Labels

Around the end of 1998, when I was working on the initial essay for "Unconditional Love," I was trying to summarize a news article that referred to a minor-attracted adult. The man in question was referred to in the article as a "convicted pedophile," a phrase I did not at all care for, as it implied that being attracted to children was itself a crime. I asked a boylover friend of mine for advice on how I should refer to the man in the article. The article itself gave no clue as to how the man would have labelled himself, so I was left with trying to find a term that conveyed the facts of the article. Should I call the man a child molester, to make clear what crime he had been convicted for? Should I instead de-emphasize the criminal aspect by calling him a pedophile? Should I use my newly coined term minor-attracted adult? The friend replied, "Why don't you call him a man?" Blushing, I went off and did just that. And ever since then, I've tried to avoid such words as "minor-attracted adult" and "boylover," when "man" or "person" would do just as well. It's not always possible. When you're writing an article about a group of people who have a tremendous amount of differences, and whose one common feature is that they have been convicted of sex offenses, it's hard to avoid using the term sex offender. But there's something more than a little dehumanizing about labels, whether the labels be negative or positive. Calling someone a boylover – however much a badge of honor the word may be – implies to the world that the person's love of boys is the important fact about him, to the exclusion of all else. Likewise, if I call myself a journalist, people are likely to focus on that fact and forget about everything else I am in my life. Negative labels are especially horrendous in their effects: technically speaking, I know that two of my friends were sex offenders, but that label is about as inadequate a term I can think of to convey what sort of people they are. So yes, I'd love to get rid of all such labels. How to do so and to continue to communicate to laypersons is the part I haven't figured out. Heather [E-mail]   [Home Page]