FIXATION AT EARLY ADOLESCENCE AS A CAUSE OF PEDERASTY BY PARKER ROSSMAN
The following is one of the sections of the fourth chapter of Dr. Parker Rossman’s Sexual Experience Between Men and Boys (originally published in 1976), entitled "Why Do They?", introduced here, and intended to explain why in general some men desire boys, though in practice limited in its evidence to what was then recent in countries with a Judaeo-Christian tradition.
Fixation at Early Adolescence
In a book on education which discusses how adolescent boys often provide subconscious erotic problems for male teachers, Friedenberg[1] attributes this kind of pederasty to a “subject eroticism,” which leads a man to view a boy as an extension of himself. Such a man identifies “with them in their growing capacity to love women … often taking delight in their young friends’ marriages.” Such a man feels tender and protective feelings for boys, unless “it is contaminated with a good deal of self-hatred.” Such pederasts - one of whom describes himself as having “twisted paternal feelings” for some reason - are in no way effeminate. Rather, their erotic attraction to boys is a jealousy of youth and sexual vitality, leading such pederasts to love “the boy in themselves and themselves as a boy.” Such men generally make excellent teachers, although in some cases when this erotic attraction to boys exists at a subliminal level of awareness, the homosexual taboos of Western society tend to turn it into an impatience with the aggressive and boisterous behavior of youngsters. Friedenberg says that sexuality in an attractive and vital boy can provide a double threat to an adult man. The boy’s capacity for pleasure stimulates the man’s repressed sexuality, and if the boy has sexual problems - as most adolescents do - the sympathy of a concerned and affectionate man may well cause sexual arousal.
One pederast said: “When I love a pubescent boy I am really loving myself at that age, remembering my pleasure then, and the memory of that excitement makes him erotically attractive to me. I love to watch a boy who is stirred by a girl and in my imagination to share his thoughts and emotions. I am moved to help him fulfill the potential for intense feeling which I have, maybe as a result of infant preconditioning which made me vulnerable and susceptible to an intensely erotic emotional experience at puberty or shortly thereafter, but I think something happened to me at puberty to freeze my development at that age, and has led me ever since to be fascinated by a boy in erotic bloom. I love to relive my own pubescent experience over and over.”
Another said: “I have no memory of any erotic attraction to a boy before puberty. I was, however, sexually precocious. I was erotically aroused by girls when I was five and six. When I was nine I had coitus with a little girl. I read in books that I was too young for it to be possible, but it was highly pleasurable and successful. I was fascinated by the way the girl - she could not have been more than six - enjoyed it. At puberty I began to enjoy and be fascinated with the way boys enjoyed their sexuality, just as that little girl had, and I’m still touched and charmed by young boys who are erotically aroused and excited. I’m not interested in their genitals so much as I enjoy the sort of aura of pleasure that hangs over a boy, especially the flush of anticipation.” Another wrote, commenting on Friedenberg: “I can understand how a gay-homosexual is responsive to the arousal of another male, but why should a man like me, with all of my interest in women, also be attracted to young teenagers? If it is their sexual vitality and capacity, shouldn’t I be more aroused by older teenagers? No, I can almost tell you the day and hour when I became a pederast. In my pubescence, around the time of my first ejaculation when I should have been wilting at the sight of a cute girl (which might have happened if girls had been undressing in view?), I saw a thirteen-year- old boy undressing to put on his gym shorts. I was so enthralled by the experience of his bodily charm that I followed him for days, hardly eating, neglecting my schoolwork to daydream about how to find excuses to touch him. Perhaps it would have been a passing moment if I had actually tried a sex contact, for when I finally did find an excuse to put my hand on his bare back it was highly disappointing. By then, however, my fantasies about him, which had for some months concentrated all of my erotic emotion around my masturbation upon that enthralling boy, had become so erotically powerful that I was spying on boys and dreaming only about boys. I wish I had a picture of him, for I’m sure he was in no way as good-looking as I remember. It was my own erotic imagination that turned him into the demon that has haunted my erotic dreams ever since. At that highly impressionable age my erotic sensibilities were irreparably grooved and seared by his impact upon me or - no, by my own experience of him.”
[1] Edgar Friedenberg, The Vanishing Adolescent. Boston: Beacon Press, 1959, p. 121. [Author’s footnote]
Comments
If you would like to leave a comment on this webpage, please e-mail it to greek.love.tta@gmail.com, mentioning either the title or the url of the page so that the editor can add it.