INTRODUCTION TO NEGATIVE ASPECTS OF MAN/BOY RELATIONS
BY EDWARD BRONGERSMA

Presented here is the introduction to “Negative Aspects of Man/Boy Relations: Presumed and Real”, the fourth chapter of Loving Boys, the encyclopaedic study of Greek love by the eminent Dutch lawyer, Edward Brongersma, of which the second volume (including this) was published by Global Academic Publishers in New York in 1990.

A Cautionary Tale

Once, long, long ago it was customary for men to sleep with boys and have sexual relations with them. All the men did this, and the real boy-lovers among them did it with even greater joy than the others.

Then the Christians appeared on the scene and told everyone that it was a very great sin to sleep with boys. And from that moment on whenever the Authorities managed to get hold of them, boy-lovers were burnt alive, strangled, drowned or beheaded.

That went on until the French Revolution, when a new breed of philosopher began to say that penal law should be used only to protect society and prevent individuals from being illegally harmed, not to enforce morality.

The boy-lovers took heart; they started sleeping with their young friends again, and nobody bothered them.

But it wasn’t long before some people began to preach that this kind of activity was enormously harmful to the child, for children were pure, innocent creatures who were quite unaware of such a vile thing as sex. So once again boy-lovers were hunted down, and when the authorities got hold of them they were ruined and cast into prison.

Then came Freud and his followers who affirmed that children weren’t asexual creatures at all. He even went so far as to call them “polymorphously perverse”.

Boy-lovers, of course, had known this for centuries; once again they took heart.

But along came the medical doctors, the same ones who had been busy telling everyone that masturbation caused horrible illnesses and brought on premature death; now they said that any boy who had sex with a man would invariably be turned into a homophile himself, and would remain one for the rest of his life. Legislators listened to these expert opinions and they made the laws much tougher; now men were sent to prison for having sex not just with pre-pubertal boys, but with adolescents and even young men.

Then some psychiatrists were able to demonstrate that this was all nonsense and gave rise only to misery and injustice. In several countries the old harsh laws were repealed.

But now another group of scientists started to maintain that it may very well be true that children were sexual from head to toe, and it may be quite healthy for them to have sexual play among themselves, but this by no means proved that they wanted to play in the same way with adults. Children had not matured enough for that. So the boy-lovers whom the police had managed to catch stayed in their prison cells. Moreover, as the aggression of society grew stronger and science progressed, they were subjected to torture by brain surgery and aversion therapy.

Now a group of researchers came forward with many examples of boys who wanted to establish intimate relationships with adults because adults could give them a feeling of security and protection which friends of their own age simply could not. Once again, the boy-lovers began to take heart.

But the traditional psychiatrists and psychologists immediately raised the objection that in this kind of relationship the partners weren’t equal: the adults dominated the boys. There was, of course, nothing wrong with dominating boys as long as it was done to teach them their lessons, send them to church, discipline them and bring them up properly, but where sex was involved, it was absolutely impermissible. And so boy-lovers caught by the Authorities continued to go to prison.

Then one psychologist came up with the crazy idea that even this concept of the man dominating the boy needed to be investigated. He studied in detail a number of such relationships and how the balance of power actually was held. And in none of them did he find any evidence that the man dominated the boy. On the contrary, in several instances it was the boy who dominated the man! In each case the boy wholeheartedly consented to the relationship, including all its sexual aspects. Boy-lovers once more began to take heart.

Then, however, a psychiatrist who had evidently studied the work of Jung rose to declare that when children involved in such relationships say “yes”, what they really mean to say is “no”.

“And when they say ‘no’?” the boy-lovers asked hopefully.

“Then they also mean ‘no’!” the psychiatrist replied.

So when the police managed to catch boy-lovers they still went to prison, and stayed there for years on end.

And the universities began to enlarge their medical faculties enormously, for wasn’t it evident that, in the future, every child had to be provided with his own individual psychiatrist? Otherwise who could tell his parents, teachers and pedagogues what he really meant when he said “yes” and what he really meant when he said “no”?

But now a group of scientists came along doing follow-up studies of individuals who, as children, had consented to sexual activity with adults. These researchers agreed that they could find no trace, even after fifteen years, of damage resulting from their youthful sexual experiences.

Once again the boy-lovers began to take heart, but almost immediately the psychiatrists answered that the lasting damage done by early sex with adults might take longer than fifteen years to become apparent.

The boy-lovers shrugged their shoulders and asked for proof. And, lo and behold, along came a physician who shouted triumphantly, “It’s not up to us to prove there is damage; it’s up to you to prove there isn’t!”

Now this threw the boy-lovers into considerable confusion. No researcher had ever been able to prove that sexual relations with a boy were harmless, nor had it ever been satisfactorily established that sexual relations with anyone were harmless – nor, for that matter, that traveling in a train was harmless, nor the eating of green peas. And we all well know that under penal law every man is guilty until acquitted, that in this world everything is forbidden unless one’s government specifically permits it.

The situation became even more confused when another psychiatrist^[1] proposed that we should ignore entirely any data or arguments submitted by people showing even the slightest trace of paedophilic desires themselves. The principle in itself seemed sound. Only bachelors should be allowed to write treatises on marriage; all sexological books should be compiled by scholars utterly devoid of sexual feeling. Never listen to the man with personal experience, never listen to the man who comes to the defence of something you don’t like, for isn’t that the essence of mental health?

The problem with this proposal, however, was that sexologists had long ago established that there was a bit, and sometimes more than a bit, of paedophilia in every human adult, thus all discussion of boy-love would have to cease immediately. How, then, could you send boy-lovers to prison if you couldn’t even talk about what they did? So this idea had to be dropped.

For a brief moment boy-lovers thought they again saw a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel when a few psychiatrists declared that any kind of sex in which a child willingly engaged was in itself completely benign, but then their hopes were dashed when these men of science added, “Such activity, however, brings the child into conflict with the standards of his environment and the society in which he lives, and that is very detrimental.”

So the boy-lovers, half-crushed already, surrendered. They were well aware of how powerful the standards of society were. In Hitler’s Third Reich a Jewish girl was in deep trouble if an Aryan became enamoured of her. In South Africa a black youth is lost if a white woman takes him as her lover. So the boy-lovers ran weeping to the psychiatrists, begging for help, for it isn’t only in Soviet Russia that psychiatrists are called upon to adapt people to the standards of society.

But the children didn’t give in. They continued to seduce nice adults and called those who reproached them for this silly fools. For in the meantime they had learned a bit about psychoanalysis. They said, “For every objection they were forced to abandon, these stupid men and women immediately produced another. Could it be that, though they don’t realize it, they are just trying to hide the secrets of their own innermost souls? Aren’t they simply a little bit afraid of sex itself?”

But nobody bothered to listen to what they said, for how could truth ever come from the mouths of children?

Continue to The Usual Objections: "The Child is not yet Mature Enough for Sex"

^[1] Fraser, M., The Child. In: Taylor (Ed.) Perspectives on Paedophilia. London: Batsford, 1981, p. 41. [Author’s note]