The science of sexual deviancy
Modernity is supposed to be about Progress, progress being made possible by Science, which discovers the Truth about nature. This is so unlike the obscurantism of the old days, where religion blinded and oppressed humanity with dogma and sheer nastiness. The funny thing is that the intellectual elite of modernity didn't come exclusively out of those opposed to the Church(es). To some extent yes, and traditional Catholics in Europe like to tell the tale of the evil Masonic lodges waging a centuries long war against the Church. But if you check the historical record, a big part of the intellectual elite of modernity was composed of the children of clergy, and some rebellious parts of the clergy itself.
As we know, all human traits are inheritable, so if you have a movement made of the children of the enemy, what do you think will happen here? You're obviously not going to get something much different from that you're fighting against. It might be superficially different, but the odds are the children of the clergy are eventually going to build a church which is pretty much identical from their fathers'. And that's precisely what happened. That's what the term "Cathedral" is supposed to capture; the fact that the Progressive intellectual elite is not only similar to the old Christian churches; it is actually descended from them, in part physically so. And even if it weren't, you could trace its descent just by a simple functional analysis. They just work the same way.
The latest fashion of Progressive agitation, the present phase of the Permanent Revolution is World War G, which is almost finished (sweeping the countryside to shoot fleeing enemies in the back, mostly), and World War T, which started a while ago and it's starting to get momentum. Now I won't get into why exactly our government is so invested with promoting sexual deviancy; American Kremlinology (Cathedralogy?) is quite a complex matter by itself. The point here is that progressives aren't interested in the scientific truth behind sexual deviancy; some are actively hostile to studying it, and most people just don't give a damn. And you'd think we'd need to know something before starting a massive war against disgust of sodomy.
You'd also think we'd need to know whether Saddam actually had nukes. It doesn't work like that, does it? The fact is we have a lot of good science about homosexuality and gender dysphoria, but it had been long thrown into the memory hole before talk of letting homosexuals marry each other started to get traction. Although fortunately, the American Kremlin hasn't found it necessary to actually throw things into the memory hole; it just makes people not care about it. But for those who do, the data is out there. The books are on Amazon. There's even Wikipedia pages.
And you should be interested. Progressives give massively disproportionate attention to sexual deviancy for bad reasons, but the topic *is* very interesting. Because it makes no sense. If neoreaction means something (although it probably doesn't anymore), it's about applying evolutionary theory to humans. And seen through a Darwinian lens, homosexuality makes no sense. No sense at all. Zero. There's no way on earth that a condition that makes you lose attraction towards the opposite sex is going to survive natural selection. None. And yet everybody has its own theory about sexual attraction being very malleable, psychological effects, upbringing, or whatever piece of shit one can come with. As Greg Cochran said in this epic thread at the old GNXP:
One of the interesting things you get out of this line of work is the realization that people think they're entitled to have opinions, opinions that are somehow respectable, on subjects of which they know nothing. Not every subject, mind you: I never meet people with passionate, uninformed opinions about the relative merits of Rayleigh-scattering beacons and sodium beacons in adaptive optics, or blue versus red giants as targets for Trident's II's star sensor. But when it comes to evolutionary biology, every man's a King.
This comes to mind too. Thing is, sexuality isn't "malleable" in any animal, period. And why would it be? There's no benefit to that. A total lockstep heterosexual individual is always going to outbreed any pansexual bohemian animal. For obvious reasons. And if it were all susceptible to random psychological quirks, you would find much more variation than actually exists. In reality, only 3-5% of men are homosexual, transexuals are 1 in 20,000+, and the manifold paraphilias have similar prevalence. These figures are consistent in most of the world. Bisexuals don't appear to actually exist, and sexual orientation appears to be impossible to change. Some malleability that is.
The best book out there on the topic is Michael Bailey's The Man Who Would Be Queen. It's intelligent, thorough, and very well written. Hilarious at times. It reads itself; easily readable in a weekend. The very title tells you that Bailey has a good sense of humor. It shows during all his book; I'd love to have some beers with this guy. He sounds like a really cool man.
In fact he's too cool: he keeps his cool in a sort of topic that would cause paroxysms of disgust in any normal person. The guy talks of decades of going to gay bars, talking to trannies, reporting the most bizarre and revolting paraphilias; and yet he has nothing but detached scientific curiosity; even when talking about really inflammatory stuff such as homosexual couples raising kids. He calls himself "pro-gay", doesn't see it as a big deal, and apparently it amuses him to no end. The book is a masterpiece of non-judgmentalism. And he never even intended to make a career on it; he mentions how he just stumbled upon it while thinking what to write his dissertation about. Yet he did make a career on gays and trannies with all that it entails, and he became a world-class scholar in it. Bailey makes a number of claims in his book. The first part of the book is focused on gays. I’ll make his points briefly:
Gays are feminine men. They were sissies as children, liked to play with girls and dress like them. Over time, through social pressure most stop acting like girls; but they are still attracted to men and overwhelmingly choose feminine professions. There is ample proof that gays have a particular way of talking, walking and even facial expressions, which are easily explainable by acting feminine in a male body.Gays lie, deny being feminine because they dislike feminity. They are attracted to manly men. Unfortunately for them manly men won’t have sex with them; so they are stuck with each other. Consequently they must feign being manly if they want to attract sexual partners.Gays aren’t totally feminine though. They have the same sex drive as heterosexual men, the same focus on the physical appearance of their sexual partners, the same lack of interest in children and nurturing.Whatever makes gays feminine, it appears to be inborn. Nurture effects are demonstrably ineffective in changing gender roles. Babies with cloacal exstrophy are born with malformed genitals among other things. The standard practice has been to cut off the malformed penis, and force gender reassignment therapy. Male babies thus were raised as girls since birth. They never knew they were genetically male. Nonetheless most of them grew up to identify as boys, and those who didn’t are severely depressed. Cutting off the penis, constructing a vagina, putting them on pink dresses and telling them they are girls for 15 years since birth didn’t deter them from being boys attracted to women.
He amusingly calls nurture theories of sexual orientation “looked at’em funny theories”. It’s just against the evidence, and it just makes little sense. If subtle cues from the parents attitude were all it matters, there would be much greater numbers of gender dysphoric children, or at least a much more random distribution of them. Gays are quite consistently around 4% of the population in the developed world.
Now, the nature theory cuts both ways. You can’t make a boy attracted to men even if you cut his penis and call him Amanda since the day after birth. But you can’t straighten out a feminine boy even if you beat the crap out of him every time he tries one of his sisters dresses. He’ll probably stop wearing the dresses, but he’ll still be attracted to men when he grows up. There is no evidence that this can be altered either way.
No causes of homosexuality have been identified. There seems to be some small family clusters, but nothing conclusive. The correlation in identical twins appears to be in the 20-50% range. As Cochran says here, the correlation for leprosy in identical twins is 80%. So it’s certainly not genetic, at least not only genetic. And it’s nothing about the environment in the womb. Studies about prenatal stress haven’t found any correlation. He also quotes Ray Blanchard’s birth order theory, although the evidence is being contested. So we have no idea. Steve Sailer interviewed Bailey before the publication of the book, and he gives some credit to Greg Cochran’s gay gene theory, although he doesn’t seem totally convinced. Some interesting quotes:
Psychologist Sandra Witelson has hypothesized that the brains of homosexual people may be mosaics of male and female partsFor about 30 years, from the late 1960s until the late 1990s, it was de rigueur to scoff at these stereotypes and look askance at those who believed them. But recently, science has provided support for the stereotypes, in the only way that stereotypes are ever true: on average.Earlier in this chapter I suggested that having been mistreated as feminine boys is not the only reason gay men tend to react uncomfortably to the implication that they are, or used to be, feminine.The other reason, which I hope is now obvious, is that gay men themselves dislike femininity, or at least they find it sexually unattractive. To call a gay man “feminine” is not only to say that he is a target of many straight men’s ill will, but also that he is less attractive than he would be otherwise. It is certainly an unfortunate state of affairs that gay men tend to be feminine, tend to be less attracted to femininity, but tend to be stuck with each other. There are similar ironies in straight relationships. The designer of the universe has a perverse sense of humor.
AIDS patients with an average age of 35 years reported an average of 60 sex partners per year, or approximately 1,000 lifetime partners.
On average, gay men have their first homosexual experience at about age 14.
A gay male must be careful about approaching other males sexually, but very feminine boys are a safer bet. I would wager that among the many highly publicized cases of predatory men having sex with adolescent boys, a non-trivial percentage of the boys were recognizably feminine.The older men had reason to think that their advances would succeed.
The second half of the book is about transexuals. Now, given the massive attention behind World War T, you’d think there’s a transexual in every neighborhood. But the figures he gives are about 1 in 20,000 males changing their sex. That’s about 15,000 people in the whole USA. But these figures aren’t very important, and can be very variable. You’ll see why. He explains the research of Ray Blanchard, and puts it succintly:
The two types of transsexuals who begin life as males are called homosexual and autogynephilic. Once understood, these names are appropriate. Succinctly put, homosexual male-to-female transsexuals are extremely feminine gay men, and autogynephilic transsexuals are men erotically obsessed with the image of themselves as women
Let’s start by the most familiar type. Homosexual transexuals are in other words consistent gays; feminine boys who actually change into women. They tend to change their sex relatively young, usually as young as they can afford to. And they tend to look pretty good. There have been actresses, playmates, and many actually marry heterosexual men. He writes some hilarious stories about them:
Terese lived as a woman for three years before she got enough money together (about $10,000) to get her operation. Part of the money was a loan from Cher, who had become one of her best friends. In July 1997,Terese (then 25) flew to Belgium and over a four-day period, had sex reassignment surgery, learned to care for her new vagina, and recovered sufficiently to leave the hospital. Within three months, her neo-vagina had healed, and she lost her neo-virginity soon after.In many ways Terese has blossomed since her surgery. She looks great. Not only do people fail to notice that she is a transsexual, but most men find her sexy and attractive. Depressed and in self-imposed isolation when I first saw her, she is flirtatious, energetic, and socially busy now.Among other things,she models lingerie.She has dated and had sex with several heterosexual men, none of whom knew about her past life. (She is still looking for a serious boyfriend.)
Why do they look good? The obvious answer is that only the ones that look good change their sex. Transexuals are gay men who could have just continued being gay man. That they went through all the cost and trouble to physically change their bodies means they had reason to think they could pull it off. As he puts it:
homosexual transsexuals are better looking because homosexual men who want to be women tend not to enact that desire unless they can pull it off.The standard transsexual story implies that the transsexual is so dissatisfied with her incorrect male body that she cannot wait to discard it, regardless of how good she will look as a woman.This is another place where the standard narrative is wrong, at least about homosexual transsexuals. I have begun asking the homosexual transsexuals I meet whether, if they had looked awful as women, they would have transitioned to full-time females. Most have said “No,” and no one has answered with an unambiguous “Yes.” Extremely muscular and masculine looking homosexual transsexuals probably choose not to transition, but instead remain among gay men, who value their masculine looks. (…) As men, the homosexual transsexuals look and act extremely feminine, and that presentation is not very marketable among gay men.They are far more fetching as women.
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There’s also a social aspect to transexualism. One often hears talk about how the idea of “gays” is a social construct unique to Western culture; the idea of men who are attracted to men and have a particular feminine lifestyle doesn’t happen anywhere else. In academic circles that’s called “egalitarian homosexuality”. But most foreign cultures do know of transexuals, which are often conceptualized as a “third sex”. This is called “transgender homosexuality”. He gives some examples:
The hijras are paid to perform at weddings and the celebration of male births, but this service is actually more extorted by the hijras than solicited by families. If a family does not pay, the hijras make trouble, perhaps even flashing their mutilated genitalia. Many of the hijras also engage in male prostitutionWhen he visited Tahiti, Captain Bligh (commander of the Bounty) noted that the mahu participated in the same ceremonies as women did. At first, their feminine behavior and speech led him to believe that they were castrated, but he learned otherwise. He observed with disgust the practice of men rubbing their penises between the mahus’ thighs.The contemporary mahu fellate the men they have sex with, who do not return the favor.The xanith perform women’s chores in highly sex-segregated Oman and are classed with women for many social purposes. Their clothing and physical presentation is a mixture of male and female, perhaps because they are denied by law the right to dress as women. Their attractiveness is judged by female standards of beauty (white skin, large eyes, and full cheeks, for example), and they serve as homosexual prostitutes.in the Philippines many straight adolescent males have their first sexual contact with bayot, or members of the transgendered gay male tradition there. Sexual liaisons with bayot are thought of as adolescent peccadilloes no worse than smoking and drinking. They are certainly more acceptable, in certain respects, than spoiling the virginity of “nice girls.”
Surely more homosexuals in Thailand or the Philippines choose to identify as women because their society does not allow the idea of girly men having their own society where they have sex with each other. Girly men are thought of as girls who can’t have children. And they’re often quite useful as that, especially given that in most traditional societies, women aren’t very accessible for casual sex. Another interesting point that Bailey makes is that homosexual transexuals are the perfect prostitute. Gays, remember, have male sex drives, and absolutely no qualms about casual sex. He puts it very clearly:
Nearly all the homosexual transsexuals I know work as escorts after they have their surgery.
He even writes about a transexual who actually got to marry a heterosexual man and live with him as the closest thing to a real woman. 1 year later they separated, and “she” was back as a hooker. Allegedly, monogamy wasn’t very fun. In the end, homosexual transexuals are easy to spot. If a man has changed his sex to female, and has sex with men, he’s just a homosexual transexual. Which as we’ve seen is a common occurrence in many cultures. What about transexuals who aren’t attracted with men? These are the autogynephiliacs, the likes of Donald McCloskey, Linn Conway (who tried to destroy Bailey’s carreer for writing about it), the Navy SEAL Sailer often talks about, Jennifer Pritzker, and all those eerily looking cross-dressers who one always feels weird about when reading the news. These are easy to spot because they are invariably older, on average older than 40, and they just look like dudes. Autogynephiliacs are often very masculine men, married and with children, that some day suddenly come out wearing a dress and say they are now to be called Jennifer. After their sex change, they often stop having relationships of any kind. They of course claim the old story that they always felt like a girl inside, in effect claiming to be homosexual transexuals. But a careful look at their life paints a different story:
Honest and open autogynephilic transsexuals reveal a much dif- ferent pattern.They were not especially feminine boys.The first overt manifestation of what led to their transsexualism was typically during early adolescence, when they secretly dressed in their mothers’ or sisters’ lingerie, looked at themselves in the mirror, and masturbated.This activity continued into adulthood, and sexual fantasies became in- creasingly transsexual—especially the fantasy of having a vulva, perhaps being penetrated by a penis. Autogynephilic transsexuals might declare attraction to women or men, to both, or to neither. But their primary attraction is to the women that they would become.
While gays might have some reason to claim they are functional human beings (letting aside their sexual practices), autogynephilia just sounds like plain mental illness.
Blanchard noticed different forms of autogynephilia in the different patients he saw. Some patients were sexually aroused by cross- dressing, others by the fantasy that they were pregnant, others by the fantasy that they had breasts, and others by the fantasy that they had vaginas. One patient even masturbated while fantasizing about knitting in a circle of other knitting women or being at the hairdresser’s with other women.
He mentions amputee fetishes, and it sounds similar.Transexuals of this sort, and Blanchard here includes also people who don't end up chopping off their penises i.e. masculine cross-dressers, just have a very weird fetish. They are not feminine, don't have feminine hobbies, have generally been attracted to women, and for all observers lead absolutely normal lives as heterosexual men. If anything, they are more stereotypically masculine than normal:
Autogynephiles rarely have stereotypically female occupations. On the contrary, many have served in the military. I even met one who was in the Green Berets.Technological and scien- tific careers seem to me to be over-represented among autogynephiles. (Ray Blanchard remarked to me that he saw a seemingly close relation between autogynephilia and computer nerdiness.)
These explains theiroverrepresentation in LW! Autogynephilics have what seems to be a combination of extreme narcissism and attraction to women. For some reason their attraction is not towards actual woman, but towards themselves, as a woman.
Autogynephiles are not “women trapped in men’s bodies.” (Anne Lawrence, a physician and sex researcher who is herself a postoperative transsexual, has called them “men trapped in men’s bodies.”) Homo- sexual transsexuals, so naturally feminine from early on, can make this claim more accurately, but as we shall see, it is not completely true even of them.A utogynephiles are men who have created their image of attractive women in their own bodies, an image that coexists with their original, male selves. The female self is a man-made creation. They visit the female image when they want to have sex, and some became so attached to the female image that they want it to become their one, true self. This explains the name of the transvestite organi- zation “Society for the Second Self.” It also explains the maddening tendency of some autogynephilic research subjects to put down two answers to every question—one by the female self, and one by the male self. Homosexual transsexuals do not do this.They have one self that is a mixture of masculine and feminine traits, and not alternating selves. No, autogynephiles are not women trapped in men’s bodies. They are men who desperately want to become women.
Bailey doesn't feel the need to explain the existence of autogynephilics. It's just yet another paraphilia. There are all sorts of paraphilias, all of which seem to only occur in men. Some men are attracted to babies, others to feet, others to shoes, others to obese women, others to old women. There's a lot of weird stuff out there.
First, all paraphilias occur exclusively (or nearly exclusively) in men. Second, paraphilias tend to go together. If a man has one paraphilia, then his chances of having any other paraphilia seem to be highly elevated.The best established link is be- tween autogynephilia and masochism.There is a dangerous masochistic practice called “autoerotic asphyxia,” in which a man strangles him self, usually by hanging, for sexual reasons. Although autoerotic asphyxiasts arrange an escape hatch—for example, a well-placed stool they can stand on before it’s too late—sometimes things go wrong. Perhaps 100 American men per year die in this way. About one- fourth of the time, these men are found wearing some article of women’s clothing, such as panties. There is no obvious reason why autoerotic asphyxia should require cross-dressing. Apparently, these men are both masochistic and autogynephilic. Cross-dressing has also been linked to sexual sadism—although most autogynephiles are not sexual sadists, they are more likely to be sadists compared with men who are not autogynephilic.
Paraphilias are overall very rare, and there is some family clustering. So it's plausible that they are just the result of bad genes. We're talking less than 0.001% of the population in most cases. Yet here we are, with the worlds newspapers running a massive campaign in order to allow these people to use women's toilets. And they are fierce in their claims that they always felt like girls in the inside while signing up for the Marines and fathering children. They are obsessed with their female identity, to the eternal annoyance of actual gays who do behave like girls.
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Now, the book is very interesting as an explanation of what homosexuality and gender dysphoria is in reality. But Michael Bailey is also a psychologist by profession, and so the book also gives much attention to the treatment that the medical profession should give to this people. Bailey, cool, detached, non-judgmental, explains the whole debate between the rising clout of homosexual psychologists who want to want all gender dysphoria to be not considered a disease at all, and some doctors who insist that at the very least transexualism should not be encouraged. The standard they use is "happiness". Will a sissy be happier as a transexual woman or as a gay man? Will a cross-dresser be happier with a penis or without one? Baley calls himself a utilitarian, and generally proposes letting them do what they want.
Yet you can somewhat sense that his endorsement is quite sarcastic. The thing is, the picture one gets of gays and particularly transexuals is one of severely damaged people. They are incredibly dysfunctional, and the autogynephilics are genuinely mentally ill. The "happiness" that spending 30,000+ dollars in a sex change operation is going to give them is a small and fleeting thing. For one they will never be real women; they are always haunted by the chance that the men they attract will find out, that pre-op friends of them will rat out to their mates and reveal their identity. Autogynephilics all end up divorcing, and in a vast majority of cases not being able to talk to their children again; in most cases losing their jobs (unless your boss is a savyy Cathedral apparatchik like Cheap Chalupas) . And that's when the sex change goes well; which is not always the case.
Many of the transsexual people who went to Mexico for gender reassignment surgery in the seventies and eighties wound up mutilated, with genitalia looking like they belonged to one of the creatures in the bar scene in “StarWars,”and not like something likely to be found on a human being of either gender. Some of these people, expecting vaginoplasties, received simple penectomies, leaving them looking somewhat like a Barbie doll. Others ended up with something that looked like a penis that had been split and sewn to their groin—which is essentially what had been done. Some ended up with vaginas which were lined with hair-bearing scrotal skin; these vaginas quickly filled up with pubic hair, becoming inflamed and infected. Some ended up with peritonitis, some with permanent colostomies. Some ran out of money and were dumped in back alleys and parking lots to live or die. Some died in those parking lots or back in the States, of complications from the surgery.
And all for what? For the chance to live as a fake woman. Which can't work well, at the very least because men have male sex drives, which are a very dangerous thing when not constrained by women. Males just want to have sex, and males having sex with males allows the sort of free impulse, short-term pleasure seeking that has led to them becoming a massive reservoir of nasty STDs.
Yet this is being enabled, and lately elevated to the most important issue of social morality because of our society's focus with "happiness", together with the bizarre cult of "love", is just the endgame of utilitarianism. Utility can't actually be measured, it relies on self-reporting, so if a she-male really really wants to chop of his dick because he'll make 10x as an escort, and has convinced himself that it'll make him happy; well his dick must be cut off (in Northern Europe paid by the state), and anybody who opposes that is an enemy of humanity.
Given that sex is an incredibly powerful drive, any utilitarian morality system is going to give sexual pleasure a very big place, overriding many other considerations that may be actually more conducive to a functional society. And of course any objective research on the topic is likely to work against the realization of happiness of sexual deviants, so that must go to. See the amount of shit that Ray Blanchard is given in an interview he gave to Vice magazine.
The doctor likes to flout political correctness, he can’t resist an off-color joke, and his ideas about gender and sexuality are archaic, even by the standards of the peddlers of pathology at the APA. It has been 40 years since homosexuality was removed as a mental illness from the DSM. But given a clean slate, Blanchard said he would still classify homosexual sex as abnormal.So you don’t see a male-to-female transsexual as being female?I think that a transsexual should be considered as whatever their biological sex is plus the fact that they are transsexuals. That’s how you would do research on them. There’s no other way to do it. If you’re interested in whether the brains of transsexuals are different in some way, you’re interested in seeing if they differ from other individuals with the same biological sex.So in a way psychiatric research is inherently gender normative?I would say medical research is inherently gender normative.You wrote in a blog post the word normal has been effectively off limits for describing erotic interest for decades. Why do you think people object to the word “normal”?I always say "normal" is the other n-word. You just aren’t allowed to say it. I would say I have almost never written the word normal because for decades now, since I was a graduate student, and I’m an old man, normal has been a dirty word.So why do you keep using it?I guess because I think it’s a perfectly good concept. I don’t aggravate people if I don’t have to, but I’m not going to say that there is no gold standard of what sexual behavior’s purpose is.So, in your point of view, science rules. Scientific inquiry is the first priority, whatever it might mean for social justice?If you put it in abstract terms, it makes me sound vaguely lunatic.
Blasphemy! Social justice is the first priority. Of course. Scientific inquiry is evil. Thankfully there are still people like Ray Blanchard and Michael Bailey, willing to be tarred, feathered, and deemed witches by the media, and try to bring the truth to light.
As an epilogue, I'd like to suggest some further areas of research. On the interview, Blanchard says:
Do you think autoandrophelia, where a woman is aroused by the thought of herself as a man, is a real paraphelia?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.
Which does sound right because you never see heterosexual women cross-dressing regularly, let alone actually getting a sex change operation. But then I remembered this by Scott Alexander's girlfriend:
ozymandias says:August 2, 2014 at 10:46 pmThis is a public commitment to still being interested in a relationship with Scott if he becomes a reactionary.I actually suspect that polyamory is a harder fix than transness in the case of a relationship with Hypothetical Traditionalist Scott. I am really, really unhappy in monogamous relationships and traditionalists tend to be really firm about the monogamy thing. OTOH, as in my discussion with Mai and Nydwracu upthread, it is possible to incorporate gender dysphorics within a traditionalist framework, and even without that I would be no more than mildly unhappy as a woman as long as I got to have a double masectomy.
! Might this be a first case of autoandrophilia? Or just an amputee fetish? More research is needed.
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[…] Source: Bloody Shovel […]
Actually, that's not quite right. Modern humans seem have evolved from apes rather quickly, under 1 million years, so it stands to reason that our genetic engineering is not of the best quality (e.g. neoteny seems relevant). We know that in the state of nature men are disposable. If some combination of genes, which is otherwise advantageous, is prone to breaking some male children's gender identification, it's just not critical. Other men will be more than happy to step up. Note that even Bailey says that there are no "bisexuals" (usually it's women who claim to be such) and much, much fewer paraphiliacs and FtM transsexuals among women than men. This makes sense: women are important, can't afford to waste women. Men? Meh.
That explains that paraphilias happen overwhelmingly in men. It doesn't explain the relatively big numbers of homosexuals. It's hard to see what advantage it may give you, and in any case the heredity is not clear at all. Still I'd rather not speculate about what I know nothing about. You got any other example to back your idea?
A few percent isn't that big (for males). As for similar examples, there's color blindness (8% in European men, 0,5% in women) — that's all I could find on short notice. I'm no specialist either. The thing to look for are genetic disorders of high incidence, because the lower the incidence, the weaker the selective pressure and the slower the selective sweep. Ultimately the advantages from being a non-affected carrier may balance against the disadvantage of the higher probability of producing affected offspring. Cystic fibrosis (not sex-linked) looks like one case of the latter.
It appears to increase female fecundity. (By the way, to find the DOI for this article, I had to look through the journal's table of contents, and man... your tax dollars at work!)
Hey, there's some actually interesting stuff out there. Better than global warming theology. I've seen that theory, and homozigosity theories are interesting, but how does one explain discordance in identical twins then? You don't get a healthy identical twin if one has cystic fibrosis or color blindness. Btw Cochran mentions cystic fibrosis as probably giving some protection against typhoid in his latest blog post. And about the expendability of men: men's sexual attraction seems to be quite focused and even obsessive, but women are actually quite malleable in this respect, and can be made to enjoy different types of sex by psychological means. That of course is offset by male obsessiveness, which balances the whole thing. If men's sexual orientation were as contingent as some make it to be, surely much less mating would occur, given that women's sexuality is often passive, malleable, and a pain in the ass to seduce. So the evidence is evolution has coded for hardwired, insistent male heterosexuality.
Homosexuality is more complicated than cystic fibrosis or colorblindness, both simple single-gene defects directly producing the disease. Actually, the concordance is more than 1/3, not so small considering that in about half the pairs one twin didn't answer the relevant questions, that the study used number of actual sexual partners by sex to construct proxy variables and that in the current climate men may be tempted to "try it" just for novelty or whatever. The ancients knew for a fact that men will screw anything — women, girls, boys, men, sheep, dolls etc. You know how this works out in prisons.
Re more complicated, you scoffed at that book JohnK linked below, but obviously even if one had alleles predisposing to homosexuality, one's dick wouldn't just home in and stick in other people's butts all by itself. Active cooperation from the affected individual is required, otherwise "coming out" would not be a thing. (Also, consider heterosexual men: if this were not the case, there wouldn't be so many male virgins.) With colorblindness and cystic fibrosis, there is no interference from volition or behavior.
You're being overly nitpicky here. Even if homosexuality depended on 5234 genes all working together, identical twins share 100% of their genes. Concordance should be higher. And the discordance is not about bad data; give that to Bailey, Blanchard and others; they know what they're doing. It's not a single study. Of course sex targets also depend on availability; but there's a difference between men who seek feminine men to get their dicks west because there's no women around, and men who seek hairy dudes to suck their dicks because they can't get enough. Surely a man who fucks a female goat and a man who gets fucked by a male goat will be looked differently even in an Afghan mountain hamlet. Given how easy it's for high sex drive sluts to get laid in their teens; to men willing to have sex together must be the easiest business on earth.
Maybe I am being nitpicky, but I was putting forward a slightly different point. Even if identical twins are genetically identical, unless they keep living together they won't behave the same, they will be different persons. (I wonder if any twin behavior studies try to control for this.) Similar, yes, but I don't buy hard genetic determinism in general*. Manifest homosexuality is not a simple property like height or reaction time or even general intelligence, it's a complex deviation from a complex behavior and it depends on many things besides availability of targets. That's why I am not sure which concordance numbers for it would be high and which low. I'll even retract my remark above on the 1/3 number. As an aside, I do think Cochran's parastic/infection theory is intriguing and deserves serious consideration. * Even though macroscopic physics of the mind is completely deterministic (I think Penrose's "quantum mind" is rubbish), the "sufficient reasons" for at least some of our behavior are so unimaginably complicated that they are impossible to establish, making free will a useful concept.
You're making attraction to men being a personality trait, but there's no evidence on it. Sexual orientation in men is almost completely binary, and homosexuals generally have girly traits and preferences beyond liking to suck cock. There's no continuum, no bell curve as there is on other behavioral traits. Some (probably not that many) may be induced by societal pressure into “trying it", but they either like men or they don't. Of course some people are more willing to try strange things than others; but there's a real difference between a very horny man with a very low disgust reaction who is willing to put his dick on a man (which is likely a very rare thing) , and a man who is not attracted to women period (which are 4% of the population). I do think that Bailey leaves a lot unanswered. There's stuff like this: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/28s37j/whats\_the\_most\_fucked\_up\_thing\_youve\_done\_for/ or this http://www.reddit.com/r/sex/comments/17c8oa/i\_23m\_just\_discovered\_prostate\_stimulation\_and\_i But again, exclusive homosexuals appear to be distinct and more numerous than simply depraved men which end up occasionally having weird sex involving men. And the way I understand how genes work; the math doesn't add up towards any living being developing sexual deviancy to this degree against the pressure of natural selection. All mammals are conventionally heterosexual, we share most of our genes with them, to develop a different paradigm where sexual attraction depends on finely tuned psychological parameters would require selection towards that sort of brain arrangement. And as I said, homosexual behavior is actually quite simple in how it manifests itself. I honestly don't think discussions on free will vs. determinism are useful. We know about some things that reliably influence behavior, some things that don't, behaviors which are possible and those which are implausible. There's also a lot we don't know, but discussing free will in psychology is like talking about God in physics; it just stops the discussion without adding anything to it.
No, I'm not making it a personality trait. I guess I'm explaining it very badly. What I mean is that it's somewhat like alcoholism: it is known that the susceptibility is at least partly genetic, but a susceptible person doesn't necessarily becomes a functional alcoholic. There was a time, not so long ago either, when many of the people who today are functionally homosexual would have been functionally heterosexual, and nobody would have been the wiser. Anyway, I don't know much about the subject. I even doubt I've ever seen a live homosexual. About the weird stuff: file that under "men will screw anything" and general degradation. Some girls have multiple pussy piercings, some men sit on drumsticks. About natural selection: see above. You know the figures that, until relatively recently, only a minority of men left descendants. So if, say, 50% of men never reproduce, adding another 3% of homosexuals on top of that is not a big deal, especially if the allele provides other advantages e.g. in females. Or, even more likely, that 3% has been included in the total figure from the start, but I don't suppose it's possible to establish one way or another. About free will, I know you don't care for metaphysics, and I don't know whether it is a useful concept in psychology, scientifically speaking. But people do in fact act and think as if they had it, and it is hard to understand the meaning of such things as promises or responsibility or self-discipline without at least implicit references to it, or related concepts. Anyway, this discussion doesn't belong in this thread, I think.
Any master theory of homosexuality has to take into account Afghanistan. Where the men are really into male on male sodomy, need to ask U.S. soldiers how to impregnate their wives and yet the total fertility rate is 6.16, down from nearly 8 before the US invaded. And while Afghanistan is a weird place, it's probably closer to the historical norm (in terms of general lifestyle, not necessarily homosexuality) than our societies. Certainly the modern western homosexual lifestyle seems unusual. All these theories seem wrong. As gross as it is, I'd look to the vile apes for clues. Specifically the bonobos who use gay sex to avoid violence and the orangutans with their cheater strategies where some males act effeminate instead of macho, don't defend any territory and avoid conflict with dominant males. This allows them to hang around on the periphery of a dominant males territory and "force copulation" on some of the females attracted by his calls.
Van Phauc: as I was recently pleased to discover, that bonobo hippie stuff seems to be overrated.
Fascinating stuff, made me want to read Bailey's book. By the way, cannot agree with *If neoreaction means something (although it probably doesn’t anymore), it’s about applying evolutionary theory to humans.* Neoreaction may have an interest in human nature, but the neoreactionaries I observe are concerned with more than that.
That's why I say it has no real meaning anymore.
I have no dog in this hunt, but before putting 'Science' in the title of an article on sexual deviancy, you might want to look at 'My Genes Made Me Do It' first: "The book argues for a roughly 10%/90% nature/nurture effect in homosexuality while asserting that any genetic effect is very indirect eg: any physical characteristic making a person feel gender-atypical. The book shows that homosexual orientation is not biologically driven or fixed but that change toward heterosexuality frequently occurs naturally without any therapeutic interventions. It contains arguments not found elsewhere. Using orthodox science and summarising over 10,000 scientific publications and papers, it is nevertheless very accessible to the average reader." http://www.mygenes.co.nz/index.html
Give me a break.
Where do you get this shit from? Give me a single reason why anybody should pay attention to these guys. I'd rather get into Herbalife.
>Candide Bailey's theory is that there's not such a thing as "functional homosexuality". Some men have effeminate brains which leads them to behave like females in many aspects and be exclusively attracted to men. Some of these men would have been, and are today socialized into marrying women; but they are not very inclined to having sex and procreate with them; so it results in differential fertility. Even a small percentage of difference would create selective pressure against it, enough to weed it out of the gene pool in short notice. There's a pretty straightforward math to it. The fact that 50% of men didn't procreate doesn't mean that they all had some behavioral trait in common, if they had it, that gene would disappear pretty fast. Try reading on the topic; you'll probably end up understanding it better than I do.
> Bailey’s theory is that there’s not such a thing as “functional homosexuality”. We just understand the terms differently. If a guy is attracted to men but is socialized into marrying a woman and begetting children on her, and isn't getting serviced in the back way on the side, he's a functional heterosexual in my book, even if he doesn't enjoy it much.
Point is this sort of people had less children on average; and the genetic math means that sort of behavior would get weeded out of the gene pool pretty fast, even if the different wasn't that big. I think the big question here is what's the deal with "tops", i.e. men who exclusively penetrate the feminine homos. There are people who exclusively do the male part of gay sex, and these often use to have sex with women. But I don't have figures at hand of how many there are. I happen to know one, but he was an extreme leftist of the sort of who could be suggested into "trying“, perhaps he went back to sleeping with women. Or perhaps they get hooked with the sheer ease of sex with men; getting your dick wet at will can be a pretty nice experience if you can accept fake women as partners. Perhaps that's what's behind the theory of homosexuals as super-promiscuous men.
>Van Phauc, Afghans aren't into sodomy between hairy 40 year old warlords. They are into raping prepubescent boys, which they dress like women and force to dance to girly music. These are not homosexuals, i.e. people exclusively attracted to real men. They'd fuck girls if they could find any decent looking one without risking family feuds. And also bonobo's aren't exclusively homosexual. That's pretty peculiar to humans and sheep. This requires explanation. Saying well people are weird is not an explanation.
Maybe we got it from sheep through some of those tribes in Caucasus or wherever.
That appears to be Cochran's theory.
My impression (just from reading) is that pederasty is the public face of Afghan homosexuality but that there is quite a bit of slightly less open man on man stuff going on as well. "When it was explained to him what was necessary, he reacted with disgust and asked, 'How could one feel desire to be with a woman, who God has made unclean, when one could be with a man, who is clean? Surely this must be wrong.'" Do we know how common exclusive homosexuality was, prior to the modern world? My impression is that it existed, but it was quite uncommon, perhaps even on par with the frequency of other rare conditions that are really bad for your chances of reproducing. Whereas non-exclusive Afghan or British sailor or prison style homosexuality seems to have been much more common and dependent upon circumstance / location / culture / whatever. Disagree? If non-exclusive, opportunistic homosexuality is within the "normal" range of circumstance dependent behavior for a significant segment of the population, it could simply be the case that something about the modern environment is causing people to focus on it obsessively, instead of taking opportunities to mate with females when they arise. After all, something about the modern environment is causing straights to develop mating patterns that don't make any sense either.
Well there's records on very girly men seeking men for sex in most ancient cultures, while we don't have records of other paraphilias like say masochism. That implies homos were more common. They are also a dime a dozen in many places like India or SEA, which can hardly be called modern. And I repeat: Bailey's theory is that homosexuals not only are exclusive, they are attracted to masculine men. Not boys, not girly men. Prison rape is not about hairy men sodomizing each other; it's about finding a plausibly girly looking man and taking advantage of him. The same in British boarding schools. And homosexuals are sissies by definition. There is nothing in the modern environment causing male toddlers to behave like girls. Even boys who were reassigned sex for medical reasons never do this. It's not psychological.
"… and even without that I would be no more than mildly unhappy as a woman as long as I got to have a double mastectomy." I'm slightly confused now - I thought ozymandias *was* living as a woman. Ze is Scott's trans girlfriend, right? I assumed ozy was a) biologically male b) post-op c) transwoman. Or am I wrong?
Apparently it's the other way around
"Women don't have a fetish to become men." Tilda Swinson. Butch lesbians. Female-to-male transsexuals.
That's homosexuality taken to its final conclusion, not a fetish. Women don't masturbate wearing mens clothes.
I wonder what you think of the case of Billy Tipdon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy\_Tipton Not even Billy's wife and kids knew he was female. I wonder how the mechanism for lesbianism or F to M transexuals differs from the one for homosexuality.
Well the wife wasn't very observant, for one. I've met plenty of butch lesbians, and they just appear to be manly women. I also have anecdotal evidence that there's more in China than anywhere else, which is interesting.
"Bisexuals don’t appear to actually exist, and sexual orientation appears to be impossible to change." I was heterosexual for the first 20 years of my life, then consciously decided to see if I could be attracted to men as well, and am now bisexual. Setting aside gender, I've observed some definite changes in the nature of my sexual attractions, some of which I've consciously caused. I have no idea how common that is, but I do exist.
You give yourself and your "consciousness" too much credit. A normal man doesn't wake up some day and "consciously decide" to try to have sex with men. It doesn't work like that. Do you get equally aroused with men and women? What sort of men do you like? Who do you have sex with more frequently? What kind of sex do you have? All these are factors, not just the sex of your sexual partners.
I certainly have some experience with bisexual attraction but as far as I remember it was never consciously caused. I'm interested to see what you will say, so I'll just answer the questions you asked Shea. I am a male, and I've always been attracted to some women (if they don't act like men), and always been attracted to some men -- as regards whether I am equally attracted to one or the other, it certainly varies, I can say 5 years ago I was more interested in males, but now I am certainly more interested in females (I notice females more, and they appeal to me more now; it was the opposite before). I don't find the idea of anal sex appealing -- I would be surprised if this was a desire that comes just with the disease of attraction to men, and it seems to be more of a paraphilia that just happens to be more common with gay men (of course heterosexual men sometimes seem to have an interest in anal sex too). So, I'm more into straight forward vanilla sex with females and more or less just "foreplay" with males. The sort of men I like tend to be at least over the 10th percentile in IQ, thin or muscular, and the sort of women I like tend to be quite girly, thin, and not loud or too chatty, for both, I seem to have a preference for East Asians (I'm of Scandinavian ancestry), but I think this might just be part of the IQ preference. As for actual sex frequency, it's a difficult situation since I tend to be rather picky, but I have been rejected by all the women I attempt to court (I certainly have approached more women than men). I have been intimate (some sex, but like I said, I prefer not having actual "sex" with men) with 5 men in my life over a period of 4 years. I'm not sure I'd take that to be a good example of my interest though, as I'm certainly far more keen on finding a woman these days. I completely buy the idea that it's a mental disease. I think some people might be less diseased than others. Afterall, if we look at other mental diseases, we also find varying degrees of severity. The question is, why don't people report it if they experience it? I can't answer that, I can only report my own case. One thing I know from other people who call themselves bisexual is this similar phenomenon where they often are more attracted to one sex than another at different points. I knew one person who even would refuse to use the same mattress for his homo and hetero phases. For me, I go through phases where it is more or less equal, but generally it is a preference for one or the other.
The fact that you're not actually interested in sex with males indicates you aren't homosexual. It's probably just that you've developed a willingness to relate to girly men (you mentioned Asians), as they're more available to you than women, which you haven't been very successful with. I wouldn't call you diseased, your situation has much in common, and is even milder than situational homosexuality which is a quite common phenomenon around the world. The problem I see with you and other similar people is that you think too much about attraction and feelings and romanticism. Sexuality is about sex. If you find yourself hiding in a public bathroom asking people to let you suck their penis, you are attracted to men. If you don't, you're not. And there are no actual men attested to do that, and also enjoy having sex with women. That would be an actual bisexual man. It's really that simple.
Spandrell, I am fine with homosexual oral, it is only anal that I am not interested in because it simply strikes me as a dirty and unappealing thing to do. Certainly I don't find much attraction to men who are hairy (i.e. Asians have less testosterone), but girly men, in terms of 'behaviour,' are very unappealing to me, not attractive at all. Or, if you prefer, I couldn't have sex with a girly man. But I couldn't have sex with a masculine woman. Just to clarify your position here. You claim that sexuality isn't about attraction, feelings, or romance, but sexual activity. You claim attraction depends on sexual activity. But in order to get aroused in order to have sexual activity, one must be attracted. So sexual activity (also) depends on attraction. I think it's clearer to say that sexuality is attraction and/or sexual activity. If one is attracted and/or has sexual activity for/with both men and women, then one is bisexual. I can attest to that without difficulty. The other obvious issue with claiming that sexuality depends upon sexual activity is that plenty of people who in 'ordinary language' can easily be called heterosexual or homosexual because they 'want' to have sex with an individual of the opposite or same sex respectively, may have never had sexual activity with either. In which case, your position here seems to be that they would be asexual. This clearly doesn't quite seem right to me. Either one is diseased and homosexual, or one isn't and is heterosexual. Just like someone either has schizophrenia due to misfiring dopaminergic neurons, or one doesn't, regardless of whether one observes the individual in question displaying the behavioural symptoms of schizophrenia. There are also different degrees of severity of schizophrenia, just as there are different degrees of autism, and just about any mental illness. Why, for some magical reason, is homosexuality the exception? Why does homosexuality, unlike all other mental illness, take over and control the brain utterly and thoroughly in every single case unlike every other mental illness known to science?
Yes, of course attraction is necessary, but not quite sufficient. Some people are prone to overthink their romantic inclinations, and talk a lot about what they like or not. But liking is hard to measure. Generally I think it's more useful to look at what people do, not what they say. That's how you control for signaling or simple delusion. I don't know how useful the schizophrenia analogy is. Homosexuality is orders of magnitude more common, and we know empirically that it's mostly binary; homosexuals have sex with men and only men, heterosexuals don't have sex with men. I don't know why it should be so, but even conceding that bisexual people do exist, they (you) are a tiny minority. Male homosexuality prevalence is around 4%, while many paraphilias are around 1 in 10k . Bisexuality is likely closer to the latter. Which means that homosexuality is not just some mental illness, or a personality trait. The most plausible theory given the evidence is the pathogen theory, but it has several problems too.
Regardless of whether abnormal behaviour is caused by a pathogen, smoking marijuana, or the impact of low testosterone on brain development during gestation (which I think is more likely), it is still a mental illness if it impairs one from acting normatively. Being ambitious is a personality trait, but being unable to recognise human faces is an illness, just like being unable to be attracted to females -- which is obviously the normative human behaviour as regards sexuality. If we are talking about the principles of what sexuality is, rather than the principles of experiment design, then the question of attraction is primary. There are many ways to measure attraction which don't require reports of sexual activity (which, by the way, are frequently over reported by men and under reported by women). Moving to claim that bisexuality may be a paraphilia that exists, is a far cry from claiming that it is non-existent, and that there is no instance of it ever happening. A cursory glance at the data in psychology journals will tell you that this is quite an outlandish claim. Yes, there are issues with the percentages due to bias in the selection of respondents, due to the simple fact that people lie about their sex lives, and perhaps more pertinently for the question of bisexuality, the fact that people prefer a simple and straightforward answer to a more complex one. Frankly, at many points in my life I can only describe myself as sexually frustrated and confused. And yes, there is some impact on exposure, and some malleability in how the brain responds to sexual stimuli depending upon how habituated it is to respond to certain input. Anyone who is claiming that there is no evidence for brain plasticity is living in 1900 as regards cognitive science. If I spend months watching pornography, my brain will want more novelty, whereas if I don't watch any, my brain will be easily turned on. If I spend a month watching only straight pornography, I'll be almost completely interested in women by the end of the month, whereas the opposite is true for homosexual pornography. This is no surprise at all, if your mood and preference for activities changes with the weather, what more can one say about sexuality? So to a certain extent, I think Shea Levy is not completely off the mark. I don't think it's simply a question of deciding to be one or the other, there must be some influences which make one interested in the first place, and if one is conscious of the change, one might very well identify as bisexual. I most confirmable bisexuals I know (and I have known less than homosexuals and heterosexuals to be sure but still some) do more or less just switch over one day, and spend phases of months or years preferring one sex to the other.
Bailey claims bisexuals do not exist based on a 2005 study which observed genital arousal, and didn't found anyone aroused by both sexes. If bisexuals aren't attracted to both sexes at the same time, but go through alternate homosexual and heterosexual phases, that could explain that. Still that begs a new question: sexuality in men appears to be hardwired; what kind of wiring produced alternate phases? If the etiology were hormonal imbalances in the womb, we would be likely to see a sort of normal distribution. If bisexuality is a milder version of the issue that causes homosexuality, we would be likely to see more of it, not much less. If you believe the brain is completely plastic, you're living in 1950 as regards of cognitive science. A normal heterosexual man would not suddenly desire to suck dick if we watched gay porno for a month. It doesn't work like that. Moods and preferences change according to a weather but limited by inborn personality and inculcated culture. And again, you come from a very, very particular background. Neurotypicals don't spend as much time thinking on their attractions or other cognitive processes. I have the impression that given a 130 IQ, many people are capable of rationalizing any situation and changing their behavior accordingly. Which is why your internal introspections of what attracts are you not reliable. What people do: who they have sex with, what sort of sex, and how often, is a much more reliable data on the issue. Of course people lie about what they do; efforts should be made to find the truth. But self reports of psychological mood are so fleeting and prone to signaling and delusion that they are useless to ascertain anything at all. To put it in concrete terms: say you're on a heterosexual phase, as you call it, and find a cute girl who you like very much, and have lots of sex wit her. Once that happens, whether you end up falling out with her and seeking men for oral sex or whatever you like to do with them, would be an interesting question. As of now, it's all in your head.
"If the etiology were hormonal imbalances in the womb, we would be likely to see a sort of normal distribution. If bisexuality is a milder version of the issue that causes homosexuality, we would be likely to see more of it, not much less." As you said, alternate phases might explain why that study did not find bisexuals. However, everyone knows you can't rely upon one study, and just because what is likely under 1% of individuals weren't turned on by the pornography Bailey showed them doesn't mean that they are never turned on by someone of that sex. Moreover, recall that in looking for 1% of the population, Bailey's meagre selection of 100 participants recruited through ads in gay magazines (why would a bisexual even read those?) is hardly scientific. Moreover, As I am sure you will agree, most people are not likely to be turned on by a random selection of pornography. They may have specific tastes or different standards of beauty. Moreover, the notion of hormonal imbalances during gestation is supported by autopsy and rat studies, which show significant differences in homosexual and heterosexual brains caused by hormonal imbalances during gestation (typically around the 3 months period, which affects the growth of the hypothalamus). The question in the end is what is the best explanation, and so far the pathogenic theory isn't quite as fleshed out to win me over. But to each their own. "If you believe the brain is completely plastic, you’re living in 1950 as regards of cognitive science." I never claimed it was completely plastic, that would be rather asinine. Regardless, people do develop what can become rather obscure sexual interests due to habitual viewing. Going so far as changing from heterosexual to homosexual is not likely for either heterosexuals or homosexuals, and indeed I never claimed that this can or does occur. All I am claiming is that this is a region that is probably more prone to plasticity for bisexuals since they are already open to one or the other. In my case, I can turn from having 50% homosexual attraction and interest, to 10% just by watching less homosexual pornographic material, and the same for heterosexual material. We're talking about actually becoming physiologically aroused here. "But self reports of psychological mood are so fleeting and prone to signaling and delusion that they are useless to ascertain anything at all." What we are talking about in the end is a question of abnormalities and diseases. In psychology, that one person behaves a certain way that is not normal is significant enough to warrant investigation -- and indicates potential disease. In sociology, that someone is pathological and not normative, also warrants investigation. Moreover, the question of psychological mood is significant if it is a determinant of behaviour. If I were deluded, surely I would not be able to get physically sexually aroused by a woman and a man. My self report is not one of just psychological mood, since attraction is a physical phenomenon; it corresponds to physiological responses. This is also the same with many other moods. You can actively measure fear in an individual by monitoring their pupil dilation, heart rate, and horripilation. Sexual attraction is fairly straight forward, among many physiological effects, it results in erection of the penis or swelling of the vulva. This is normal for heterosexual attraction, and abnormal for homosexual attraction and even more abnormal for bisexual attraction. "As of now, it’s all in your head." Eppur si muove.
Hello. I can't be bothered to argue with the entire article, but speaking as Ozy's girlfriend I am somewhat confused by the suggestion of zir heterosexuality.
I am somewhat confused by the reason behind this utterly content-free comment. You might as well detail how typically lesbian she is because you do this and that. In any case it's surely a pretty strange homosexual woman who publicly announces having a boyfriend and wanting to have children with him. Then again he did say he wasn't much into sex, so there's that.
Ozy has a girlfriend because ze likes girls. Ozy has a boyfriend because ze likes boys. There is a word for this. The word is not heterosexual. The word is not homosexual. The word is bisexual. (Ozy is also not a woman but I don't expect you to grasp that or use correct pronouns in the light of your writing.)
How odd that bisexuality appears only to be possible in women. But she is not a woman because chromosomes are evil, I guess.
What? Check 4chan or Tumblr. Or history. Or OKCupid's statistics. (About the statistics: seems plausible that people would identify as bisexual even with predominantly heterosexual/homosexual attraction patterns after one positive experience with the sex they don't message, or attraction that they don't act on, or whatever. So the 15-20% in the charts is a floor, not an absolute percentage -- it could be higher.)
That's what you're gonna tell Blanchard and Bailey? Check 4chan? A 15% of self-styled bisexual men sending online messages to both sexes is hardly evidence of equal sexual attraction to both sexes over the long term. And enough with the nurture crap. You should know better. Positive (or negative) experiences don't change inborn sexual orientation.
If the observations don't fit the theory, that's a point against the theory, not the observations.
The theory is about sex. Not about messages or gif posting in small online communities. If you have evidence of significant numbers of men being equally aroused and having regular frequent relationships with both manly men and feminine women, by all means give them to Bailey.
lolololol inborn sexual orientation. You know that was made up by gay activists to trick people into supporting gay rights, right? pwned tool of the cathedral *much*
Nobody is talking about women here. And try to speak like an adult. This is not tumblr.
I think it is less plausible that women don't have paraphilias and more plausible that women are fucking liars. You just have to let them be anonymous.
Women are widely reported to end up mostly not having sex at all if there are not men involved. Different sexual drives should entail different distributions of sexual deviancy. How many women are found having dead in autoerotic asphyxiation? That's hard data, more reliable than your *very* outlier intuitions.
Fanfiction and so on is useful data. In my experience, there are two types: usually-homosexual pairings written around sappy emotion-porn, and usually-heterosexual pairings written around BDSM/hypermasculinity-and-hyperfemininity. (cf. the theory of BDSM as making-acceptable and acceleration of traditional gender norms) But this is probably inaccurate, since it's drawing on distant memory of limited data. (I don't watch TV and stopped paying attention to Homestuck a while before the megapause.) A statistical analysis of fanfiction themes would be interesting. Has anyone done it? Doubt it would be that hard; could get decent results by scraping AO3 tags and waving whatever magic statistics wand at them to find correlations.
[…] The science of sexual deviancy. […]
At first, Bailey had trouble finding male bisexuals, but then he tried harder (also) and found them. They are rare, but probably more common than transexuals, most of the topic of this post.
Yes, I read that one. I hope he continues his research. Still the fact that so many self declared bisexuals weren't actually bisexual is interest in its own.
FYI - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/15/ozy-a-response-to-spandrell/ Might want to respond there - although I expect that you'll get banned pretty quickly.
He's never banned be before, gotta give him that. Others have refuted most of her drivel. I think Scott will appreciate that I don't feed the sick troll he has for a girlfriend.
[…] Some good comments in this discussion of Spandrell’s earlier sexuality piece. […]
What if homosexuality is like sickle-cell disease? That in most individuals, the genes involved help them in some way, and that only a tiny fraction develop behavior you term problematic. Saying it makes no sense is rather.. short-sighted. Animals are not simple.
Going through Scott Alexander's banned list, came here. Lol'd at telling Ozy to try and talk like an adult. Sperm wars' theory always made most sense to me: that a little bit of gayness gives an evolutionary edge because it helps communicating with women. Too much gayness from too many competing gay genes and you're fucked tho - evolutionary dead end.
That makes some amount of sense, but I have the impression that Cochran would tell you that the genetic math doesn't add up.
'Genetic math' sounds very vague. Do you think Cochran would object to the argument because he has a more compelling argument for the existence of gays or do you think he would object because it is a bit dark and cold to think of gays as evolutionary dead ends?
No, because there's plenty of rigorous math on how genes propagate and what kind of fitness advantage they need to do so. Cochran knows exactly that gays are evolutionary dead ends, which is why he says it must be a pathogen.
That still leaves the question unanswered - why homosexuality? Napkin math tells me that if 4% of gays got genetically unlucky contracting genotype gg, then about 8% of males has bi tendencies (gG). Which seems like an entirably reasonable evolutionary niche to me.
Yeah, but how do you explain that identical twins have plenty of cases where only one is homo? Concordance is only 25%. Can't be the genes alone. A bug that makes you wanna fuck in the ass 3 random people every day is a bug that's gonna reproduce like crazy.
In terms of behavioral explanation a 25% correlation is pretty high. Sure there are environmental influences, but mostly they trigger genetic tendencies that were already there. There might be a gay bug for all I know, but then its success is likely due to its symbiotic relation with gay genes.
4% of males*
[…] I should add that interpreting homosexuality as a sexual choice and not inborn gender dysphoria doesn’t fit the scientific evidence we have, nor the historical evidence of what most of humanity has thought of the issue. For a very informative, and extremely readable book on the issue, look to Michael Bailey here. Here’s my take on the book. […]