Reply #134: I think we'll have to agree to disagree ...

[RoyGBiv]

And just leave it at that.

I don't disagree entirely with your position, nor especially your discussion of differences. I fully disagree on the utility of the poll you posted, which is the agree to disagree part because I think we're at an impasse there. I could discuss the issue more fully, but I have been unable to find the appropriate articles I would need to do so online in a form that actually allows you to read the entire study and its conclusions. I've become somewhat obsessive about keeping abreast of mental health issues related to sexual abuse, and I have never run across anything that suggests people are able to predict as adults how they would have reacted to incidents that happened when they were children. More practically, what I have read has lead me to the conclusion that in almost all cases, be they male or female, any level of sexual encounter involving a power relationships (adult/child) has varying degrees of negative pyschological results.

I'll just offer one final comment on this line. I have not mentioned this before because, deep down, I think it's irrelevant, but perhaps it might explain a bit further how I think of all this. I didn't, for the most part, think negatively of the experiences I had when they were happening. At first, they were pleasurable, if a bit confusing. The negative psychological effects I experienced were not known even to me, much less anyone around me, until I was 19 years old, and those effects did not hit a dangerous point for my personal well-being until a few years after that, after the death of my grandmother, when I retreated into a bottle. I won't go into all the gory details of how it's all connected, just note that it is and that I, as an adult, could not have foreseen any of it, thinking as a 14 year old boy.