An interesting fact literally no one believes me about is that until relatively recently it was sexological consensus that women don’t have paraphilias.
When I say this, people are like “okay, Ozy means some weird, fringe sexologist who believes bizarre things that no one else agrees with, obviously they can’t actually mean that within our lifetimes sexologists believed women don’t have kinks.” But, no, really. Here is a quote from page 524 of the DSM-IV, published in 1994 and updated in 2000:
Except for Sexual Masochism, where the sex ratio is estimated to be 20 males for each female, the other Paraphilias are almost never diagnosed in females, although some cases have been reported.
To be clear, “paraphilia” is a term which includes most of what we’d consider to be kinks; there is no requirement that a paraphilia be obligatory for sexual arousal, and in fact it is explicitly mentioned that some paraphiliacs are aroused by sex where their paraphilia is not included. Paraphilias defined in the DSM-IV include:
- Sexual Masochism: “recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving the act (real, not simulated) of being humiliated, beaten, bound, or otherwise made to suffer”
- Sexual Sadism: “recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving acts (real, not simulated) in which the psychological or physical suffering (including humiliation) of the victim is sexually exciting to the person.”
- Fetishism: “recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving the use of nonliving objects (e.g., female undergarments).”
Special shoutout to transvestic fetishism which literally could not be diagnosed in a woman or a queer man.
The DSM-IV defined ‘paraphilia’ as a diagnosis by inclusion: paraphilias were a set of specific sexual interests, examples given above. The DSM-5 defines ‘paraphilia’ as follows (pg. 685):
The term paraphilia denotes any intense and persistent sexual interest other than sexual interest in genital stimulation or preparatory fondling with phenotypically normal, physically mature, consenting human partners.
(“Phenotypically normal” is intended to exclude visibly physically disabled and transgender people, as well as perhaps members of some other groups. Please note that “paraphilia” and “paraphiliac disorder” are distinguished; a paraphiliac disorder causes mental distress or is a threat to the psychological or physical wellbeing of others. It is possible that what the DSM-5 intends is that, for example, female crossdressers are all unusually well-adjusted.)
This is what the DSM-5 has to say about the prevalence of paraphilias:
- “The highest possible lifetime prevalence for voyeuristic disorder is approximately 12% in males and 4% in females.”
- “The prevalence of exhibitionistic disorder in females is even more uncertain but is generally believed to be much lower than in males.”
- “It has been estimated that 2.2% of males and 1.3% of females had been involved in bondage and discipline, sadomasochism, or dominance and submission in the past 12 months” [about masochistic disorder]
- “Fetishistic disorder has not been systematically reported to occur in females. In clinical samples, fetishistic disorder is nearly exclusively reported in males.”
- “Transvestic disorder is rare in males and extremely rare in females.”
- Silence about the prevalence of sexual sadism in women.
This is definitely an improvement on the insistence that women essentially never have paraphilias other than masochism, which has twenty men for every woman (!); still, there is an insistence that the paraphilias are extraordinarily rare in women.
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Why was this a sexological consensus? I present a few hypotheses.
First, most research on paraphilias is conducted on a sex-offender population. For various reasons, women are less likely to be sex offenders. Sexual crimes by women may be underreported and underprosecuted; women may also be legitimately less likely to engage in many sex offenses.
Second, the definition of ‘paraphilia’ is androcentric. Consider omegaverse. “I get off on a man going into heat and then getting knocked up by another man with a dog dick” is certainly a sexual interest in something other than genital stimulation or preparatory fondling with phenotypically normal, physically mature, consenting human partners. However, it does not fit in any of the current paraphilias. Conversely, there are paraphilias for sexual interests that are more typically male, such as an interest in jerking off into a shoe. This is likely to be a self-perpetuating problem; since paraphilias are defined androcentrically, paraphilias are underdiagnosed in women, and there is no way for psychiatrists to discover that they should correct the definitions.
Third, there is a lot of stigma on women admitting their sexuality, and many women would feel reluctant admitting their sexual interests to a psychiatrist or even on an anonymous survey. (As a very obvious example, studies consistently report heterosexual men having a higher mean number of sexual partners than heterosexual women.)
Fourth and most importantly, women are less likely than men to be aware of what their kinks are, especially before the present day. There are both biological and cultural reasons for this. Biologically, if one has a penis, arousal is more obvious and the mechanics of masturbation are more intuitive. Having a male-typical level of testosterone also usually gives you more interest in sex than having a female-typical level of testosterone does. Culturally, women’s sexuality tends to be shamed and stigmatized as “slutty.” Female sexual exploration and curiosity tends not to be encouraged as much as male sexual exploration and curiosity, particularly historically.
Among all age groups, women are both less likely to have ever masturbated and less likely to have masturbated in the past year. It is likely that many women who have never masturbated or who masturbate rarely also don’t sexually fantasize or fantasize rarely. They may have completely failed to notice what their kinks are.
The self-hating man with a paraphilia might go to a psychiatrist for help fixing himself. The self-hating female woman with a paraphilia might very well never realize she has a paraphilia and instead conclude that she just doesn’t like sex that much.
How did this change? Why, in the past thirty years, have we gone from “women don’t have paraphilias” to “don’t be ridiculous, Ozy, of course it wasn’t sexological consensus that women don’t have paraphilias”?
I believe the answer is our friend the Internet.
Perhaps due to sexual stigma, women seem particularly averse to buying porn. In 1970, if a woman wished to purchase erotic literature, she would have to go to a literal physical store and buy it from an actual shop clerk and then maybe display it on her actual shelves where people could see it and judge her. Today, all she has to do is search on Amazon and download The Devil: Devil’s Playground Duet #1 to her Kindle and literally no one will have any idea.
We’ve seen an explosion in the past twenty years of art, erotica and porn aimed at women. I talk about fandom a lot, but I think it’s equally obvious in the romance novel world: since the development of the Kindle, there have been a lot more erotic romance novels with more and filthier sex that caters more directly to common female interests. This is a self-perpetuating cycle. If you have porn that’s catering to you– porn with sexy men in it rather than sexy women, for example– you’re more likely to notice the sorts of things you get off on.
Cards on the table: I suspect that, while men might be more likely to have certain paraphilias and women might be more likely to have certain other paraphilias, women and men are equally likely to have intense, persistent interests in sexual activities other than genital stimulation or preparatory fondling with phenotypically normal, consenting adult human partners. I believe, in the next few decades as the number of people who had access to porn as teenagers increases, we will see more and more women with paraphilias, and this fact will become obvious.
Arrioche said:
“…in fact it is explicitly mentioned that some paraphiliacs.”
I think you lost the last part of that sentence.
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demiandproud said:
I remember reading one of the oldest Kirk/Spock fics still available online. In its preface, it spoke of what a revolutionary power it was for a woman to see and write about beautiful men, especially in a sexualised manner. It boggled my mind to think of writing slash as an act of female sexual empowerment, but it also made a lot of sense.
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demiandproud said:
I may have misremembered that. Can’t find citation
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Aapje said:
Or that it doesn’t tend to cause distress in women, because society is far more forgiving of women in pants than men in skirts.
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tailcalled said:
“To be clear, “paraphilia” is a term which includes most of what we’d consider to be kinks; there is no requirement that a paraphilia be obligatory for sexual arousal, and in fact it is explicitly mentioned that some paraphiliacs are aroused by sex where their paraphilia is not included.”
The DSM-IV-TR has Criterion B too, which requires paraphilias to lead to problems such as distress or harm. The DSM-5 distinguishes between paraphilias and paraphilic disorders, with the latter requiring that they lead to distress or harm too.
I think it would be interesting to look into whether distress from paraphilias is more gendered than the paraphilias themselves. A priori, I’d have assumed that women would be more distressed about having them, but I feel like you’re much more likely to hear about men than women who’re distressed about their paraphilias. Seems like this would be interesting to study more.
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tailcalled said:
Oops, apparently missed the sentence where you mentioned this for the DSM-5. But the point about this being included in the DSM-IV-TR too is also worth bringing up.
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Lawrence D'Anna said:
“most research on paraphilias is conducted on a sex-offender population.”
😳
That might be the most catastrophic instance of a selection bias I’ve ever heard of.
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Noname said:
Is not that women don’t have kinky sex, but that they are far less likely than men to be obsessive about it, or in contemporary parlance, women’s sexuality is more fluid.
An example, both from my experience and relevant literature, is that lesbians tend to have had plenty of sex with men. There was even a study that claimed that lesbians had on average more male partners than heterosexual women did. On the other hand there are plenty of men who are exclusively homosexual.
If paraphilia is not about if you engage in a kink or not, but how important it is for your sex life, then it may well be that women rarely suffer from paraphilias.
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ozymandias said:
If women’s sexuality is more fluid, then surely they would be more likely to have ever had an intense, persistent, and recurring sexual interest in something other than genital stimulation and preparatory fondling?
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tailcalled said:
It would be more likely for women to have sexual interests in something other than genital stimulation and preparatory fondling, but less likely for it to be persistent.
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ozymandias said:
Persistent is only over a period of six months, though.
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Aapje said:
If ‘intense’ is measured by problematic behavior, then the generally relatively passive nature of women’s sexuality may cause behavior that simply does not qualify nearly as often.
Also, I think that being thing-orientated correlates with the kind of obsessions that people consider more remarkable. So given that studies have found higher substantially thing-orientation in men, male obsessions may seem more peculiar, in the same way that society considers it more peculiar to want to know everything about trains than about celebrities.
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opisaheretic said:
Not a lesbian, but it seems like there’s multiple things going on. It seems like some lesbians experience “exceptions” to their primary pattern of attraction to women. It also seems like some lesbians have slept with and/or dated men, but it was before they realized they were gay. They’re not meaningfully fluid.
Believing you are straight because we assume everyone is straight by default seems pretty common. Though of course that doesn’t account for the disparities between gay women and gay men in this regard.
But above Ozy discusses the factors that limit some women’s sexual self-knowledge, and they could easily apply to sexual orientation too. That jibes with what I’ve heard from some lesbians who have a history with men.
It’s genuinely hard to figure out how other people experience sexuality (since it’s inherently subjective and private, at least in part). A good, though exaggerated, film example of this cluelessness occurs in But I’m A Cheerleader. An Internet example would be the blog closetedlesbianopinions, which iirc often discusses this type of pre-lesbian confusion.
I’m not scientifically literate enough to comment on the finding you brought up except “that’s interesting I guess”.
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Aapje said:
It seems possible that lesbians would be relatively more likely to try out various men to see if their lack of sexual excitement is due to the men they are sleeping with, rather than a general aversion to men. Such a strategy is also much easier for women than for (gay) men, because of how easy it is for women to find male (casual) sex partners.
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gazeboist said:
Do you think the narrative/visual gender gap is a real thing, or just an artifact of bias in the porn?
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Mircea said:
I don’t know if it’s just my overly kinky female self, but I can’t imagine anything less sexy than ‘genital stimulation and preparatory fondling’.
Wonder how not knowing/not accepting female kinks plays into the increasingly accepted idea that women’s sex drives easily die from boredom.
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Sophia Kovaleva said:
Fun fact: here’s what the “drug facts” sheet from the box of cyproterone acetate that I bought a year ago says:
A careful reader might notice that if this weren’t real and as such completely horrifying, it would have been decent forced feminization porn (“oh, we discovered that you’re a gross pervert – now we’ll force you to transition!”), but also, it is indicated for being horny and kinky as a man, but not as a woman. That is despite the fact that women’s horniness tends to respond to the level of serum testosterone similarly to men’s horniness, so it would have worked (to be fair, if you really really want to, you can remain horny and kinky even with literally undetectable serum testosterone – tried that! – but you have to have a firm philosophical devotion to being a degenerate for that, which most people don’t have). But since Russian medical establishment is still convinced that horny and kinky women don’t exist, there’s no such indication.
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Jeremy L Redlien said:
“(As a very obvious example, studies consistently report heterosexual men having a higher mean number of sexual partners than heterosexual women.)”
Doesn’t this difference in number of partners between heterosexual men and women basically go away if your study bothers to include sex workers? Or at least I remember seeing a study that was basically like “oh yeah, so that’s why this happens…”
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Actually Autistic Blogs List said:
Here’s an example of how that might work. Consider a community of 1000 men and 1000 women. 10 women are sex workers and the rest are monogamous. If all men visit the sex workers, their average number of partners is ten or more while the women average just one.
It doesn’t require sex workers (though that helps), just different distributions of promiscuity between men and women.
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lucian said:
If you take the sex workers into account the women should actually still have the same average as the men.
Suppose 990 men are each dating one woman, and additionally see each of the sex workers, for 11 partners each. A further 10 men see each of the sex workers but do not have any addition partners, for 10 partners each.
(990*11) + (10*10) = 10990; 10990/1000 gives us an average of 10.99 partners per man.
For the women, there are 990 women with 1 partner each, and 10 women who are sex workers and have 1000 partners each.
(990*1) + (10*1000) equals, again, 10990, which divided by 1000 gives us an average of 10.99 partners per woman.
Is there some error I made that I’m not seeing?
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Actually Autistic Blogs List said:
It depends on what kind of average you’re taking. For this type of situation it’s common to use the median, which is what I assumed.
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Actually Autistic Blogs List said:
What I mean by “this type of situation is that pollsters almost always use medians because the mean is extremely sensitive to outliers (as in this example). It was sloppy of me not to specify this.
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leftrationalist said:
That’s not true. In the DSM-IV, paraphilia means things that cause distress:
Thanks to /u/unnamed_economist for pointing this out.
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beleester said:
Even given the limitations you mentioned, I’m really confused. Doesn’t the presence of a masochist imply the presence of a sadist, and vice versa? How did they manage to find masochistic men but no sadistic women? Is there some definitional thing I’m not getting?
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ozymandias said:
One can have sexual fantasies that are difficult to fulfill in real life!
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Aapje said:
@beleester
One reason why professional dominatrix’s exist is that there seems to be a shortage of women who are into it for (sexual) pleasure.
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jossedley said:
I guess one question I have is whether the DSM quote was true at the time it was included.
The quote was:
If it was true, then I guess the next question is whether the DSM authors believed that the quote would properly have been followed by:
“… because women don’t experience paraphilias,”
“… because people doing the diagnoses are sexist.”
“… because people defining the diagnosis categories are sexist”
or
“… and we don’t know whether those diagnoses are accurate without further study.”
Only the first implied statement necessarily translates to “women almost never experience paraphilias,” so I’m not sure I agree that Ozy’s conclusion follows from their evidence.
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