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Sufeitzy's avatar

An odd piece, which has some discontinuities in thought and phrases which were jarring, some false dichotomies, and an entirely male-orientated view of sex in part and in the whole. For context, I'm a gay man who's been extremely active sexually for 5 decades worldwide (alive due to the quirk of being homozygous for the CCR5 Delta-32 gene rendering me immune to HIV), and been legally married to a man for a quarter century. I'm reasonably well-read in sex research from Kinsey to "The Mess Commission Report" and knowing a variety of personalities in the area going back to the days of Reimer and that problem, as well as Trans and an enormous variety of (gay) paraphiliacs. I also have a large collection of (written) pornography spanning seven decades, and made it somewhat of an amateur study.

Let me share my editorial view.

1) "gender-critical" As always, a working definition of gender is useful since it's utterly ambiguous.

2) "Unlike partnered sex, masturbation reflects only the masturbator’s motivation." - I'm afraid in the partnered sex I've had, motivation was critical too, and for most people I know. I'd rate this false.

3) "An important cause of this sex difference is the level of circulating testosterone, which is considerably higher in men than women, on average. Castration of sex offenders is highly, if imperfectly, effective in preventing recidivism." - I don't understand how these two sentences logically follow each other - from circulating testosterone to sex offender recidivism? Can you define circulating testosterone, why the word is important? Is it relevant to understand free/bound testosterone, or heavy-chain vs light-chain derivatives?

4) "However, for men with normal levels of testosterone, increasing these levels does not boost their sex drive; the picture is similar for women." - this is utterly false. It's famous (notorious) in bodybuilder communities that supraphysiologic levels of testosterone from steroids which raise testosterone markedly makes men, and women, almost maniacally aggressive sexually. "Super Horny".

5) "Men are more interested than women [...] men like and use pornography more often than women [...]" I find the statement misleading. There are at least two principal varieties of pornography - written, and visual. In my experience with people and pornography, men prefer visual, women prefer written. Men tend to be object-oriented, perhaps women are more verbal. Men are fairly uninterested in the written pornography women enjoy, and vice-versa. Women are as interested in written pornography as men are in visual, in my experience, though men do enjoy explicit written pornography.

The entire industry of Erotic Novels, with the sub-genre of Romance Novels with erotic content is slanted very heavily to exclusive consumption by women. Since "50 Shades of Gray" is a pornographic novel for women by a woman writer, which is in the top-10 books ever sold now. I'd rate the statement here false. The rest of discussion of pornography is entirely male-focused visual pornography, and little discussion of the difference of written pornography vis-a-vis women. It's a highly-constrained view which will automatically find "differences".

6) "When I was a teenager in the early 1970s, there was no Internet and the only visual pornography available was pictures in magazines." - for men. The entire pulp fiction industry existed to create written pornography for both men and women for decades; the Romance Novel industry exists almost exclusively for women.

7) "... much larger erections"... you mention later "photoplethysmograph" for women, but not the ordinary penile plethysmograph for men. I don't think it measures size of erections (larger) so much as it measures volume. However, there's an essential problem in that the plethysmograph on a penis can induce erections in and of itself due to the pleasurable tension it creates - indeed, a volumetric plethysmograph is identical to sleeves commonly available in sex shops, along with an astonishing variety of cuffs - cockrings - also available. There's an entire paraphiliac genre related to use of the equivalent of volumetric plethysmographs in sex in clinical and non-clinical situations. More on this later.

8) "... when viewing videos featuring only attractive women compared to videos featuring only attractive men. In these studies, videos that include both sexes are less informative because it’s unclear whether the arousal is triggered by the woman or the man." - I find the idea problematic, since the arousal need not be triggered by the woman or the man, but by both, in combination. It's a logic problem of false dichotomy. Then what follows - "men who say they’re homosexual show the opposite pattern–a tendency to get far larger erections in response to videos featuring attractive men rather than those featuring attractive women..." seems tautological.

9) "The second reason is that some men's arousal patterns do not align with their reported sexual identities." - perhaps trivial, but I'd say "reported sexual orientation", an identity is a permanent fact of existence. One observes the identity (male/female being permanent facts), one reports a subjective orientation.

10) "If a man identifies as heterosexual, has only had sex with his wife, yet gets much stronger erections to men than to women, he has a homosexual orientation." - Another false dichotomy, since bisexuality is a fact of existence. I could conjecture many plausible reasons besides homosexuality for the response.

11) "Measuring female genital arousal is considerably more indirect and complicated compared to that of males. An instrument called a vaginal photoplethysmograph, which is contained in an acrylic tube the size and shape of a tampon, is used for this purpose. Women insert it into their vaginas prior to watching our videos." - I don't know, but to me inserting a tube in a vagina isn't quite what I would call indirect, perhaps "invasive" is a better term. I'm curious why the tube is acrylic, and we get such a detail description, whereas we don't get the description at all in any way of the penile plethysmograph, which frankly is ar more complex. As opposed to colorimetry, it must have a strain gauge and volumetric sensing.

The problem here is comparing physiological responses between men and women - arousal patterns, where the physical measurement is utterly different - blood flow vs penile volume, penetrative vs compressive. I know these are the standards used, but when we measure blood pressure or body temperature, we perform measurements almost exactly the same way among all people to create a baseline from which we can use to interpret changes.

Comparing response to an invasive probe versus a pleasurable cuff seems to undermine any logical measurement comparisons between the sexes, and frankly could account for the entirely of the differences. I cannot be alone in this conjecture.

12) "Neither homosexual nor heterosexual women feel sexually aroused by watching male couples have sex—indeed, even heterosexual women tend to dislike this." - I find this statement problematic since I know a number of heterosexual women, and to my surprise lesbians, who enjoyed seeing gay men have sex, an identical correlative of heterosexual men enjoying visuals of lesbian sex. The market was so large for heterosexual women viewing men having sex (solo, or sometimes with a partner) that there were categories developed by male pornography film houses to cater to the market for women - "Colt Buckshot: Minute Men". But, women enjoy written pornography more than men, perhaps more than men enjoy visual pornography.

13) "Large recent shifts in LGBTQ identification have been more pronounced among girls and women than among boys and men, although these shifts have not been accompanied by equivalently large changes in sexual behavior." - I identify as Gay, not LGBTQ; claiming LGBTQ orientation, I've found in the last 20 years, is negatively correlated with gay or lesbian sex. Indeed, most men who claim TQ & nonbinary - are ordinary heterosexual men. Visible lesbianism has become so challenging for Lesbians, I cannot imagine them doing anything except running from LGBTQ, which I'm sure is part of the AGP you will speak about.

14) "Men generally have stronger sex drives compared to women and show more interest in casual sex and visual pornography." - the first time pornography was mentioned as visual.

15) "This difference likely contributes to greater sexual flexibility (or fluidity) in women than in men [...]men to develop paraphilias–intense sexual attractions to specific types of people, objects, or fantasies." - I'm not sure where sexual fluidity was outlined in prior paragraphs, this is someone new idea jumping out, like the men who were recidivistic sex criminals.

I don't find the case was strongly made for different sexual responses except for male-oriented visual pornography as measured by incommensurate scales and metrics between men and women.

You might consider that visual pornography itself is a paraphilia, and all you're measuring is the differential response to a paraphilia which is unusual to share between men and women, not some underlying sexual response. The same goes for written pornography, which is consumed at dramatically higher levels by women. As a friend of mine said, the difference between porn and erotica is time, porn is fast, erotica is slow, but they cover the same territory.

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Dr David Pilgrim's avatar

The author suggests that women may be more GC than men because they lack insight into male sexuality. That may be true for some (an open empirical question). As a male heterosexual involved in a British GC group I have also noted though that like me many are scientific realists which is a key motivation for attacking trans activists claims. More important though for women whatever their sexuality are the consequences of TRA expectations ie the oppressive invasion of their intimate spaces. This is not about science but the impact of patriarchy. The trans movement by and large is a men’s movement and that is why second wave feminists are up in arms (I would be had I been born female).

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