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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24902 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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I have zero doubt that sexual preferences and predilections can be substantially altered through a combination of conditioning, cognitive therapy, and repetition.

this seems like denial or repression though. does the underlying urge ever go away?

Worth telling you: I got this post on the volunteer queue. I'm not the original reporter, so I don't know exactly why it was reported, but at a wild guess your lack of capital letters probably strikes some people as "low-effort".

this seems like denial or repression though. does the underlying urge ever go away?

I think this is kinda irrelevant. The underlying urge to bang Perkins waitresses certainly never went away for Tiger Woods, but his executing on that urge was not good for him or the rest of his family.

There is also an open question as to homosexual urges as to how much their development itself is conditioned. As we saw with the Catholic Priest scandal, it was a bunch of priests sodomizing teenage boys, simply replicating the behavior they had been taught as a different priest sodomized them 20 years earlier. And because no one much cares to police the sexual adventures of teenage boys (except those they have with teenage girls) this dynamic seems both common and accepted in the gay community.

I am again agnostic. While homosexuality isn't among them, I can say that I have had strong impulses and preferences regarding various things in life that I no longer have. Certainly, fetishes and kinks can come and go (heh) and often seem to be the product of conditioning. I honestly haven't done any meaningful reading on mechanisms or extent for these sorts of things, but it would be surprising to me if there isn't quite a bit of variance in just how much fluidity and control over that fluidity people have.

To be clear, I am not coming at this from any sort of prescriptive perspective.

Would that make it any different from going to a therapist for alcoholism? Any change in behavior means denial or repression to some degree, that doesn't necessarily make it bad.

'Ex-gay' and 'gay but desperately repressing it so you can lead a miserable life of permanent chastity' are qualitatively different claims.

The people that CNN is claiming to be debunked call themselves the 'ex-gay movement'. That's the level of claim at question here, at least at the top level.

Is this purely an academic discussion over whether homosexuality is innate/controllable, or is there an additional implication that homosexual acts should be avoided? If the latter, I’d be interested in hearing reasons why.

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