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Somewhere downthread, or perhaps last week, conversion therapy was described as akin to the Ludovico treatment from A Clockwork Orange. Let's say that this assessment is plausible. Why hasn't an effective version been developed for some (not necessarily gay male) sexual preferences? Surely there is no shortage of adults who would like to reprogram themselves but lack the means to do so.
I agree. According to this study on identical twins, the concordance of homosexuality is in the ballpark of 65%. There may be some environmental factor there. For me it is interesting that we now have a situation where biological sex is supposed to be fluid and sexuality is supposed to be ingrained and outside of being able to be changed.
Unless, of course, you're not attracted to trans or fats, in which case you need to "unlearn" that.
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If there is no such thing as having the wrong sexuality for one's body, it does not look like a contradiction or "interesting" to me that attempts to change it are akin to conditioning a dog to flinch when it sees its formerly favorite treats.
Sure, it is not “wrong” to have certain sexuality, similarly how it is not inherently wrong to be certain sex. The left is all about individual power and choice - if somebody wants to become straight or gay, why not explore ways how to do it? They are willing to do it for the sake of sex/gender.
I would like to see the reactions of various groups if the left one day said "you know what? fine, sexuality is a choice, and we're going to give children a choice to go to a straight->gay conversion camp, complete with all the features of gay->straight conversion camps".
Judging by the latest veritas leaks re. passing out butt plugs in LGBT class, I think that's just called "school" now.
Not any more than handing out condoms in school is "straight conversion camp". After all, condoms primarily serve heterosexual couples by acting as birth control (pregnancy is the most common STD by orders of magnitude). And yet, I don't see any progressives complaining about that blatant bias.
Edit: now that I think about it, I can remember a few examples of schools that allegedly functioned as de facto gay conversion camps. British boarding schools 100 years ago, to be exact. Maybe they still are.
Given the prevalence of female birth control (every sexually active girl I knew in middle school was already on it), condoms mostly serve to avoid STDs, and the messaging seems to have changed to focus on that
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Pregnancy is not the most common STD unless you include intentional pregnancy, which certainly shouldn't be counted as a disease. There are like 10 people with an STD for every 1 teen pregnancy.
"Are"? Well, in that case I'd thank the condoms for that. I assume those who are conscientous enough to wrap it would also be less susceptible to catching STDs even without condoms.
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Some of this probably reflects a lot of conversion/reparative therapy being based on largely outdated and not-especially-brilliant psychological theories to start with : Ludovico's bad enough, but a Ludovico approach driven by shoddy Freudian psychoanalysis manages to often be worse, creepier, and more prone to abuse.
There's been some efforts toward 'bihacking', for a (weakly) less controversial approach using somewhat more updated techniques, although I (and Ozy) both caution that it's not been hugely successful and even those who do end up bi often find themselves unsure whether they 'changed' or just started noticing better or being more comfortable with it.
((Uh, alternatively alternatively, some people just go in the furry fandom for long enough, but that's probably a different selection effect.))
Internally, though, I don't think the model underlying the whole CBT is right (in the cognitive-behavioral therapy sense, though I expect the nutbusting one doesn't work either). I get why people think of sexuality as parallel to how salvatory glands work, and there's probably some component of that there. But sexuality has enough counter-inductive things backed into it that trying to Pavlov's going to feel incomplete.
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Fetish communities seem to have figured out a method that is at least somewhat effective, it's just neither psychiatrists nor Christian groups are interested. And the time investment, unclear reliability, and possible side-effects are such that it's hard to see it being worthwhile under most circumstances. The basic method is that you masturbate (and possibly edge), a lot, to the thing you want to be attracted to. To do this you generally couple it with something you are already interested in. Examples:
Fetish acquisition and drift. It is common for people to pick up new fetishes (and strengthen existing ones) over time. It is also common for those fetishes to become more extreme and/or more abstract over time, more distant from baseline sexuality. Unlike most of the other examples, I think this one is sufficiently well-known on the internet that it's almost considered common-sense. People masturbate to something with content they like, it also has other fetish content, and over time they find the other fetish content arousing as well and may seek it out. It's not the origin of every fetish, plenty of people talk about having certain fetishes arousing from very early on, but it clearly happens. On places like 4chan you can see people talking about the progressions like this they have gone down. Sometimes they end up doing something like deliberately going back to more vanilla porn or cutting back on porn in general because their fetishes ended up in an extreme and emotionally unpleasant place. I remember a Reddit comment by someone claiming to be involved in prosecuting child-pornography offenses claiming around 50% of cases are people who seem to have been pedophiles to begin with while the other 50% are like this, people who sought out increasingly extreme pornography until getting caught with child porn.
Fetish sponging. You see people in fetish communities talk about picking up fetishes from sexual partners. It's a similar principle but with sex instead of masturbation.
Sissy/humiliation/chastity/hard-femdom/etc. fetishists who fetishize the idea of being turned gay . Here we get into sexual orientation. For various reasons related to humiliation/submission/transformation fetishes/etc. some men are not attracted to men but do find the idea of being turned gay sexy in the abstract. In this case part of "something you are already interested in" is the idea of being gay, but also that sort of porn is generally focused on women even if it claims not to be. 4chan's /gif/ had regular "gifs that make you want to suck cock" threads but they had women doing the sucking, their "sissy hypno" threads would straight-up alternate between women/straight-sex and images of penises, chastity-cage image-captions where the reader is forced to sexually serve men while being caged still use images of sexy women, etc. Trans porn is often used, combining both elements in a single individual. Screenshots I've seen floating around claim with seeming sincerity to have become sexually interested in men for real after masturbating to enough content like this. (I also remember seeing one that claims to have arranged a meeting to give a gay blowjob and then backed out because it wasn't at all sexy like the abstract fantasy was.) While someone could argue anyone like that had unconscious/suppressed desires all along and sought out that sort of porn for that reason, that is not the impression I get from the accounts and from my understanding of how the relevant fetishes work. Now, obviously comments on the internet are untrustworthy and comments about fulfilling sexual fantasies especially so, but it seems plausible enough as an extension of the fetish drift phenomenon.
This Medium article, linked by a post here a while back, describes a similar fetish community that is gay to straight instead. I'm not familiar enough with it to guess if they've had actual success or just fantasies.
Regarding time investment to do this sort of thing on purpose, a lot of people don't specify and obviously it hadn't been studied so its hard to guess. Probably stuff like fetish drift doesn't necessarily take that much. But you do encounter people mentioning edging to relevant content for hours almost every day for months or years, so possibly more extreme changes like sexual orientation take something like that. This could also have unwanted side-effects, such as increasing or decreasing your sex drive. (Would an exclusive pedophile trying to shift his desires over to adults risk increasing his sexual desires generally? It's a pity that a study examining this can't happen for a variety of reasons.) Or increasing tolerance for extreme sexual stuff in general, particularly with edging. I guess someone who already masturbated a lot could change his habits to fit the desires he wants to have. Mostly I think this concept is potentially useful in avoiding doing it by accident, don't make a habit of porn involving X if increasing your interest in X would be undesirable.
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I want to double this and kind of ask the question in a different way:
If someone says: "I am a woman, and I want to be a man" - we put the person through an intense, and experimental regimen of hormones and surgery. We do massive amounts of work, with a few high profile regretters. The process seems to carry a high risk of infertility?
If someone says: "I am gay, and I want to be straight" - nope. Sorry. Technology just isn't there. You have to accept who you are. There is nothing we can do, nothing we can try. "But I really don't want to be-" stop internalizing your own homophobia. Your lived experience here is wrong. - is this an exaggeration? I'm not trying to strawman here.
Really in all directions, I feel like I have seen a lot of people in my life go from evidently and obviously straight to gay. Like, if they were closeted, they were Daniel Day Lewis level acting and hiding their true feelings for decades. Even talking to one wife just shrugged and was like "it literally makes no sense". I have never seen someone go from gay to straight (sorry, I don't believe Milo). Even members of my faith who do the "i'm gay but I'm not acting on it" don't try to pretend that they became straight. Why? If it's a spectrum, and fluid, why does it only ever seem to go in one direction?
I hope this doesn't come across as hostile or sarcastic - I'm genuinely curious how a lot of this stuff works inside the brain/body, and if there was a way to change it how that might change a lot of things. I get why on some levels we don't - awful stories of conversion therapy attempts from the 70s and 80s seem to have really hurt a lot of people. Maybe there are people who had a successful time and we just don't hear about them. But I'm guessing the outcomes were negative, and the health establishment isn't willing to risk it again. But they seem to be willing to risk it for other things - and if it's consenting adults as opposed to minors, then well...give er? I'm assuming there is still a market for "Christian guy who doesn't want to be gay", but maybe not as much.
You know "a lot" of people who have gone from straight to gay? That seems unusual. I don't think I personally know anyone like that and I have a pretty wide social circle with plenty of non straight people in it. The closest would be a guy I met years ago and had a single conversation with who claimed he went gay after his wife cheated and he got divorced.
I guess it would be about 5 people, so not a lot - maybe I should clarify. They may have been gay the whole time, but there was no indication, it wasn't like a "ohhh, yeah, not a shocker" it was like, "are you our greatest living actor?"
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My understanding is that from a psychological perspective we don't have techniques for removing, instilling, or modifying sexual desires. Last I checked the primary treatment for paraphilic disorders is aversion therapy, which doesn't work great. Exodus International was a non-profit attempting to provide conversion therapy for homosexuals since the 70s, and in 2012 they shut their doors and their final president put out a statement saying that conversion therapy doesn't work.
We really don't have a good understanding of why people have paraphilias of all types, much less how to change them.
We still use aversion therapy and chemical castration for certain categories of sex offenders, don’t we? Seems like the biggest objection to conversion therapy is that it treats homosexuality as wrong. This is, needless to say, a value judgement and not something you can prove or disprove with data.
Chemical castration definitely works to remove sex drive. Aversion therapy is the one tool we have in the toolbox for changing sexual orientation/paraphilias, and my understanding is that it has limited success at best.
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Presumably the point of conversion therapy would be to make you like the opposite sex though, not just not like your own. The methods you mention may have some negative effect on sex offenders’ attraction to, say, children, but I don’t think they do much, if anything, to make them like adults instead.
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