I have a close friend who knows about my attractions. He doesn't understand it, and quite frankly, it seems to make him uncomfortable when I talk about it (so I don't bring it up much), but he at least accepts me for what I am and even trusts me around his kids. He doesn't care for the term "boylover." He says it seems to describe the action rather than the attraction or feelings. I can understand how this might be interpreted that way, since when someone says that this or that person is their "lover," it generally means they are having sex. So when you tack on the word boy, that might imply to some people that being a boylover means having sex with boys.

I don't like the way the media always uses the terms "pedophile" and "child molester" interchangably, as if they mean the same thing. They don't, of course. But because of that kind of constant misuse of the word, many people just assume a pedophile is a molester. So I used to favor the boylover tag. To me it just meant that you loved boys, not that you had sex with them. But since my friend has shown mw how even that word can be misinterpreted, I've gone back to either usung the pedophile term, or MAA (minor attracted adult). I think we shouldn't allow the uninformed to force us to give up on a word. Until the dictionaries start defining pedophiles as people who have sex with minors, instead of just having the attraction, I'm going to keep using the word. I think that by playing games with words, we may look like we are trying to hide something.

Dakota