First thoughts on “Elaborating and Testing Erotic Target Identity Inversion Theory”

Michael Bailey, Kevin Hsu and Henry Jang have released a new paper, Elaborating and Testing Erotic Target Identity Inversion Theory in Three Paraphilic Samples. In it, they investigate whether ETII theory appears to apply to attraction to amputees, animals and fat people.

They recruit their participants from highly active male members of internet forums dedicated to the sexual interests in question, and overall they find something like ETII theory to apply. For instance, they find that members of these groups are likely to be sexually attracted to being amputees, animals and fat people respectively, and that those who are sexually attracted to this are also much more likely to have corresponding personal preferences/identities about becoming amputees, animals and fat people.

Overall, I am not surprised by these findings. They align with what Pasha and I have found in previous similar studies. But as usual I feel like the full scope of this phenomenon is underappreciated by ETII theory. It is not just that attraction to certain sexual targets correlates with sexual attraction to being those targets. What I’ve generally observed is that this pattern extends far beyond classical ETII phenomena. For instance, in my research, it appears that sadism and masochism are highly correlated, as are desire to give and receive oral sex. These are not usually thought of as ETII pairings, but they seem like they would fit the same overall pattern.

Correlation of 1?

One of the surprising things about the study is that they claim to have found a correlation of 1 between eroticism towards being something vs corresponding overall preferences to be that thing. This is surprising to me, because I usually find such correlations to lie in the 0.5-0.7 range, rather than to be 1. Furthermore, it is surprising because correlations of 1 are really really high, so it is rare to see them.

Part of how they achieved a correlation of 1 was through a statistical technique called “correcting for attenuation”, which I am quite familiar with. However even when doing this, I generally don’t find correlations this high for these topics, and furthermore the study’s uncorrected correlations were also quite high, in the 0.7-0.88 range.

The easiest way I know of that something like this could be caused is if there’s something up with the measurement, so I have requested the data to check how it looks like for the measurement. I will give an update once I receive the data.

Does this make Blanchardianism the leading theory?

Due to the similar results from the similar research by Pasha and myself, I feel like we already basically knew the results here. (Except for the correlation of 1, but I don’t believe that correlation, so that doesn’t make a difference.) As such, it doesn’t really change my mind about anything.

But other people might not be familiar with it, and so might need to change their minds. The authors suggest that it provides a superior explanation to the alternative models:

Erotic Target Identity Inversion Theory as a Parsimonious and Unifed Explanation

Findings from our study were generally consistent across the three paraphilic samples, and they are also generally consistent with prior research findings regarding autogynephilia (an internalized sexual attraction) and nonhomosexual male gender dysphoria (the extreme form of its associated erotic target identity inversion) (Lawrence, 2009b, 2013, 2017). To the extent that Erotic Target Identity Inversion Theory can provide a unifed explanation of these phenomena, positing different explanations for each of them is less parsimonious. For example, attempting to explain autogynephilia, Serano (2020) implicated cultural emphasis on female beauty and “the male gaze”: “a mindset wherein men are viewed as sexual subjects who act upon their own desires, whereas women are viewed as passive sexual objects of other people’s desires” (p. 770). But “the male gaze” is irrelevant to any conceivable explanation of apotemnophilia, autozoophilia, or autolipophilia, which all follow from Erotic Target Identity Inversion Theory. Nor can we imagine a plausible analogue to “the male gaze” for apotemnophilia, autozoophilia, or autolipophilia.

Similarly, attempting to explain the phenomenon of adults seeking amputation of healthy limbs, Ramachandran and McGeoch (2007) theorized that it resulted from “dysfunction of the right parietal lobe” leading to “uncoupling of the construct of one’s body image in the right parietal lobe from
how one’s body physically is” (p. 250). Their hypothesis was motivated by observations of patients who have suffered somatoparaphrenia, a rare condition following a right parietal stroke, leading to rejection of the left arm. However, neither this nor any similar model can plausibly explain phenomena highly analogous to the desire for limb amputation that some men with apotemnophilia experience, such as the desire for sex reassignment surgery in some autogynephilic males, or the desire to become fat that sometimes accompanies autolipophilia.

Elaborating and Testing Erotic Target Identity Inversion Theory

I’m not gonna comment on the neurological theory, because my impression is that it is just kind of unfounded. But since they phrase their study’s findings as if it was to be in contradiction with Serano’s theory, I feel like I should point out that this contradiction doesn’t seem to be there to me.

First, note that Serano (2020) endorses a model that is causally isomorphic to the external sexual attraction → internalized sexual attraction model from the ETII study:

Specifically, if an individual is attracted to femaleness and femininity in a more general sense (e.g. they find such qualities erotic in their partners), then these same attributes might also be sexually salient with regard to their own embodiment, leading to more frequent or intense FEFs. (A similar correlation between attraction to maleness and masculinity, and MEFs, might also be expected.) Or to phrase this conversely: If an individual is not attracted to female or feminine attributes more generally, then they may be less likely to find FEFs arousing or compelling.

Autogynephilia: A scientific review, feminist analysis, and alternative ‘embodiment fantasies’ model

So the predictions seem to match those of Serano.*

Of course, one might say that the additional phenomena like “male gaze” are additional complexities to Serano’s theory, they are burdensome details which need additional evidence. I think this is true to an extent, but I think it is necessary to break it down further.

There is certainly sufficient evidence to conclude that some people have “a mindset wherein men are viewed as sexual subjects who act upon their own desires, whereas women are viewed as passive sexual objects of other people’s desires”. For instance, I’ve unsuccessfully tried to debate with people who believe that males have an internally-driven sexual orientation and females don’t. So that part of Serano’s theory doesn’t seem to be discardable by parsimony.

However, even if that mindset exists, it seems unlikely to me that it would cause autogynephilia. But if you read her paper carefully, that is not what she is arguing. Rather, she says “another reason why many cisgender men are able to take their bodies for granted is because they are men”, arguing that cis men and trans men often have sexual fantasies in which they have male bodies while engaging in sexual activities*, yet that people are not inclined to call this “autoandrophilia”. Her reasoning is that the reason people are not inclined to call it autoandrophilia is due to the male gaze. This seems relatively plausible to me, but also I don’t think it really changes that much with the rest of the field.

1. The key point where Serano’s theory differs from ETII is not in predicting a correlation between these two aspects of sexuality, but rather in how she characterizes the direction of causality between gender issues and FEFs (autogynephilia); she argues that cross-gender identity causes one to have sexual fantasies in which one imagines that one is a woman.
   
   The ETII study somewhat addresses this, pointing out: “A second justification for believing that internalized sexual attractions cause erotic target identity inversions rather than the reverse is the fact that adolescent boys have a variety of strong identities (as fans of sports teams or music groups, for example) and identity-related fantasies (to become actors, astronauts, athletes, doctors, and lawyers, among many others), but there is no evidence that most of these identities and fantasies are sexually arousing”.
   
   This response makes sense as a response in isolation, but since Serano argues that attraction to women is also an ingredient that plays a role in producing FEFs/autogynephilia, it seems like this can fit perfectly fine within her theory. She could simply say that people who want to be astronauts do not have sexual fantasies about being astronauts because they do not find astronauts particularly erotic. ↩︎
2. Her favorite example of this is blowjobs, which I suppose can make a good example because the central image in a blowjob is the man’s own penis. ↩︎

A Hypothesis On Female Paraphilia Denial

Blanchardians tend to deny that women can have paraphilias, often coming up with stories that seem bizarre and unfounded to me. For instance that apparent female paraphilias are actually caused by them having contact with boyfriends who had that paraphilia, with the girlfriend adopting them from the boyfriend, rather than internally. I’ve had a hard time imagining what could drive Blanchardians to propose such theories, as it’s not ordinarily the case that women who report sexual interest in autoandrophilia etc. blame these sexual interests on their boyfriends or anything like that.

But due to a conversation in a twitter chatroom, I’ve just thought of a way in which it might appear this way to Blanchardians. Blanchardians primarily choose to study paraphilias in spaces that already select for maleness for other reasons, e.g. in the context of porn sites, crime, etc.. It seems plausible that some paraphilic men might invite sexually open-minded girlfriends to participate on porn sites. So even if unusual sexual interests for women aren’t usually caused by their boyfriends, plausibly participation in male erotic communities might be.

I haven’t studied women in male erotic communities, so for all I know they might in fact claim to have non-paraphilic motives or stories for being there.