On Ephebophilia
June 6, 2012
A READER writes:
You mentioned the incidence of child molestation among homosexuals in your recent post. The strong preference of homosexual men for much younger men has indeed been substantiated. This phenomenon merits a special category of its own: ephebophilia. Technically, an ephebophile can have a preference for a boy or girl from (roughly) just pre-adolescence to post-adolescence, but in reality, ephebophilia refers to erotic attraction to boys, just as the word “youth” is a synonym for young lad of a certain age. I’m in the library and most of the sites referring to ephebophilia have been blocked, which tells you something.
Jesse Bering is a psychologist who writes for Scientific American online. (Maybe the print version too, I don’t know.) He is homosexual, and never shuts up about it. He is annoying, but is a fairly honest social scientist and will write things that aren’t completely party line. Yes, he is a materialist.
He admits that ‘homophobia,’ so called, is natural, innate, and makes sense. He quotes a social scientist named Gordon Gallup, which bears careful scrutiny:
“Although the incidence of heterosexual pedophiles exceeds that of homosexual pedophiles by a factor of about two to one, individuals in the population at large with a heterosexual orientation outnumber those with a homosexual orientation by about 20 to 1. Thus, although there are fewer homosexual than heterosexual pedophiles, the proportion of homosexual pedophiles is considerably higher than that of heterosexual pedophiles. Homosexual pedophiles also tend to be highly promiscuous. [In 1987], the mean number of victims of heterosexual pedophiles was 19.8, whereas among homosexual pedophiles the average number of victims was 150.2. Because they have more victims, homosexual pedophiles have a correspondingly greater likelihood of being apprehended, and this might account for their disproportionate representation among those arrested for sex crimes.”
The dismissal of the correlation between homosexuality and pedophilia is based upon a misunderstanding of numbers, statistics, and proportional weight in the population. I’m no statistician, but even I can figure that one out. “Gay slang” also is full of rich allusions to young, handsome men on the brink of maturity, such as “twinks” and “chicken,” analogous to words like “tomato” and “cheesecake”, to refer to pretty young women. But if you ask me, the latter have an affectionate implication (or can), whereas the former are purely predatory and exploitative.
Also, an 18 year old boy can’t be compared to an 18 year old girl. Boys lag in psychosexual development compared to girls.
