The Role of Androphilia in the Psychosexual Development of Boys

Abstract

It is generally recognized that boys, and especially later prepubertal and young adolescent boys, are openly attracted to older boys and men. They identify with these more mature, most often unrelated males; they want to learn about the masculine world; they want to "be like" these people. This article examines previctimological and more recent literature to consider the extent to which boys' generalized inclinations to explore, experience, and enjoy their emerging masculinity in the company of older males also may be manifested in their psychosexual developmental interests, desires, and activities. Insights from the literature concerning boys' perspectives are taken into account, and various extraneous factors that may negatively affect boys' psychosexual development are considered. The authenticity of this juvenile male androphilic sexuality is found to be supported, as is the repression thereof as a significant dynamic in young male social alienation and maladjustment.

Victimology, Divergence, and Disinformation in Sexology: Commentary on Riegel (2011)

“…There is no place for a legitimate difference of values between people but only one possible perspective that is 162 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SEXUAL HEALTH not permitted to be questioned under the dominance of victimology. This is one of the points highlighted by Riegel (2011) on which I would like to comment, as well as his questions regarding our knowledge in sexology and its teaching in universities.…”

“…In other words, thanks to the current hypersensitivity with the problem of child sexual abuse or so-called "sexual violence" in general and the mental frame that it imposes, we are more and more uninformed about some important areas of human sexuality, and we are passing this disinformation on to our students. The point presented by Riegel (2011) about the existence of minors actively interested in adults is probably one of the most paradigmatic of this ignorance, but not the only one. Victimology is fighting against sexology and has been winning the war.…”

Alcibiades the Schoolboy Redux, or the Impossibility of Childhood Sexuality

“…A recent defense of pederasty published in this journal (Riegel, 2011) recites a host of naturalistic arguments that have become endemic in a wider scene of what I would call trench academia (many proponents cited by Riegel) that, seemingly without parodic intent, has tried to play the empirical card on late 20th century Judeo-Christian sexual politics. Comparable evolutionary gestures, incidentally, are being published even in today's psychoanalytic outlets (Josephs, 2011).…”

“…The joke is surely on the reader, taking carnivalesque inversion of the global village's most manneristic moral theatrics for a positivist's sincere indignation. For Riegel (2011), as Rocco (2000), clearly deploys another strategy than directly rebutting the known traumatopoetics of the exalted Victim: He meticulously (brilliantly, one has to venture) satirizes the tactical repertoire of his nemesis, the late modern Victimologist: (1) the declaration of a discrete, empirical stake; (2) the postulation of that stake as the universal nature of the Child; (3) the choreography of an intellectual outrage over the blindness of Man in the face of these Facts of Life; (4) the proposition that a return to or confrontation with the Facts will guide us ill-informed persecutors and benefit the kids; and (5) the invocation of a Greek word to do the job. These maneuvers cannot but read as cumulatively and delightfully parodic reiterations of the West's ever-clumsy relegation of moral strictures to the purgatory of scientific parlance.…”

“…However efficient as ironic figure, many texts of the past two decades (none of them cited by Riegel [2011], and too many to be supplied here) scattered across the history of the sciences, the humanities, critical psychology, queer theory, and the wider culture studies and critical social sciences fields, have avoided the empirical cul-de-sac of postulating yet more misunderstood and denigrated philias, by focusing on the tendentious and self-serving structure of all naturalistic accounts. While effective and much-needed as modern-day satire, Riegel cherry-picks his way through the canons of pederasty apologetics without offering something in the direction of a theoretical account of the situation that makes publication in this area such a precarious adventure, as he laments.…”