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We all know from actual scientific studies that were carried out in the 1970s and 1980s that boys have found their sexual experiences with men to be positive and not traumatising. We all know? I think we should all reject the assumption that this is a settled question within our community. You present consensus as though it were self-evident, which raises the obvious question of whom you believe you are speaking for. Nor is the issue one of the existence of a dissenting fringe such as VirPed. Trouble is BC is not representative of the boylove community at large to start with, but even here (a more pro-contact board than most BL spaces), we do not have anywhere near a full consensus of what you claim “we all know.” Treating the matter as settled reflects a limited appreciation both of the issue itself and of the limitations of the research, not to mention the often anecdotal nature of some of the sources you cite. You will have to forgive me, but I have no desire to spend the day retracing arguments that have already been made countless times, so I will confine myself to a brief and necessarily incomplete example. Even that should be enough to demonstrate that studies often treated as beyond reproach within our community are not exempt from legitimate scrutiny. Here is what Rind wrote in his famous meta analysis: “Three-fourths of the studies, however, focused on experiences occurring in middle to late adolescence, generally with age criteria of 16 or 17 years.” “Only one-fourth of the studies focused on experiences occurring before age 14 or before puberty.” “Most studies also required that the other person be at least 5 years older if the participant was younger than 12 or 13 years old, and 10 years older if the participant was an adolescent.” With such broad definitions, the number of truly man-boy encounters the meta-analysis captured are going to be extremely limited. Most encounters are either going to be heterosexual in nature and/or between two participants who are themselves underage, or close to it. There is considerably more that could be said on the matter of boylove and research, but real-world obligations take precedence unfortunately. Hopefully this has been sufficient to briefly (and, yes, incompletely and imperfectly) illustrate that what is being presented as something “we all know” is, in fact, nothing of the sort. Side note observation: The irony is that some of the people most contemptuous of religious matters are perfectly comfortable creating secular versions of it. The vocabulary changes, but the habit of treating certain beliefs as beyond serious scrutiny remains exactly the same. |