Re: Boylove is (still) not prostitution

I wasn't trying to formulate an argument, I was expressing exasperation. I may have expressed myself too strongly, and I don't mean any offence to Currant BL or to anyone else. Of course there are sometimes good reasons to refrain from casual sex, but I don't agree with moralising about what two people find fun to do together. I just think that it's their own business and no one else's. And if only people would actually read the book, they would realise that the casual sex was enjoyed by the boys as much as by the author. It simply wasn't a case of the author "strongly manipulating relationships towards that end [sex] meanwhile telling themselves the boy initiated it" (to quote Currant BL's original post). Stephen had more experience of real boys than most people on this forum, and he knew from experience that boys were not asexual beings or only interested in deep, long term relationships. Indeed, surely to suppose the opposite of this, and to insist that boys are only interested in what we see as ideal relationships, is precisely to discuss them as "a strange abstraction devoid of even the scent of the real". Currant BL averred that "we conveniently ignore any feelings and needs of boys that contradict our own fantasies and desires". Just read Nicholson's accounts and decide for yourself what the boys' "feelings and needs" were. That is all I'm saying.