“The unadorned truth is, adolescent girls are horny as jackrabbits. It’s not their fault, nature designed it that way. For the protection of the species. And there’s nothing politics or religion can do to alter that physical reality, short of drugging the girls with medical depressants or siphoning off their hormones with rubber tubes. But because modern society is by nature unnatural, we’re in a state of absolute denial over it. Absolute denial. That our daughters, granddaughters, nieces, and little sisters might be highly charged sexual dynamos makes us so uncomfortable, so queasy, that we, men and women both, have to lie to ourselves and each other and pretend it doesn’t exist.
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“And you also have your own self to consider. Listen. Any adult male heterosexual who says he isn’t never turned on by pubescent girls is a liar or a geek, and you can tell him Bad Bobby said so. But we’re in denial over that, too. Serious denial. A man go Humbert-Humberting around in America, he’ll find himself thrown into the volcano, a sacrifice to appease the gods who’ve blighted humanity with all these nasty, unwanted, upsetting transgenerational cravings. The morality police’ll tar a romantically smitten fool like you with the same wire brush they use, justifiably, on the sicksacks and twisttops who actually prey on children and injure ’em out of a psychotic need to exercise power over somebody weaker than their own weak selves. The smut sniffers from the victimization industry are also into exercising power, remember, and drawing fair and intelligent distinctions has never been one of their long suits. Some of ’em, sad to say, are only seeking revenge for hurtful things that happened to
them as children—but, then, the same could be said of the child molesters. Two sides of the same unlucky coin. At any rate, we got us a climate where normal men are scared to admit, even in the mirror, that they occasionally get bit by the lust bug whilst gandering at a junior miss. And I reckon society’ll go right on lying about it until the day it reaches enlightenment.” In one swift gulp, he finished off his beer. “ ‘Course, as long as it keeps lying to itself about itself, there ain’t much chance of it ever becoming enlightened. Anyhow. Don’t do it, Swit. That’s my advice. For a dozen good reasons, don’t do it.”