. One was “Hooker Barbie and Pimp Ken”, based on the sex worker interview in Studs Terkel’s Working, and the other was dressing up in a secretly-borrowed gold teddy and dancing to Madonna while gliding her crotch up and down the doorframe, pretending it was a “tall, sexy” boy a couple of years older, named Jake. That same year, she was keen to kiss boys during her classmates’ Bar Mitzvah games of Spin the Bottle, but they were less keen on kissing her, as she wasn’t one of the pretty-and-popular crowd. A couple of years later, however, she acquired a boyfriend, a nice and ‘good’ boy who, the first time Howey pushed his hand against her padded training bra, fled to the bathroom and cried. Howey cried too as she apologised. “I was mortified that my sexual urges were so strong. I promised myself that…I would let him make the moves. If nothing happened, so be it. Better that than be labelled one of those frightening words scribbled in toilet stalls about girls who pushed and pushed until they got what they wanted: Bitch. Cunt. Nympho. Slut.” But presently things worked out: “I had come to realise that, without actually pushing Todd’s hand down my shorts or up my tank top, I could quietly make sexual activity — if not actual intercourse — happen. I could drop hints, mimic sexy scenarios, and once we actually fooled around, I made believe it was all his idea. This seemed completely normal to me.”
Howey’s father is now a woman and her mother has a new husband. Howey is married with a daughter and son and works for Everytown for Gun Safety. They are all on good terms with each other.
>…reassuring, telling her that as a child she’d practised kissing with other little girls and “everyone does it”. Howey wasn’t convinced: “It *is* wrong. They tell us in school that you shouldn’t have sex until you’re old, like sixteen, or married or something. I did all this stuff when I was nine. I’m worse than anyone.
Even with parental reassurance, and even where there was no intergenerational “abuse”, it seems a kid can be highly vulnerable to sex-negative messages based on “what they tell us in school”.
Sometimes it is said that a child’s peers and the wider culture are a more important formative influence on their behaviour than their parents. A couple from Scotland who move to London and have a child will find the kid grows up speaking not with their own Scottish accents but with a cockney one.
But that’s just a couple. A Jewish child living with Jewish parents in a community with a strong Jewish presence may attend a state school in Britain where Christian acts of worship and “religious education” predominate (unlike in the US, religion is not kept out of state education) but will be very unlikely to change religion on that account.
The pressure of the dominant language, or accent or dialect as the case may be, is very strong, and can throw difficulties in the way of parents attempting to raise bilingual and biliterate children. The (at least temporary) solution to a child’s sometimes sudden unwillingness to speak the minority language used at home is often to send them off to the relevant parent’s home country for summer camp or a stay with extended family, so that they can hear many other people using the language in all parts of life. I have personally been aware of many kids and former kids who immigrated from a Spanish-speaking to an English-speaking country aged 5-11 and, despite living in largely Spanish-speaking enclaves and having a daily Spanish for Spanish speakers literature and composition class at school, quite soon switched to using Spanish only with their parents and others from the older generation and only English with their peers, including siblings.
Some years ago psychology researcher Judith Rich Harris put forward the deliberately provocative “hypothesis of zero parental influence”. She argues for this hypothesis in The Nurture Assumption, apparently claiming that the way kids turn out is due to 1.) genes 2.) identifying with peers, such as classmates, imitating them and adopting their attitudes. I haven’t read the book but it’s in the queue.
>…it’s in the queue.
I guess it’s a long queue! 🙂
So many books, so little time!
As I was trying to write but my computer broke down, it sickens me that the judge makes all these excuses for this woman, but if it were a man he would be burnt alive.
This ANTI-MALE society sickens me. She is every bit the PERVERT and PAEDOPHILE that Adam Johnson is!
Looks like you missed your medication today, Cid. I’m no great fan of the liquid cosh that batters dissenters into tranquility, but I can tell you this kind of shoot-from-the-hip angry post doesn’t impress anyone here. But your best provocations, your more thoughtful ones, are worthy of our attention. So let’s have your best and can the rest!
“…or the emancipation of all younger people…”
Oh, is that ’emancipated’ from being prevented from being your lover? You people seriously make me laugh. Do you really think that there is evidence that young people are unhappy because they can’t take older lovers? You just want to do the opposite of what the child protection people do.
Just focus on adolescent and child on child “abuse”, but don’t expect for one moment that it will benefit your “cause”.
Sometimes Sapphocidaire, I feel your anger reduces your ability to debate effectively (and civilly).
I for one do not interpret “the emancipation of all younger people” as solely benefiting adults; far from it. I see it as benefiting society as a whole, and on many different levels.
I concur with what Feinmann0 said, Sapphocidaire, in that your anger sometimes overrules your sense of judgement, and how you interpret statements made by others, so that you too often “read” negativity into something that was in no way intended as such. This is because with anger comes uncontrolled emotion, and too much emotion overrides the reasoning faculties. That’s the root source of hatred and the fuel of the mob mentality that we see in every moral panic, including this present version.
“…or the emancipation of all younger people…”
Oh, is that ’emancipated’ from being prevented from being your lover?
I meant the granting of all civil rights of personhood to younger people. In regards to the matter of sexual choice specifically, yes I do think preventing a younger girl from making the choice of being my lover if that is what she wanted is not in her interest, because: 1) It’s robbing her of choice, plain and simple; and 2) Frankly, yes, I think I would make a very compassionate lover and partner to any younger girl who may reciprocate the feeling, and all parties concerned are denied the opportunity to experience such a relationship.
You people seriously make me laugh. Do you really think that there is evidence that young people are unhappy because they can’t take older lovers?
I think the many younger people who “act out” in negative ways in our society – e.g., rampant rates of running away from home, suicide, reports of abuse occurring in the home, shooting sprees occurring within the authoritarian schooling environment, huge amounts of depression leading to alternative sub-cultures based on “darkness” and depression (such as the “emo” identity) and the trending of demonstrable forms of self-harm such as cutting, etc. – suggest that robbing youths of their full personhood harms many of them on many levels. I think the above examples youths “acting out” do to a strong but marginal understanding that they are denied full personhood and are thus at the mercy of powerful adult dominance which, among many other things, forces them to repress their natural desire for sexual expression. The many who end up as sex offenders for things like sexting and being caught in displays of sexual curiosity provides even more evidence. The right to be sexual with whom they please, when they please, and to have these choices both demonized and criminalized, does indeed hurt them on many levels. I’m sorry, mate, but even Dr. Blanchard acknowledges the phenomena of gerontophilia, and the strong belief that virtually no younger person could possibly desire an older person is nothing more than that: a strong belief that is fueled by a compelling and dominating social narrative.
You just want to do the opposite of what the child protection people do.
No, mate, I want to be an alternative to what our youth oppressive and sex negative society forces upon all age groups.
Just focus on adolescent and child on child “abuse”, but don’t expect for one moment that it will benefit your “cause”.
I expect that the truth will win out in the end, as it always has, no matter how much opposition has been allayed against it.
Important correction: When I said “The right to be sexual with whom they please, when they please, and to have these choices both demonized and criminalized, does indeed hurt them on many levels,” I meant to say: The suppression of the right to be sexual with whom they please, when they please, and to have these choices both demonized and criminalized, does indeed hurt them on many levels. This is what happens when you try to respond to comments immediately after just waking up :-\
“This is because with anger comes uncontrolled emotion, and too much emotion overrides the reasoning faculties. That’s the root source of hatred and the fuel of the mob mentality that we see in every moral panic, including this present version.”
You think it is “mob mentality” and, perhaps, something called ‘unreason’ that is fuelling the societal cleansing of, in fact, all kinds of intimate affection towards children? Seriously?
Those who work in this industry and those so-called journalists and alleged intellectuals who refuse to analyse it in a clear and honest way let alone condemn it, do so cloaked in something they call “science”, whatever they actually mean by that. I shall write more about this later, because I am obviously too angry right now.
Yes, this society that upholds the terror is in fact very proud of pointing out how it disdains religion in favour of “reason”. They read Christopher Hitchens, and all fawned like North Koreans at his death as they were desperate to be near him in life. They say all organised religion existed to oppress free individuals, despising especially the Roman Catholic Church for those very alleged reasons.
They are highly reasonable beings.
You think it is “mob mentality” and, perhaps, something called ‘unreason’ that is fuelling the societal cleansing of, in fact, all kinds of intimate affection towards children? Seriously?
Yes, seriously, El Cid. Mob mentality is what it’s called when large groups – in this case the general public – all gang up against some group and/or idea based on emotions like fear, hatred, and ignorance with no consideration for the actual facts involved. And yes, ignoring factual information for a preferred fealty to emotional “gut reactions” do indeed count as the antitheses of reason in my estimation.
The MASS will always react this way, being for the most part less intelligent than the QUALITY, towards whom they are infinitely jealous and want to destroy. I am just remembering when the prole-Communards took over Paris and, much to THE SHOCK! of the troublemaking liberal intellectuals at the time who had doen so much to incite them, started to burn all the art and smash the statues. Now, of course, the liberal elite in the West don’t know anything about Renaissance paintings or Classical statues so would assume their own place in the destroying. When the Prussian military arrived in Paris, we were met by dead silence and an horrific premonition of what would eventually happen to MASCULINE WESTERN CIVILISED SOCIETY.
I don’t blame the MASS, at all. I blame the liberal elite who are supposed to guide them and prevent them from lunging to excesses.
It is frightening, but for the first time in England, I honestly think given the justified anger at the elite we could see the rise of a nasty organisation cloaked in a queer ‘nationalism’, extremely anti-muslim and anti-pedo. The liberal elite have failed in every respect, merely enriching themselves; it’s very frightening.