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I'd like to pick up on something important Deva said about age difference possibly being crucial and of immense value. This doesn't mean that sleeping with people around the same age as you is less valuable, but in my experience it's really different.
I have felt like a student in my relationship: intellectually, and sometimes emotionally. A. has been an unofficial third supervisor for both of my academic theses: she reads almost everything I write, and she edits really closely. While this can be terrifying at times, she also pushes me to take my ideas to their limits, which no official academic supervisor would have time for, or would feel comfortable with. I tend to edit her work too, but there's a level at which I won't necessarily understand it, completely. It's taken me a long time to learn how to sit easily with this difference in our knowledges, and not feel inadequate or 'less than'. Now that I'm used to it, I feel really lucky and blessed. And I tend to do a bit more chopping wood and carrying water to sustain a karmic balance. We have really different sets of friends, which is another big difference from my previous relationships. That, also felt weird for a while but now I'm just used to it. We have very different taste in music and 'cultural' stuff, but this just means that sometimes we both learn more, and sometimes I go to concerts with other friends. Easy.
About the 'teenager' thing, and the concerns Haus brought up about adolescents not necessarily being in control of their sexuality, and not necessarily being totally sexually mature even if they act like it... (Is that what you meant, Haus?) From when I was about 13-19, I remember feeling bored witless by the emotional capabilities and interests of people my own age. Clumsy, inexperienced, obsessed with computer games or makeup and crap boy bands, self-absorbed, underdeveloped social skills. Most other adolescents seemed pretty undesirable at that point. Frankly, no-one my age seemed interested in sex in the particular way I was -- about diversity and exploration rather than just getting off. So boring! I wanted to meet someone older, more intelligent, more complex, who could teach me how to think and how to love and how to fuck. No-one over 18 actually took an interest, however. Once I did have sex with older people, I realised that most of them weren't any more mature; sometimes spectacularly less so. If someone had told me I was too young for them, at that point, I would have felt humiliated and mightily pissed off. It would have made everything worse. I absolutely loathed being classed as a teenager, found it discriminatory and undignified.
What I'm getting at is, just as adulthood is not a linear plane of development, that progresses along a set of definable stages in adulthood, neither is childhood or adolescence. Evidently there are adolescents who, by force of experience or coincidence, end up feeling way more adult and emotionally mature than adolescents are expected to be. With that may come more 'mature' or complex desires. If you tell them it's inappropriate to meet those desires with the kind of people who might know the most about them, and/or play a role in exploring them, those adolescents may feel as if their autonomy was not being respected. And they'd be right.
(I'm not saying that there isn't an issue with intergenerational sex and the possible destructive power dynamics thereof. I'm just being relentlessly Foucauldian: no form of power is entirely repressive, or entirely 'bad'; no form, either, is entirely 'good' or productive. If intergenerational sex has destructive elements, then it must also have positive ones. -- To simplify the fuck out of Foucault, who would turn in his grave if he read this.) |
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