Dear Cat-in-the-Shades:

Well, every boy-lover has the fantasy that he could go back and "make things right." But of course, the reason that "Situation X" (whatever happened back then) is soooo interesting, is that something WRONG happened to the boy-lover at 6, or 8 or 10, or 12. And of course it takes CHARACTER and SUPPORT and HONESTY and UNDERSTANDING to go back into that memory, and experience the PAIN and the POWERLESSNESS. And these are things that the average BL simply does not have access to. What we typically want to do is fix the pain by going back into that memory and playing the "fun" role of the abuser, instead of the "powerless" role of the abused boy...but the truth is in the PAIN. There's a lot of JUST BEING THERE IN THE PAIN involved. THEORETICALLY a man could have a really cool relationship with a boy; practically, any individual boy-lover is going to bring MORE bad into the relationship, in proportion to how LITTLE he is aware of his BAD. So be very, very scared of people who say that "Oh! Timmy and I have going to have NOTHING BUT FUN TOGETHER!!!" But of course once you're AWARE of how bad it feels (felt!) to be an abused boy, you lose a lot of interest in doing that kind of thing to another boy.

Anyone who is serious and professional about "boy-work" knows that there is a lot of pain and discipline involved in bringing up boys right. You have to be constantly ON them to do this and not do that. You have to build a discipline structure that involves making them cut out a lot of their favorite activities, and punishing them when they slip back into immature behavior.

To be a good boy-worker involves constantly reliving the death of one's own boyhood, in order to kill the boyhood of one's discipuli (pupils) It's a very grim business, really, and I don't have the heart for it. But the death of the boy (in rigid discipline, in taking on a skilled social persona) is the life of the man. And the life of the boy -- that is, when a man grabs hold of a boy and tries to lock him into an artificial perpetuated boyhood, constantly saying "Gee Tommy! Let's go to the Fair! Let's stay up and play video games all night! Let's eat potato chips and look at naughty stuff on the internet!!!" -- is the death of the man. As Collodi tells us in Pinocchio, such boys grow donkey ears.

The tragedy of Oidipous is not that he married his real mother by accident; it's that the average man marries a woman who is NOT his mother, and he then TURNS HER INTO his mother, in order to work out all those old scenarios that were so exciting and traumatic for him as a boy.

Hence the overwhelming (and very sad) dynamic at BC: "Abused boys need to shut up! It wasn't that bad! I don't want to hear any more of that abused boy nonsense!" etc.

Email me again next week; I'm bogged down with paperwork, but will send you a copy of the "intervention." If I felt like I was in the midst of friends, I wouldn't hesitate to post it, as it's the kind of aggressive approach every BL needs to take to solving his problems and getting on with his life; but I *really* don't feel like putting up the good bits and the bad bits of my relationship with my mother on the net for goons like Xavvy & Luvvy to snicker at.

---Didaskalos