This is a historical topic, and maybe it is well known while I haven't been paying attention all this time, But I'll share it anyway because it's interesting and instructive, I think.

One of my kids had to read The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. Who didn't have to read it in school? Probably a minority because it is one of the most assigned books that school kids have to read. I read it way way back and liked it then, but I could hardly remember what it was about except that it was about a teenager's angst. But because the teacher gave them some non-trivial interpretative questions, I thought I'd re-read some parts and help my kid.

We-e-ell, I am reading some chapters and letting them filter through my, unfortunately, no longer innocent mind, and I am noticing this really weird emphasis on little children. Mind you, the protagonist is a teenage boy, but he grows weak in knees and waxes rhapsodic at the sight of "very cute" kids. These are a lot of thoughts about and descriptions of little children. I am thinking to myself: this is really weird. This is not how teenage boys see the world, this is not what they like. This book is either an allegory that goes over my head or something is weird about this author. I start googling, and the first thing that come up is this:

http://postflaviana.org/a-pedophile-fantasy-in-the-rye/

Very interesting, indeed. It mentions MK Ultra also.

Another interesting "discovery" has to do with Thomas Mann, a really-really big author of the 20th century, a literary giant. He was married and is not very connected to various scandals, as far as I know. But he has a novella called "Death in Venice" that tells a story of a middle aged man, a writer, who comes to Venice and meets and falls in love with a very beautiful 14-year-old boy. It turns out that this novella is based on a real life episode of Mann himself who fell i love with a boy. But according to his wife's diaries, the real-life boy who inspired this story was not 14, but 10!! We can only guess whether this boy was molested or Mann's "love" was purely Platonic.

What is this with these aesthetes and artistic souls? Do they get so surfeited with regular sex that they need to up the stakes in order to continue being stimulated?