Analogies and paraphilias

"I would very much like to discuss the topic with you, where exactly would you like to start?" Well, saving myself from going back to reread the original thread, did I respond to any points you made, and if so, what did you think of my response? "I admit to finding your parallels to people who have desires to rape and murder boys quite distasteful" I've had this problem before. Would it help if I explained that I'm trying to make an analogy, not a parallel? The difficulty is in finding a condition that everyone here would agree they would find personally distasteful if they happened to be saddled with it. I could have used any number of other sexualities - necrophilia, zoophilia, heterosexuality - but I couldn't be sure which of these my readers would not want to have. I take it for granted that everyone here would it distasteful if they woke up to discover their sexual desires were centered upon rape. "Such parallels do nothing but tragically reinforce the societal stereotype of a pedophile as the guy lurking in the bushes, waiting for an opportunity to jump an unsuspecting child, rape him or her and kill them." Yes, well, I've had the same comment made to me when I tried to make analogies between gays and boylovers. I do not believe that adult-attracted gays are the same as boylovers, yet I do believe that it can be fruitful to make analogies between them. I do not believe that boylovers are the same as rape-oriented people or necrophiliacs or zoophiles or heterosexuals, yet I do believe that an analogy between these groups (for various reasons) can be fruitful. The problem, of course, is that any time one makes an analogy with a group that is negatively perceived (whether they be boylovers or rape-oriented people), the person in the original group says, "We're being attacked!" And it's quite reasonable for them to believe this, if such an analogy has been used for attack purposes in the past. But I'm not using this analogy to attack boylovers; I'm using it to try to make a point about the usefulness of therapy for people who believe they would benefit from it. Incidentally, I have no ill feelings toward rape-oriented people, so I don't see such an analogy as a smearing tactic. I've known some very nice rape-oriented people, who went to great a deal of trouble to find positive ways to deal with their sexuality. "You seem to be falsely equating orientation (which is to whom someone is attracted) with how one expresses those feelings (lovingly, engaging in s&m, rape)." I'm afraid we're in disagreement on this. Having spent a fair amount of time researching the BDSM community, I do believe that some people's primary orientation is toward types of activities rather than types of people. If you look at classical views of sexuality, you can see that the modern belief that orientation is solely a gender-determined matter (or, from the perspective of the BL community, an age-determined matter) is really quite a recent idea. Classical people judged people's sexuality on the basis of activities proper for a particular person's status; thus, a freeborn man who had sex with a youth and a freeborn man who had sex with a woman were both vir in the eyes of a Roman - in both cases, the man was undertaking a particular type of activity (penetrating), and what the object was of his activity was less relevant. Likewise, I believe that a gay man who spends his time exclusively in the leather community has more in common with a straight man who spends his time exclusively in the heterosexual BDSM community than he does with his fellow gays. Some people are drawn toward nonconsensual sex. For them, the gender and age of their partner may be secondary, just as it was for the Roman man. It is the type of activity that primarily raises their desire, not the person with whom they will have the activity. Likewise, there are child-lovers for whom gender is irrelevant - their primary orientation is based on age rather than gender. And some people are primarily drawn toward particular parts of the body (foot fetishists, for example). I think that anyone who begins to look at the variety of sexual impulses either ends up declaring certain types of sexualities "orientation" and other types "paraphilias" (as the medical community has done and I sense you have done), or else he ends up acknowledging that sexual orientation is far too varied to catalogue under one or two categories (gender and age). Heather [E-mail]   [Home Page]