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Yeah. "Girlish" traits like frivolity, stupidity/incapability, and artsiness are valued among AGP folks because it turns them on. Whacking it to not being able to do math is a common AGP pastime. There's an element of roleplay going on that is impossible to dissociate from the chemical element without double blind studies.
Also, "Increased experience of meaningness in day-to-day life." - yeah, making major life changes, having a new project, and potentially a new social group, can do that for you.
How do you know that?
Pretty common is an overstatement, but it's a behavior I've seen around AGP/sissy spaces. I used to be AGP. Not all trans people are AGP, but it seems that a greater portion of AGP people are going trans nowadays than back when I was into it.
In the broad sense, getting turned on by behavior the person associates with feminity is the most common and defining AGP behavior, and that is not rare at all. The trans redditors call it "gender euphoria" nowadays, to avoid calling it a paraphilia.
Yeah, but that's both because nobody knows what a paraphilia is[1], and because it sounds like that other '-philia' that means you're into kids.
(Actually, the same's true of using the expanded form of 'AGP', for the same reason, and those who use it know that.)
[1] I mean, I like that caliber and being prepared and all, but I've yet to develop a sexual attraction to bullets and MREs.
It's curious that sex-positivity means that you can openly declare yourself kink-friendly, and yet in common parlance the suffix "-philia" is only ever used to refer to creepy things which even proudly kinky people would not want getting out about them if they had them (paedophilia, necrophilia, coprophilia, ephebophilia, zoophilia). Maybe it's just because Greek words sound clinical, like you're a specimen being studied under a microscope? Maybe AGPs would be less resistant to the diagnosis if it was framed not as "I have autogynephilia", but rather "I have an 'imagining myself as a woman' kink".
A lot of the axis that popularized AGP have been trying to paint furries as autozoophilies. It's objectionable to me in part because a lot of people would round off the 'auto' bit, so it is less palatable than 'tf kinkster'.
((Although there's a few places that -philia that does show up in kink-heavy spheres: vore fans call themselves voreaphiles or endosomaphiles pretty often depending on flavor, and people who buy 'i consent' sleep masks call it somnophilia even if it doesn't fit under the technical definition.))
But it's also objectionable because it seems pretty obviously wrong as a broad model. Yes, there are people who fit the central version of the case: Bailey brings up plushophiles that have a plush tf kink, which is pretty common, but I could link to a guy talking about how he wants to TF into a werewolf, get rawwed by a werewolf, or both at the same time. But there's an absolute ton of people that don't, ranging from human-on-anthro fans, to those who fantasize about being a different species than what they find attractive, to those who only find transformation or becoming an anthro interesting in a nonsexual sense even if they have sexual interests in other parts of the furry fandom, to those with intense sexual interests in a transformation concept so long as it's happening to someone else.
To be fair, Bailey et all don't claim that autoanthrozoophilia is absolutely universal among furries. But they do everything up to that point in the articles themselves, and in contexts outside of academic papers just imply it really heavily, and indeed go further and suggest that these correlations explain how people became interested or more interested in the fandom, rather than any other possible arrow of causation.
That's a pretty big central part of the disagreement for Blanchard/Bailey's AGP theory, and there it is much more explicitly aggressive: they claim that trans people either fall strictly into one of homosexual transsexual or AGPs, categorically. To the point where any testimony that crosses the margins -- a solely-androphilic transwoman without traditionally-male interests and who masturbates to dressing as a woman, or a solely-gynophillic or bisexual transwoman with traditionally feminine interests who doesn't -- is evidence that the trans person isn't willing to be truthful. This was maybe defensible in the 1980s and 1990s, where various motivating factors lead trans women to present study leads highly sanitized versions of themselves.
But these days we have wide arrays of sources that can't be built around people trying to lie to psychiatrists. There's tons of counterexamples, and even a handful would raise serious questions about whether this behavior was the motivating factor.
Well, I can't imagine any way that could possibly be abused.
In fairness, I don't remember ever personally encountering any trans women who didn't fall into one of these categories or the other. I'm sure there must be a handful, but based on my own personal experience it wouldn't be unreasonable to round it off to these two categories (increasingly heavily weighted towards the latter).
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They'd still be highly resistant, because the rest of society can say "kinks/fetishes are optional, so we have the right to tell you to keep it at home and otherwise judge you for it".
It has to be an orientation, because orientations are considered sacrosanct (that was the whole "born this way" fight being hammered out in the '00s). If they fall out of that social protection scheme they predict, correctly, that their social power to do their thing will go away.
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We use Greek for diseases a lot. 'Homophobic' is used because it connotes a diseased mind, as did 'homosexual', which is why nobody willingly uses those terms to describe themselves. Gay people don't call themselves 'homophiliacs'.
They were going to back in the '70s, but this didn't catch on.
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I've seen some people on Tumblr encouraging the use of "androphilia" and "gynophilia", the main disadvantage of hetero- and homo-sexuality being that they are relative, rather than absolute, terms: you need to know the speaker's sex before you know the sex to which they are attracted. Andro- and gyno-philia don't have this problem. I like the terms for this reason, but I can't imagine them catching on in casual conversation.
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Of course we do. It's obsessive sexual target error.
The exact causes or how alterable the phenomenon is is subject to lots of debate, but it's obscurantist nonsense to claim the category has no merit. It makes specific falsifiable claims.
For all of the issues with it, I'd like people to actually provide scientific arguments against Blanchardianism instead of "nuh-uh" and "my politics say this is badwrong".
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No, I know what he's talking about with that one. (Not because I've ever been on HRT, but because on this particular point he's just describing how I am by default, and this point seems to be a persistent and noticeable difference between how I experience things and how other people experience things.)
The simplest way I could describe it would be something like, "the impression that sensory perceptions carry semantic content that extends beyond the boundaries of what is literally contained in the sense perception". Normally irrelevant details like colors, landscape features, or the particular spatial arrangement of objects triggering strong emotional associations, taking on "narrative weight", etc. I think that everyone is familiar with these types of experiences to some degree (could be something as simple as, visiting a place you haven't been to since you were a little kid and triggering nostalgic memories as a result), but some people have these types of sensations much more frequently and intensely than others, and from a wider range of stimuli. But the point is that it doesn't have to be attached to traditional "centers of meaning" like new projects or new social relations.
It could also be described as "a strong natural resistance to depression". Typically when I hear people describe depressive moods they use language like "feeling empty", feeling like everything has been "drained of meaning", feeling like "nothing matters", and... I've never felt any of that. Like ever. It's hard to imagine feeling like that when everything is so damn meaningful all the time! (On the flip side, I am extremely prone to anxiety, so it's not at all the same thing as just having a clean bill of mental health.)
This is how my perception has worked since early childhood, so I can confidently say I'm not describing the effects of psychedelics or other foreign substances.
I'm a trans-woman and I think this is pretty accurate. I started hormones and then spent 9 months presenting as male 'closing out' my old life and wasn't part of any sort of trans community except some peer support groups that were kinda trite. When I'd go hiking in the Sierra's though I'd get emotionally overwhelmed and end up crying because I was flooded with this feeling of intense meaning I didn't really have any way to structure. I went back to church because I feel a really intense gratitude and God felt like a good place to put it, though I can't say I truly believe. I have a number of friends who became religious shortly after transitioning, though they tend to end up Catholic and I'm the lone prot.
The strong natural resistance to depression is also something I really resonate with. It's easier to be satisfied by and engaged with my own life on E. I feel less drawn to escapism or hyper stimulation and better able to enjoy pleasant steady states like walking in the park with a friend, or cooking a nice meal.
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True, but that's also known as the pathetic fallacy. It works better as a literary device, because in the real world yes sometimes the sky is cloudy and it starts to rain just when you're feeling sad or angry, but sometimes it's just a cloudy sky and a rain shower.
I found a much simpler way of explaining it.
Say you're in a large crowd of strangers, you don't know anybody. You scan the crowd and every individual person looks largely the same to you, they just melt into a sea of anonymity. But then you notice your best friend somewhere in the crowd; suddenly this person "lights up" in a way that none of the others did, to you this person looks quite different, even though to anyone else they would look like just another stranger. Importantly, this isn't a conceptual/discursive thing: you don't have to consciously think to yourself "oh there's my friend, we had plans to meet up today, I should go talk to them now". It's baked into the immediate visual perception itself that they just "glow" in a way that the strangers don't, pre-discursively, even though from an "objective" point of view there's nothing really to distinguish the raw visual image of your friend from the raw visual image of any other person.
People who are higher in "meaningfulness of experience" have these experiences more often and from a wider range of stimuli, people who are lower in meaningfulness have them less often.
We can hypothesize that the mechanism of action in full blown schizophrenia is that this meaningfulness becomes so excessive that the person has to adopt delusional beliefs just so they can build a coherent internal model of their own sensory experience (e.g. that signpost on the side of the road looks so salient because it must be a coded message just for me that was planted there by the CIA).
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I'm going to assume the word they are groping for here is "meaningfulness" and not "meaningness" but of course their new girly oestrogen brain can't word properly, tee-hee!
Seriously, if guys think this is what being a woman is like, there is no goddamn hope for any mutual understanding between the sexes. On the other hand, it does explain the 'dressing like an anime avatar my new name is Lilith Raven Andromeda see how I've coated my face in a thick layer of makeup so girly now' transformations.
My guess is that this is common to the subset of guys who both have AGP and the propensity to act on it by transitioning, but can't be extended to guys in general.
To be fair, women don't understand men's mindset either (see the discussions on here about male sexual desire and need versus women's; yeah my dear men, emotional disturbance can make it so that the very last thing you want is to have some snoo-snoo and if the body isn't aroused, it ain't gonna happen).
We do have different bodies, it's hard to understand how something works from the outside as against the experience of "I've been this body all my life".
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The term has been floating around in the self-help literature sphere, and even made it onto Wiktionary (which claims that it's chiefly used in "philosophy"). I would assume that it was introduced by people who didn't want their poetic self-help goals tarnished by association with the more prosaic readings of "meaningful" (like not of insignificant scale or impact, not nonsensical, etc.): if you say you are striving for meaningfulness, some are bound to read it as a win-friends-and-influence-people sort of thing.
Oh God, therapy-speak neologisms. I should have guessed!
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I have an acquaintance from college who transitioned male to female. They once showed me a picture of a neckbeard with acne, saying "this is what I used to look like, then I transitioned and I'm so happy with how I look." Well, no crap my friend, you shaved the neckbeard and started taking care of yourself!
Now I want to know whether "being forced to find the derivative of an integral" is someone's kink. Surely not?
Yudkowsky tried it but they apparently didn't end up liking it. I know about this because it became the basis of a rumor in SneerClub-adjacent circles that he kept a harem of "math pets" that he forced to do math problems and that this was abusive somehow.
https://old.reddit.com/r/HPMOR/comments/1jel94/hate_for_yudkowsky/cbemgta/
https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1172190781794160641
Example of the rumor:
https://old.reddit.com/r/badmathematics/comments/127vquu/eliezer_yudkowsky_0_and_1_are_not_probabilities/jehu62q/
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The answer is always yes.
Oh yeah. "Can it be possible that someone would find X a turn-on?" Yes, and it doesn't matter what X is or how disgusting/repulsive/but surely that's physically impossible you think X is.
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Matter of fact, it has been my fetish ever since that one time I dated a math grad student with impostor syndrome.
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I assume /u/FarmReadyElephants was referencing bimbofication fetishes, and I have also observed a huge overlap between transwomen and bimbofication fetishes online.
It seems far less common for people to fantasize about people becoming smarter, and so I doubt there's been a lot of kink around being forced to do derivatives of an integral.
Mostly, my "grand unifying theory" of kink is that most fetishes (in the non-clinical sense) involve sexual power dynamics filtered through an "unusual" power hierarchy. So gigantification/shrinking fetishes are dominance-submission dynamics filtered through the lens of size, bimbofication fetishes are dominance-submission dynamics filtered through the lens of intelligence and low class beauty norms, weight gain fetishes are dominance-submission dynamics filtered through the lens of weight, etc., etc.
I suspect that normal human psychology in both men and women goes out "looking" for power hierarchies to internalize, and that most people in our society converge on a broadly overlapping set of hierarchies (wealth, beauty, class, height, etc.) Those hierarchies then play a role in what a person goes looking for in a sexual partner. But in a subset of the population, they become fixated on a single power hierarchy, like height, weight, or intelligence and so when the internalized hierarchy interacts with their psycho-sexual development, it manifests as a fetish.
I suspect that "being forced to find the derivative of an integral" is off the beaten path of power hierarchies, though I suppose it could have overlap with teacher-student roleplay.
I like this model for some things but I actually think bimbofication is a different pathway. The appeal is silencing neuroticism. It's ignorance is bliss and fetishizing not just a lack but a total incapacity for responsibility. Same reason a lot of this stuff is involuntary. Lots of people feel responsibility as an unbearable burden. But maybe you're wrapping all that into the sub role.
I do think a lot of that is part of the sub role, but I was also trying to describe the appeal from "both sides."
There are people who want to become the bimbo, and I agree that a large part of the appeal for them is literally "turning your brain off" and giving in to blissful ignorance while letting another person take control. But there are also people who want to make the bimbo, and I think for them it is all about the feeling of seeing someone who was smart being taken down a peg and becoming a parody of themselves.
I think the bimbo sub has a lot of overlap with the sub in ageplay, petplay, hypnoplay, etc. All of those involve embracing a more simple-minded mentality and letting someone else take control for a while.
A much more speculative part for me is why particular kinks end up appealing to particular people. I have a second hypothesis, which I might call the 'horror story hypothesis.' I think that the power dynamic that becomes part of a person's fetish is often a thing that they worry about a lot. Classic examples would be the girl obsessed with staying skinny who ends up with a weight gain fetish, or a smart guy whose greatest fear was brain damage getting a bimbofication fetish - which are both examples I've seen in the wild. I don't think that this explains every instance of someone fixating on a single power hierarchy, but I think it probably explains a good deal of them.
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My understanding is that, in addition to the physical component of masochism (some people really do find pain pleasurable -- maybe it's to do with mild endogenous painkillers released?), much of the interest in submission among people who swing that way is about surrendering control and shutting off your brain, just like you say. Humiliation is probably something else entirely. And frankly my politically-incorrect view is that people with humiliation kinks are people who truly believe they're inferior in some way and believe being placed in a situation where it's called out is just revealing and acknowledging a reality they already fear is true.
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There is the claim about being sapiosexual, and its opposite: being unbearably attracted to someone stupid, the dumber the better. At least I thought the latter (being morosexual) was primarily a joke, but turns out some people possibly do claim to be that in reality.
Good Lord, I just cannot keep up with the modern world!
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I think there’s a bit of LARP to anyone claiming an identity they are not born with. I’m not even convinced that one could reliably describe the feeling of being oneself. What does being M’aiq feel like to M’aiq? If I were asked to describe myself, I wouldn’t be able to describe myself by internal feelings of M’aiq-ness because there’s nothing so unique to my internal states that I could point to and say “if you feel like this, that’s what it feels like to be me.” I could talk about interests and behaviors, beliefs, favorite movies or TV shows. I could talk about my memory of some event. But all in all, my experience of being me is pretty much a normal human being experience. And everyone has male and female coded interests. I like HEMA and art and hiking and watching baseball and Masked Singer. I think I could find several people both male and female who like those things.
Did you reply to my comment by mistake? It feels like a bit of a non-sequitur.
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Ok, I guess we're taking this seriously as an idea.
If we're speculating about it like this -- I could easily see a humiliation kink developing around self-esteem issues involving math; I've struggled with math since I was in primary school, and despite having a lot of interest in tyical "geeky dude" hobbies like computers and spacecraft, I find math really hard to wrap my head around. I don't think that was bad teaching or anything, I just don't have the aptitude, and it shows up on actual IQ tests because my verbal IQ massively outstrips my performance IQ. So I've always had a bit of a complex about being intersted in lots of things where math is very significant, but finding it really hard to grasp the mathematical concepts that make them work. I could easily see a complex like that becoming a kind of humiliation kink, because being unable to do things that people you respect can do creates a power hierarchy!
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The mind of AAPs are completely alien to me, so who knows? Maybe one of them is hot and bothered by roleplaying Grigori Perelman.
I've also noted one instance of an AAGP in the wild (a woman who wanted to be a man who wanted to be a woman). Human culture has no end of oddities.
I will admit that the inverse of this has crossed my mind on more than one occasion.
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I tried to come up with some sort of calculus joke that would fit, but I think I’ve reached my limit.
Then again I remember barely anything from Calculus and I got Cs on many of my Calc exams. Maybe I’m a woman. (I’m not. The Asian girls always did way better than me.)
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