SEDUCTION BY OTHER BOYS 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.
Seduction by Other Boys
Whether or not any man has a “pederast nature,” the important question of motivation remains. Why does he choose to take the exploratory steps into the underground by engaging in illegal sex play? In court a judge usually takes into account a person’s motives for perpetrating a crime; the assumption being that each man is responsible for his “nature” and his actions. Yet our evidence suggests that a high percentage of pederasts began their illegal activity before they understood the consequences. Society, too, recognizes this fact in a sense by its concern over protecting adolescent boys by law from homosexual seduction, on the assumption that a youngster can be “damaged” as a result of such sexual experience - indeed, that a youngster might be given a second “nature” which is antisocial. What has often been overlooked in debates on such law is the fact that most young adolescents who are seduced into homosexual activity are not seduced by men, but by other boys. A psychiatric study of juvenile experience found that homosexual play is a “mass occurrence” which is “apt to produce major adjustment problems for practically everybody” as a result of “undissolved latent homosexuality in the make-up and conduct of our western civilized life,” since “the real problem is the mutual seduction of juveniles by other juveniles.”[1]
Our evidence certainly supports that thesis. Not only are the boys who become sexually involved with men most likely to be those previously involved sexually with other boys, but it may well be that a basic cause of pederasty - insofar as we accept the notion that sexual preferences, habits and behavior are learned - is to be found in the sexual experience an older adolescent has with a younger one. The older boy is “seduced” into pederasty by the pleasure he finds in sex play with younger boys in mid-adolescence. This learning is reinforced during older adolescence and into adulthood by the “fantasy replay” of these erotic experiences as well as through “recurring emotional experiences coupled with masturbation, mutual masturbation and other self-seducing activity”. For example, one pederast said: “I might have become gay had I continued to sleep with boys my own age as I grew older. I don’t know. But I am sure that my pederast inclinations developed through the continuing, highly pleasurable active male-role sexual intercourse I had with younger boys in the all-male boarding school I attended. Maybe a younger boy can become gay by playing a feminine role for a long time during his adolescence, especially if emotions run high. I’ve seen such cases. But I was aggressive in seducing young boys and it was a highly satisfying erotic game. I have a good marriage, but these inclinations continue to pop up once in a while, especially when I meet the kind of lovely, well-bred younger lad I slept with when I was seventeen. My spine still tingles to remember the magic of that experience.”
[1] J. Z. Eglinton, Greek Love, London: Nevill Spearman, 1971.
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