/lit/ - Literature

It's extremely /lit/

20 The idea of having grown into a “man’s body” by mistake

I will use my own case as an example. There is an idea that has settled at the bottom of my consciousness. This idea is that at the point of bifurcation during puberty I may have taken the wrong path. Perhaps I was supposed to have blossomed into a “female body” but by some mistake I took a wrong turn toward the “body of a man,” or, to put it more accurately, I was forcibly compelled to take the path leading to the body of an adult male without my conscious will having any say in the matter. This is the sort of thing you often hear from people with gender identity disorder. I would speculate, however, that a much wider range of men are also able to understand this feeling.

As for why I have this idea of having grown into a man’s body by mistake, I think it is because ever since I hit puberty and my body began to change I have been unable to affirm myself as a being with a “man’s body.” As my body became that of an adult, it began to produce male hormones, grow muscles, acquire a more rugged, angular shape, grow more hair, and dirty itself with seminal fluid, and a strange odor began to emanate from somewhere inside me. That I was becoming this sort of body was something I could not accept at all during my adolescence. Even now I cannot honestly say that I am really happy to have the body of a man. Of course there is nothing to be done about it now, but I suspect there are in fact many men who feel as I do. They have perhaps remained silent about it because it is an extremely difficult thing to say out loud. They also probably try not to think about it very much, as in our society, having sufficient confidence in one’s own male body is connected to male honor.

Deep down inside me, there is a longing to return to the body I had when I was a young boy, a body that had not yet been transformed by male hormones, muscles, body hair, and semen. There is also a longing to take the other path, if I could, at the point of bifurcation during puberty and make a sharp about-face towards a “female body” that does not have any of these attributes. Deep within my consciousness I ruminate on these longings over and over again. And I am drawn to the bodies of eleven and twelve-year-old girls that stand at puberty’s point of bifurcation and are just beginning to turn towards a “female body.” I think to myself, “I wish I could have taken that other path like the body of this young girl,”and I feel a desire to slip my consciousness into her body and while inhabiting it experience her puberty from the inside. This is how my lolicon mentality arises. Here we see once again the psychological mechanism described at the end of Chapter Three.

What are /lit/'s favourite books about cute boys?

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann gets my vote.