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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31668 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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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.

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.

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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