Threaded index Date index FAQ
The Erotic Haecceity of Boys
Posted by Pharmakon on 2023-October-11 04:41:37, Wednesday|
Girls who want boys Who like boys to be girls Who do boys like they're girls Who do girls like they're boys Always should be someone to really love --"Girls & Boys," Blur, 1994 When Diogenes used the term "haecceity" a few days ago (link below), it was new to me. He wrote: Boys must be loved and they must be loved for being boys. Only a pederast can do this, because only a pederast loves them for their very boyishness, their haecceity. No other figure can do this. Diogenes is rightly alarmed by the Bronze Age Pervert's tendency to equate masculinity with "martial virtues." He goes so far as to invoke the Hitler Youth. "It is," he argues, "because BAP glorifies war that I think he's a bit shallow." I suspect Diogenes thinks, as I do, that if this sentiment was ever anything more than an excuse for the rich to sacrifice the lives of the poor to make themselves even richer, it is certainly now past its expiration date. Yet I think Diogenes' useful formulation about the haecceity of boys fails to go quite far enough in challenging the BAP premise. The task of the pederast, Diogenes seems to concede, is to provide "the greatest affirmation of the boy's masculine selfhood that he can experience." Errant, invoking the notion of "unhindered boyishness," points out that putting it this way -- "the boy's masculine selfhood" -- is potentially limiting. He comments: I like the importance placed on discovering one's sensual embodiment in that statement, though the gender expectations here can be especially problematic. What happens if the boy doesn't have a typically boyish body? Especially if he prefers to be girlish? Diogenes does not say that a boy's masculine selfhood is his entire selfhood. BAP does seem, at least sometimes, to advocate that males expunge all traces of femininity from their selfhoods, but this probably is not meant literally. Each of us has a masculine and a feminine side. Diogenes is suggesting, I think, that the pederastic tradition involves men modeling masculinity for the boys they love. It does, and I don't mean to minimize the importance of that aspect of boylove. But there is another almost opposite aspect of boylove that speaking of the haecceity of boys in terms of masculinity tends to obscure, and that is equally essential in understanding the pederastic tradition. Boys are, at least in comparison to men, feminine. The pederastic tradition did not understand itself as homosexual -- only with the decline of that tradition could the latter term even come into existence. To many if not most men before the invention of homosexuality, women and boys were understood as interchangeably objects of adult male sexual desire and activity. And this was further understood in terms of the similarity of boys and women. Of course, an important aspect of this similarity was pure fuckability. But adult men are also fuckable, and (unless neither women nor boys were available) the men of the pederastic era did not generally find them sexually attractive. It was specifically the femininity of boys that made them sexy to men in ways that other grown men were not. Today's boylovers tend much more often than the men of the pederastic era to be attracted only to boys and not to women. (Not that much more often, though, and many find youths of both sexes desireable.) But even for those of us for whom a penis is an erotic sine qua non, there is an important sense in which masculinity is better understood as a turnoff than a turn on. Male puberty is a process of masculinization at the end of which a boy is no longer a boy. He becomes a man, and for many of us the sexual attraction cannot survive that transition. Masculine, in that sense, is exactly what men are and boys are not. To speak, then, of the haecceity of boys in terms of masculinity is almost a contradiction. Women are feminine. Men are masculine. Boys and girls are, at least in comparison, androgynous. And this is an essential element of their compelling beauty for us today and throughout history (something that, as Sick Rose notes here, Camille Paglia documented in her book Sexual Personae. But can a boylover affirm a boy's feminine selfhood? Yes, though less often by modeling as with masculinity. Instead, by making him an erotic object, a boylover places a boy in what is culturally understood (today, as it was in pederastic times) as a sexually feminine position. A boy who has this experience gains an appreciation of what females experience when men desire them sexually. I don't think this depends on whether the boylover and boy have sex, or on what kind of sexual practices they engage in if they do have sex. But I do suspect that being fucked by a man -- so far as we can tell, the most common sexual practice between men and boys in the pederastic age -- provides the closest analogue to the female sexual experience and thus the fullest appreciation of it. And I worry that if boylovers today tend instead to just give boys blow jobs (if they have sex with boys at all), this does less to give boys such an appreciation. On the contrary, it may condition boys to unrealistically expect (and perhaps demand) that their own sexual pleasure can and should be the exclusive focus of every sexual interaction. hugzu ;-p  |
Follow ups:
