The foremost question is this: What do you mean by expert? Experts are not something one just becomes by being extremely knowledgable on a topic. In society, an expert is primarily someone with some academic backing and institutional backing, typically from a university or major organization. These sorts of experts, at least nowadays, do not really exist for boylovers. Back when, you could've argued that Edward Brongersma is such a person. Furthermore, boylove is not considered legitimate in the eyes of scholarly communities. Any studies of sorts would be solely relegated to the realm of studies on historical pederasty, such as in ancient Greece, or perhaps some more modern anthropology. So, there are no official, legitimized experts. So let's try at another definition: An expert is simply someone who is extremely well-read and well-studied, even if only in personal pursuits, towards boylove as an academic subject. In which case, I would argue a great deal of us are unofficial experts. But if this is the case, who validates this expertise? Expertise is most frequently considered authoritative (not in the sense of "having power over others," but being validated by reasonable standards.) Where does this validation come from? Admittedly, then, perhaps there's a more communal definition of expert to go by. An expert in boylove is any boylover who has been validated by their own community as a trusted figure on the subject. Then the question comes, what if this person is correct, well-read, well-studied, and just hated? The definition, then, seems unfair. Ultimately, then, my final answer is less a definition. Less a list of standards, and more a total questioning of the existence of such a thing in our current society. |