#654 - J Michael Bailey - Activists Tried To Get This Study Banned

37:58Is there a natal female equivalent? Have you ever come across anyone that is the opposite of auto -gain affiliate. This is controversial and that should be the preface for every single sentence that you say. This is controversial I would say scientifically. I don't think anybody is politically upset about this at least yet. Give it time. So the word for that would be auto -andro -filia and I I know transgender persons who insist that there really is auto -androphilia. There's a guy who named Phil Ile Phil Ile, Ile, why I think he's about to publish a book called AutoHeader Sexuality. Very smart guy, but he believes that auto -endrophilia occurs commonly among transgender females.

39:19I am less convinced. You know, I'm being a hard -ass scientist. You know, maybe, but I kind of doubt it because male and female sexuality are of different. Otagonifilia is something that requires a male type sexuality, which is very focused and fixed and strong. Otagonifilia occurs sporadically, a male finds out on his own and becomes even though he's never heard of it before, it dominates his early sex life. And I'm really kind of skeptical that that happens in natal females, but we'll see. Does that, if someone, and if it's common that somebody that's never heard of it before, kind of stumbles upon this thing, this particular interest, this orientation, Does that suggest that there is a biological disposition precursor?

40:30I would bet more money than I have that we will find that eventually. I think Otagana Fili is strongly biological. Now, can I prove that? No. But what is going to make a 14 year old boy decide to put on his mother's panties and go into the bathroom and look at himself and become aroused and so on. Nobody teaches him that. You know, there's a lot of interest now, especially among general critical types about something called Sissy Hypno porn, which is it's a type of pornography consumed by Otogonophilic males and they're saying that this porn is creating Otogonophilic. Well, I don't believe it.

41:30I feel like these guys have this interest in they're finding the porn. I don't think anything plausibly is going to raise this idea in somebody that doesn't already have the interest. The other word that I learned when looking at some of your work is Guy Nandromor Fulfilia. One of the longest words I think I've ever said in my life. What's Guy Nandromor Fulfilia? Guy Nandromor Fulfilia. So I'm going to say a word that I think is fine, but some people are touchy about it. Guy Nander Morpheelia is sexual attraction to she -mails. What I mean by a she -mail is an adult male trans woman who has both breast and a penis still.

42:32I can see it in my mind. Yep. Well, it's not hard to find it online. That is a kind of pornography I have come across. And it actually is quite a common form of pornography. And even I think just plain old normal straight men get into that sometimes. But they're different than the kind of men who need that and prefer it. And for example, I had a girlfriend at one time whose ex -husband had that preference. and in order for them to have sex, they needed to bring a picture of a Gmail on the computer screen so he could look at it and become a rouse. That became a problem for her. I can imagine that that would create complications, yes.

43:41Yeah, but that's, you know, some other just plain old,

43:50I just I think don't have the hang up about the penis being there too. This is what you know back in the 90s you know on Alan Partridge which is a famous British comedy show. One of his friends that turns out was going to Thailand and he comes back and all he wants to hear about is the lady boys. He's all he wants to hear about is lady boys. Tell me about the lady boys. He keeps on saying. Yeah. That's right. The lady boys. That's that's what they are. Yeah, they still tour as ladyboys of Bangkok in the UK I don't know if that's the same in the US, but I mean the posters everywhere for ladyboys of Bangkok To my knowledge they don't come here, but You know there are Gmail Escorts that you can find online I knew In writing my book, the 2003 book called The Man Who Would Be Queen, I actually at that time knew some transsexual prostitutes, some of whom had worked as she -male prostitutes and then they got surgery and continue to work as female prostitutes.

45:14Opening opening up to as many markets as possible. Yeah, yeah. Well, the one that I'm thinking of preferred the the men who liked women to the men who liked females. I think she thought that the ones who like she males, I don't know, that they treated her differently as a very interesting. So this is an obvious follow -up, which is, is this a new category of sexual orientation? Are these people closer to gay? People, are they closer to straight people? Great question. And so I can answer the second part that question. They are very close to straight people. They're not at all gay. Guys who get into she -mails.

46:07So if we bring these guys in the lab and we show them pornography featuring just women and the kind that we use in this situation is two women having sex with each other. female female porn and male male male porn. Those are the kind best kind of stimuli because if somebody gets aroused there's no ambiguity about who they're getting aroused by. Guys who are into she -mails get aroused to the females but not the males. But they get slightly more aroused to videos of two females getting it on. And that's a little different than typical straight men who get more aroused by two females and two females.

47:02But neither or gay men, gay men or morphophiles, nor regular straight men get aroused to men getting it on. Right. Next, next obvious follow up question to that is, I've heard you say that heterosexual women are genetically indifferent. What does that mean? I would say not just genetically indifferent there, I think that their conscious feelings are indifferent in the laboratory to erotica. So if we bring women into the lab and we show them in the same kinds of stimuli. Two men having sex, two women having sex. Straight women, showing indifferent pattern of genital arousal. They get equally aroused to both by both, and they get, and they say, they get equally aroused by both.

48:07Now, they don't get that aroused psychologically. psychologically. They don't straight women do not get as aroused to watching either kinds of erotic stimuli that I just mentioned as either straight men do or gay men do. But it is interesting that they seem to show this flat pattern. Lesbians in contrast do show both a genital preference and a subjective preference for female stimuli. Is there a vestigial arousal among lesbians for men?

48:55lesbians do get more roused by male stimuli than they do to nature scenes. But what about do they get more aroused to gay men than gay men do to lesbians?

49:13These questions are hard to answer. These are the studies that we need, Michael. These are the hard Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Not charging questions that we need. Well, they're hard to answer because the kinds of apparatus that you must use to measure genital arousal in men differs from that that you must use to measure them women. And the best evidence that we have, we've taken it out of the genitals into the brain. we've done FMRI scanning of people looking at erotic stimuli. And it pretty much shows the same patterns as the genital stuff does. And your excellent question, I think I'm going to have to hold off answering because I don't remember.

50:16That's fine. So we kind of, I remember I had a conversation with Christina Duranty and she taught me about a study where they brought women into a lab and they sat them down opposite two different guys. One guy was really nerdy and one guy was kind of a bad boy leather jacket and sort of like coft hair and stuff like that. And they analyzed the verbal responses and the physical responses that women had to each of these different men. Now they had a Oscar -winning film writer, some award -winning film writer, write the script that the gentleman actor was using. So it's like, you know, if you were going to cut it, the cool guys, like, if you come with me, I'll show you the best night of your life and it's going to be really cool.

51:10But I don't really cares, so it kind of, it doesn't really matter so much, but very, very high status, prestige prestige prestige. Whereas on the other hand, the other guy was something else. Now the interesting thing is, it was the same guy. The same guy was playing both roles. They just styled him differently in his mannerisms, had been adjusted. One of the most interesting takeaways was there was a number of lesbian female attracted women who were in the study. And when they looked at their behavior with the lower status man, it seemed relatively straightforward. When they looked at their behavior with the highest status man, even though they had a self -report of not being attracted to him and their verbal behavior wasn't particularly forthcoming, their non -verbal behavior was much more flirtatious.

51:58So they were playing with the hair more, they were kind of leaning in, they were pounding a little bit more and what that kind of suggested to me, which I think kind of leads into some of your work, is that even for women who are not attracted to men, for a very long time, men have been the gatekeepers to so much with regards to survivability, reproduction, protection, resources, etc. That it feels like even exclusively female attracted women, just keep this skill set in the locker room somewhere, where if they need to deploy it because the Chieftains come over and she's just finished up with her girlfriend that nobody knows about secretly in a cave somewhere, that she can still kind of turn it on.

52:47And I thought that that was really interesting. That is really interesting. I wasn't familiar with that. Also, I think that Lesby and the women who are identify as lesbians are not as exclusively female attracted as gay men are male attracted even if they might deny that lesbians are more likely than gay men to become non -lesbians. Relapse. They'd go back. Yeah, there's a researcher named Lisa Diamond who has studied something she calls female fluidity which refers to women's greater propensity to, I don't know, become romantically interested in somebody regardless of their natal sex. And not all women do this and there are some, you know, let's say gold star lesbians who would never go for a man, but I think there are more lesbians who have the capacity for sexual attraction to men.

54:06Okay, so in your opinion, then, is male sexual, men's sexual orientation is more fixed and And it's absolutely is more malleable. Absolutely. And that's part of the reason why men, but not women, not many women, have parapherias, which are these weird sexual interests. Utterganophilia is a parapheria, but some others are, for example, pedophilia, sexual traction of children. What's the amputee one? What's that one? That is called acrotomophilia. Yeah, right. Yes, which we've been studying. There's an zoophilia attraction to animals. Lipophilia, which is attraction to morbidly obese people and the guys who are into them tend to be just normal weight guys.

55:04And we just we have a paper that is about to be published. It's accepted. and I'm working on the proofs now, which I think is, he modestly says, I think it's very interesting, but we studied guys into amputees, guys into animals, and guys into the really huge fat people. And for each of these three kinds of parafilius, a lot of these guys also have the Inversion they are actually aroused by the idea of becoming Yes, I think fat person and animal which you know And and I think we have about 10 Guys into amputees who've actually managed somehow to get amputations Wow. So I first learned this from Dr.

56:05James Cantor and spoke to him about it and he described it in this really lovely way, which was a lot of the sexual, let's just call it, a lot of the paraphernalies that people have and the odd fetishes that people are turned on by is reflected both outwardly and inwardly. So there are people who are attracted to amputees, there are people who see themselves as amputees. They have their limbs, they have all of their but they feel like they should not. They feel like they shouldn't have that. He also, I don't know whether you believe that, this is true, said that there are people who are attracted to children and there are people who see themselves as children.

56:43There are men often who want to be dressed up as babies. We did the first study of this. Kevin, my PhD student, Kevin Sue, and I did a first study of auto -peteraphilia. And that's right. And the most ethical form of pedophilia. Yeah, and when a really interesting finding of that study was that men some of these men are attracted to boys some are attracted to girls well the the guys who are attracted to girls are sexually aroused by the idea of being a little girl Not a little boy, which is interesting So you have, that is a great way to prove that the relationship outwardly and inwardly is the same because otherwise you wouldn't have this relationship between the two.

57:40That's so interesting. Why is everyone not a sex researcher? Why is everyone not doing paraphernalia sex research? I feel the same way. So interesting. Oh, okay. So in your opinion, does bisexuality truly exist in men? Like how accurate do you think the stereotype is that bisexual women are really straight and that bisexual men are really gay?

58:06In I think it was 2005 we published a paper that failed to find evidence that male bisexuality truly existed where by that I mean that men in the laboratory would show arousal to both men and to women. That did not make us popular. We were, you know, got us into the news but not liked. We have kept studying this by me and my then -Gradwood student now, he's a professor in England, Geryl, Friger, and we've gotten several hundred subjects in the lab. And two years ago, we published in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences a paper in which we showed beyond the shadow of a doubt that male bisexuality truly exists.

59:24There is a subset of bisexual men who clearly produce a rousal to male stimuli and to female stimuli. Most of them are somewhat more roused by one sex than by the other. they're not exactly predominantly gay or predominantly straight bisexual. Yeah, but they're they're a bit bisexual. Yes, so I now believe for sure in male bisexuality. At the same time, if you talk to gay men, ask just ask them this question. Did you ever say you were bisexual? About half a gay man will say, yeah, then you say, well, were you really bisexual and they say, no? So it really does happen that some men misrepresent being bisexual, but it also seems to happen that some men are bisexual as I would understand that.

1:00:30And this is a small cohort and also it's difficult to stress test whether this is the thin end of the wedge en route to becoming a fully fledged member of the gay community or whether you're actually going to just stop it, they'll let it be. Yeah, that's interesting. What about environmental influences on sexual orientation? So we have at the moment in Korea a very sort of sex negative culture, which you'll probably be familiar with where there is the four B's movement, women who are recanting, I can't remember what the four different B's stand for it's in Korean, but it's men and patriarchy and family and work or kids or something like that.

1:01:15And it is downstream of a whatever less than one birth rate and it's everything's career's just a mess. But that seems like whether it be outright celibacy slash abstinence or turning to lesbianism, I don't know whether that's true. That is a sexual orientation response to an ecological or environmental cue. right? Something has happened that has changed maybe the sex ratio, maybe the make value of the potential available partners that are around downstream from that. We have declining birth rates across the West too. We have an increase in cohort of high performing women and an increase in cohort of underperforming men.

1:02:06Hypogamously that means that maybe women are going to be struggling to find men that are of the make value that they would desire even though we're in a society which has been the most sort of sex positive, ostensibly than it's ever been, I think that there is a bit of a sex recession going on, there's a great article in the Atlantic about this. So with all of this folded together, how malleable is sexual orientation in response to the local environment and could you foresee a future given where we're at sexually and with the mating crisis at the moment that this could continue in the future?

1:02:43This is another one of those times when it's important to distinguish male and female sexuality. And this is what I'm going to say is speculative because this hasn't been established and there's a lot of disagreement. But my gut sense is that men's sexuality is not going to be responsive to cultural pressure much. I say much because there are parts of the world where men will have sex with other men, other males. Let's not call them men. If the males are presenting as very feminine and perhaps transgender. So for example, in Samoa, there's a natal males who are considered a third sex called the Fafafina.

1:03:51You got the lady boys in Thailand and so on. It's pretty common for just plain old straight men to have sex with these natal males. Now, I don't think that makes them gay. They're not having sex with men. They're seeing these people as female like. But I don't think there's anything, any kind of cultural change. even if I could build society from the ground up, that would make straight men want to have sex with each other. I think women are likely different and more responsive to cultural factors. And perhaps also things like bad experiences with men, there's a, you know, this belief that when route to lesbianism is being mistreated by men, we don't know that's true, but I find it plausible.

1:05:01But I don't think that women mistreating men is going to make them go gay. No, that's fascinating. One thing that I've been considering a lot is you've been talking about the thin line between what being gay means physically and what it means in terms of appearance. There's an interesting question. Is a very voluptuous big boob, big lips, long hair, Thailand, lady boy type presenting person more female than a very shaven head, sort of more androgenous body type, but vagina owning woman. And there's a really interesting question going on here, but you know that you highlighted there in some over its refer to as a third gender.

1:06:04You know, there's a lot of accusations from the left of genital fetishism, which you might have heard of, which is that you're actually being, you're addicted to the genitals as opposed to the presentation, but there is an interesting question given that our sexuality is so easily fooled. We are such rampant sexual beings that a six inch by four inch screen that has a small depiction of sex happening on it is enough to fool our brain to think there's some sex happening here. No, there isn't. There was some sex happening there a long time ago and now you can see around the side of it. You know that it's not here.

1:06:51You know that you're not getting any of this. That illusion is responsible for the internet. Correct. So my point being that you already can see, as soon as you accept the fact that porn is an effective stimuli, you accept the fact that it is not exclusively about the action, it's about the presentation, right? Is it just a difference of degree, not a difference of kind, all the way down to the more female presenting regardless of whether it's an XX or XY chromosome person? It really starts to blur the line between what is and is not classed as a same sex or an opposite sex attracted sexual orientation?

1:07:41Yeah. I think that all we have for the most part are senses and, you know, men, especially, but humans in general are very visual species. And you're absolutely right that some trans women, even those who still have a penis, can look white. They look like really attractive women, although often you can kind of see the remnants of their maleness and their bone structure or something like that. But yeah, and I think that in those cases, men who don't feel attracted to them or say they don't. That's more likely to be mental, you know, some kind of aversion, an idea. Like that person is a man, not a woman.

1:08:45So despite the fact that they look like a really attracted woman, I can't go there. Yeah, it's so fascinating. So I've seen this, you know, I've seen this argument happen on dating shows or on a right -wing commentary channels and stuff like that around no, because that would be gay. I'm like, is it more gay to have sex with what looks like a nine out of ten woman body shape, size, voice, presentation, actions, everything with a penis, then it is to have the exact opposite. All of the presentation factors of a man could be on testosterone, could be all of the rest of it, but has a vagina that it's a really, really fascinating question.

1:09:35You know, this sort of, it falls in line with the number of other arguments, this sort of more biological essentialism side of things, especially the people that would say, unless you can change your chromosomes and even not then, if you're a natal male, I'm calling you a man, if you're a natal female, I'm calling you a woman for the rest of time. So, it's a suite of beliefs, I suppose, all of which are interplay with each other and would also cascade down from there. But yet, it's a really, really fascinating consideration around what it means. And this is when you get into the deeper and deeper into the layers of paraffelia and and the nuances of sexual orientation, it all kind of starts to break apart.

1:10:15It's like the quantum level of sex research, I suppose. Yes, yes, we are going on the outskirts here. What about people's gay dars? Do you think that most of us have an accurate gay dare? Yeah, this is again something we've studied quite a bit and yeah, people have a much better than chance GADAR No, it's not perfect But they are much better at than chance at discerning whether a man is GADR straight and they rely So gay men, you know, just their outward appearance in the West currently is not necessarily very feminine, although I think gay men might present themselves more attractively than straight men.

1:11:18But it's more things like movement, you know. And speech, speech patterns are... Yeah, you found there's like a gay accent. There's a gay accent, yes. What is the gay accent?

1:11:37So we know it when we hear it, and actors can often effect the gay accent, even if they're straight. There's interestingly, there's a lesbian accent too. I think gay accent may tend to be more expressive, and gay men articulate more clearly than straight men and lesbians have the opposite. They're less expressive and they don't articulate as clearly. Do you think is that in any way gay men modeling female speech patterns? Are there any parallels there? Yeah, you ask great questions and you know, so nobody knows and I think there are two at least two good hypotheses there. One is that unconsciously growing up gay men, you know, some of them they had somewhat feminine gender identity and they did model.

1:12:45The other is that there's something about gay men's brain, which is somewhat feminized and produces the speech better. Nobody knows. Well, when it comes to the ability to present clearly my speech coach that I use for the podcast is gay, classically trained in theater, classically trained in improv, for not just an outrageous communicator, and probably the best communicator that I've had on the show is Douglas Murray, who is also a human miles in my speech culture, like two peas in a pod that have never met. But just phenomenal, like out of this world precision, with his ability to remain cool and depression, to be able to communicate in a very precise way, to be able to use inflection and drama and whimsy, and to then be able to pull it back without being fragile, just phenomenal.

1:13:44And so yeah, I wonder, Andrew Doyle as well, Satur is from the UK that runs the Tatanya McGrath, a Twitter account. I wonder whether being gay is a competitive advantage in the world of online commentary, perhaps. But yeah, all of that stuff so interesting, and you're right, is all that you kind of... I don't think I've been around sufficient lesbians to be able to say that I could pick up on that. The only real things that I ever noticed with Lesbian to sort of the dress, I think that Lesbian seemed to dress significantly more differently to normal women than Gays do to the hair man. Yeah, the plaid shirts, the baggy jeans.

1:14:33Yeah, gay men dress somewhat differently, more stylishly, at least. It's just better usually. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah, very funny. What was that paper that you did about male mate value being more malleable than female mate value? you. That's an old one.

1:15:02Yeah, the student who was the lead author on that was interested in the explaining the sex difference in the in depression. Women are more likely to get depressed than men are and she hypothesized that it could be because women's made value is more tied to their looks, which she said you can't do that much about whereas men, they're accomplishments which you can. And she got some evidence for that. I'm not sure that I, that's an old paper and I'm not sure I believe the theory, because, you know, So if women really can't do that much about their looks, what's the cosmetics industry doing? And it's not that easy for a man to go out and double his income.

1:16:05So anyway, but that's what the paper was about. Yeah, so I find I had a conversation with Ed Hagen as well recently and Ed did a study where they controlled for upper body strength when looking at differences in depression and anxiety and when you control for upper body strength the differences between men and women get smaller and smaller and smaller and then essentially go away. And the reason that I was interested in discussing my liability of mate value is that it's a common discussion that's had on the internet. And it's borne out of a contest between men and women about who's got it worse.

1:16:48It's like, well, it's easy for you because you just need to go and get a boob job, but I can't make myself any taller. And when I was there, it's easy for you because, you know, at 21, I reach my peak sexual market value and it's all downhill hill from there and you get to continue to accrue status and resources. And it's very much sort of two people talking different languages that the sexual brains, the sexual attraction mechanism that works for men, what they want from women and for women, what they want from men are not the same. It's not you can't play a balancing act here. There is no ability to work out the equity, there's no exchange rate between these two.

1:17:31Like how many boob jobs is three inches of height worth? Do you know what I mean? Like there is no way of us doing it. Oh well, you could wear high heels and put makeup on, but you can go out for five years and increase your earning potential by 40%. Like what does that even mean? When we're talking about this, I had a theory, which I thought maybe total horse shit, so I'm going to try and bring it back up again. I had a theory that male mate value to the individual is more malleable and to the group is less malleable and female individual mate value is less malleable and to the group it's more malleable.

1:18:13That you basically have as a man there are more degrees of freedom that you can move yourself on and there is a longer timeline that you can do it on, specifically because of the fact that, you know, a guy who's 35 is more attractive than a guy who's 25 to most women on average. And I don't know when that peaks probably in your mid to late 30s, perhaps. But even then, you know, Leonardo DiCaprio has been acquiring and disposing of under 25 year old girlfriends, regularly for like two decades now. So with sufficient status and resources, you can continue to cycle through that. But yeah, what do you, what's your mindset at now when it comes to malleability, especially with this facing this mating crisis and people having concerns around being able to be seen by the other sex?

1:19:05Well, I think that in the sense that I understand I think we're probably very malleable. The culture has changed tremendously in a fairly short time and it's gonna, guessing it will change tremendously still. I hope it changes back in certain ways because I'm not that happy with certain things now. But that's a different question than, do I know how to change it? And I do not. And that has to do with male female interactions as much as academic freedom, both of which, well the latter concerns me more now. Michael Bailey, ladies and gentlemen, Michael, I really, really appreciate your work, any opportunity to dig into people that are looking into sex is fascinating for me.

1:19:59I've immensely enjoyed talking to you. I hope that we get more chances either in person or back here, whatever. I have a question. I have a laundry list of things that we didn't get to talk about to do with sexual arousal patterns, virtuous pedophiles, the birth order effect of homosexuality so we can absolutely run this back. Let me know once your new paper is out. As a reminder for the people who want to check out your article and also follow you online and stuff like that, where should they go? Where would you want to direct them? I am a boring academic week. You can go to Google Scholar and search for J Michael papers as well or email me at my university address.

1:21:01It's J .M. Hyphen, Bailey, B .A .I .L .E .Y. at northwestern .edu. And I'll try to help you if you need it. Yeah, nothing fancy for me. Michael, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you.