As you might have noticed by now (for the exactly zero valid values of 'you' that are not also 'me'). I am on a project to rewrite the Hardy Boys books as erotica. Various folks have pointed out this is a risky business, especially inasmuch as the original books (from 1927 to 1959[?])—at least those by Leslie McFarlane—gave Frank Hardy's age as 16 and Joe Hardy's as 15. Despite there being every possibility that two boys in their mid-teens should be well adjusted and mature in their experience of lust—enough to seize sexual agency where and when and with whom they want—it is obviously not legally ok to write pornography about a 15 year old.
By 1959 when the Stratemeyer Syndicate began a systematic 'update' of the original novels (including a number of complete rewrite with new plots), the brothers' aged had been upped 2 years, to 18 and 17.
I personally feel it is more obscene to insist a 17-year-old is necessarily 'a child'—and that any sex shared with that 17-year-old by someone above 18 is necessarily molestation—than it is to write fiction that includes and celebrates that kind of sex. But I also maintain I have no interest, as I plod along from middle age to old age, in having sex with youngsters.
What does continue to interest me is the years in my own life roughly between 13 and almost 18 when I was burning for sexual activity and had no idea how to initiate it. In my freshman year of high school (14–15), I spent every second of second period wishing, with exquisite, feverish, horned-up self-torture, that I could figure out a way to get my mouth on Coach Treen. I had never seen a more beautiful pair of thighs in my life. They were like double-wide trailers, only for legs. And had I had the wherewithal to attempt that contact—and had Coach Treen agreed, which seems unlikely—then it would have been an unforgivable insult to me, my agency, and my rights as a thinking human being to arrest him for having had sex with a minor. (A minor in his charge as a teacher—yes, ok, that's valid: he definitely should not have agreed even if I had gotten up the gumption to proposition him.)
But the point is, that's one of any number of persons/occasions throughout my teen years where I wish to this day I had had some sort of mentor—a slutty older brother, a gay uncle, whatever—that could have advised me on the art of getting my dick wet. Because holy fuck I woulda. That being the case, what right have I to deny Frank and Joe Hardy their own sexual enlightenment, fulfillment, apotheosis?
Anyway, told you that to tell you this: What I'm writing is parody, so it doesn't matter what ages Mr. McFarlane or any of the rest of the Franklin W. Dixon brigade assigned to these two youngsters: for my purposes, Frank and Joe Hardy are of the legal age of consent.
Oh, by the way: when the first episode of the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries series aired on ABC on 19770130, Parker Stevenson, who played Frank Hardy, was 24, and Shaun Cassidy, who played Joe, was 18.
