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Most of the information I've seen suggests that formal use of 'hard' aversive stimuli (eg, electric shocks, physical impacts, harsh chemicals) fell out of favor by the mid 1980s. There's claims of it since, but they tend to revolve around extremely marginal cults and/or really sketchy political activist backstories. Even before it was marginalized in the social conservative sphere, it was considered (probably reasonably!) as likely to backfire, end up with asexual or otherwise less-sexually-functional-than-before outcomes, or trigger even weirder behaviors in the Nicholas Cummings side of the sphere.
(Although I was under the impression van den Aardweg himself was prone to flirting closer than most talk therapy-focused groups: there's always some fuzzy edges between exercise as process versus exercise and punishment, but the whole Failed Male and Failed Social Relationship framework seemed prone to leaping off that edge, in addition to just being hilariously wrong in a number of cases I know firsthand.)
Yeah, that's not unprecedented or unbelievable. I was trying to keep to the legal arguments above, but the factual side of this is an ungodly mess.
My impression is that there's a small portion of people (either bisexual or malleable for other reasons like their approach to sexuality or very pressing in the 'every hole is a goal' sense sex drives) for whom even the 'standard' form of Man Up works, or could probably even work themselves into a pretty wide variety of results in the Dodo Bird Verdict sense. There have been a few bihackers that were successful going the other direction, and happy with it, and I kinda do have to mention that there's a ton of guys who were perfectly straight and then spent some time in the furry fandom and discovered Oh No He's Hot.
But the flip side is that a lot don't, even within the small group who seek this out the hardest: a large portion who try are only able to shove down same-sex interests for short periods, or they're able to function with women but still crave men in ways that they're not really comfortable with. Likewise, you get bihackers that aren't grossed out by gay sex anymore, but wouldn't actually look out for the stuff, or might struggle to even top (or even top the 'most gay lite' guy available, cw: furry comic).
I'm not kidding when I say Cumming's 14% number seems really optimistic.
The flip side to that is that we've got a lot more tooling available, now. At the moderate level, there was a long-standing theory that gay guys just needed to have a couple good rounds of 'healthy' sex with a woman to Become A Man, and contra the invasive therapies and wireheading from erwgv3g34's older example, these days some gay guys can do it with a Little Blue Pill and a weekend in Vegas. It doesn't work -- a few still can't get it up or keep it up, and a much larger number can pump away and just don't really feel satiated at the end -- but it seems like it should be something that redefines how a lot of frameworks around everything here should go, and it really hasn't.
People having widespread changes to their sexuality as a result of hormonal supplementation is common, if not universal.
(At the more extreme, I'd expect rTMS to have some impact, and while I think experimenting like that is a terrible idea regardless of what you're trying to change your mind on, it's far from the most terrible idea to get massive support and grants. On the flip side, I can understand why both social conservatives and LGBT advocates think it's a really dumb weapon to invent and then leave around for someone else to mandate!)
On the flipside, with the possible exclusion of the Kaiser SF program, it's weird how messy "improved somewhat" is as a term of art. Does that mean they were still gay, just got perceived hypersexuality under control? Still gay, but could run on the masc4masc side of grindr? Still gay, but less conflicted about it? Could they now have sex with their wives, and if so did they enjoy it or see it as a chore? Or did they have reduced same-sex attraction, in the sense that they jorked it to gay porn instead of cheating on their significant other? Because some of these endpoints -- even and maybe especially if they are desirable for the patients in question -- seem like they could be confronted in ways that don't revolve around 'changing orientation' as the central result, rather than a rare side effect.
Even assuming as a given the whole progressive mainstream philosophy as true, there’s a lot of this stuff that could be relevant and interesting and important, completely divorced from sexual orientation change, and they’re not looking into it deeply either.
I think using positive punishment in order to create a conditioned response is just a very, very bad idea to do to people and can mess them up in ways that we don't fully understand. #JusticeForLittleAlbert
Ok, this is one of your sentences I had to read thrice before I got it. I thought you were talking about the straight-to-gay people here (I guess you call them the 'bihackers'?) and I was genuinely confused for a few minutes because I thought you were saying "they could only shove down" in the sense of "avoid throwing up because of" same-sex interests for short periods, and I was trying to discern how that was different from your next sentence about the guys who were no longer grossed out by gay sex. It took me longer than I care to admit to understand you meant "repress" and not "keep a full stomach on", which are very much the opposite thing.
I thought about making a matrix joke, but then I realized that making a matrix joke about gender and sexuality wasn't particularly original.
Wait, is the point that the 'most gay lite guy available' is a trans man with a vagina? I will admit that I've found some people who call themselves trans men attractive, but this is on the "I have changed literally nothing about my appearance--I am now wearing masculine clothing but I've done nothing irreversible--I am a proud trans-masc-femboy and this is a masculine pink skirt I'm wearing" spectrum of trans men, or in other words the ones where they could just say 'I am a woman' and no one would think anything of it. When male-pattern hair or surgeries start getting involved that's where my brain nopes out. I suppose that's a long-winded way of saying I'm not attracted to trans men.
I mean, this doesn't not sound like someone's kink. We already live in a world in which gay hypnosis pornography exists.
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