Do Gay Men Have More Sexual Interest in Children than Straight Men Do?

I thought about holding off on this post until the next time somebody in the news declares that gay men are to blame for the sexual abuse of children. I’d probably only have to wait a couple of weeks at most. But I’ve decided to go ahead and put this research notice out there, so that hopefully the next time this issue comes up, the rational folks talking about it have the data they need to back up their hunches.

So, at the outset, let me give away the answer to my headline question: Do gay men have more sexual interest in children than straight men do? No. And we have lab studies to prove it.

In fact, the British Journal of Psychiatry published a major study backing up the “no” answer almost 40 years ago. The distinguished sex researcher Kurt Freund and his colleagues used a laboratory method (described below) that demonstrated that the sexual responses of gay men to boys were similar to the responses of straight men to girls. (Both responses are relatively low.) This past June in Canada, at the major international research conference on sexual orientation science, sex researcher Ray Blanchard (who was trained under Freund) presented substantial new data confirming and expanding on Freund’s findings.

Blanchard has published this work online, making the work freely available to all comers. Click here to see the full paper. But, because this work is so important (the scientists assembled in Canada were stunned into near silence when they saw the impressive datasets and theoretical work Blanchard put before us), I asked Blanchard to explain the work somewhat more plainly for those who are not scientists. He’s been kind enough to do so for us here.

Fetish or Orientation? The Case of Men Wearing Female Masks

This week in his ever-pleasurable Savage Love iPhone app, the internationally-syndicated sex advice columnist Dan Savage reprinted a question from a woman whose boyfriend "enjoys wearing women's clothing and acting like a submissive woman when we have sex." The woman told Dan, "Nothing gets him off more. We have only just started exploring his fetish in the past year because he has been ashamed of it all his life. I have encouraged him so far and now we have a couple hundred dollars' worth of sexy women's clothing that fits him. Last night he asked me if he could wear a latex mask of a woman's face during sex."

As one can see, Dan’s reader termed her boyfriend’s proclivities “his fetish,” but as Dan implied in his response, the boyfriend’s interests may be more like a sexual orientation. What’s the difference? In sex research and in clinical psychology, “fetish” usually refers to an object (like a particular article of clothing) or substance (like latex) that an individual finds particularly sexually arousing. By contrast, a sexual orientation is more about how we are wired to interact (or not) sexually with others.

Out of curiosity, I asked Ray Blanchard, a sex researcher, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, his thoughts on this reader’s boyfriend. Ray and I actually met over the sexual orientation possibly at issue here, namely autogynephilia, when I wrote a history of a controversy over autogynephilia.

Meet the Hebephiles, the Missing Link between Pedophiles and the Rest of Us

Consider the little-known group falling between pedophiles and the rest of us. But first, their sponsors....

Like the dinner party guest who manages to put more feet in his mouth than he even has, on Tuesday, the Vatican equated pedophiles and those who seek the ordination of women, at least in terms of their place in Church doctrine. Yes, apparently priests who use their office to repeatedly sexually assault children are now officially akin to those who might dare to suggest women are capable of serving the Lord in the same manner as men. The mind reels.

This whacked worldview is at least sort of cohesive. To do the Vatican Hustle, you just pair up any non-normative gender behavior with the devil (or his alleged earthly representatives), and dance! Damn to hell any women who might actively seek power, and tell the world that the root problem of the sexual abuse of young boys is gay men, not pedophilia

For those of you who haven't been following the Vatican edition of "Dancing with the Stars (around Your Head)", the issue of the ordination of women has arisen in this context because some have suggested that introducing women into the priesthood might help stem the problem of sexual abuse. And indeed, if the guys at the Vatican knew any sexology, they'd know there's something to this idea.

Of Kinks, Crimes, and Kinds: The Paraphilias Proposal for the DSM-5

When is a kinky interest really sick?

That’s the central question the Paraphilias Sub-Work Group of the American Psychiatric Association has had to face as they’ve developed proposed revisions for the DSM-5. Pity those given the task of trying to figure out how, when, and why to medicalize or de-medicalize everything from asexuality to zoophilia (the latter being the sexual interest known to less progressive types as bestiality).

Looming over the whole task is the ugly history of the pathologizing of homosexuality. As I teach my students every year, it took until 1973 for the American Psychiatric Association to stop officially categorizing all forms of homosexuality as mental disorders. And that official demedicalization happened not because a happy and spontaneous consensus emerged that the science supported the change, but because gay psychiatrists understandably had had enough.

Nowadays, you can find self-appointed representatives of every sexual interest who will try to align their history with homosexuality, because, like the gay psychiatrists of the early 1970s, they want out of the DSM. The bondage folks, the zoophiles – even the pedophiles want out. At least the vocal ones do. They’ll tell you that, like gay men and lesbians, they never should have been in the book in the first place.

I would have been watching the progress of the Paraphilias Sub-Work Group regardless; as an historian of sexuality, I’m professionally fascinated to see where it will all go. But as it turns out, I’ve had something of a ringside seat, because my friend Ray Blanchard has been serving as the chair of the sub-work group.

Womb Gay

Reading an excerpt from the new book Sex and War has got me thinking about the Mormons and California’s Prop 8. Sex and War features a meditation on how biology might help to explain why and how humans kill each other. The battle between the Mormons and the LBGT civil rights movement, now being waged over the Mormon’s support of California’s anti-gay Proposition 8, has not (yet) turned bloody. But I can’t help but think about the interesting biological background to all this.

Discussions and debates over the origins of homosexuality have tended to focus on two possibilities: you’re either gay because you’ve got a “gay gene,” or you’re gay because of some aspect of your upbringing. (The latter option is usually imagined to involve something nasty, like a pedophilic priest.)

These two options—gene-gay and turned-gay—fit neatly in the (yawn) nature-nurture debate, and that probably explains why almost everyone seems to keep ignoring a third option, one for which there is astoundingly robust data: womb-gay.