Fiance raises some very important issues which rightfully so flare up from time to time on this site, because it is a very, pun intended, eunuch site.
A combination of stories which by definition are fantasy, and these are sexual, erotic, yet involving desexing, or neuteuring, so even the erotic content is unusual, while at the same time, it is a place of factual, and very enjoyable, serious discussion.
That is a fascinatiing and powerhouse combination.
Personally, I've always shied away from stories involving too much violence, blood and gore here or elsewhere, or focusing on the causation of pain, even in adult settings, and like others, the harmation of actual children is anathema to me.
However, there may be another reason some retreat into the historical mode beyond the fact that such things "actually happened."
It takes the writer even further into the statment of the artistic world where not only is this not actually happenning, it's not even happening in any serious contemporary "now."
The contemporary now, at least in America by some, is turning into delusional understandings,that "children" can be defined by statute state by state and that under 21 or 18, one is a minor. This is vital and good in many reasons and circumstances, but it hardly true biologicaly or culturally elsewhere, and certainly not historically.
With such shortened life spans heretofore, death expected at 40, a person of 13-14 would hardly have been an adolescent, but in fact a truly perceived to be adult, as the Bar-Mitzvh ritual shows us.
While the contemporary Jewish boy might still be a kid, I doubt he was in historical times, they weren't kidding, you were grown up then, and I strongly suspect you are still literally so in in contemporary Amazon tribes, can't imagine you are being long babied with kindergarten, you join the adults, and become adult, as quickly as possible and reproduce when puberty hits.
If other people then and now don't understand the ludicrous notion for some now in America that playing "tag" on school grounds now is "harmful" you can hardly blame them from recoiling from such absurdities.
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Art, erotic fantasies, these are very slippery slopes, remembering adolescent masturbatory fantasies and projecting them now into a current "it was/it should have been..." I feel that is legitimate.
Some people are artists, Anne Rice, who has written about castration, or Vladimir Nabokov with his "Lolita"...welll, most of us are not at that level, but they pull it off.
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I don't know what the answer is here, because I too start to feel uncomfortable with what in some cases could be pedophliac tendencies in some, while others are in fact recreating what could have been.
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To throw this yet way off in another direction -- get a load of this one -- I don't feel that males and females understand one another anyway, because most of us are different genders, and I feel the blunt, impersonal, direct, very male, highly sexual fantasy of quick eager insertion and orgasm with no serious consequences is easily matched by its female equivalent, the soap opera, where no male or female works even in work settings, and everyone adopts the female fantasy of endless discussion of romance, affairs, and scandals, relationships, relationships, relationships, relationship, talking, talking, talking, over coffee and drinks, prefer drinks.
Both are fantasy distortions going off in extreme Yin and Yang directions despite the actual genders of people writing and producing and watching.
How could one distortion be more legitimate than the other?
And it still begs the question why are all of us fascinated with castration?
o-ramma to me and I think many others.