The temptation of Saint Agnostic: 1

I've already mentioned that it's the youth who corrupt the adults and not the other way around. I suppose anyone can travel down the path toward ruin by indulging their vices, but in most of these cases, the person themselves is to blame. In a handful of cases, though, their vice actively seeks them out. I wish my vice were inanimate and could be kept at bay by simply not buying it. This mini-series, which should only take two posts, will show how easily my kind of temptation can sneak up on a person and how active of a role young girls have played in tempting me.

In part, this is just to collect and arrange my thoughts, but it's also dispel the myth that guys who like teenagers began with some sort of fetish which they nurtured and then acted on, trying to prey on helpless girls. At least in my case, the first one established contact with me first, and in all cases they provoked me, unrelentingly at times. A love of adolescents may, over time, come to occupy such a guy's thoughts, but that's not at all the "born monster" image that the lazy-minded are content to believe in. It's also a truism that if social sanctions forbid X, only those who are more risk-taking and liable to indulge their vices will seek X. Just as one example, in the Southern Slavic countries at the beginning of the 20th Century (or if we believe the commenter Gannon, in today's Argentina), a late-20s guy who prefers teenage girls would have been completely unremarkable, while it would have been strange in England, even going back several hundred years.

It should go without saying that vice here means "something that makes personal ruin more likely," and not something that is evil. Having now re-discovered the too taut texture of adolescent flesh, could the pleasure centers of my brain light up if I were forced into a relationship with an older-aged woman? It will happen some day, after all. (I plan to marry a very young girl, so that by the time she reaches that stage, I'll be too bogged down in paternal duties and the occasional discreet affair with pretty young things, paying for it if need be, to care about her skin condition.)

Although I didn't always have an eye for teenagers, they ambushed me almost as soon as possible. I was too insulated from the real world during college to have any contact with them, and besides -- college girls. I evaded them my first year after graduation; even during a three-month living-and-teaching stint in Barcelona, where I recall seeing them swarming around the city center, I was still too fascinated by my college-aged students. And after most people's fun year after college, they insulate themselves even further from the world of adolescents, obviously to their health.

It was that damned desire to teach. Satoshi Kanazawa and Mary Still looked at the General Social Survey and found that male teachers were more likely to be divorced than men in other professions or women in the same profession, and really this only held for secondary school teachers or college lecturers. The inference is that they're faced day after day with the sight of The Teenage Thigh, and cannot be content with women their own age. Anyone who's ever worked with teenagers knows that, while their faces look younger, and their muscles a bit more fit, it's the impossibly tight and luminescent skin on their thighs that is the most jarring to older males, who had previously become accustomed to steadily more slackening and opaque skin in women their age. And of course it's also the part they are happiest to display: regardless of the churning of fashion's wheel, young girls will always remain eager to show off how great the skin on their legs looks (damn them).

In the next part, I'll recount some specific instances. There are far too many to cover, but they're all pretty similar and reviewing just a few will serve to make the point: if you had seen, heard, felt, and smelled the things I have, you'd understand how easy it is to be tempted by and to fall for teenagers as an adult.