Strawmanny Questions About Genital Preference, Part One

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speshul snowflake trans

I recently stumbled across this set of questions for trans people about sexual orientation and genital preferences. Since there is nothing I enjoy more than answering strawmanny questions, I decided to help.

1) if sexual orientation is an inborn trait, what is it based on? Innate sexual orientation can’t be based on a social construct — gender is a social construct — and can only be based on physical, material traits. This excludes genitalia, secondary sex characteristics, body hair distribution, scent, voice, etc, so what determines our attraction to others in terms of their gender? What element of any given gender is attractive to hetero- and homosexual people?

First of all, I think “innate” is a confusing word when talking about any aspect of human psychology, and prefer not to use it. All complex human traits– from language use to altruism, from art to work, from love to childrearing– are a product of a complex combination of genetics, non-genetic biological influences (such as prenatal factors or childhood nutrition), interactions with other people, the broader culture, and that thorny and mysterious thing we call ‘free choice.’ Sexuality is no different.

“Innate” is a confusing word, because it bundles together a bunch of different concepts. For example, if a thing is innate, there are connotations that it is more real or legitimate than things that are not innate: your genes are what you’re “really like,” and all that society stuff is just brainwashing covering over your genuine preferences that would exist in a cultural vacuum. But this is not how humans work. If we are innately anything, we are innately a cultural species. A child raised without cultural influences does not have the true, free, authentic preferences that humans have untouched by society; they are a feral child.

Similarly, there are connotations that if a thing is innate then it is unchangeable, and if it is not innate then it is changeable. Imagine that we knew for certain that one person’s depression was exclusively and 100% caused by a certain gene and another’s by her experience of childhood abuse: is the former cursed to depression forever, no matter which medications she tries or how much therapy she goes to or how well she takes care of herself? Are you surprised if the latter winds up dealing with the aftereffects of abuse for the rest of her life?

For this reason, I feel it is necessary to define “innate” with some less connotationally-laden term. I am going to here treat “innate” as meaning “caused by genetics or non-genetic biological influences early in life”; if I am misrepresenting the author’s point of view then I hope they go to the comments to correct me, and I shall rewrite. 

“Social construct” is also kind of a confusing word. I am not really sure what it means. So I am going to replace it with “thing that only exists because we all agree on it,” which again I think reflects the intended meaning of the author. If we chose not to have “do you have a penis or a vagina?” as a major organizing factor in our society, which decides everything from what color we decorate the nursery to how much you’re paid, then gender would not exist.

There are lots of things that only exist because we all agree on them. For example, language exists because we agree on it: we have all agreed that this one set of mouth sounds means “dog” and this other set of mouth sounds means “pickle” and this third set of mouth sounds doesn’t mean anything at all; if we all woke up one day and decided that no mouth sounds meant anything, they wouldn’t. But while the science of language acquisition is tremendously complex, we can all agree there is some genetic influence on humans’ ability to acquire language: that’s why humans can learn language and lemurs can’t.

Similarly, money only exists because we agree on it: dollars have value because we all agree that they have value; if we decided that dollars were worthless, cash would primarily have value as a form of toilet paper. Some people desire money greatly, while others don’t care about it at all. It seems likely that this is to some degree genetic, like every other personality trait. If you have two extremely greedy parents from lines of extremely greedy people, their child is likelier than average to be very greedy. But money is a social construct! So a genetic trait can cause someone to want something that is a social construct.

Therefore, the entire premise of this question is fallacious. 

2a) if they are not inborn traits, what are the bases of hetero- and homosexuality? are they learned behaviours, conscious or subconscious decisions, or something else?

Sexual orientation has a genetic component but is actually not particularly genetic. Among men, genetics explains about a third to two-fifths of variance in sexual orientation, while among women genetics explains about a fifth of variance. Sexual orientation may be related to prenatal environment. Sexual orientation has never been firmly linked to any postnatal childhood experience (although people are more likely to identify as LGBQ in an environment where this is socially acceptable). Certainly, the scientific consensus points to sexual orientation not being a choice.

However, historically, many societies have had much higher rates of homosexual behavior than our current society. Societies such as classical Greece, Rome, and the Islamic Golden Age all had extraordinarily high rates of bisexual behavior among men, to the extent that the average man behaved bisexually. It is difficult to explain this in any way other than culture. People in societies where being interested in both men and women is no more marked than being interested in both tea and coffee are far far more likely to have sex with both men and women. Since that’s not true in our society, you’d hardly expect it to show up in our studies of the variance in sexual orientation. So I do believe that there is a cultural component. Certainly, there are some people who are exclusively interested in men in any possible culture, and others who are exclusively interested in women. But the balance of the evidence, in my opinion, suggests that there is some cultural component for many people. 

2b) is the exclusive attraction to one gender bigoted in the case of gay men being unattracted to straight women, whom they oppress on the axis of gender? if so, why? if not, why not?

I don’t actually think it’s bigoted to not be attracted to people, even across an axis of oppression.

Certainly, one could be not attracted to someone in a bigoted fashion. To use an extreme example, if I am not attracted to a Jewish person because I believe that I must preserve the purity of the white race by not having sex with those of lesser races, obviously my lack of attraction is rooted in bigotry. For a less extreme example, if I am not attracted to a fat person because I believe that all fat people are lazy and gluttonous and that lazy and gluttonous people are unattractive, then that is rooted in bigotry. For an even less extreme example, our society typically does not depict wheelchair users as sexual beings: if I have never been attracted to a person in a wheelchair, is this because I have never been exposed to narratives in which a wheelchair user is an object of sexual desire? It is difficult to know without exposing me to those narratives. 

But in any of those cases, the problem is not the lack of attraction itself. A Neo-Nazi who is attracted to Jews is hardly a more ethical person than a Neo-Nazi who isn’t. The lack of attraction is a symptom of an underlying prejudice (or in the case of the wheelchair user, an oversight) that should be addressed.

But imagine a person who is not attracted to fat people because, for whatever reason, they happen to not find fat rolls particularly attractive, the same way that a person might not be attracted to thin people because for whatever reason they don’t find muscles or slender waists particularly attractive. I do not think this is bigoted. It is part of the beautiful diversity of human sexuality. 

I am assuming here for the sake of argument that the person knows why they’re attracted to a particular trait. Many people don’t: if you’re not attracted to fat people, it can be hard to know if that’s because you happen to dislike a particular physical trait or because you associate fat with laziness. Fortunately, this is totally irrelevant to what you should do. If you are prejudiced, you should try to become less prejudiced; if that changes your attraction patterns, then cool. If it doesn’t, well, who cares. 

If a man happened to be exclusively attracted to men because he thought women are silly and frivolous, and in the absence of this belief he would be attracted to both men and women, then he is a misogynist. If he is exclusively attracted to men because he prefers flat chests and penises and beards, then he is not. 

2c) if sexual orientation is immutable despite not being inborn or innate, at what point is it formed, and based on what? at which point is it immutable? at which age?
2d) if sexual orientation is not immutable, how can it be changed? under which circumstances? by which processes?

We don’t understand the origins of sexual orientation very well, so I don’t know at what point it is formed. However, given the general lack of success of conversion therapy, one could argue that sexual orientation is probably fixed by the time one goes through puberty. 

Alternately, of course, people who grow up in repressive religious environments who can be anything other than gay already are. That is why conversion therapy is so stunningly unsuccessful and doesn’t have its success rates inflated by the existence of bisexuals who could maintain a happy straight relationship all along. The bisexuals don’t go to conversion therapy in the first place. The existence of situational sexual behavior suggests that this is true for some people; however, anecdotally, people’s deliberate efforts to make themselves bisexual do not work as well as one would hope. 

So my guess is that it is fixed around puberty for many people and is more but not infinitely flexible for other people. And trying to become attracted to people doesn’t work at all. If you’re going to become gay in prison, your dick will handle it for you, willing yourself into wanting your bunkmate is not going to work. 

That said, placing yourself in an environment without people of the gender you are typically sexually attracted to sometimes seems to work. Many people are more likely to be bisexual in an open accepting environment which encourages low-stakes experimentation with people of the same gender, although many people won’t be. Hormone replacement therapy is also sometimes known to change sexual orientation, but obviously this approach is not helpful for cisgender people.

3a) if sexual orientation is not an inborn trait, why are approximately 5-10% of people of either sex repulsed by the opposite genitalia without necessarily having experienced trauma? what determines this? is “penis repulsion” (or “vulva repulsion”, i suppose) an inborn trait?

I am really skeptical of this statistic! Only about 1.7% of the U. S. population is lesbian or gay, and only one percent of people are asexual. Even if you assume that all asexuals and all gay people are repulsed by the opposite genitalia– which is very far from true– that suggests that between 1% and 6% of straight people are repulsed by the opposite sex’s genitalia. Since no source is given, and that seems pretty implausible, I think this statistic was made up.

Many people find genitals in general to be kind of squicky, especially outside of a sexual context. But I think that being repulsed by particular genitalia is pretty easy to get over, if there’s some reason to. Consider other forms of sexualized disgust. Homophobes are often genuinely disgusted by (male) homosexuality; I have read homophobic writers mention something as bland as the fact that gay men are sometimes penetrated, and then immediately apologize for the horrifying mental images this brings up. A completely non-homophobic person (who is not repulsed by sex in general) is not particularly horrified by reading the sentence “gay men are sometimes penetrated,” nor do they experience disgust when watching two men kiss or hold hands. (To be clear, if you are homophobic in this fashion, I don’t think you need to beat yourself up about it, as long as you don’t let queer people know that we disgust you.)

Presumably this is not because homophobes were born with a natural disgust for gay sex, while non-homophobes were born without this repulsion. Instead, non-homophobes have interacted with gay people, seen gay people kiss and hold hands, and normalized homosexuality. It is an ordinary part of life for them. Similarly, I expect that if you are repulsed by certain genitalia, and then you interact with them as part of a normal course of life– perhaps because you are a medical professional or you participate in certain clothing-optional events or you are heterosexual– they will become less disgusting. Instead, they will be an ordinary body part, perhaps an unappealing body part, but no more remarkable than an elbow. 

I don’t expect that becoming less disgusted by particular genitalia will make you want to have sex with people with those genitals. Lack of disgust is not enthusiasm; it is indifference. Even if you are chill about penises in general, it is perfectly reasonable to not want one coming anywhere near your bits. Fortunately, there is no law that requires that people have sex with everyone they are not disgusted by, or non-homophobic straight people would be in real trouble.  

Of course, a major difference between genital repulsion and being repulsed by gay people is that, unless you are heterosexual or a medical professional, you can live a perfectly long and happy life never interacting with genitals you think are gross. You should avoid expressing this opinion in public, as it may make people feel bad about their bodies, but I think there is no particular obligation to become undisgusted by genitalia unless you want to.

3b) if “genital preferences” are not inborn, how are they formed, and based on what? at which point are they immutable?

If the study of sexual orientation is in its infancy, the study of how sexual orientation interacts with transness is a fetus. I don’t think anyone knows the answer to this question.

3c) if genital preferences are not immutable, how can they be changed? what process should someone go through if they are seeking to overcome their genital preference? what resources are available?

I feel like I need to emphasize that I do not actually think any person needs to be attracted to people with penises. There are more than enough straight and bi men, bi women, and lesbians who are attracted to trans women to keep every trans woman sexually satisfied for the rest of her life. (And the converse for trans men, of course.) I think a better approach is to destigmatize attraction to trans people, so that people who are attracted to trans people are not so full of self-hatred and disgust about it, so they can date trans people. 

But if for some reason you feel a deep desire to be attracted to both women with penises and women with vaginas… well, I’d suggest “conceptualize women with penises as women” but honestly a lot of guys who are into trans women don’t seem to do that? “She-male” is its own porn category. It’s worth a shot, though. I am not sure how to convince your brain to reclassify trans women as women; it seems like a thing that naturally happens in trans-positive social groups. At a guess, I’d suggest that hanging around with trans people helps. 

I’d also suggest looking at porn with trans girls in it. Maybe trans girls with cis girls at first, so the dick is no different than the dick in het porn you watch, just attached to a woman with a pair of nice breasts. Once you associate trans women with hot sex things happening, maybe you’ll be more cool with dick. 

There’s also just random chance. A lot of people I know were not particularly interested in trans women… until they met the one trans girl who happened to turn them on. I don’t believe in forcing people to be attracted to people they’re not attracted to. I encourage people to be open-minded about unexpected attractions, so that they don’t wind up dismissing something really good because it doesn’t fit your preconception of what you like. For a lot of people, dick in general is meh but their girlfriend‘s dick is hot. 

4a) sex-based attraction is considered to be problematic because we can’t always know someone’s sex just by looking at them. isn’t it also true that we can’t know someone’s gender just by looking at them?

Yep! This is why, in my experience, the most common form of attraction is based on secondary sexual characteristics: both the obvious ones like breasts and beards and the more subtle aspects of fat distribution and muscle size that make a person recognizable as male or female. Trans people who have been on hormones for a while usually have the secondary sexual characteristics associated with their identified gender, so many people are attracted to trans people.

Of course, the diversity of human sexuality is infinite. Some people are attracted to other people based on their stated gender identity; others, based on their presentation as feminine or masculine; still others, based on genitalia; and of course many people are attracted to a combination of these things.

4b) if a hypothetical gay man experiences attraction to a woman-identified person, does he lose attraction to her upon learning of her gender identity, or is he in fact bisexual?

Some people do lose attraction to people upon learning that they identify as women. Some people don’t. Being attracted to the occasional person of the other gender doesn’t make you straight, any more than a straight girl with a girl crush on Christina Hemsworth is bisexual, or a straight man who’s attracted to a very convincing crossdresser is homosexual. Trans people are confusing for sexual orientation, and it makes sense to identify as ‘gay’ if in general you are not attracted to women. 

4c) if he loses the attraction, why does the same principle not apply to sex-based attraction?

Well, sure, you can become unattracted to someone upon learning that they have a penis, just like you can become unattracted to them upon learning that their favorite movie is Thor: The Dark World or that they are cruel to puppies or any other trait you can’t learn from looking at them. You can also become unattracted to someone upon learning that they’re infertile, although the rarity of this complaint among infertility bloggers makes me suspect it is a less common preference than blog commenters on posts about dating trans women would lead one to believe.

You can also become unattracted to someone upon learning that they almost certainly have XY chromosomes. However, this is a very strange preference. Normally, people do not have sexual preferences about the inside of other people’s bodies: no one goes “it is SO sexy that you have two kidneys” or “I am only attracted to people with arachnoid cysts.” Therefore, one might suspect that this is related to the gendered meaning we assign XY chromosomes: that is, that people with XY chromosomes are men, and you are not attracted to men.

In fact, not being attracted to someone because they have XY chromosomes is very similar to not being attracted to someone because they identify as a man. In both cases, you have learned a fact you cannot observe that causes you to reinterpret their bodies as someone who is not a target of your sexual attraction, because they are not the gender of person that you are attracted to.

To be honest, I am curious about how this is supposed to work with the genetic nature of sexual orientation which cannot be influenced by social constructs or other such things we expect genes not to know about. How do your genes know what a chromosome is? Did you evolve very very quickly after the invention of karyotyping?

4d) if he is in fact bisexual, are we not all bisexual? how can we claim to be only attracted to women or men if we don’t know the gender identity of everyone we’ve been attracted to?

How can you claim to be only attracted to women or men if you don’t know the sex of everyone you’re attracted to? It seems to me that the “I am only attracted to people with XX chromosomes, therefore I’m straight” argument fails equally: you can never know for certain that you haven’t been attracted to a trans woman (or, for that matter, a convincing crossdresser). 

Like, seriously, are you going to tell me that if you’re a straight woman or a gay man and you walked down the street and looked at this guy:

and went “Nice!”, actually you’re bi? And how convinced are you that this has never happened?

Let us please use words in a way that vaguely corresponds to reality. 

5) if sexual orientation is based on gender, what is the definition of ‘gender’?

Gender is a word that means several different things, including:

• The system of roles and expectations that derive from our sexed bodies;
• The way that people classify individuals in relation to this system (as “men” or “women”);
• Your inner psychological relationship to that system;
• The specific aspect of your inner psychological relationship to that system that relates to your preferences about your sexed body and how you’re classified. 

The second one is thorny and people often misunderstand it as saying that it is masculinity or femininity. Laith Ashley up there probably has XX chromosomes. Lea DeLaria also has XX chromosomes:

They are both masculine people. They are both people with XX chromosomes. Gender is the thing where you can tell that Laith Ashley is a man and Lea DeLaria is a woman, and that she does not magically become a man due to her choice of haircut. 

I would honestly expect that sexual orientation is most often based on gender in that sense, because of the simple fact that most gay men and straight women are going to go “nice!” about Mr. Ashley and are going to go “not my type, because I’m not attracted to women” about Ms. DeLaria. If we have to reduce sexual orientation down to one single trait– instead of accepting that people’s sexualities differ and that “gay,” “straight,” “bisexual,” and “asexual” are abstractions over a more complex reality– this one would be the one. 

Letter #26: Pedophiliac Attractions to Children

Tags

neurodivergence, ozy blog post, rape tw

[I have posted this letter from my advice column over here, because Medium doesn’t let me hold new commenters’ comments for moderation, and I would rather not subject the letter writer to the unfiltered vitriol of the entire Internet on this subject. Comments will be moderated closely and misbehavior will be particularly likely to result in a ban. Please be compassionate to the real person who is in a very bad situation.]
[content warning for description of attraction to children]

I’m a trans woman and started HRT three months ago. For the most part the experience has been immensely positive, and has rescued me from bad depression, but there’s one (possible) big downside: it might be causing me to be (non-exclusively) sexually attracted to pre-teen girls; the feelings seem to correlate in intensity with level of estrogenisation. I expect this to go away and not stay (it’s only been a couple of weeks I’ve been fully feeling it), but I’m still anxious about the possibility.

What should I do if this turns out to be real? Is it responsible for me to continue HRT knowing it has this effect? Should I seek out therapy for this, and if so how? Do you know any healthy ways of managing such desires, or deal with stigma? How will I be able to find adult partners who won’t hate me? I am very anti-contact/anti-csem and don’t think I’m at serious risk of offending; I have been badly hurt multiple times by previous interactions with the mental health profession as a child and as an adult, which makes me nervous about seeing a therapist for this, but am open to the idea.

(Also, to forestall the question: I don’t think this is pOCD. I do have other distressing intrusive thoughts, but I don’t feel panicky now at the thought I might commit/have committed/be committing sexual violation, and I don’t think pOCD makes you moan and roll your eyes back in ecstasy at the thought of making out with a kid.)

This is definitely not an effect I’ve ever heard of anyone having with estrogen, and it seems unusual. However, it doesn’t seem implausible to me that this is an effect for you: testosterone and estrogen both typically lead to changes in people’s experience of their sexuality, and you drew the worst fucking hand. 

I am not a doctor and am not qualified to diagnose anyone with POCD, especially through a letter; I encourage you to consider the possibility that you have it carefully, but will proceed under the assumption that you are attracted to preteen girls.

You mention that you don’t think you’re at risk of harming a child. In fact, the same thing is true of many people in your situation! The research suggests that pedophilia and child molestation are, while linked, distinct. (Wikipedia has a good summary.) Somewhere between a quarter and half of all child molesters are pedophiliac. It is difficult to know how many pedophiles molest children, because non-offending pedophiles are typically closeted, but most experts believe a large proportion of pedophiles never hurt a child. 

You mention seeking out therapy, and that’s a lot of people’s first piece of advice for people struggling with pedophilia. Unfortunately, despite years of research, no one has to my knowledge come up with a reliable way of treating paraphilias. In fact, sex offender treatment programs sometimes increase recidivism rates. Our best treatment strategy is medication that reduces libido.

What is worse, seeking therapy is going to be very difficult. All therapists are mandated reporters, which means that if they suspect you are abusing a child they must report it to the authorities. Therapists typically vary wildly in their interpretation of these rules, and it’s difficult to know how a therapist will interpret it until you open up to them — and potentially face serious consequences. I don’t mean this to discourage you from seeking therapy, but simply as a note of caution. 

However, you don’t actually need a therapist. You will need someone who can listen to you, a source of nonjudgmental support, affirmation, and acceptance and of advice and even criticism when necessary. A therapist can provide that, but so can a friend or family member or (if you’re religious) a religious leader. (You can check the list of mandated reporters in your state here.)

I would suggest talking to at most two or three people: you don’t want your secret getting out any further than you need for support. Choose people who are trustworthy and keep secrets. Select someone you feel comfortable around. Find someone who is calm, doesn’t freak out, and is willing to hear you out about things. 

Unfortunately, many people do not have a friend that trustworthy and have to seek other options. I don’t know anyone with experience in these groups, but this website seems to link to a lot of support groups for non-offending minor-attracted people; perhaps one of them will help you?

Seeking support is an important first step for anyone in your shoes. The other steps you should take depend a lot on your personal experience of your attraction to preteens. Whether or not to continue taking estrogen is a personal decision. You can continue to take estrogen and manage your feelings on your own. You can choose to go off estrogen (and explain to those who ask that you can’t take estrogen for medical reasons), if you find yourself struggling with temptation or if the costs of experiencing this attraction aren’t worth it for you. 

You can also choose to remain on estrogen and add a libido-lowering medication: the easiest ones to obtain, which have the fewest side effects, are SSRIs. You can get SSRIs by telling your primary care physician that you have depression; the screening is usually minimal, although it may help to look up the symptoms of depression ahead of time. The website Roman sells sertraline (an SSRI) legally, online, and with minimal fuss as a treatment for premature ejaculation, if making a doctor’s visit is too difficult. Even if your first choice of SSRI doesn’t work, you can keep trying. Different SSRIs have different effects, and an increased dose or a different SSRI may be exactly what you need to make your sexuality more manageable. (As a second-line option for people assigned male at birth, the research suggests antiandrogens, but presumably you are already on those.)  

Some people suggest that pedophiles avoid all contact with children or being alone with children. Again, I think this is a personal decision. It is important to remain scrupulously nonsexual in your interactions with preteen girls, and if you can’t do this you must avoid them. But people attracted to adults are often attracted to people that they must remain scrupulously nonsexual with, and most of the time we do not implement the Pence Rule. You will have to talk with your support people and figure out what a reasonable set of boundaries is for you.  

However, if you have a crush on a preteen girl — and particularly if you’re starting to think she has a crush on you, or she’s flirting with you — it is important to distance yourself. Avoid being alone together, giving gifts, cuddling, and other “plausibly deniable” flirtatious or romantic behavior. Make a list of the many reasons to avoid feeding your crush (suitably redacted if you’re afraid of snoops). Consider drawing your attention to the flaws of your crush and making a deliberate effort to notice all the things that would be bad about it. 

Because you can’t distance yourself from your own child, I would advise against having children if you have not already; if you do have children, this is a strong point in favor of SSRIs or going off estrogen. 

Think carefully about whether you use written or drawn pornography involving preteen girls. (Of course, you should not use child porn created through raping actual children.) For some people, porn is an outlet for desires they cannot ethically put into practice. For others, it reinforces and strengthens their paraphilia. Reflect on which of these is truest for you. Similarly, consider whether ageplay is a satisfying expression of your fantasies for you, strengthens them, or simply does nothing. 

Finding a romantic partner may be difficult. You do not have to disclose your attractions and, in a more casual/secondary relationship, I wouldn’t; the stigma is too harsh. When looking for a primary partner, you might consider bringing up the topic of pedophilia early on in the relationship, perhaps on the third or fourth date (or equivalent). You can ask in a sort of general way how they feel about sex offender registries, treatment for pedophiles, or lolicon; you can also discuss how they feel about keeping secrets. If there’s a positive result, you can come out to them. This will be risky, particularly if they decide to tell your friends! But it’s best not to have a long relationship with someone who, while personally tolerant, does not want to commit to someone with attractions like yours — that way just leads to heartbreak.

In having pedophiliac attractions, you are in one of the unluckiest positions a person can be in. It seems like you’re taking a good approach to it: you need to accept your sexuality as it is — unchangeable — while taking steps to avoid harming children. I want to say that this is an unfair burden which has been placed on you, and that it is a brave and admirable thing to exist with this stigmatized trait without harming others. 

Good luck!

Sex-Positive, Porn-Critical?

Tags

ozy blog post, porn, PRECIOUS sexual energy

In the past, I have had a bunch of pretty positive things to say about porn.

Mea culpa.

To be clear, I have pretty positive things to say about some porn. I have nothing but positive feelings about AO3, pictures of hot naked people, the Best Women’s Erotica series, the Erogamer, porn comics, caption porn Tumblrs (RIP), the work produced by many independent camgirls, and the noble person who put every sex scene from Call Me By Your Name on Pornhub. But man, guys, mainstream video porn– the thing you get if you open up the tube sites and start scrolling– that stuff is actually pretty bad!

Now, in my defense, everyone else is entirely wrong about why it is bad. Criticism of mainstream video porn usually involves listing a bunch of sex acts I’ve done and then explaining that no real human being would ever do them. It is then explained that these acts are inherently degrading and objectifying and it is impossible to do them in a way that is respectful of other people’s personhood. The statistic that 88% of porn films include violence against women is thrown around, along with the fact that the women typically respond with pleasure. Finally, the explanation is wrapped up by explaining that all of this will lead to an epidemic of violence against women and porn-induced erectile dysfunction.

Taking it from last to first: It is difficult to know how common erectile dysfunction is. One review suggests a prevalence of somewhere between 3% and 76.5%. Therefore, it is very difficult to know whether erectile dysfunction is increasing beyond the expected rate of increase due to aging. More young men may be going to their doctors complaining of erectile dysfunction, but this might simply be because the treatment for ED now is a pill instead of months of therapy. Of course, there have been some positive anecdotes of people who stopped using pornography and their erectile dysfunction went away; if you struggle with ED and want to try it, there doesn’t seem to be any harm. But it is very far from certain that there is any link between erectile dysfunction and porn use in the general population.

If porn causes an epidemic of sexual violence, it is difficult to explain why rates of sexual violence continue to fall during the largest expansion of porn use in history. Of course, it is possible that some other cause, such as a decline in the acceptability of rape, is making rape rates fall, and they would have fallen even faster without porn. More careful work should be done. (It’s a pity no one convinced PornHub to roll out to a random selection of US counties for a few years first.) But I think this does put a hard cap on how large the problem could possibly be, and suggests that we should not come to overly firm conclusions from short-term laboratory studies of exactly the sort that have been falling victim to the replication crisis.

If the woman enjoys and consents to the violence against her, that is not violence, it is BDSM. Most porn videos depicting BDSM is an interesting fact but not in and of itself a sign that anything has gone wrong.

Sex acts are not inherently degrading or objectifying. Degradation and objectification are attitudes that people have to other people, and you cannot ward them off by sticking exclusively to PIV and oral. If you can’t understand how someone could facefuck someone they like, the problem is your failure of imagination, not the pornography.

I assure you that people who are not porn stars have deepthroated dick, taken it up the ass, had various body parts come on, been double-penetrated, been fisted, and nearly everything else you think real people don’t do. (I must admit, however, that as far as I can tell you are right about double anal. I too am suspicious that this sex act has only ever been performed with a camera in the room.)

So I feel I had a very reasonable conclusion here that mainstream video porn was probably fine, because all the arguments against it are terrible.

But I think, having watched more of it, actually I was quite wrong, and there are legitimate concerns I have about it.

Contrast mainstream video porn with, say, fanfiction. We make fun of Horrifying Fanfiction Lube, but the average fanfiction sex scene, in an ordinary ship, where everyone involved is human beings and not space aliens or elves or omegas, is a reasonably accurate depiction of 95th percentile sexy sex. The sex is somewhat kinkier than most sex is; communication is more seamless; no one ever farts or loses their erection at an inopportune time; people instinctively know the best ways to touch each other and no one has to figure out how to gently redirect someone else away from slobbering on their neck. And of course the sex usually has far more of a role in the narrative arc than sex in real life ever does. But overall, the acts people perform, the kinds of feelings they have, the relationships they have with other people, all seem like things real people would do.

Most of the time, to the extent that it is inaccurate, it’s inaccurate in a direction where, all things considered, you’d prefer it to be inaccurate. For example, fanfiction has an unrealistically high percentage of married gay couples who use condoms and typically depicts significantly more prep for anal sex than people usually do. But normalizing condom use is a good thing. And it’s good for people who are trying anal for the first time to be very cautious and go very slow; they can switch to a more reasonable amount of prep once they have more experience.

(One thing fanfiction is definitely inaccurate about, much to my eternal disappointment, is the percentage of men who are gay.)

And the things that are inaccurate are more clearly marked as inaccurate. No one is surprised when it turns out that human males do not typically go into heat or have self-lubricating asses. And it’s very rare to look in the Spike/Buffy ship tag for a depiction of loving, consensual sex in a healthy relationship. I know people who have gotten themselves in trouble because they’ve been misled by fanfiction, but you do have to work at it.

Mainstream video porn, on the other hand…

Most obviously, sex acts are often depicted in a way that is actively unsafe. The most obvious example is not using condoms, obviously, and I don’t need to belabor that. But think about the way mainstream porn depicts anal. Horrifying Fanfiction Lube is one thing, but at least they’re aware that you need lube. In mainstream video porn, you get guys with enormous dicks just banging away immediately without any sort of preparation or working up to it or even starting off slowly so she can relax. In real life, this is a recipe not just for painful, unpleasant sex but for anal fissures.

But even that criticism– as well as the criticisms I discussed above– miss the most important problem with mainstream video porn, which is that all of the films are apparently shot, directed, and starred in by bizarre sex aliens.

As far as I can tell, there’s very little foreplay, particularly if you require that your foreplay involve touching and caressing and exclude oral sex. There’s strikingly little kissing, and very little talking. Surprisingly often, sex begins by a woman stripping naked without a man touching her, dropping to her knees, and giving him a blowjob, without any sort of preliminaries. No one uses condoms or discusses birth control or testing. Strange and acrobatic sexual positions are depicted. At the end, he either pulls out and comes on her face, or comes inside her and then she squeezes the come out in a very unusual fashion. No one cuddles.

Now, I don’t mean to say that people don’t do those things. Obviously, people have unprotected sex without talking or kissing or touching, or where they strip naked instead of taking each other’s clothes off, engage in almost no non-genital sexual activities, use uncomfortable sex positions, and then end with a facial or the squeezy come thing and no cuddles. Some people even do all of those things. But I think the combination of all of those things is actually very very rare, while in porn it is a plurality of the videos available. It is not that any individual thing depicted is that strange, but collectively they give the impression that no one involved in creating porn has ever actually had sex with a human being.

What is worse, I think, is the absence of feelings or relationships. As far as I can tell, in video porn, sex typically consists solely of genitals being combined in various ways with orifices. It is quite difficult to work out what anyone’s opinion of the situation is, although you can extrapolate that presumably people think orgasms are nice. No one is unhappy and being comforted, or ecstatic about getting to have sex with someone so hot, or hopelessly in love, or trusting that their partner won’t hurt them when they try something new, or any of the other things that people sometimes feel about sex. In particular, it is quite hard to figure out what the people involved seem to think of each other. Rarely do the people involved seem to like each other, or dislike each other, or really have any sort of opinion of each other at all. In Bizarre Sex Alien Land, people typically have sex with people they’re completely neutral about.

This is even more appalling, in my opinion, than the first thing. Uncomfortable sex positions are a thing some people like, but it is actually extraordinarily rare to have sex where you have no emotions about the sex or the person whatsoever. Mainstream video porn leaves out a lot of what makes sex different from– and better than– masturbation. It’s a systematically inaccurate depiction of what sex is like.

Now, you might say that porn is intended as a masturbatory aid, not sex education, and sex education should be in schools. This is true as far as it goes. But I think proponents of this idea have failed to consider the sheer awkwardness of having education in middle-school health class about how most people typically kiss and touch each other extensively before they begin oral sex. This is really not the sort of lesson you want to have from your gym teacher. And while perhaps many people should read a good sex advice book before they begin having sex, most people won’t.

And, even setting that aside, I do think that watching a lot of mainstream video pornography is going to have an effect on your sexual script. How could it not? You have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours watching people do a thing. You may have few other sources of information of how it is done; you may never have done it yourself. Even if you know porn is inaccurate, where are you going to learn what sex is really like?

Of course, many people are sophisticated consumers of media, capable of separating reality from fiction. But mainstream video porn does not present itself as a ludicrous fantasy. It presents itself as a documentary of normal people having sex. And while viewers may be able to recognize that penises are not normally that large and women have pubic hair and you should use condoms, are they going to be able to recognize literally every way that porn is inaccurate?

I do not have hard data that suggests problems related to this. The generation that grew up with unlimited streaming video porn is still quite young. But I do not think it is at all unreasonable for sex-positive feminists to be concerned, and I wish that porn-critical discussions would move away from inaccurate statistics and slut-shaming and towards a more real discussion of the problems with pornography.

Polyamory Survey: The Results, Part One

Tags

polyamory

I collected 498 responses to my polyamory survey. Of these, 19 (3.8%) were deleted for being monogamous, leaving me with 479 respondents. The survey was promoted primarily on my blog, Thing of Things, and Slate Star Codex. For this reason, it is primarily representative of the rationalist community. 81% of respondents identified as rationalists.

Limitations

Due to a miscommunication with Scott Alexander, the polyamory survey as posted on Slate Star Codex failed to clarify that single people who would be nonmonogamous if they were dating anyone should take the survey. This may lead to underrepresentation of single respondents.

Mid-survey, I added some clarifications, which included defining “assigned gender at birth” and informing people who don’t know what a rationalist is

At least one person failed to follow instructions and included platonic primary partners; I do not expect the number of people who both have platonic primary partners and are bad at following directions to be high enough to distort the data. While I attempted to create categories that would encompass many different ways of doing polyamory, some forms may not be accommodated; for example, one participant complained that he slept with dozens of new people every year but, as he does not have many relationships, was recorded in the survey as having no partners. I do not expect people this unusual to distort the results much.

Several people refused to take the survey because they felt uncomfortable classifying their gender, sexual orientation, or romantic orientation within the boxes given. This survey may underrepresent queer people with unusual genders or orientations. Some participants felt that “transgender” is a term which only includes binary-gendered people; thus, nonbinary people may either have been underrepresented or incorrectly included as cisgender.

The definition of “sex” was confusing to several respondents. In particular, some respondents included cybersex as sex, while some did not. Depending on whether you consider cybersex to be sex, my survey may either undercount or overcount how much sex people are having.

Do Cis Straight Poly People Exist?

Before we can determine whether polyamory works well for cisgender heterosexual people, it is first necessary to determine whether cis straight poly people exist at all.

The answer appears to be “yes”. The gender, sexual orientation, and romantic orientation breakdown of respondents is as follows:

7.1% asexual
42.7% bisexual
42.9% heterosexual
7.3% homosexual

1.5% aromantic*
45.5% biromantic
44.7% heteroromantic
8.4% homoromantic

54.4% cisgender male
24.9% cisgender female
7.5% transgender person assigned female at birth
13.2% transgender person assigned male at birth

(There was a high overlap between “heteroromantic” and “heterosexual”, “biromantic” and “bisexual”, etc.)

However, I live in Berkeley, so I am aware that cisgender straight poly people often do things that many monogamous people would not consider to be very heterosexual or cisgender. For this reason, I included two additional questions to test whether someone is paradigmatically cisgender and heterosexual.

I asked heterosexual people whether they had had sex with a person of the same gender, or with any transgender person. (After some consideration, I chose to include all transgender people, on the grounds that cis people seem to consider sex with any of us to be kinda gay.) I clarified that “sex” includes any activity two or more people are doing, at the same time, which is primarily intended to cause sexual arousal or orgasm in one or more participants, and that it still counts if a person of your preferred gender was also involved, you didn’t touch their genitals, one or both of you didn’t get naked, it was BDSM, it was exclusively over the Internet, etc. 40.5% of heterosexual respondents have had sex with a person of the same gender, or with any transgender person.

I asked cisgender people whether they have taken any steps conventionally considered to be part of a gender transition process, such as taking cross-sex hormones; asking people to refer to them with different pronouns or a name not associated with their assigned gender; binding, tucking, or wearing clothing or makeup conventionally associated with the other primary gender on a regular basis; or deliberately altering their presentation to cause people to read them as the gender they weren’t assigned at birth. 13.6% of cisgender respondents have taken a step conventionally considered to be part of a gender transition process.

It is now possible to calculate what percentage of poly people are paradigmatically straight and cisgender. 21.5% of poly people in my sample were paradigmatically cis and straight. Rationalists were more likely to be paradigmatically cis and straight than nonrationalists: 36% of rationalists were paradigmatically cis and straight. 33% of cisgender men were paradigmatically cis and straight, while only 8% of cisgender women were paradigmatically cis and straight. This reflects the common polyamorous wisdom that cisgender, heterosexual poly women are very rare.

*I used a narrow definition of aromantic, in which a person is uninterested in having any relationships described as “girlfriend,” “boyfriend,” or “partner”, rather than a broader definition in which one might have partners that one is not romantically attracted to.

Are Poly People Cucks?

Many people accuse polyamorous people, particularly men, of being cucks: that is, they are sexually aroused by the idea of their partners having sex with other people. Unaccountably, no one has ever collected data on this claim.

At first blush, this generalization seems accurate: 78.7% of respondents reported that they found the prospect of a partner having sex with someone else arousing, even if only a little bit or only in particular situations. However, only 15.2% of respondents found it arousing in a submissive way, as implied by the word “cuck” (e.g. you are aroused by your partner having sex with other people because you find it humiliating). 29.4% found it arousing in a dominant way (e.g. the idea that you might “force” your partner to have sex with someone else). The majority of respondents, 76.8%, found it arousing in a non-kinky fashion (e.g. because it is hot when your partner has orgasms).

Further, this arousal is not a significant driver of people’s interest in polyamory: only 4.8% of respondents reported that this was a major reason for them to be poly.

I will now look at cisgender male respondents specifically, as this is a subject of particular interest. 79.3% of cisgender men found the prospect of a partner having sex with someone else arousing; 15.7% were aroused in a submissive way, 35.7% in a dominant way, and 73.4% in a non-kinky way. 7.2% said that this was a major reason for them to be polyamorous. Cisgender men appear to have approximately the same pattern as everyone else, although they are perhaps slightly more likely to be interested in a dominant fashion and less likely to be interested in a nonkinky fashion; cis men may also be more likely to have this as a primary reason for them to be poly.

Therefore, I have concluded that, while poly men are typically aroused by their partners having sex with other people, poly men are not in fact cucks, nor is this a major reason for them to be poly. I am unclear on whether it is a good idea to raise awareness of these results, however. If you must humiliate someone for their partner having sex with other people, you should at least humiliate the people who get off on it.

Tune in next post for answers to a variety of other exciting questions such as:

• Are poly people satisfied in their relationships?
• How many people are poly people dating?
• Are poly cis men lonelier than poly trans people or poly cis women?
• How much sex are poly people having really?
• Are poly people more attracted to their primaries or their secondaries?
• And more!

Autogynephilia Survey

Tags

ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans

Methods

I have 784 respondents; twenty respondents were deleted for skipping an excessive number of questions, leaving me with 764 respondents. The respondents were mostly taken from my blog, Thing of Things; therefore, they may not be representative of the general population.

To assess autogynephilia, I used a 22-item scale which is commonly used in the literature on autogynephilia. Unlike in previous studies, I did not alter the language for cisgender respondents. To assess autoandrophilia, I genderswapped the items on the scale. Certain items were easily genderswapped: for example, “fantasies in which I have a vagina/vulva” became “fantasies in which I have a penis”. Others required more of a judgment call, as when I decided that erections and ejaculation are physical male functions analogous to pregnancy. As my autoandrophilia scale has never been validated, the results are unreliable and should be considered preliminary. Further, this scale would not capture any ways that autoandrophilia manifests differently than autogynephilia. (For example, one might expect autogynephiles to be more interested in wearing women’s clothing, as there is more sexy clothing which is only for women than sexy clothing which is only for men.)

To assess gender, I presented two questions. The first asked people to identify as cisgender or transgender. The second asked people to identify as transgender, definitely cisgender, or uncertain whether the terms “cisgender” or “transgender” best describes them.

To assess sexual orientation, I asked whether a person was attracted to both men and women, men but not women, women but not men, exclusively nonbinary people, or no one at all.

Demographics

A gender and sexuality breakdown follows. Percentages may not add to 100 due to rounding.

53% cisgender men
19% cisgender women
10% transgender people assigned female at birth
18% transgender people assigned male at birth

24% definitely cisgender men
9% definitely cisgender women
8% AFAB transgender
16% AMAB transgender
14% neither cisgender nor transgender AFAB
30% neither cisgender nor transgender AMAB

18% bisexual cisgender men
32% heterosexual cisgender men
2% homosexual cisgender men
1% asexual cisgender women
12% bisexual cisgender women
4% heterosexual cisgender women
1% homosexual cisgender women
2% asexual AFAB trans people
6% bisexual AFAB trans people
2% homosexual AFAB trans people
2% asexual AMAB trans people
8% bisexual AMAB trans people
1% heterosexual AMAB trans people
6% homosexual AMAB trans people
1% miscellaneous

Autogynephilia and Autoandrophilia Scores

(For these numbers, a score of zero indicates that none of the fantasies are arousing, while a score of 88 indicates that all of the fantasies are very arousing. Please behold the quarter-assed bar charts.)

Autogynephilia

Cisgender man: 44
Cisgender woman: 22
AFAB trans: 13
AMAB trans: 35

 

Definitely cisgender man: 36
Definitely cisgender woman: 25
AFAB trans: 11
AMAB trans: 40
Neither cisgender nor transgender, AFAB: 22
Neither cisgender nor transgender, AMAB: 48

Asexual cisgender man: 41
Bisexual cisgender man: 52
Straight cisgender man: 40
Gay cisgender man: 40

Asexual cisgender woman: 6
Bisexual cisgender woman: 36
Straight cisgender woman: 17
Gay cisgender woman: 21

Asexual AFAB trans: 2
Bisexual AFAB trans: 17
Straight AFAB trans: 15
Gay AFAB trans: 7

Asexual AMAB trans: 31
Bisexual AMAB trans: 39
Straight AMAB trans: 17
Gay AMAB trans: 36

[Note that sample sizes for asexual cisgender men and heterosexual AFAB trans people are particularly small.]

Autoandrophilia

Cisgender man: 20
Cisgender woman: 25
AFAB trans: 30
AMAB trans: 6

Definitely cisgender man: 23
Definitely cisgender woman: 18
AFAB trans: 30
AMAB trans: 7
Neither cisgender nor transgender, AFAB: 29
Neither cisgender nor transgender, AMAB: 17

Asexual cisgender man: 18
Bisexual cisgender man: 23
Straight cisgender man: 18
Gay cisgender man: 26

Asexual cisgender woman: 8
Bisexual cisgender woman: 28
Straight cisgender woman: 23
Gay cisgender woman: 24

Asexual AFAB trans: 19
Bisexual AFAB trans: 33
Straight AFAB trans: 19
Gay AFAB trans: 34

Asexual AMAB trans: 7
Bisexual AMAB trans: 8
Straight AMAB trans: 3
Gay AMAB trans: 2

[Note that sample sizes for asexual cisgender men and heterosexual AFAB trans people are particularly small.]

Discussion

Confusingly, cis men are the group most likely to experience autogynephilia, and cis women are also more likely than average to experience autoandrophilia. However, when broken out into more specific categories, we discover that this is mostly driven by people who identify as neither cisgender nor transgender– that is, the potentially gender dysphoric.

People are much less likely to experience autoandrophilia than autogynephilia. It is unclear why this might be. It is possible that my measure failed to capture autoandrophiliac sexuality; I suggest performing qualitative research on transgender men to construct an appropriate measure. It is also possible that autoandrophilia is legitimately less common than autogynephilia for some reason: for example, perhaps because female bodies are hypersexualized in the media while male bodies are not, or because people with testosterone-dominant systems have kinkier sexual fantasies.

It has been occasionally claimed that women do not experience autogynephilia. My study suggests that this is false. While cisgender women do not experience autogynephiliac fantasies as commonly as AMAB transgender people do, they do seem to sometimes experience autogynephilia. However, it is also occasionally claimed that autogynephilia is ordinary female sexuality. It does not appear that my survey supports this hypothesis; cis women are far less likely than trans women to be autogynephiles. Autogynephilia seems more characteristic of definitely cis male sexuality than definitely cis female.

Some trans advocates argue that trans women overreport autogynephilia, because if one has a penis it is marked and unusual to have sexual fantasies in which you have a vagina, while if one has a vagina it is not at all marked or unusual to have sexual fantasies in which you have a vagina. It is unclear how this hypothesis can be tested; as such, my survey does not provide evidence for or against it.

It has been occasionally claimed that trans men do not experience autoandrophilia. My survey suggests that this is false; trans men have a notably higher rate of autoandrophilia than other groups. The alternate construct of “autohomoeroticism” is not supported: autoandrophilia is detected in a survey which does not ask about any specifically homosexual male behaviors, but merely about sexual arousal when imagining having a physically male body and adopting a male social role.

Autogynephiliac fantasies tend to be about having a woman’s body, wearing women’s clothing, or being admired or having sex while a woman. Very few people were interested in more outré forms of sexuality, such as menstruation, urinating while sitting down, sitting in a feminine way, or being seen as a woman by strangers. Trans women are more likely than cis women to be aroused by these unusual fantasies: cis women’s average is typically between 0 and 0.5 on a scale where 0 means not at all arousing, and trans women’s is typically around 1. However, most trans women have no interest in these fantasies; attempts to depict them as typical of trans female sexuality are inaccurate. 

Similarly, autoandrophiliac fantasies tend to be about having a man’s body (particularly a penis) or being admired or having sex while a man, and not about adopting a male-typical social role outside of a sexual context. 

Bisexual cis women experience a rate of autogynephilia comparable to transgender women’s. I believe this is problematic for claims that no real woman would experience autogynephilia; it implies that either bisexual cis women are not real women or that they are lying about their sexual fantasies in a far less socially desirable direction. It is possible that something unusual about bisexual cis women causes them to fetishize womanhood. It is also possible that autogynephilia is associated with same-gender attraction; certainly, it seems like being attracted to breasts might cause you to be attracted to your own breasts. However, if that is the case, it is unclear why lesbians show such low rates of autogynephilia. My sample size of lesbians was quite small and it is possible this is just noise. I suggest interested people study autogynephilia specifically in a queer cisgender female population.

Gay and bisexual men show elevated rates of autoandrophilia compared to heterosexual men. However, their rates are not comparable to trans men’s. It is possible that while autogynephilia similar to trans women’s is typical of (bisexual) female sexuality, autoandrophilia similar to trans men’s is not typical of any sort of male sexuality. It may also reflect the inadequacy of my measure of autoandrophilia.

Definitely cisgender men are both more autogynephiliac and more autoandrophiliac than definitely cisgender women. This may be due to social desirability bias, poor awareness of one’s sexual fantasies, lower sex drives due to estrogen-dominant hormone systems, or a legitimate difference in sexual interests between definitely cisgender men and definitely cisgender women.

Traditional Sexual Ethics Are Impossible In The Modern Day

Tags

ozy blog post, sex positivity

The recent and thought-provoking Slate Star Codex sequence on cultural evolution has led me to think about traditional sexual ethics, and the fact that it is literally impossible to do them in the modern day.

There are three large changes that have occurred in the past few hundred years, which affect sexual ethics. The first and most obvious is the invention of birth control, which permits people to separate (penis-in-vagina) sex and babies.

It is easy to overstate the importance of birth control. Many effective methods of birth control, such as homosexuality and outercourse, were known since the Paleolithic. The Oneida Community reportedly had a typical use pregnancy rate of 0.5%, more effective than modern birth control pills, with male continence; this is a method known since Biblical times. (Of course, the Oneida Community may have had particularly motivated users, and widespread use may have been less effective.)

Nevertheless, giving people more birth control methods with fewer side effects and no chance of not using them in the heat of the moment likely changes many things about sexual ethics.

Second, children are now a net financial drain on their families. In the developed world, children are always a financial cost for 18 years, and often for longer than twenty; they rarely pay their parents back. However, historically and in the developing world, children often began making a financial contribution as young as seven. It is difficult to estimate how many children are/were involved in child labor and how large their contributions to the household were. However, even today, in large families, teenagers who are not sent to school can often pay for themselves through chores and taking care of younger siblings; there is no reason to believe this was not true in the past. (I am interested in more detailed data and am happy to edit this section with more.)

Finally, and most importantly, child mortality.

Our World In Data provides some interesting graphics about child mortality in the past two hundred years. In summary: in 1800, while there is little data, the best estimates suggest that about 40% of children died before age five. In 2019, in rich countries, less than one percent of children die before age five.

Forty percent is a lot of children. Consider a fairly ordinary traditional Catholic family of five children: in 1800, they would only have had three. A family of ten would, in 1800, only have six children. Even the Duggars’ nineteen children would only have been eleven.

But high child mortality rates affect more than family size. That forty percent isn’t evenly distributed among families; some may bury seventy percent of their children, perhaps because of a series of epidemics or a bad crop year. If all you care about is one of your children surviving to take care of you in your old age, and the mortality rate is less than one percent, you have one child. However, if the mortality rate is forty percent and unevenly distributed, you may have to have many more than two kids to have a chance one of them survives to adulthood.

(The evidence is suggestive that decreasing child mortality tends to decrease fertility, in part for this reason.)

What this means is that practicing truly traditional sexual ethics is literally impossible.

You could stop using birth control, and people do. (Catholics use natural family planning, but natural family planning is itself a fairly recent invention. You could, fortunately, do extended breastfeeding for a break in between pregnancies.) In theory, it is required that you educate your children. In practice, you can homestead in a state that doesn’t check up on homeschoolers much and put your children to work farming or watching their younger siblings as soon as they’re able. It wouldn’t be doing right by your kids– it turns out some knowledge of writing and math and history and science is useful for being alive in the 21st century– but you could do it.

But child mortality is a bitch. “Not using birth control” is unpopular, and “educationally neglect your children in order to live on a homestead” is unpopular, but “forty percent of your children die” is more unpopular than either of those. There exist some religions that don’t use modern medicine, but you’re never going to get particularly widespread uptake.

But even if you are a Christian Scientist homeschooler who doesn’t use birth control, you’re still not going to get to the environment that traditional sexual ethics evolved for. Many of that forty percent died in epidemics, and most of the diseases they died of have been eradicated in the United States due to vaccines. You are never, ever going to have three of your children die of smallpox in a single month.

These changes are generally agreed upon to be good things among both sexual liberals and sexual conservatives. No one wants forty percent of their children to die. Child labor is generally unpopular. While some social conservatives disapprove of birth control, most social conservatives do not.

But it means that you can’t make the argument “the sexual ethics of 1800 are good because they are traditional and worked for hundreds of years.” Our situation is very very different from the situation in 1800. Children are financial drains instead of investments; children are almost certainly not going to die; it is possible to separate PIV from reproduction with a good deal of reliability.

This is not, of course, to say that the traditional sexual ethics of 1800 are incorrect for modern humans. It may well be that we would all be happiest if divorce and sodomy were illegal, no one used birth control, having sex before marriage if you’re a woman made you a fallen woman, and men are technically not supposed to have sex outside marriage but in practice seeing a prostitute is a common vice among urbanites. But this proposition– in the current situation– has at best a few decades of track record. It cannot take advantage of the argument from tradition, any more than can the proposition that we would all be happiest if gay marriage were legal, divorce were unstigmatized, many people were poly, and birth control is the default.

We knocked over the Chesterton’s Fence, because Chesterton’s Fence was driven through the heart of millions of children and subjected them to a horrible painful death. Now we have to figure out sexual ethics in a fencefree world. Chesterton’s Fence does not apply.

The DSM-IV Believed Women Didn’t Have Paraphilias

Tags

ozy blog post, sex positivity

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.

—

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.

Further Objections To Three Sentences In An Interview With Ray Blanchard (They’re A Really Bad Three Sentences)

Tags

csa tw, ozy blog post, rape tw, ray blanchard callout post, speshul snowflake trans

On Monday, I wrote a post about my most important objection to this answer of Ray Blanchard’s in an interview from 2013:

[Interviewer:] Do you think autoandrophilia, where a woman is aroused by the thought of herself as a man, is a real paraphilia?

[Blanchard:] No, I proposed it simply in order not to be accused of sexism, because there are all these women who want to say, “women can rape too, women can be pedophiles too, women can be exhibitionists too.” It’s a perverse expression of feminism, and so, I thought, let me jump the gun on this. I don’t think the phenomenon even exists.

I wanted to stick to the most important issue in the first post. However, I could not in good conscience refrain from objecting to everything else objectionable about those three sentences.

First: autoandrophilia obviously exists. Autoandrophilia obviously existed in 2013. Archive of Our Own had existed for four years at the time. AO3 hosts an enormous quantity of porn written by women about men having sex with each other; many (although of course not all) of the readers insert themselves as one of the characters in the pairing. The phenomenon of women imagining themselves as men in slash fanfiction dates back to 1966, when the TV show Star Trek began and women began shipping Kirk/Spock. There is honestly no excuse for a person who considers himself a world expert in sexuality related to gender deviance to be unaware that autoandrophiles exist.

As I said in the previous post, Blanchard has recently admitted to the existence of autohomoeroticism, a sexual fetish in which people assigned female at birth are sexually attracted to the idea of being a gay man. He considers this to be extraordinarily rare. (Out of curiosity, I did a small survey on a fandom Discord I frequent and found that 60% of the respondents assigned female at birth were autoandrophiles, although I suppose it is possible that every autohomoerotic person in the world frequents this particular Discord.) It is unclear to me how the hell autohomoeroticism is supposed to be different from autoandrophilia, except that it would be embarrassing to Blanchard to admit he’s wrong because of something as minor as “the facts.”

Second: Blanchard implicitly equates pedophiles, rapists, and exhibitionists with autoandrophiles. Pedophiles and rapists either perform nonconsensual sex acts or are tempted to do so; while people who have sex in front of consenting people are also considered exhibitionists, presumably Blanchard is referring to people who want to show their genitals to or have sex in front of nonconsenting people. Cisgender autoandrophiles might strap on a dildo and get a blowjob from another consenting adult, but they don’t do anything nonconsensual nor are they tempted to do so.

I am glossing over the complicated issue of transgender autoandrophiles, in part due to the disagreement about whether they exist. I have met the occasional self-identified non-dysphoric autoandrophile who has transitioned. In general, they have tried to be indistinguishable from dysphoric trans people and to pass as their preferred gender. This is very unlike rape, pedophilia, or nonconsensual exhibitionism, where the victims know they’re involved in a sex act. It seems rather more like a person getting off on the reactions they get when they wear sexy clothes, or on secretly wearing sexy underwear, or on receiving a hair massage, or whatever: perfectly fine as long as it is not obvious to other people what they’re doing. Whatever you may think of the wisdom of their transitions, it does not seem to be a nonconsensual sex act. Blanchard’s inability to distinguish between consensual and nonconsensual sex acts is appalling.

Third: Blanchard has an openly contemptuous attitude towards the idea that women commit sexual violence. However, women uncontroversially commit sexual violence. In a study conducted in 2010, it was found that 4.8% of men had been, over the course of their lives, forced to penetrate someone through violence, threat of violence, or use of drugs/alcohol, and 6% were coerced into sex. 79.2% of male forced-to-penetrate victims had only female perpetrators, while 83.6% of male sexual coercion victims had only female perpetrators. By comparison, 98.1% of female rape victims had only male perpetrators, and 92.5% of female sexual coercion victims had only male perpetrators, and women are more likely to experience both rape and sexual coercion than men are.

Female child molesters are understudied. However, victimization surveys suggest that somewhere between 14% and 26% of children molested are molested by a woman. Official crime statistics suggest that as few as 1% of children molested are molested by a woman; it is probable that female child molesters are undercounted.

It’s true that men are more likely than women to commit sexual violence. However, a significant minority of victims of sexual violence have female perpetrators. The idea that pointing this out is laughable is rape apologism and morally wrong.

Fourth: Blanchard appears to believe the only reason one would write paragraphs like the above is some sort of bizarre “women can do anything men can do” ethos. It does not seem to occur to him that people would care about supporting the victims of female rapists. I have drafted several sentences in response to this and had an extraordinary difficulty ending them with anything other than “fuck off.”

People– men, women, and nonbinary– are sometimes raped by women. I’ve gotten anguished emails from victims of rape by women thanking me because I am the only blogger they’ve found who will even say they exist. I’ve listened to people– blog readers and friends– talk about bracing themselves when they say the gender of their rapist, because people will laugh at them, or tell them they wanted it, or question them to see if there was some sort of horrible misunderstanding, or immediately derail the conversation to talk about how Men Commit Most Rapes Though, or assume they’re anti-feminist men’s rights activists and call them misogynists, or ask intrusive details about how it could happen mechanically, or assume that they’re the perpetrator and their rapist was the victim. Our society is awful to rape victims of all stripes, but there are unique ways in which it is awful to victims of female perpetrators, and it needs to stop. Pointing out that female rapists and child molesters exist is the first step.

Het-Partnered Bisexual People Can Experience Homophobia

Tags

gay stuff, ozy blog post

[content warning for slurs]

I have sometimes seen arguments that imply that bisexual people partnered to heterosexual people do not experience homophobia.

It makes sense that people might think this is the case. There are a lot of concrete ways that being in a heterosexual relationship makes your life easier. Het-partnered bisexual people can walk down the street holding hands with their partner without having someone yell slurs at them. They can get married in every country. Their parents are unlikely to reject their partner purely because of their gender. I certainly don’t mean this post to erase these advantages or to imply that het-partnered bisexual people who consider themselves to not experience homophobia are wrong.

When a lot of bisexuals talk about our experiences of oppression, the word that comes up a lot is invisibility. This can seem like, well, a pretty privileged complaint. “People think I’m straight” is often not a problem that the visibly queer have much sympathy for. And while that’s invalidating of your experiences, it can be hard to think what material harm being taken as straight causes.

But I think het-partnered bisexual people do have a very particular experience of homophobia, and I hope I can explain the material harm it causes in a way that makes sense.

First, and most obviously, being het-partnered now does not erase the homophobia you experienced in the past. Familial rejection, job discrimination, and inadequate health care — to name just three examples– can have effects that last a long time after your same-sex relationship ends.

Second, many (perhaps most) het-partnered bisexual people are partnered to straight people. And straight people are very often homophobic. Thus, het-partnered bisexual people are often in a position of being in a committed relationship with someone who hates a fundamental aspect of their identity. This particularly affects younger or more vulnerable bisexuals, who may not have a lot of options or may not know how to filter for kinds of homophobia more subtle than waving around a GOD HATES FAGS sign.

The effects of heterosexual partners’ homophobia can be very severe. 61% of bisexual women and 37% of bisexual men have experienced rape, physical violence, or stalking from an intimate partner, compared to 44% of lesbians, 35% of straight women, 26% of gay men, and 29% of straight men. 90% of bisexual female survivors report only male perpetrators; 79% of bisexual male survivors report only female perpetrators. The stark conclusion here is that, for queer people, being in an intimate relationship with a straight person is dangerous. The danger, I believe, is directly tied to the homophobia of many straight people.

Even bisexuals who are not abused can face harm from their partners’ homophobia. (I am mostly familiar with female bisexual experiences; I appreciate input from male bisexuals.) Some bisexuals are closeted to their partners, which means they have to self-monitor to avoid giving any sign that they might not be straight, even in their closest and most intimate relationship. Other bisexual women face extreme jealousy from their partners, who believe that they are “slutty” or will inevitably cheat because they’re bi. I myself have dated several men who treated my interest in women, not as if it were an important part of my sexuality, but as if it were a performance for them, a trivial thing that only mattered because they got off on it. They were confused when I discussed my bisexuality in a context other than dirty talk.

Third, the closet itself is a deeply traumatizing experience. As an excellent article about gay men’s experiences of the closet puts it:

“The trauma for gay men is the prolonged nature of it,” says William Elder, a sexual trauma researcher and psychologist. “If you experience one traumatic event, you have the kind of PTSD that can be resolved in four to six months of therapy. But if you experience years and years of small stressors—little things where you think, Was that because of my sexuality?—that can be even worse.”

Or, as Elder puts it, being in the closet is like someone having someone punch you lightly on the arm, over and over. At first, it’s annoying. After a while, it’s infuriating. Eventually, it’s all you can think about.

Closeted bisexual people have some advantages over closeted gay people: they can form relationships with people they love and have them socially recognized. These advantages can make it easier to be closeted. Het-partnered bisexual people can also find themselves de facto forced into the closet, particularly if they have an unsympathetic partner; being out as bisexual can feel like it’s oversharing or bringing up private information, even if mentioning your heterosexuality in the same context would be fine.

But many of the ways the closet can be traumatizing are the same. You hear what straight people really think about faggots and dykes when they don’t think any of us are around; in some contexts, that can be pretty horrifying. (My dad used to explain that he was fine with gay people as long as they didn’t flaunt it “like this,” that last accompanied by a mincing limp-wristed high-voiced caricature of a gay man.) You may have to self-monitor: avoid overly gay dress or body language, don’t look too long at someone you find attractive, hide your crushes, don’t mention people you find attractive when it comes up. While the studies are methodologically limited, research suggests that LGB people have higher rates of anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, and substance abuse, and that concealing one’s LGB identity makes the psychological distress associated with being LGB worse.

Of course, the closet is different for different people. Some people find it easy to hide their LGB identity; they can either shrug off homophobic comments from straight people or don’t experience it. But I think a strong “het-partnered bisexual people don’t face homophobia” position requires you to believe that the closet is a privilege. We recognize that a twelve-year-old gay kid who can’t come out to his parents because they’ll reject him is facing homophobia, even if he’s not ready to date; the same can be true of the monogamously and heterosexually married thirty-year-old bisexual man.

Sexual Attraction and Tide Pods

Tags

asexuality, ozy blog post

Sometimes people define “sexual attraction” as “wanting to have sex with someone.” This can be really confusing when we talk about the asexuality spectrum. If we define “demisexual” as “only wants to have sex in a committed and emotionally intimate relationship,” it’s extraordinarily common, perhaps normal. A huge number of people– perhaps most women– are demisexual.

But I think it’s important to distinguish two kinds of wanting.

Think about tide pods. (Or fake fruit, or dice, or those really fancy cakes that are actually made out of cardboard.) Every time I do laundry, some part of my brain insists that the tide pod is CANDY and would make a DELICIOUS SNACK and I have the impulse to eat one.

I don’t actually want to eat a tide pod. If you put some tide pods in front of me for dinner, I would not experience the slightest internal conflict. I am perfectly aware that tide pods are gross and would make me feel disgusting if I chewed one.

But there’s still that part of me that says “tide pods are a snack.”

Sexual attraction is similar. I don’t want to have sex with that hot person I see in the coffeeshop. I would have to talk to them first. We might not be sexually compatible. I am somewhat frightened of strangers. If you presented Hot Coffeeshop Person to me naked and were like “okay, have sex now” I would not experience the slightest temptation to have sex with them.

But some part of my brain is like “probably appropriate to have sex with?” the same way some part of my brain is like “probably a snack?”

It is normal for allosexual people to have very few people– often, less than a dozen or only one person– in their I Would Experience Any Temptation At All To Have Sex With This Person If They Tried To Have Sex With Me category. It is not normal for allosexual people to have that few people in their Part Of My Brain Thinks Sex With This Person Is Appetizing The Same Way Tide Pods Would Make A Good Snack category. People who have very few people in their Want To Have Sex With The Same Way I Want To Eat A Tide Pod category may be graysexual or demisexual.