It is endlessly interesting. But it only scratches the surface. For me, if the two front teeth are coming in, we're probably raring to go. If a boy is old enough to dare explore that spooky abandoned house on the corner that he's not supposed to trespass, then he's old enough for me. (What's so tragic about this modern paranoia is that boys of ten or even twelve have been scared out of their own sense of adventure – and they lose their appeal entirely, no matter how good looking they may be.) On the upper side, I'm generally unlikely to fall for a boy with obvious signs of puberty – broken voice, hair down there. But AoA is a poor way to understand boy love. I'm not alone in knowing that once you've fallen for them, you generally don't stop falling for them until puberty ends and adulthood begins, at which point the relationship has changed anyway: the boy, now a young adult, pursues his more ultimate desires in the sexual domain, while the friendship has become one that says, however close or distant it might be, "I'm with you." This may be wishful thinking, but it seems to me that my attraction to pre-adolescents, segueing as it does as an erotic relation into one adolescence and feeds into long-term friendship, is a kind of blessing and encouragement that bespeaks its purpose as something that's supposed to last a while, starting early and lifting away years later. Any "AoA" characterization of human sexuality, reduced to what images trigger the plesythmograph, cannot capture this. The "lovemap" is too spatial: it forgets the temporality of the boy, the forward motion of eros beyond its initial conditions. |