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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.
Yeah. There's still some small groups trying it for smoking cessation and addiction therapy, but even in that specific context it's controversial, and for a reason. When using it with sexual arousal, it seems like giving people really unpleasant BDSM kinks is kinda the best-case scenario, and broad hangups or extreme social discomfort more likely. But like the lobotomy, it was popular for a time.
My apologies. This last interpretation is the correct one: of the small group of gay men who actively search out therapy to become less gay or more straight, a large majority either only find themselves 'less gay' in that they're able to go more time without a strong hunger for gay sex, or 'more straight' in the sense of having the ability to have sex with women but not the ability to enjoy it or to find it preferential to sex with men, and in both cases not being any more comfortable with their same-sex attraction.
This is separate from bihackers (mostly straight-to-bisexual-seeking), where there are a small number of unequivocal success stories who aren't sure if they became bisexual or just became comfortable being bisexual, a tiny number who had organic changes cause overt and undeniable differences in attraction (mostly trans people on hormones, kontextmashine's brain tumor), and then a large majority where it couldn't change their likely romantic (or grindr) focuses even as they became comfortable.
Uh... I was kinda trying to motion around really-really-feminine guys, regardless of the anatomical side; that's just a comic that's really explicit about it without being actual porn on the same page.
But it does apply there, too. I'd kinda naively expected trans men with vaginas to maybe be less psychologically difficult for a 'straight' man trying out gay sex, (and a lot of trans guys reasonably don't like being seen as training wheels), if only in a 'it's nothing you haven't
seenfucked before' sorta way, but your specific reactions seem fairly common for guys who strongly prefer women. Even well before male pattern baldness or mastectomy, most normally-straight guys, no matter how much they've gotten used to the idea of men having sex, aren't into a bit of even soft and downy chest hair. Go figure on that one!For that specific comic, with the warning that it's almost certainly too much information :
Fair. And since I do have an actual orientation play kink, if one that doesn't overlap much with conversion therapy or orientation change (or mind control), so that also makes this whole matter complicated to talk about. I definitely don't want to mix real-world advice and smut-world logic, or pretend that pulling psychoanalysis from smut is going to give some broad and consistent view of human thought.
But I also have to recognize the limits of my introspection, so I can't just say I'm looking at the topic completely dispassionately, either for or against.
It's still shocking to me that it won the nobel prize. I understand the harsh experiences and conditions of the instutionalized and that people genuinely did 'improve' in the sense that they didn't express wild emotions any more, but the null hypothesis for any such change, especially when it came with cognitive impairment, would obviously be that you've butchered them and something about their internal experience has been seriously degraded. I wonder at times whether the lobotomy was a product of behaviorism, or of the medical neglect of the mentally ill. Probably both.
This seems hard to tease apart. But I guess it's genuinely an open question how someone actually "discovers" what turns them on, and what the difference is between "being comfortable with it" and "being it sexual." Even within a particular orientation there are obvious features that seem culturally determined, like of course the tension between the "I want me a woman as thin as a rail" guys and the "I want that venus tummy" guys.
Really? In terms of being attracted to people of a very different kind than before, not just being more attracted to the same kind of people?
I will say that I think straight men love the general body shape and appearance of women more than they love the vagina, specifically. I guess 'pussy pics' are a thing, but it's telling that the main thing men want to see in a woman is really something more like the curves, the breasts, the buttocks. Even more than that, there's an angle on the female body positivity movement that's 'vulva positivity', because a lot of pornography selects for ladies with minimal labia minora, which suggests a kind of genital minimalism in men's attraction to women. Perhaps this contributes to why gynandromorphilia is so common as a thing that it has a whole porn category?
(To be clear, I don't think men actually have strong opinions about the size of a woman's labia, and it is sad, I guess, if women feel bad because they think their genitals look ugly. This is a kind of body positivity I can support.)
Chest hair specifically is very male, and it wouldn't be suprising to me if, in recent primate evolution, it became one of the primary selection points for males to tell themselves apart from females. Perhaps this remains as a sexual preference that subtly encodes heterosexuality. You might say something about breasts, but lots of women naturally have small breasts. Some men even prefer it -- "Itty Bitty Titty Committee" is apparently a lesbian film (TIL), but I've always heard the phrase online as a joking discussion of male preference for the small-breasted. It's not a wild leap from "this small-breasted lady is hot" to "this pectoral gentleman is hot" or even "this individual who once had breasts but no longer does is hot" (although mastectomy scarring can jarring to a lot of people), but body hair serves as kind of an immediate "THIS IS MALE, CANNOT BE REPRODUCED WITH, ABORT" signal in the broad and crude sense that lots of evolved preferences are. Noticable facial hair is also a major turn-off, perhaps for the same reason, and this is where a lot of trans men I think explicitly try to simulteneously mascmaxxx and minimize their attractiveness to the straights by growing a beard.
Women naturally have some level of hair (usually quite light, but sometimes darker) on their arms and legs, and while I think men overall prefer them shaved, I don't actually think it's actually a massive turn-off or an intense male fascination the way some feminist takes consider it. Obviously our distant ancestors didn't have any issues with females growing hair all over, so this is probably a recent adaptation in geological time scales and I presume the sex differentiation in hair was very crude and focused on key, noticable differentiators that could be sacrificed without harming survival.
I have a lot of chest hair, and my hair is very dark, women comment on this sometimes. My girlfriend said she showed a picture (fully clothed, so I guess it was just the hair peeking up over my collar) of me to her aunt, who exclaimed, "he's hairy!" Whether this is evidence of my androgens being high, a genetic inheritance from... someone, or just luck of the draw, I don't know. But I will say that this makes me polarizing, and only the true androphiles can understand my appeal.
Ah, I see. I am used to you linking comics with a very... creative set of descriptions for genitals, so I suppose I was linking that terminology to that pattern.
I think personal interaction with a severely decompensated schizophrenic would help make it clear that lobotomy was a fantastic option when we had no other options.
You've probably seen street people - when your choice for your family member is let them live like that, during a time when that was mostly a quick death sentence, or sending them to an asylum to be locked up for the rest of their life....excising part of them while leaving as much as they could behind looks like a good idea.
This is what we do for cancer after all.
Thank god we have other options now, but before...
I bet it's fantastic for people who had to take care of them, but executing them would yield a similar effect in terms of taking a burden off their shoulder.
I mean poor quality of life or poor quality of life that drains on society less...
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Yeah. There's a handful of clear-ish cases (eg, latex kink seems like one of those things that's either an instant love or meh, with very few people changing opinions afterward) but even some stuff that seems like it should be less mutable acts weird, too (eg, foot fetishism seems like some neurological mismatch would be the best explanation... but it's really common for artists to pick up a taste for it, organically).
At least in self-reporting, it's pretty common but neither universal nor especially predictable in direction. The Blanchard faction claims up to 40% have some change over their lives (and I have no idea how that's supposed to fit the AGP theory), though they definitely merge in some unrelated to hormone therapy when doing so. Unfortunately, they seem the only people trying to actually run a survey on it.
The data is a hell of a mess, so I can't be too confident: at least some MTFs report a drop in libido as making gynophilic relationships more viable, which isn't of interest to most people, and some new-found FTM attraction is probably 'just' a general libido increase (and some loss of attraction might be downstream of sexual function problems), and of course there's the social identity effects for any self-reports.
Agreed. There's a lot of weird hangups that people develop because of indirectly absorbed beliefs, that it seems like there's a lot of revealed preferences as not existing, available pretty widely? I know there's a lot of 'intrasexual competition' as an explanation, and maybe that's a thing for shoes, but there seems a lot of low-hanging fruit if only the genders could more comfortably talk between each other.
((Admittedly, there's also a lot of weird hangups that might develop as a result. The average straight guy probably doesn't go out of his way to look at testes, given self_made_human's complaint at the end of this post, but even androphilic women tend to find them funny-looking in ways that are vaguely sacrilegious to my perspective.))
That's fair. And apologies for the squick.
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