One early response I got, by someone who preferred to be anonymous, had some objections to this part:
But it relies strongly on the notion that taboo things become erotic, and while this is a popular idea, I’ve yet to see any convincing evidence for it, nor have the various people I’ve seen advocate for the theory been able to provide much.
The response was:
I agree the argument you’re criticizing doesn’t strike me as all that strong, but “taboos are sexy (to a non-negligible number of people, sometimes)” doesn’t seem as unreasonable as you’re painting it to me. As far as evidence goes: racialized porn searches are more common in deep south states with (presumably) more overt racism, incest porn is definitely a thing with a market, etc. The thing you may be missing is that taboo stuff is often sexy for people to think about, but taboos are taboo for a reason and so they are often a bad idea to actually do, so people mostly don’t.
Autogynephilia mostly happens, in the blanchardian model, in the autogynephile’s head, so it’d be more like watching incest porn than actually trying to sleep with a genetically related family member.
As I understand it, the deep south also has a higher prevalence of black people, which seems to me to be a much better explanation of the search prevalence than taboos.
When it comes to incest porn, I think there are several layers to this. One is actually that it can be counterintuitively hard to estimate the prevalence of something without systematic studies; this almost seems like it deserves its own post, but for now I will address it in this comment. I think the main way people guess the amount of interest in incest porn is via things like how often it appears in highly rated videos on porn sites, or how high it ranks among search terms.
But incest is taboo, so presumably incest porn production is lower than what would be implied by the demand. As a result, presumably the demand that does exist gets concentrated on fewer videos. (This depends on the relative degree that incest taboos reduce porn production vs porn consumption.) But this means that those fewer videos would, on average, get more views; which would make them more likely to appear high in the porn rankings.
To test this theory, I made a script to scrape PornHub videos for metadata, and then I looked at whether the prevalence of incest themes depended on the view distribution. The results, badly graphed, are here. Basically, the above idea turned out to be right; if you consider the most popular videos, you overestimate the popularity of incest porn.
I think some similar things might happen with search terms. A search term can be highly popular, while still making up only a small fraction of the search volume.
Also, the theory I’m criticizing isn’t “taboos are sexy to a non-negligible number of people, sometimes”. In order for taboos to consistently cause autogynephilia in the way Veale describes, it has to be “taboos are sexy to most people”. Otherwise, it would only predict that a “non-negligible number” of trans women are autogynephilic.
(I guess an alternative could be to argue that trans women are particularly likely to find taboos sexy, and so even if most people don’t, most trans women would. I don’t think this is an argument that Veale would forward, but of course the entire point of this post is that one can’t necessarily rely on critics to forward those arguments....)
Also, I think it’s worth distinguishing between “finding something that happens to be taboo sexy” and “finding things sexy because they are taboo”. Simply observing that some people are into incest is not that strong of an argument; if it’s because of the taboo, one would expect them to also find other taboo things erotic.
There is indeed some evidence that a subset of people finds taboos sexy (I call it the taboo/disgust factor of sexuality; a variety of sexual interests, including incest, pedophilia, coprophilia, zoophilia, murdersex, etc., all appear to be correlated, at least in self-reports—though this could also be accounted for taboos being unsexy to most but not all people—further research is needed).
One early response I got, by someone who preferred to be anonymous, had some objections to this part:
The response was:
As I understand it, the deep south also has a higher prevalence of black people, which seems to me to be a much better explanation of the search prevalence than taboos.
When it comes to incest porn, I think there are several layers to this. One is actually that it can be counterintuitively hard to estimate the prevalence of something without systematic studies; this almost seems like it deserves its own post, but for now I will address it in this comment. I think the main way people guess the amount of interest in incest porn is via things like how often it appears in highly rated videos on porn sites, or how high it ranks among search terms.
But incest is taboo, so presumably incest porn production is lower than what would be implied by the demand. As a result, presumably the demand that does exist gets concentrated on fewer videos. (This depends on the relative degree that incest taboos reduce porn production vs porn consumption.) But this means that those fewer videos would, on average, get more views; which would make them more likely to appear high in the porn rankings.
To test this theory, I made a script to scrape PornHub videos for metadata, and then I looked at whether the prevalence of incest themes depended on the view distribution. The results, badly graphed, are here. Basically, the above idea turned out to be right; if you consider the most popular videos, you overestimate the popularity of incest porn.
I think some similar things might happen with search terms. A search term can be highly popular, while still making up only a small fraction of the search volume.
Also, the theory I’m criticizing isn’t “taboos are sexy to a non-negligible number of people, sometimes”. In order for taboos to consistently cause autogynephilia in the way Veale describes, it has to be “taboos are sexy to most people”. Otherwise, it would only predict that a “non-negligible number” of trans women are autogynephilic.
(I guess an alternative could be to argue that trans women are particularly likely to find taboos sexy, and so even if most people don’t, most trans women would. I don’t think this is an argument that Veale would forward, but of course the entire point of this post is that one can’t necessarily rely on critics to forward those arguments....)
Also, I think it’s worth distinguishing between “finding something that happens to be taboo sexy” and “finding things sexy because they are taboo”. Simply observing that some people are into incest is not that strong of an argument; if it’s because of the taboo, one would expect them to also find other taboo things erotic.
There is indeed some evidence that a subset of people finds taboos sexy (I call it the taboo/disgust factor of sexuality; a variety of sexual interests, including incest, pedophilia, coprophilia, zoophilia, murdersex, etc., all appear to be correlated, at least in self-reports—though this could also be accounted for taboos being unsexy to most but not all people—further research is needed).