Foreword
Pedophilia, or the attraction of an older person toward one much younger, is a widely recognized phenomena in our society as well as in others. Social opinion of pedophiliacs, those who are subject to this attraction and carry it into overt forms of behavior, vary widely from one culture to another. As a very rough generalization we might begin by observing that societies which permit polygamy tend to look more leniently upon pedophilia; an aging man would be--likely to select a very young girl for his second or newest wife, and this would most likely be permissible within that society's framework of cultural norms.
Social prohibitions of pedophilia have not succeeded in eradicating it, however. Within our own society the marriage of an octogenarian to a teen-age bride is almost always good for some newspaper headlines and the stories are generally written with a tongue-in-cheek attitude, suggesting at once not only a widespread interest in such marriages but also a chiding, if not outright negative, attitude toward them. Our society even places legal restrictions upon the sexual attraction of the older for the young, thus the minimum age levels which our legislators set for consenting to sexual intercourse or for contracting a marriage. Despite these legal restrictions the attraction of the old for the young is strong enough that marriages are still contracted, love affairs still begun and consummated, which could easily be termed "pedophiliac" in nature.
Unfortunately, the term has not been defined strictly enough for us to be able to make hard and fast distinctions between that which is and is not pedophiliac in every case. How old is "Old," for example? How young must one party be, and how great must the discrepancy in ages be, in order for a sexual relationship to be pedophiliac? We do not have a formula for arriving at exact answers to these questions. Lacking the scientific precision necessary for a really profound treatment of these questions, we must turn to the realm of everyday usage in an effort at developing satisfactory working answers.
It becomes obvious, upon taking a common-sense view of the matter, that a mere arithmetical solution cannot be found. Thus, an affair between a man of fifty and a woman of thirty would hardly be considered pedophiliac; indeed, marriages involving age groupings of this sort occur daily throughout the country and never attract the least bit of attention from the public. An affair between a man of, say, thirty-five and a girl of fifteen, however, would be a very different story indeed and here, we can be sure, the public's reaction would not be at all the same.
This extreme example is good enough to suggest an important point to us. The public's opposition to pedophilia, as well as its interest, is most aroused when one of the partners is a young girl, perhaps even below the legal age of consent (which varies considerably from state to state). In reading popularized accounts of such marriages or affairs, one is often conscious of an underlying belief on the writer's part, a conviction that the older partner must have exercised some kind of trickery or force in order to carry out the scheme being described. This is not always the case; there have been well-documented instances of the younger partner being the aggressor in these relationships.
Most often the public's imagination presupposes an older man and a young girl when pedophilia is mentioned. Again, this is very far from being the rule in all cases. We do not have any accurate information about the extent of pedophilia, much less the composition of the partners. Thus we cannot determine whether the public imagination is correct in its assumption about the most prevalent form of pedophilia. We do know, however, that there are some cases in which older women are attracted to males much younger than themselves, and these cases are just as much an instance of the phenomenon pedophilia as any other.
Ann's Young Studs is a fictional rendition of one such case. It diverges from the public's assumptions in at least two respects: the female character who forms the central focus for the book is the oldest character in the book and the young males who become her partners in an amazing series of sexual escapades are definitely the aggressors. While the female character eventually becomes reconciled to having sex with males considerably younger than herself, she does so only after being forced into it; in no sense can she be considered the perpetrator of the deeds described in the pages that follow. Ann Gooden, the central character, thus emerges from the book as a very sympathetic figure.
It is certainly not our intention to suggest that every camp is the scene of such orgiastic happenings as are described in the following pages.
The fictional camp is just that, a creation of the author's imagination, and should not be understood as anything else. Nevertheless, we believe that the situation is entirely credible and could well be substantiated by references to events taken from everyday life.
-The Publisher