That’s a great observation about Michael Apted's "Up" documentary series, which is one of my favorite films, too. I love how it shows the continuity of human character -- oddly reassuring! -- and which elevates the young because it shows them as fully self-possessed of their own being. It’s a radically anti-liberal film – it shows soul eclipsing any account of the individual as essentially rational competence reducible to mere counting of birthdays. Also a great point about how boys’ burgeoning sexuality tends to be its own object, redounds on itself, is sex for sex’s sake, naturally self-referential. One felicitous mode for a man to be with boys is to engage and mirror back that energy, which men with a heart for boys are primed to do. Any society that can afford to puts off young male heterosexual liaison until the time youths gain skill and social and economic capital (in normal times, mostly constituted by relations with men). Only in crisis or social breakdown – see the American ghetto -- are boys short-circuiting into heterosex before this "accumulation". And I agree that boys given work to do in the male group will gladly prefer that over being trapped into a heterosexuality that in so many ways reproduces life under mom. |