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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026

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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."

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).

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?

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.

(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.)

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.))

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.

That's fair. And apologies for the squick.