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Health See other Health Articles Title: You Can’t Much Help What Turns You On Your sexual fantasies may have little to do with your non-sexual beliefs. Published on May 25, 2012 by Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D. in Evolution of the Self It might be argued that many—if not most—of your sexual preferences are societally or culturally determined. But Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, the authors of A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire (2011), think otherwise. Exploring the subject of human sexual tendencies in remarkable depth (their bibliography contains over 1300 items!), they make a strong case that most of our sexual choices are independent of what (at least subliminally) we’ve been taught to favor. This extensive series of posts (in 12 parts) on male and female sexual cues is mostly based on Ogas and Gaddam’s comprehensive volume. And following these authors’ lead, I’ve pretty much been forced to conclude—from examining their review of findings in biology, anthropology, neuroscience, and case histories of infants organically altered—that the evidence clearly tilts in that direction. Namely, that our erotic inclinations have instinctual and genetic causes, as well as being rooted in early (generally unwilled) life experiences. Moreover, these preferences tend to be highly resistant to change. If, that is, they can be changed at all. Let’s start with a brief discussion of the extraordinary case of David Reimer. In 1965, circumcised in Manitoba with an electrocautery needle, the attending urologist accidentally burned off his entire penis. In reaction, his horrified parents consulted Dr. John Money at Johns Hopkins University. The most famous sexologist of his time, Money was convinced that human sexuality could be completely controlled through social indoctrination. He therefore instructed the parents to change the infant’s name to Brenda (the name they’d planned to give the child if it were born female), have him undergo surgery to provide him with a vagina, and raise him as though he were their daughter. Taking their son/daughter to Money’s office for gender-identity therapy (once annually, for over a decade)—as well as furnishing him with dolls and dresses, and giving him hormone treatments so that he’d develop breasts—they were assured by the psychologist that their feminized (rather, emasculated) son would function just fine as a female. So what was the result of such unprecedented sex reassignment therapy? In a word, disastrous—though this isn’t what, for many years, Money reported back to the scientific community, falsely claiming that his unorthodox “gender bending” was a complete success. In fact, “Brenda,” as early as age three, was tearing off her dresses, opting to play with cars and guns (vs. dolls), and using her jump rope not for skipping but for whipping her identical twin, rough and tumble brother and tying people up. An outcast at school for her various behavioral oddities, she was routinely teased and rejected. When Brenda hit puberty, despite all of Money’s attempted “therapeutic” reprogramming, she/he experienced no attraction whatsoever to boys. Which led Money to ask the distraught parents (and, to me, the simplicity, denial, and incalculable arrogance in his thinking is absolutely mind-boggling): “How do you feel about your daughter being a lesbian?” (!) Finally, no longer willing to ignore their child’s mental and emotional anguish, the parents rebelled against Money’s chief demand of them. Heeding the advice of a local psychiatrist, they confessed to their beleaguered adolescent child, now 14, that “she” had been born a “he.” This came as a great relief to the child, who proceeded to change his name back to David. Undergoing a mastectomy to remove his breasts and a phalloplasty to give him a (nonfunctional) penis, he began dating girls and eventually got married. But never again did he return to the eminent sexologist, Dr. Money—whom he saw, indignantly, as “brainwashing” him. Still, as a result of all the “psychological warfare” (his own term) that he just couldn’t get out of his head, at age 38 he committed suicide. (And how tragically ironic that he took his own life through firing a shotgun into his brain.) Nonetheless, because of Money’s unwarranted optimistic reports, thousands of genetically male infants with “anatomical disruptions” were brought up as girls—and with markedly negative outcomes. The upshot of so many failed experiments in this area is that today the medical profession actively opposes this kind of nonvolitional surgical sex change. All of which suggests that a genetically male’s social environment does not have the power to transform the nature of his sexual desire—or, for that matter, redirect it (O&G, pp. 10-12). Ogas and Gaddam provide the reader with an even more dramatic example of an entire society (the Sambia, in New Guinea) forcing on its male youths a practice that would seem perfectly contrived to “shape” them for later homosexuality. Yet roughly 5 percent of male Sambian adults have been found to be gay, a rate about the same as that in Western societies. The authors’ conclusion? Simply that “some things we instinctively find arousing [which is what's called “cued interests”]. Even if society urges us to participate in a sexual practice [in this case, fellatio] during our formative years, this does not necessarily determine our adult desires.” True, Ogas and Gaddam admit they haven’t uncovered research specifically demonstrating that the determinants of female sexual interests are identical to males’. But it does appear that it may be the innate brain software in all of us that, finally, constitutes the key influence on what’s destined to turn us on. (see pp. 12-13). Although, as I’ll illustrate, both genders can find themselves sexually aroused by what they’d prefer not be enticing to them, I’ll start with some examples specifically related to males. I mentioned in a previous post that so-called “shemale porn” ranks high among what’s visually most exciting to males. And I’d be willing to wager that most males would probably experience embarrassment owning up to such a preference with their wives or girlfriends (and maybe even their guy friends, too—who might secretly share this choice!). In fact, such an interest is commonly held to be a “squick” (a kink that—conventionally or culturally—is seen as repulsive). But despite the likelihood that most men drawn to such images (of attractive, curvaceous females exhibiting erect penises) are so involuntarily, such pictures and videos still have the power to markedly turn them on. It doesn’t matter that this arousal may go against their sexual grain, or that this predilection is unwilled. Regardless of their ambivalence, such imagery can titillate them—and frequently to their surprise, even astonishment. So what’s going on here? And why is such a seemingly atypical interest so well represented in mainstream porn sites—such as PornHub, the world’s most popular adult video site? In fact, Ogas and Gaddam quote Wendy Williams, a transsexual porn actress, as asserting that this form of porn “is one of the largest-selling niches in all of straight porn . . . a huge moneymaker” (p. 217). It’s important to emphasize here that the main audience for shemale porn (models for which are also known as “trannies,” “T-girls,” or “ladyboys”) are heterosexual males, married as well as single. Additionally, that such transsexual women, who yet maintain their original penises, have received hormones to acquire not only breasts but a female figure generally. Straight males’ interest in viewing such unusual anatomies (and, according to two sociologists investigating the phenomenon, some bisexuals as well) relates to the fact that transsexual women present a novel juxtaposition of two kinds of visual cues known to turn men on. First, there are the usual set of femininity cues—breasts, buns, curvy figures, and female facial features and mannerisms. And second (value added!), there’s the visual cue of the penis. As I’ll discuss in my next post, the sight of an erect penis is—however strange it may seem—likely to arouse males’ sexual brain. Combining in a single body, then, these two “opposite” cues has the power to sexually excite many males in ways that, previous to such exposure, they might never have imagined. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 2.
#1. To: farmfriend (#0)
Drink Coke!
Utter fraud.
There are no replies to Comment # 2. End Trace Mode for Comment # 2.
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