Oh, thanks for clarifying, Justine. I don't want to give you a hard time about not finding writing easy, I just thought that if you had access to an easier way of saying things, like in another language you knew, I should give you a chance to use that easier way. It's always better to post and not just read because posting keeps the board alive.

I am not sure I believe in a concept of "innocent sex play," because I think that prepube sexuality is much like ours, except that it is not so forceful and it has much less information to work with. Certainly many people will knowledge they were 'horny' as young kids. I had constant fantasies about cute boys starting from when I was 7 or so -- not about sex, since I had no idea it existed, but about loving them and bringing them to live with me. There are other bits about me at that age that I wouldn't air on an open board like this that convince me that I was never any more innocent than I am today. I just knew a lot less. 'Innocent of knowledge,' you could say, but not innocent of desire.

So, to me, kids' sex play can be completely non-adult in nature, but to call it 'innocent' is whitewashing the truth. When does sex play stop being innocent? If seven year olds playing doctor and exchanging feels are innocent, are twelve year olds innocent when they circle-jerk at scout camp? Are 16 year olds innocent when they suddenly find themselves hugging and jerking together during a sleepover? Was one of my friends innocent when he first managed to cruise himself a cute man (a 30-something schoolteacher, as it happened) at 16 in the local discount clothing store? I come from the gay community, and there is a lot of belief there about harmless sex play, which could include going to the baths and enlivening the posteriors of a series of occupants.

As for me, while I don't imagine God takes an ultra hard line against Christian young people experimenting a little, I think that sex is really best preserved for your primary relationship, if you can have one. Start playing it around and you end up in promiscuity world, which is just one of those places that I wouldn't want to live myself. All these gay guys finding themselves having sex with their best friend and then 6 weeks later shacking up with his boyfriend (and so ending THAT friendship, sometimes), and then 6 months after that having that 'ex' painfully snatched away by someone else's ex, and on and on. I recently told a friend I lived in a certain city during certain years, and he suddenly looked me up and down and said "no...!" He was almost sure that if I'd been there in the gay community then, looking as I do, he must have had sex with me! I'm not judging him -- he's a fine fellow -- but I am glad I can remember my sex partners vividly. My memory is no better than anyone else's, so you can infer that they were not in their dozens or their hundreds. Another friend went to San Francisco and had sex with 100 men in 30 days (he kept a notebook). To me, 'innocent sex play' is similar in intention to that way of life. It's not that the kids aren't innocent - it's that a lot of the gay guys, despite knowing about sex practices, are also pretty innocent. They can't figure out why, when they do fall in love, it's so hard to find a good constant man.

So no, I was talking about prepubes who approach older teens or men with a degree of real amorousness with overtones of outright horniness, and who, like the YF of one college student I once knew, can be very pleased to think of themselves as the older person's boyfriend even if they're only hugging intensely and not having sex.