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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   34967 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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But presumably you also want to say that boys getting molested by men turns them gay. So why does it have the opposite effect on boys that it has on girls? How come, instead of the boy’s trust and comfort with men being permanently damaged, he instead becomes hyper-attracted to men and seeks out even more intimacy with men?

(Also second wave feminists thought that being a lesbian was pretty much the most virtuous thing that a woman could do so it strikes me as odd that any of them would try to link it to trauma.)

I used to know a woman who got raped in the past and continued to regularly have casual sex with strangers in an attempt to "regain control" of her sexuality (unsurprisingly a psychology student in the same year as my wife, yes all the stereotypes about different study topics are true). She occasionally admitted that it's mostly stupid and never actually led anywhere good, several of these encounters even have ended up kinda rapey and made everything worse. But she just couldn't not do it, as I understood her she constantly feels threatened by men and going partying, targeting a specific guy, getting him to buy you drinks, getting him to focus on only you the entire night, and then "rewarding" him at the end, all completely on your own schedule made her feel powerful. Especially if he afterwards gets obsessed with her.

I'm mostly rephrasing @Terracotta here, but there's always different ways to deal with a perceived threat. If you get beat up, you can either get buff - fight response - or forever avoid - flight response - every situation where it might possibly happen again. And the more extreme the (perceived) threat, the more extreme the reaction is usually.

Traumatic experiences can have that paradoxical effect, though, where some victims become intensely avoidant while some victims go the opposite direction and obsessively repeat the trauma. Show a bunch of 5-year-olds a scene from a scary monster movie, and some will become so terrified of monsters that they can't even handle* Sesame Street*, while some others will get painfully hyperfocused on that type of monster and deliberately seek out all the possible media about it that they can find- not joyfully, but with an anxious kind of obsession. I've personally observed both reactions, and both make sense in their way. One effect of fear is to focus the attention, so it makes sense that kids would develop a compulsive interest in processing or making sense of the trauma by repeating it on their own terms.

Mapped onto sexual trauma, that would mean that a boy molested by a man might become a sexually voracious gay dude, or might flee into borderline asexuality. A girl molested by a man might become a sexually compulsive straight woman, or might flee into lesbianism. All four of which do seem to match at least my anecdotal sense of the real-world outcomes for these cases.

But presumably you also want to say that boys getting molested by men turns them gay.

Well, no, as a matter of fact I don't.

To be fair you did make the argument that sexual abuse leads to homosexuality.

No, I made the argument that it leads to loss of attraction to the opposite sex, provided the abused belonged to it.

So you think they aren't really sexually attracted to women, they aren't real lesbians, just traumatised?

She then becomes either asexual or lesbian in practice.

So yes? That's the exact line that confused me, I don't know if you are saying they become lesbians through the act or are only lesbians in practice.

I am saying they were heterosexual or bisexual and become asexual or homosexual.

So why does it have the opposite effect on boys that it has on girls?

Probably because boys are not girls and girls are not boys and there's no reason to think that they are equivalent or interchangeable, especially when it comes to sex.

Male and female sexualities are asymmetric in more ways than one, so I wouldn't consider it the most shoddy prior that males and females are more/less likely to come away with different experiences of the same thing.

Yes, I agree that men and women are different. But are we allowed to invoke that as an explanation whenever we want to? Sometimes men and women behave the same, instead of differently - what then? Do we just say "sometimes men and women are the same, sometimes they're different, and that's all there is to it"? It would give you unlimited explanatory license to justify whatever you wanted in regards to theories of gendered behavior, without ever having to address gaps in the theory.

My concern is that people are starting with the conclusion they want to prove ("gays are icky and pedos are icky, therefore they must be linked in some way") and then working backwards. So you end up with a just-so story that adds more and more epicycles to prove the desired conclusion.

Sometimes men and women behave the same, instead of differently - what then?

Now this is an honest question and not meant to be snarky: When?

I just genuinely cannot think of a single situation in which men and women behave the same. Not one. Not when studying in school, not when walking to the bathroom, not when sitting down for lunch, not when speaking in a business meeting. Maybe I'm just not thinking broadly enough?

Currently though, I'm liable to think the proper heuristic is "men and women literally never behave the same in any situation ever, and if anyone says they do they're either smoothing over differences or autistic." If there are some weird exceptions then those seem to fall more under the "exception that proves the rule" than anything else.

This doesn't give unlimited explanatory power, but it does require every single generalization about people to be split into two more specific generalizations, which I feel will cleave reality much closer to the joints.

The little bit of data I've found seems to align with the original hypothesis (that homosexual molestation is much higher for both sexes):

Forty-six percent of the homosexual men in contrast to 7% of the heterosexual men reported homosexual molestation. Twenty-two percent of lesbian women in contrast to 1% of heterosexual women reported homosexual molestation.

Which shouldn't be exceptionally surprising. Men aren't significantly more likely to molest children, I believe, once you account for reduced reporting rates among male victims of female molestation.

This seems to line up with that, taking into account the naturally higher rate of homosexual attraction among women, which pads the numbers somewhat.

Well, "being molested by someone of the same sex turns you gay" is at least more consistent than plausible than "being molested by a man turns both sexes gay". But it should be pointed out that there was an "Editorial Expression of Concern" for this paper that pointed out some inconsistencies (results stated in the discussion didn't match what was actually in the table).

Well, "being molested by someone of the same sex turns you gay" is at least more consistent than plausible than "being molested by a man turns both sexes gay".

Why? If the hypothesis is that "being molested increases rates of homosexuality" and men do most molesting, both of those stories can co-exist with the second one having more explanatory power.

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