My use of the word perv is the result of a search for a shorthand to refer to us as a group that isn’t profoundly binding like paedophile, which inflates the importance of erotic/romantic preferences to the point where they define the person holding them; or a term like Girl Lover, which doesn’t really escape the misplaced significance of the attractions it tries to label, and also lends itself to moralistic interpretations in its own way (‘a True Girl Lover would never do x or y, but in an ideal world might consider z with the permission of a girl’s parents, etc etc…’). Perv also has the advantages of being gender and age-neutral, and pointing to the real reason that we are here associating together as a group: that the bulk of society thinks of us as perverts. If it wasn’t in shorthand I’d need to use a term like Individuals Unjustly Persecuted For Their Misunderstood Attraction Towards Other Individuals Whom Society Deems To Young To Be Attractive, or something similar. I’ll stick with perv, unless someone comes up with something better.

And I’m not hugely bothered that people might view the term as “soiled”. The term paedophile is also soiled, as is any other term we pick for ourselves destined to be. Perversion is relative, anyway. It doesn’t imply wrong any more than paedophilia does. Besides, there’s a fine tradition of persecuted groups adopting words with pejorative meanings and making them their own ;)