I’m a gay cis male, so I thought that the author and/or other members of this forum might find my perspective on the topic interesting.
The confusion between finding someone sexually attractive and wishing you had their body is common enough in the online gay community to earn its own nickname: jealusty. It seems that this is essentially the gay version of autogynephilia, in a sense. As I read the blog post, I briefly wondered whether fantasies of a better body could contribute to homosexuality somehow, but that doesn’t really fit the pattern you present. After all, your attraction to women was a constant.
In regards to your masturbatory fantasies, the gay analogue would probably be growth or transformation fantasies, which are probably around as popular online proportionally. When I think about it from that point of view, it doesn’t seem all that strange to desire a body that you would find sexually attractive. Personally, one of the primary reasons I haven’t even been seeking any sexual experiences yet (I’m 21) is that I feel like the participation of my current body, which I do not find sexually attractive, would decrease my enjoyment of the activity to the point of uselessness. It makes sense that the inverse, the prospect of having sex where you’re sexually attracted to everyone involved, would be alluring.
Anyway, everyone, let me know if you have any questions or feedback about what I’ve said.
I try to do a lot of research on autogynephilia and related topics, and I think there’s some things that are worth noting:
Autogynephilia appears to be fairly rare in the general population of males; I usually say 3%-15%, though it varies from study to study depending on hard-to-figure-out things. My go-to references for prevalence rates are this and this paper. (And this is for much weaker degrees of autogynephilia than Zack’s.) So it’s not just about having a body that one finds attractive, there needs to be some ?other? factor before one ends up autogynephilic. (I’ve been interested in figuring out this other factor, but I haven’t figured out much.)
According to various surveys in the rationalist community, autogynephilia in men (and autoandrophilia in women) appears to be much more common here than it is in the general population. (And possibly this applies to autoandrophilia in men and autogynephilia in women too, but studying this is controversial and feels difficult.) As such, it might be easy for a group of rationalists to take autogenderphilia for granted as something that of course is part of your sexuality, even though, by point 1, it isn’t necessarily.
Interesting, though I’d be hesitant to read too much into that. To the extent this rationality project is succeeding, I’d expect people here are more likely to be exposed to the full range (or at least a large range) of human variation, and more likely to correctly determine if they’re actually any particular minority group, with people defaulting to not-a-member on priors without significant reflection.
This seems like a really hard thing to survey consistently that’ll be systemically skewed by degree of prior exposure to the topic in question in the survey population. If you ask someone point blank “do you have [minority quirk they’ve probabably never heard of]?”, they’re unlikely to return a meaningful answer in the time surveys have. Folks spend months or years figuring that out. I don’t see how you avoid measuring P(has unusual quirk & has invested the time and developed self awareness to realize A if true) instead of just P(has unusal quirk). Speaking very generally as I expect this holds outside of the realm of sex/gender/etc identity issues too.
misc: I didn’t check out the specific papers linked. I recall Scott commenting on one or more of his yearly surveys the degree to which the LW and SSC communities end up being outliers on just about every measure like this (much higher than base rate) but didn’t find the specific comments back.
I’m a gay cis male, so I thought that the author and/or other members of this forum might find my perspective on the topic interesting.
The confusion between finding someone sexually attractive and wishing you had their body is common enough in the online gay community to earn its own nickname: jealusty. It seems that this is essentially the gay version of autogynephilia, in a sense. As I read the blog post, I briefly wondered whether fantasies of a better body could contribute to homosexuality somehow, but that doesn’t really fit the pattern you present. After all, your attraction to women was a constant.
In regards to your masturbatory fantasies, the gay analogue would probably be growth or transformation fantasies, which are probably around as popular online proportionally. When I think about it from that point of view, it doesn’t seem all that strange to desire a body that you would find sexually attractive. Personally, one of the primary reasons I haven’t even been seeking any sexual experiences yet (I’m 21) is that I feel like the participation of my current body, which I do not find sexually attractive, would decrease my enjoyment of the activity to the point of uselessness. It makes sense that the inverse, the prospect of having sex where you’re sexually attracted to everyone involved, would be alluring.
Anyway, everyone, let me know if you have any questions or feedback about what I’ve said.
I try to do a lot of research on autogynephilia and related topics, and I think there’s some things that are worth noting:
Autogynephilia appears to be fairly rare in the general population of males; I usually say 3%-15%, though it varies from study to study depending on hard-to-figure-out things. My go-to references for prevalence rates are this and this paper. (And this is for much weaker degrees of autogynephilia than Zack’s.) So it’s not just about having a body that one finds attractive, there needs to be some ?other? factor before one ends up autogynephilic. (I’ve been interested in figuring out this other factor, but I haven’t figured out much.)
According to various surveys in the rationalist community, autogynephilia in men (and autoandrophilia in women) appears to be much more common here than it is in the general population. (And possibly this applies to autoandrophilia in men and autogynephilia in women too, but studying this is controversial and feels difficult.) As such, it might be easy for a group of rationalists to take autogenderphilia for granted as something that of course is part of your sexuality, even though, by point 1, it isn’t necessarily.
Interesting, though I’d be hesitant to read too much into that. To the extent this rationality project is succeeding, I’d expect people here are more likely to be exposed to the full range (or at least a large range) of human variation, and more likely to correctly determine if they’re actually any particular minority group, with people defaulting to not-a-member on priors without significant reflection.
This seems like a really hard thing to survey consistently that’ll be systemically skewed by degree of prior exposure to the topic in question in the survey population. If you ask someone point blank “do you have [minority quirk they’ve probabably never heard of]?”, they’re unlikely to return a meaningful answer in the time surveys have. Folks spend months or years figuring that out. I don’t see how you avoid measuring P(has unusual quirk & has invested the time and developed self awareness to realize A if true) instead of just P(has unusal quirk). Speaking very generally as I expect this holds outside of the realm of sex/gender/etc identity issues too.
misc: I didn’t check out the specific papers linked. I recall Scott commenting on one or more of his yearly surveys the degree to which the LW and SSC communities end up being outliers on just about every measure like this (much higher than base rate) but didn’t find the specific comments back.