Re: Liking this discussion....

Ethan I want to say I always welcome your participation here and I always benefit from hearing what you have to say. You are logical and to the point, and you admirably refrain from getting into personalized disputes, which would be easy to do since you do get pretty aggressively attacked. I take your first point, and it is an excellent one. Of course BC too welcomes both the defiant and the less certain. And here you subject yourself to free, not constrained, community discourse. NAMBLA probably erred, in the period I am familiar with, in insisting as strongly as it did on a program of the beneficence, or at least potential beneficence (we were certainly not unmindful of the tragic consequences for a boy who was determined to have been a "victim") of sexual activity between men and boys. It did so, I believe, under the impression that a positive image of their own sexuality for boylovers was a crisis issue that required addressing in a public way that would reach every boylover, including for example someone in a rural area, like me. NAMBLA drew publicity and as a consequence reached boylovers. That was an important goal. The price may have been too high, in that although NAMBLA certainly did not exclude BLs with negative feelings about man-boy sexuality, its discourse probably made many such men uncomfortable. But I think you misunderstood the thrust of my comment about autonomy. Autonomy about attraction, no matter how determinate science might suggest it is, also poses a developmental crisis for the child (or at least can, and did during my own childhood). A discourse of autonomy empowers a child. A discourse of orientation eases acceptance, but at a cost of some disempowerment. I know VirPed invokes effectively the idea of the pedophilic child. But it does so in a way that preaches to the parents of, not actually to, that pedophilic child. The parents, yes, are our current oppressors. But the pedophilic child is our future. Whatever success VirPed has in penetrating into mainstream consciousness, it will reach children too. It will inform how they react to the development of their sexual feelings. When I was 10 or 12 the science of sexuality that came to my attention was Kinsey. Kinsey didn't find orientation. He found variety. Reading Kinsey was liberating precisely because the variety of experience he described was so broad. Today's pedophilic child has no need of Kinsey, of course, and I believe is infinitely better equipped to cope with his feelings for other and younger boys than I was 55 years ago. But the autonomy I spoke of is not just ours but also his. I think we need it, but he may need it more. I have to add a word about our autonomy, as distinct from his, because you seem to me to dismiss that too casually. "Meaningful relationships with legal-age partners" and "pedophile OCD" -- these alternatives run the risk of doing the opposite of what NAMBLA may have done 30 years ago: excluding the defiant boylover. We will not build a movement by excluding some of us. That is challenging, because in many ways what unites us is peripheral. It's about sex, which inherently can only take up so much of your day. (Take my word for it, there were times I tried.) hugzu ;-p