Acquiring self-esteem

"I'm not convinced it would be wicked for a man and a boy to have sex under certain circumstances." The point of the passage was not to prove that man-boy sex is wrong; the point of the passage was to prove that celibate boylove can be good. If celibate boylove is good, then you can still tackle the question of whether man-boy sex is right, but you won't feel under such intense pressure to prove that it is. Your initial post seemed to be saying, "My life will be horrible unless I believe that sexually active boylove can be all right" – which seemed to me to be a fallacy. If I lived on a planet where heterosexuality was forbidden, and I knew of no society in which it could be practiced without terrible consequences for my partner, that wouldn't doom me to hating myself – I would just have to work harder at finding a way (as you put it) "to integrate my sexuality as something that can be controlled and expressed in a good way." "What I'm especially interested in are stories of gay boys who wanted a romantic and/or sexual relationship but then felt abused by it. Are they mixed in with the stories of boys who were unwillingly coerced or pressured into it? It's hard for me to stomach reading the latter." The reason it's going to be hard to separate the two is the same reason that it's hard to differentiate between boylovers' stories of voluntary sex and boylovers' stories of unwilling sex: because coercion is in the eye of the beholder. I would suggest that you do in fact read the "pressured" stories, because, quite often, if you read between the lines, you'll discover that the abuser did not believe that he was coercing the boy into sex. In fact, this is a common theme among survivors – that the abuser thought that the child genuinely was consenting to sex even though the child felt pressured to have sex. This is a common theme among recovering offenders too, by the way, and I think it's a scenario more likely to happen than post-consensual misgivings. One of the main reasons to read survivor stories is to realize that "Men are from Mars, Boys are from Mercury" – what may seem to the boylover like clear signals that the boy wants sex may in fact be something quite different from the point of view of the boy. Theo Sandfort talks about this in Boys on Their Contacts with Men – he found that the boylovers who thought that the boys made the first move often weren't backed in this belief by the loved boys themselves. "It was that the only way I have found (at this time) to integrate a positive attitude toward my sexuality with my desire to do and think what's right in God's presence, is to believe that a romantic relationship, in the right circumstances and with the right adolescent boy, could be a good thing, and not to shut out the possibility that hypothetically it could even be sexual, again under the right circumstances and with the right boy." I have no arguments with "not to shut out the possibility," but you seemed to be going further than that in your original post – you seemed to be saying that you were on the point of deciding that man-boy sex could be good because that was the only way you could maintain a positive attitude toward your sexuality. Isn't this going at the matter backwards? That's like saying, "The only way I can feel good about myself as a scientist is to believe that my hypothesis is right – my self-esteem as a scientist is more important than the actual truth of whether the hypothesis is right." If you in fact are wrong about sex being right between a man and a boy, won't you be causing greater damage to yourself by trying to hide from this fact in the interests of acquiring a positive attitude toward your sexuality? Instead of worrying about whether the results of your search will cause you initial pain, wouldn't it be better to say, "I want the truth, whether it causes me pleasure or pain?" In the long run, I think, that's the only way to acquire true happiness. In other words, I'm not concerned with the question of whether you decide that man-boy sex can be a morally good thing – I'm concerned with the question of how you decide it. If you decide that it can because you have examined the issue carefully and have concluded that it is, then I'll have respect for you. But if you decide it because it would be convenient for your happiness to decide this, then my respect for you will go down. This is why I'd prefer that you treat with a grain of salt the psychobabble of the mental health community (even gay-positive psychobabble) – because the mental health community has a tendency to say that emotional health is the highest virtue, and then goes on to say that anything that interferes with emotional health is bad. With that kind of prioritizing, it only takes one step more to say, "I will do such-and-such – regardless as to whether it's morally right – because it's good for my emotional health." The Church, on the other hand, does not consider emotional health to be one of the Seven Virtues – emotional health is supposed to be the product of living a virtuous life, not an end in itself. My old elementary school has a series of posters in the hallway that say things like, "Feel good about yourself" and "You are a wonderful person" – evidently aimed at boosting kids' self-esteem. It did occur to me to wonder why the school didn't put up posters saying, "Do your homework regularly" and "Show respect for your teachers" – actions that, in the long run, are more likely to cause deep self-esteem than superficial remedies like convincing kids to like themselves, regardless as to whether they have done anything to earn such self-love. Heather [E-mail]   [Home Page]