In his essay, Mirkin compares society's current hysteria over childhood sexual abuse and pedophilia to previous generations' attitude toward feminism and homosexuality. No one reading his measured, academic prose with an open mind could take what he writes as an endorsement of sex between a 3-year-old and a grown man. His goal is simply to explore how behaviors that violate social norms are dismissed in ferocious terms so as to preclude any rational debate.

Cultures, as Mirkin suggests, tend to treat their own values as timeless and immutable. But most rational people, if pressed, would probably recognize the fallacy of that notion, at least in certain spheres. It's no secret that some societies have valued erotic mentoring relationships between boys and adult men. It's such a cliché to mention ancient Greece -- there's a lot about ancient Greece that no one would want to replicate today -- but it's the obvious case in point. Some non-Western societies have also institutionalized man-boy relations as an important milestone in the transmission of knowledge and authority from one generation to the next.

And every society has its laws. But the problem with the law, especially when it comes to sex, is that it creates rules for a realm of human experience that often defies them. Sexual relations between people are messy, chaotic and fraught with ambiguity -- and every society interprets and regulates them differently. And so, in the developed world today, age of consent laws differ so wildly from country to country -- even, within the U.S., from state to state -- that it renders absurd the notion of some universal understanding of the meaning, and potential danger, of sex between adults and teenagers.

Let me interrupt myself for a moment here to issue what has become, in discussions of this issue, a ritual defense. It's ridiculous to have to say this, but -- for the record -- I don't support sex between young children and adults. Members of the demonized North American Man-Boy Love Association and other proponents of true pedophilia, which is generally defined as a sexual interest in prepubescents, would argue that such a thing as consensual relations can exist in such circumstances. But I don't see how a 7-year old could possibly consent to sex in any meaningful way. As a little boy, I played doctor enough times with Dorothy, the girl next door, to understand that many small children love to explore each other's bodies (although it may be telling that I was much more interested in exploring her butt than any other aspect of her 6-year-old nakedness). But that's a far cry from sexual contact between an adult and a first-grader.

However, adolescence -- let's say starting at 12 or 13 for some boys, at 14 or 15 for a great many more -- is a different matter entirely. Gay men compare coming-out stories like kids today trade Pokémon cards, and over the years I've heard many tales of teenage escapades with older men, of sex with an uncle, sex with a married neighbor, sex with an unknown man driving a shiny Chevrolet, sex with a teacher. Sex in a park at night, sex in a train station toilet, sex in a stranger's home. Sometimes the sex was great, sometimes awful. Sometimes the experience was tender, sometimes rough, sometimes somewhere in between. Most of the time the kids wanted it, like I did; they were just a bit braver, or more desperate.

Or maybe they were simply too horny to stop themselves. Edmund White, the noted gay writer, recounts with relish how he started cruising grown men from the age of 13 or 14 at beaches and public toilets in Chicago. "I was very oversexed, absolutely driven wild by desire," he says. "I would pick up men, and then they would abandon me as quickly as possible because they were worried that I was jail bait. The first one was a handsome architect, who actually had children older than me. I was absolutely fascinated by him, and I seduced him. I followed him to his car, walked right up to him and started talking to him. My mother was away and I said, 'Come back to my apartment.' And it was terrific."

"It was terrific." Even relaying those words -- though they represent White's honest appraisal of what he experienced -- makes me feel uneasy. I am not immune to the zeitgeist or to expressions of social disapproval, and I have felt a little queasy when I've told people I'm writing about sex between adolescent boys and men. The words "child molester" and "child abuse" hold the same power to disturb and repulse me as they do most people -- as is intended by those who wield the terms indiscriminately to refer to any sexual contact between anyone under the age of 18 and anyone older.

Gay friends warned me to be careful and judicious, not just because the notion felt threatening to them but because they were concerned about the rabid response I might receive. Straight friends have expressed shock at the very idea, although once I lay out my qualified opinions on the subject -- that the point I want to make is that it's absurd to categorically insist that every contact between men and adolescent boys is harmful and wrong -- they concede that there may be room for debate, but still ... And then we quickly change the subject.

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