Hi, I'm new here and it's nice to meet you all. I am one of the people who thinks, in essence, that love has scriptural support whereas "God's plan for our lives" doesn't; to me, the latter is a non-scriptural idea meant to rationalize Christianity with concepts of social normality. Of course, there are many thoughts behind this assertion that can't all be laid out here and now.

To me, the genesis of sexuality is biological; and I am much under the influence of the last chapters of the book of Job -- I believe in respecting the biology God has given form and freedom to. Not that everything an animal does is appropriate for being done by humans; we don't want to start devouring our young or our male mates. But your sexuality, though basically a product of biological accident (even if you're heterosexual), is still God-given and it's your basis for a good part of your life's work in love. It may or may not be conducive to sex or to good relationships - i suppose if you're a pure necrophile you're really out of luck - but whatever it is, it probably gives you something to work with in God's service.

It does help us, I think, if we understand the biology, and I have put my thoughts on this into the following essay, which was posted earlier on another BL board. It's a little on the long side but as short as I could make it.


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Why?

You may have always wondered, why am I attracted to boys?

One reason you haven’t been told is that no one has really proven how different sexualities are formed. We can make a fair approximation, though, but then the real problem arises. The matter seems abstract and it’s hard to read through. Boring, you might say. Still, if you really want to know, the answer is what it is. It can’t be turned into a Harry Potter novel. But I am going to do my best here to make it readable.

Let’s rule out one thing right at the top. The origin of boylove is not purely genetic. We already know from studies of identical twins (who really are perfectly genetically identical) that they often have different sexual orientations, such as gay vs. straight. So there is no gene for boylove.

It’s also not purely an opinion, habit, fashion or lifestyle. We can see from fetishes that people will become permanently fixed on seeing certain things as ultra-sexy as a result of childhood experiences. There is nothing they can do about it; they are stuck with these sexual ideas permanently. For example, a 4 year old spanked with a shoe on the rear end by his 20 yo uncle may develop a lifelong shoe fetish and always be turned on by being whacked by the shoe of a cute guy. There’s no gene for shoe fetish either, but, because the 4 year old brain is still growing and developing, the shoe fetish gets hard-wired into it for life. Biologists call this process “imprinting.” It happens at a young age and it determines a lot of what and who you will be attracted to.

You can sexually imprint a bunch of goose chicks with anything you want as long as you substitute it for their mother. For example, if you take them from their mother and put a big blue ball in the nest, they will grow up only being sexually attracted to big blue balls. A Nobel prize-winning Austrian animal behaviour scientist called Konrad Lorenz wrote several good books about this sort of thing in the 1940’s and ‘50’s, such as King Solomon’s Ring. He even imprinted geese on himself so they would only try to mate with him. How’s that for perving?

With humans, you can’t just replace mom with a beach ball and have babies who grow up lusting only beach balls. We are a lot more complicated than geese. But we still have an imprinting system. The thing that makes it terribly complicated is that all our impressions, even at an early age, are filtered through something very complex, the human brain. In fact, the human brain has some simple bits, but our imprinting system is filtered by the most complicated part of all, our self-consciousness.

The reason for this is very simple in principle. Sexuality relates to what is similar to us, but also to what is different enough to be of interest (To be exact, it relates to what, in reproductive sex, is different enough to be of genetic value). So we need to know what is ourself and what is too close to ourself, so that if we are hetero, we don’t have incest and produce bad offspring. We need to know what is too far from ourself so that we don’t try to mate with chimpanzees or horses and thus make no offspring at all. There is a happy medium someplace in between too Self and too Other, consisting of people we can mate with who are right for us and, if we are hetero, right for our genetics, producing good offspring.

So there are three main questions that need to be answered by very young children whose sexualities are in the process of development: what is my Self (or someone too similar to me)? What is Other (or someone or something too different from me)? and What is the right distance in between Self and Other for recognizing someone I desire? These questions are not answered automatically by biology: they are answered by the conscious impressions very young children get about who they are. And then the imprinting process engraves them into us in a permanent way.

Going back to the people we desire, when people talk about who attracts them the most, they often talk about finding a Better Half, a partner, a complement, or (as in the bible) a “help meet.” I think these expressions are very accurate. I would say that somewhere between Self, where there is little or no sexual attraction, and distant Other (like another species), where again there is probably little or no attraction, there is what you might call Otherself, which is where attraction lives.

The fact that different people have different sexual orientations shows that Otherself is not the same for all people.

Before I talk about how it becomes different, something has to be said about the consciousness of very small children under 6 yo. We often think of consciousness as being made up of things we can put into words, or that we think in words. Or at least, we think of it as what we can clearly understand. Actually, this is only a fraction of consciousness, and it is a rather careful and slow-moving fraction. There is a whole other array of much quicker mind abilities we have that are on the level of intuition or “gut feeling” or, in sports or driving, “instant reflex.” A very good popular book called Blink by Malcolm Gladwell has just come out recently to introduce newcomers to the latest scientific support for this ancient topic, which is also the bread-and-butter of zen Buddhism, eastern Orthodox christian mysticism, and many other traditional systems for perfecting excellence.

Small children have barely learned to speak, so their spoken consciousness is not the main part of their mind activity. Most of the impressions they take in and act on are on the intuitive level. They cannot find words to express most of what motivates them. So nothing about what I am going to say about their impressions here relates to clear, speakable, conscious thought.

People now know from studies of transsexuals that most kids are around 2-3 yo when they gain an impression of whether they are male or female. Some boys at this point form the permanent impression that they are girls and become male-to-female transsexuals; some girls likewise become female-to-male transsexuals. As with sexual orientation, if you look at identical twins, when one becomes transsexual, the other tends not to (see http://www.mygenes.co.nz/transsexuality.htm). So this is really an intuitive conscious impression of “who I am” that becomes hard-wired into the developing brain. There is no gene for transsexuality.

Some time after you “decide” if you’re a boy or a girl, some of the implications of this choice start to come out. You begin to be told what boys must do and what girls must do, and you also start to find out what other boys or girls do. So several months after the “what am I in terms of what I basically am” decision is made (boy vs. girl), there’s another decision needed which can roughly be called “what am I in terms of what I am able or willing to do.” This is a much more complicated decision than the first one because it relates to power and control.

Around the time this second decision is being made, the imprinting that leads to sexual orientation and other sexual attractions is happening. Somehow, power and control are very closely related to sexual development. For example, if people can remember how their fetishes, such as shoe fetishes, got started, there is often embarrassment or humiliation involved, in other words, a feeling of profound helplessness instead of being in control. Besides that feeling of helplessness, some reference to the more sexual parts of the body like the genitals or the butt is also usually needed to get a fetish going. Four year old boys who are terribly embarrassed because they wet their pants in kindergarten might go on to have a fetish about similar things; boys made to wear diapers at that age may have a life-long diaper fetish. Being spanked may lead to a lifelong fascination with that. There are other fetishes that don’t explicitly involve feeling out of control, but this kind of fetish is a good illustration of how sexual imprinting works. The classic line psychologists use to explain these sexual fetishes is, “he wants to re-live this primal scene in a way that gives him control over it.”

I suspect that when we realize we are boys or girls, we don’t realize at first how broad-ranging this decision actually is. Therefore when we come to the second decision point, “what am I in terms of what I am able or willing to do” we find out that a big part of what we thought of as part of ourself has to be given up. I think most boys realize at this point, not earlier, that there are many soft, nurturing, gentle, motherly characteristics that they can’t hold on to, so to speak, as part of their own personalities. These lost, magical, wonderful characteristics of women become the main features of the Otherself for them, the person they will be attracted to as their sexual complement. The lost characteristics are seen to belong also with the distinctive female body shape, so this is not just abstraction – it is also physical. Boys who go through this become heterosexuals, pure and simple. What is the connection to the paragraph above about fetishes? Well, it’s subtle, but in both cases, something is lost from the Self. In developing male heterosexuality, female characters are lost; in fetishes the Self’s feeling of control over something is lost. Sexuality consists of regaining these lost things in a setting of intimacy and, often, its ultimate symbol, bodily wetness.

Now, suppose that when you, as a boy, discover what boys are supposed to be like, it all seems, intuitively, rather unattractive. You are supposed to become a tough little git who likes heavy machinery, throwing things and aggression, whereas actually, maybe because you’re not very aggressive by nature, you are really more in tune with what the girls are doing. However, you already know full well you are not a girl yourself; you just identify with their way of doing power. In that case, what is given up in your “what am I in terms of what I am able or willing to do” decision is your sense of yourself as an ideal male, a powerful ‘real boy’ who can do all those junior he-man things. This becomes your Otherself. You retain a bunch of the gentle female characteristics. In that case, you grow up to be the classic diva-worshipper type gay man who is probably very turned on by a well muscled hunk.

Now, next example, suppose you feel that you are being forced by your circumstances as a boy to be taking a harder and more aggressive path than you are really are comfortable with, and yet you don’t really identify with girls and don’t feel like giving your ideal maleness up. The way your consciousness is working, all the vulnerable, soft, sweet, spontaneous gentle characteristics that you are obliged to lose don’t seem to belong to women, but rather to an ideal boy who was once you or part of you, or someone like a little brother who needed protection. In that case your sexual attraction goes to that Otherself who is a lost beautiful magical boy and you become a boylover. Your dreams and fantasies when you are 8 yo or older may often relate to rescuing or protecting boys.

There is a special case that is a little like the last paragraph and a little like fetish development. Suppose, at around this age where imprinting is going on, you are subjected to rape or other sexual aggression or interference by a man. In that case you lose control of the sexual parts of your body at the same time as the vulnerable, gentle, beautiful side of you is being violated and requiring defense by the tougher parts of your personality. Your inner beautiful boy has essentially been cut out of you and put in a position where he needs your protection, at the same time as sexual humiliation has set you up for strong imprinting. Perhaps under other circumstances you might not have been a boylover, but this abuse event has made you one through a sort of fetish development.

These four examples are just extremes of the process. The intuitive mind is fuzzy and there is lots of room in perceptions of what is Self, what is Other and what is Otherself to allow for people to become bisexual, non-effeminate gay, BL/gay, BL/straight, BL/bi and so on. The important thing is, though, that whatever your mind in those early years has understood as being your Otherself, that thing has been wired up in neurons in your brain that are only formed at one time in your life and never again. You can’t redevelop a new sexuality no matter what mental (or religious) exercises you do. It would be the same as trying to become a transsexual and to feel deeply that you are a woman instead of a man, to the point where you need sex-change surgery. This sort of thing just can’t be done at a later age. You are what you are.

It’s a wonderful process, in a way. It’s our benefit from having conscious rather than animal minds. It comes out of having massive human brainpower. Everything that is successful about the human species is connected to it. Yes, for some of us, the result is very socially inconvenient. That’s only because humans lack the philosophical sophistication, so far, to make their social systems fit their biology. Understanding sexual development just might help that process.

By the way, you won’t find this exact same explanation anywhere else. Most elements of it are scientifically supported and quite conventional, but the “what am I in terms of what I am able or willing to do” decision is not to be found in the literature as far as I know. I think that’s because people have a fundamental inhibition about thinking about issues related to power and control. We become worried we will fall apart when we think about these things. This is really the chief handicap of our current civilization and the surprise ultimate explanation of why boylovers and boyhood sexuality are objects of panic and hysteria. We'll only really make progress when people stop panicking about power and control in relation to sexuality. An appropriate understanding of our relationships with the boys who want to associate with us will follow from that.