Modern WisdomA World Of Unusual Sexual Orientations - Dr James Cantor
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,211 words- 0:00 – 0:20
Intro
- JCDr James Cantor
It's the final domino in the series, 'cause the entire sexual spectrum of everybody's, whatever they're into, all of the kinks, this is the hardest one. If we can unravel this one, all the others are simpler, less fraught version of this toughest.
- CWChris Williamson
Your research
- 0:20 – 9:34
What is Paraphilia?
- CWChris Williamson
area, paraphilia and associated phenomena, what is-
- JCDr James Cantor
Uh-
- CWChris Williamson
... paraphilia?
- JCDr James Cantor
Uh, well, I study what makes anybody into whatever it is that they're into. Uh, when, when I started, the big question was, and including for myself, um, uh, uh, what made me gay? What makes a gay person gay, you know? I, I started with the same curiosity that, uh, uh, that we all did. Uh, I just kinda tripped over the course of my career to an opportunity to start asking the bigger version of that question. Nevermind gay, what makes, you know, all of the others? How does the brain know what to be attracted to or not to be attracted to? Uh, and so that then led me to what, uh, uh, to the paraphilias themselves, which are sexual interest patterns, but not just preferences, not blonde versus brunette or top versus bottom. I mean, people who are... It's meaningful to call these sexual orientations unto themselves. They show, uh, these are interest patterns like exhibitionists, pedophiles, uh, uh, tuturists, some kinds of cross-dressers when they, when they find it sexually arousing. These are profound, profound sexual interest patterns that these people have. And as I say, it seems to show every, uh, uh, every sign of being innate and immutable. So what's up with that? So the paraphilias, you know, we still debate over, you know, does this one count, does that one, uh, uh, count? But the general idea are these other, other than sexual orientation, other than male versus female, all of the other atypical, uh, sexual interest patterns. The, the really, really built in, practically born with it kind of interest patterns. So that, that, that I guess- (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JCDr James Cantor
... is my, my non-technical, uh, uh, my non-technical definition of it, allowing room for we don't exactly know where the boundaries are.
- CWChris Williamson
What about asexuality, the least sexual of the sexual paraphilias?
- JCDr James Cantor
Yep. Uh, there's no good simple answer. I don't think it's an it. Uh, the term is a bit of a catchall. Uh, people these days especially are kinda mixing up medical language, you know, when a medical diagnosis where we've identified the cause of something, with psychiatric diagnosis, which doesn't identify the cause. Psychiatry is different from other branches that, uh, of medicine. In psychiatry, they label the symptoms. You know, we just call the symptom depression or sadness, depression. But whether it's caused by one thing or another, that doesn't matter, you get the same, same diagnosis, as I say. So psychiatry is unlike the rest of medicine in that it labels just the symptoms. So for the paraphilias, uh, and the others, that's, as I say, kind of an open question exactly where the line goes. When do we diagnose it? When do we not? Is it in the, uh, uh, is it in the person's favor? Uh, so it's not, as I say, it's not such a simple, uh, question. So for asexuals, well, it's not posing a problem for anyone else. And there can be way more than one thing leading a person to think that that label kinda, kinda fits them. Now, it could be somebody just with a low sex drive, you know? But low sex drive is an, pardon the pun, very sexy label for it. But asexual is something that it's a label they can use. All of a sudden they have a support group and people-
- CWChris Williamson
It's a banner that you can wave.
- JCDr James Cantor
... kind of have a, uh, the important part, the part that's very easy to be empathetic for is that it socially tells people how to interact with them. You know, don't start introducing them to potential, you know, partners, you know, that they're not gonna be interested, and don't take it personally. So it serves a... can serve a certain legitimate, uh, social function. Flip side, they were just regular everyday people with regular everyday insecurities about, you know, whatever it is about their sexual life. And rather than risk rejection, rather than play at that game and risk losing, they adopt the label asexual just to get out of the whole thing. You know, that's not such a healthy reason. You know, if I had such a person in therapy, it'd be reasonable to help the person get over their, their insecurities. Or for some people, especially on the autism, uh, spectrum, there are people who have, you know, social skill deficits, and it's really social skills training that would lead to more self-confidence and so they don't need a label, uh, of asexual. Uh, and then, you know, people just as they get older and sex drive drops, again, will adopt the term kind of as a euphemism for, uh, for low sex drive. Uh, so although they kinda have in common a, uh, a signaling to the people around them, you know, how to interact properly or how to interact in a way that they want to be interacted with, uh, we oughtn't, or no scientist should, you know, take it at face value to mean literally that the person lacks a sex drive either. A lot of people can adopt the label for other kinds of reasons. All of which is to say it's not like we have proof that it doesn't exist either. I mean, if you can be attracted to one pattern, attracted to another pattern, I can imagine attracted to neither. But the last one, and again, 'cause of the very strange seat that, uh, that I get to sit in, the other one is that somebody's attracted to something unusual that they don't wanna cop to.... you know, it could be something really, really problematic like they're a- attracted to children or they're just attracted to something that, right, in the particular audience or in front of their family or for whatever reasons they don't want to be out with it. It's not something that they're gonna be sharing with anybody outside, for example, outside of their fetish community, so again, they will adopt the label asexual to kind of cover for their real, uh, uh, for the real story. Or people don't want to, you know, admit to themselves what it is that they're into, so again, they, they give themselves a reason to not be into anything.
- CWChris Williamson
You blew my mind when you mentioned talking about why there seemed to be more child offenses coming out of the Catholic Church and priests, that the priesthood, a place where you are... uh, you take a vow of celibacy, you are tending to be away from most other people. This is a life of service. This is a life of virtue. That would be the kind of place that someone who is trying to potentially, in some circumstances, hide from a sexuality that they're a little bit concerned about, might retreat to. I thought, "Oh, wow, that is such an interesting way to look at why there has been this preponderance in there," and it plays into that as well. Going on to the autism conversation, I'm pretty sure that a bunch of very famous inventors throughout history, Isaac Newton-
- JCDr James Cantor
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
... I'm pretty sure went through his entire life and remained a virgin. There may have been some, uh, religious sort of overtones over that, but how much he was using the religiosity as a cope that justified something that was coming out of him that he perhaps didn't want to, uh, face. Um, but yeah, two really interesting parallels that I've seen there. Figures from history, high performing philosophers, a ton of them engineers, physicists that didn't want to face anything sexual. Is that a byproduct? Is that a cope? Are they hiding? And then the, the priesthood as well. Two really interesting examples.
- JCDr James Cantor
Yeah. Uh, the, uh, the priesthood's a funny one. And, uh, you know, there's no good way to study it in any objective way. There's just so much politics pulling in, uh, in every direction. Uh, but that some people use it as like a, uh, as a retreat, you know, so, so, my family stops asking me, you know, how come I'm not married to a woman. You know, it's, uh... But not only for pedophiles, for, uh, but also regular everyday gay men who don't want to deal with being gay or, you know, less now today than prior generations of course, but same thing. It was a, it was an escape into a, in that context, socially acceptable or a socially more acceptable way to still circulate in society, be productive in its way, uh, but not have to, uh, live... Uh, uh, it's living a hidden life, I don't want to say in plain sight exactly, and for some people they're denying the truth of it to themselves as much as denying it to the, uh, to the world around them. Uh, so for, you know, the gays when, you know, the ones who do eventually come out anyway, the pedophiles for whom we find out the hard way, but anybody with any real atypical sexuality, again, it provides the same kind of escape or cover, cover story, I think is the be- uh,
- 9:34 – 14:32
The Existence of Homosexuality
- JCDr James Cantor
is the best term.
- CWChris Williamson
What's the best explanation that we've got for why male homosexuality exists in humans at all?
- JCDr James Cantor
Oh, this was one of the things that th- that really first got me into, uh, into this main, uh, main question. I didn't do very much research in it directly. I- I played a supporting role to, uh, to Ray Blanchard. I- I did... I was, uh, I was his mini-me. Uh, and he was already well on the way of, uh, unraveling, uh, unraveling that one. A- A- A- Another just fascinating story, and I just had a background in the brain by sheer accident, ended up doing my internship, you know, at a gender clinic, but it had Ray Blanchard in it. It was one of the chief, you know, scientists pursuing exactly that question. He was looking at brain development, I had a background in the brain, and so just... The phenomenon he identified that led to the unraveling, uh, is called the older brother effect. Pure, unremarkable, you wouldn't notice it to the naked eye except an epidemiologist studying the data. The more male fetuses a woman has, the more sons she gives birth to, the more likely the latter-born kids, males, are to be gay. That is, gay men on average have more older brothers than they should. It's the older brother effect. And it's one of those, how could a fetus, how could the development of the brain, what, how could a fetus know how many fetuses came before it? It was a very... but consistent. No matter what, what time era that, that Blanchard could find a, a, a dataset from, no matter what country, no matter in what context, the older brother effect was, was there. Very strange. Eventually what he was able to figure out is that, uh, if you remember, you know, Y fetuses... uh, not Y fetuses. Uh, male fetuses and only male fetuses carry a Y chromosome, which is foreign to the mother's system. She's formed of two X chromosomes. So far as her body is concerned, a Y chromosome is a foreign material for which her immune system starts to react. So with every passing male fetus is more exposure to... They're called... They, they have a long technical name. The HY histocompatibility antigens. The substances, right, that the mo- mother's body produces to neutralize the proteins that are coming off the Y chromosome which is supposed to be masculinizing the fetus. So sometimes those...... anti-male immune system reactions seem to hold back some of the masculinization of the male and only the male fetuses. And it happens, you know, with every exposure, even to fetuses that were in her body but she never carried to term, aborted fetuses, uh, uh, uh, or, uh, uh, uh, miscarriages still in the order they, they should be in. So, that's why it runs in families a little bit, but not because homosexuality is inherited, but the maternal immune response is.
- CWChris Williamson
That is wild. I, I-
- JCDr James Cantor
Even though it goes through the women of the family, even though the homosexuality only functions in the males in the family.
- CWChris Williamson
So, do you, as a daughter of a mother that had lots of sons, does the daughter retain that knowledge somehow?
- JCDr James Cantor
Not in a direct way that anybody's been able to fa- uh, find. Uh, the best, as I said, the best connection is that, you know, her immune system is related to, uh, to her mother's system. And there are tran- large transfers of material between maternal system and, and fetus, which is a fascinating, fascinating bran- uh, branch of, uh, of biology to itself. Uh, but nobody's found that in that transfer of material when the mother preparing the fetus for its own immune environment, nobody's found that the HY histocompatibility antigens go, uh, uh, goes through it.
- CWChris Williamson
Why do you think that this would be adaptive? Why would this be around?
- JCDr James Cantor
That's a good question. It could be a side effect. It's easy to imagine that, uh, as I say, it's just a side effect of something powerful about the immune system. And so, you know, it's worth sacrificing, you know, however many potential grandchildren if the gay ones are less likely to reproduce, that the gains from whatever this difference in the immune system offsets the-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JCDr James Cantor
... decrease in reproducibility later. It's a, to evolution, it's a math game.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay, so if that's male
- 14:32 – 21:01
Lesbians are Complex
- CWChris Williamson
homosexuality, what about lesbians?
- JCDr James Cantor
It, women are always a more complicated ... When it comes to social stuff, for men, I'm grossly exaggerating. For men, you know, sex is a drive, like hunger. There's not a lot we can do about it. For women, again, I'm overstating it a bit, it's more of a mood. It doesn't have quite the same drive. It's awfully dependent on stress and context, expectations for the future, all bound into one great big ball. Where for men, it's kind of hot not. You know, sex with our worst enemy, if they're hot enough, piece of cake. For women, that's just, that's a much more unusual ... As I say, for women, it's more of moo- i- i- it's more like a mood. Uh, so there are stuff that, uh ... So there does seem to be a biological component, and it does seem to be that, uh, their brains are shifted in a more masculine direction. But there are many, uh, more women than men who will refer to contextual parts, relational parts, memories of old relationships or prior abusive relationships. They refer to that, you know, much, much more as contributing. But, and it's unclear, is that really contributing to their sexual orientation, the way that men think of theirs, ours? Or is that just those memories interfere with how easy it is to get into one mood versus another?
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, so when, when comfort amongst females is such an important part of sex and arousal, something which has predisposed you to feel comfortable may become a part of your sexuality because that comfort is so intrinsically linked. I had a conversation yesterday at lunch with a friend, and he has a girlfriend who her first sexual encounter was with one of her female friends when she was in her teens or whatever. They felt comfortable, they felt safe. Uh, and she has now rolled forward into a marriage where-
- JCDr James Cantor
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... she still feels ... She, the, the, apparently the, um, uh, the husband has absolutely no fears at all that she's ever going to cheat on him with a man. But he does sometimes wonder about what she gets up to when she goes out to, on holiday or to hen dos and stuff like that. And she's, like, they're in a sort of semi-open thing in any case, but what she says is there is something about that degree of comfort that has sort of stayed with her. And given that that was her formative or one of her formative first-time experiences, it does seem like that's left a kind of imprint. Here's another one for you, and I don't know whether you've ever come across this. So, I have a friend who is bisexual but heavily lesbian.
- JCDr James Cantor
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
So, she mostly sleeps with women and sometimes sleeps with men. We were talking about birth control, and she said that she'd come off birth control. I asked her what had happened, and she said, "Oh, my sex drive went through the roof," and a bunch of other things. Uh, "One other interesting thing that I found was that during my ovulation period, I had a big change in sex drive." I was like, "Okay, that's interesting. Well, what happened?" She says, "Well, I'm gay for three weeks out of every month. But for one week out of every month, I turn straight again." Have you ever come across this?
- JCDr James Cantor
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Dude, that blew my mind. (laughs)
- JCDr James Cantor
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
I had to put my fork down. I was like, "Oh my God, this is so interesting."
- JCDr James Cantor
Yeah, there, there is, as I say, uh, women are, you know, and fascinated and c- that way, complicated, and they're a different ... We have one itch. They have different, they have several itches, and different itches need scratching in different ways. Uh, uh, also changes, uh, for women according to mood or across their, uh, their cycles, uh, dom/sub stuff.... that sometimes they'll be, you know, in a kinky aggressive kind of mood, or in a kinky super sub mood, and with other people who are in other situations. Or they'll be down with med sub with women. It, it's, there's just this cluster, and as I say, and they will have a couple of different ways to, roads to Rome.
- CWChris Williamson
Yes.
- JCDr James Cantor
That's not it. What is it?
- CWChris Williamson
Whatever. Yeah. I learned about red deer, Scottish red deer, and the fact that when the females come into heat, the males start deploying tons of testosterone. And they go from being really docile and friendly with all of their male counterparts to these, having these huge antlers and trying to kill all of the other men that they were recently friends with and had been chilling with for the last nine months. Then they go create a harem, (clears throat) super aggressive, and then the women stop being in heat, and then everything goes back to normal again. Given the fact that the behavior of those animals changes so much due to the cascade of hormones, it makes complete sense that small, relatively small changes in women would happen when their profile of hormones changes. It just happens to be more consistent than once every year.
- JCDr James Cantor
Uh, yes. All perfectly logical, all perfectly plausible. Although, you know, we're, we're at the far reaches of my, my, uh, my real expertise. Uh, I've often found it less useful to think about, you know, hormones having this, you know, kind of whatever effect, and therefore should have whatever analogous effect, you know, uh, across species, uh, and more, how would this have helped evolution or against it? It, it's, uh, you know, 'cause... And then the hormones and what increases or decreases, whatever behaviors of ours changes species to species in order for us to fit in whatever our, you know, evolutionary n-, uh, network is. So again, in that species, right, the offset of killing off some of the other males must have an evolutionary benefit that offsets that. And again, this is the animal hum- husbandry is, is, uh, is not my thing, right? So there's gotta be some niche that it fits for them that didn't work for us, you know, uh, uh, that didn't work for us as we came down from the trees. But what that might be, I, I, I guess I just, uh, hesitate to, uh, make all animals analogous to all other anim- uh, animals, you know, disembedded from the evolutionary pressures that got us there.
- CWChris Williamson
Getting onto
- 21:01 – 28:50
What We Get Wrong About Paedophilia
- CWChris Williamson
some more murky territory, what do you think most people misunderstand when it comes to pedophilia?
- JCDr James Cantor
Oh, uh, same as when I got into, uh, into the field. Uh, that people confuse pedophilia for a synonym for child molestation. Uh, because people, uh, uh, conversations are only about the behavior. People have trouble separating that from the sexual attraction pattern. Uh, again, for any listeners who haven't heard it before, uh, uh, pedophilia is the sexual attraction pattern itself. These are people who are genuinely sexually attracted to children the way the rest of us are, uh, to adults, but doesn't mean they ever did anyone. You know, uh, uh, it doesn't mean they committed any crime or hurt, uh, anyone. They, they just have the sexual attraction pattern, you know, first to their own peers when they're young, but as they mature, they continue to be attracted to whatever age, uh, that was where the rest of us, you know, develop attracted, uh, attractions to adults. Uh, and vice versa isn't one-to-one either. The people who commit the offenses, the actual child molesters are usually not pedophiles. Uh, incest offenders, for example, are usually not into kids. They're using the kid as, as a, as a surrogate, and they prefer adults but don't have access to an adult. Roughly about a third, as I say, of offenders against children are genuinely, uh, are genuine pedophiles. Uh, not so for, uh, for child porn. The people who are collecting child porn are genuinely into kids, even though they rarely would have ever touched a kid. Their, their offense is that, you know, indirect kind of offense, you know, where, where the victim is the, the, the unconsenting, uh, uh, subject of the picture. Uh, so the biggest misunderstanding is that, you know, a pedophile is not a criminal. Before he committed an offense, he was an inno- innocent person, and that's the day we need to get to him. These are people who are usually struggling with it. They know something's wrong, and we want them to be able to come in for therapy, sex drive reducing medications, you know, what, whatever it will take to help this person, you know, stay cr- uh, crime-free. Uh, unfortunately, because people automatically associate, oh, this is a criminal waiting to happen, they end up, you know, bringing all of the stigma and all of the condemnation, which really just drives them underground. So instead of having them, you know, in therapy getting whatever they need, they're all alone and desperate. Uh, wh- wh- which is crazy to me. You know, that's just, that's making the problem worse. Uh, so that's a very long answer, but the biggest misunderstanding, uh, uh, as I say, is that people have ch- uh, because people only hear about pedophilia in the context of molestation, people, you know, have trouble seeing that these are overlapping but non-identical categories.
- CWChris Williamson
Well, there's such a visceral response to those stories, right, and they do get a good bit of press coverage when it comes out. And I suppose what would be newsworthy about here is a non-offending pedophile who sits quietly in his house, like why is that gonna make headlines? No one's, no one's writing an article about that really.
- JCDr James Cantor
No.
- CWChris Williamson
Unless it was a very interesting expose that said, "There is this group of people out there that are worthy of-"... sympathy because of the, sort of, difficulty that they have to go through to keep their type of sexuality under control in terms of enacting it. Uh, so when it comes to what causes pedophilia to arise, how much biological, environmental influence is going on here and, and why does that happen?
- JCDr James Cantor
Uh, we have really solid evidence for the biological contributions but no solid evidence for learned kinds of influences. I mean, we can't rule it out. I mean, we can never, you know, in science, permanently rule anything out. It's always possible for, you know, future evidence to say anything. But so far, we have biology, you know, right down to brain scans and clues leading to developmental episodes that happen before birth. Uh, the biggest one is handedness. In regular, everyday populations, you know, somewhere between 8% to 10% of people are, uh, are non-right-handed so far as brain organization is con- uh, concerned. Ambidextrous goes together with left-handedness. Uh, so it's about 8% to 10% of the regular population, but like 35% of the pedophiles. Absolutely enormous. There's only one thing that makes somebody non-right-handed, you know. And outside of old Catholic schools, they didn't make you non-right-handed, they went the other way. The only way that that larger proportion of people are non-right-handed is if something is different about basic brain organization and that the hemispheric dominance of the brain is established by the end of the first trimester.
- CWChris Williamson
That's what causes handedness?
- JCDr James Cantor
That's what causes handedness. Uh, and, uh, so a, uh, right-handed person is left hemisphere dominant. A left-handed person, and I'm very left-handed, could go either way. Uh, it, it's roughly, again, about a third of them, it's cross hemisphere, and for some it's just kind of 50/50. Uh, it's just during early brain development, uh, uh, uh, one grows faster than the other, but if something happens during development that gets in the way, malnutrition of the mother, stress or something, the other hemisphere then will try to catch up for the lost time of the first one. It takes over some of the functions that the original hemisphere would have had, and handedness is, is one of them. So, large differences in a population of handedness, again, is a clue that something, maternal stress, something happened early in development and we're just seeing one of these echoes of a, you know, innocuous behavior. But it's because it's pretty innocuous that we can detect it pretty early in adulthood, but it still tells us something very, very important that was going on before birth. So, between the combination of the brain scans showing us exactly where things are different now and findings like handedness and other clues saying whatever was different, whatever links of these chains eventually lead to pedophilia, the first links were before birth. So, when you put all of this together, it's, as I say, this is a biological thing. Could there be things learned in childhood? Sure, but nobody's come up with that kind of smoking gun evidence where there's just no other way, uh, to explain it. Different for child molestation. Childhood events, stress, crises, tragedy can lead, during life, during young life, can lead a person to be disinhibited. You know, impulsive, unwilling, you know, antisocial of themselves, "I was hurt so it's really not so bad if I do something..." You know, so a person who has an atypical impulse, if they came from an abusive background, you know, that kind of thing can be learned. But of course, for pedophiles, the ones that we find out about are the ones who committed crimes, who were more likely to have come from an antisocial background. You know, so the, the, uh, so the association is stronger because that's where, you know, that's the area we get to see, but there's this great, big, dark, unknown, never reported, and it's not like they're gonna be, you know, clicking yes on any internet surveys any time soon. You know, so there's just no way we know they exist, but there's no way for us to guess how many.
- 28:50 – 34:01
Correlation of Handedness & Sexuality
- JCDr James Cantor
- CWChris Williamson
Why would it be the case that the mechanism that mediates handedness would also play a role in what somebody is attracted to in terms of age? And does that mean that there are more gay people who are left-handed, more people into dom- sub/dom fetishes and stuff? Does it correlate with anything else?
- JCDr James Cantor
Uh, excellent question. Uh, the first part, why would they be connected, they're not connected in any this leads to this, leads to this kind of way-
- CWChris Williamson
I wasn't accusing all left-handed people of, of being sexual deviants, no.
- JCDr James Cantor
Eh, eh, everybody always has to say that, and we also have to do the homosexuality pedophilia distinction also.
- CWChris Williamson
Caveat, caveat, caveat, yeah.
- JCDr James Cantor
Exactly. Uh, uh, uh, there's no direct link. It's more, uh... Oh, actually it's a great example. Uh, you remember that old and basically true chestnut, you know, correlation doesn't mean causation? We recite that almost reflexively, but what nobody points out is well, what does it mean? There are three possibilities. When X correlates with Y, X could be causing Y, Y could be causing X, or the one everybody forgets, there's a Z that causes both X and Y. So, they come and go in frequency together, but there's no relationship between them. It's because they both come from the same... So, a lot of these correlates that people talk about have that third variable thing. Neither one is causing the other, even though that's always everybody's gut reaction if they're trying to-... endorse whatever public, public policy, we want more of this, we want less of that. And so they start arguing for connections where most of it is, sorry, there isn't a connection, it's because both come from this other thing. So, the associations between hemispheric dominance, handedness, and, uh, uh, sexuality appear to be one of those. Neither one really is related to the other, it's just that if something unusual goes on during brain development, handedness is one of the things that changes, and sexual interest pattern is one of the things that changes. But there's no relationship between the two. That said, handedness is usually the first thing we look at whenever we examine any new sexual interest pattern that comes to attention exactly because it does seem to be different across the broad spectrum of them. It is higher in gay men than straight men not in, uh, but not lesbians versus straight women. It is higher again in the pedophiles versus the non-pedophiles, and it's higher in a couple of the other paraphilias. So again, not, that doesn't mean any of these is related to any of the others, it's all that same Z. It's all that same something went different during development, and these are just the many different sexual interest patterns that can change and handedness which can ch- oh, and handedness which can change, and one of the triggers of that change is testosterone.
- CWChris Williamson
In utero?
- JCDr James Cantor
Uh, in utero. Again, first, mostly first trimes- uh, uh, mostly, well, that one's really at the end of the first trimester, and it's also why more men are non-right-handed than women.
- CWChris Williamson
Because they are more heavily mediated by testosterone?
- JCDr James Cantor
Yep. And so the process to masculinize puts the brain at risk for a couple of things. Males are expandable, uh, expendable in a population. If you lose, pick a number, if you lose 10% of men there's more than enough sperm to go around. But if you lose 10% of women, you've lost 10% of reproductive potential. So w- uh, so all fetuses essentially start female, not in the way trans activists like to say, uh, but developmentally, you know, things don't start shifting into the male direction, the Y chromosome and proteins don't kick in until a couple of months in. And sexual interest pattern is one of the things that seems to change, so where, where we would start with a relatively broad mood pattern that women have in order to bring that over, so instead of being attracted to men, look for curvy reproductive age. So we, males, have to go through that process, females don't. We kind of start, our brains kind of start in that process. So, that seems to be why so many more males have these atypical sexualities but women don't 'cause they didn't have to go through that process. This is like, this is their right-handedness, where for some of us, we go through that process, the process isn't perfectly debugged so we lose a couple of percent to these atypical patterns.
- 34:01 – 43:43
Do We Have Control Over Arousal?
- JCDr James Cantor
- CWChris Williamson
How much conscious control do people have over what arouses them, or what they're sexually attracted to?
- JCDr James Cantor
Uh...
- CWChris Williamson
This isn't acting on it, this is what arouses them.
- JCDr James Cantor
I want to say zero. I mean, we can distract ourselves if there is something hot in the environment that we don't want to be caught looking at, or you know, in certain situations we don't want to accidentally give ourselves an erection in an inappropriate time or place. Uh, but that's not, you know, that, that's just, that's not changing or not being interested in it, it, it's avoiding the, avoiding (laughs) or at least postponing the stimulus. Very often that just becomes, you know, masturbation, meat for later that night. Uh, but really there doesn't, there doesn't seem to be, uh, especially for men. We can be attracted to stuff despite ourselves, you know, somebody other than our monogamous partner, somebody other than the, whatever socially approved stimulus, you know, that, that happens all the time. But no, we, we, we can't help if whatever your favorite flavor is ... For me it's ice cream. I can't will myself not to like ice cream. I might have favorite flavors, but ...
- CWChris Williamson
So, when it comes to looking at pedophiles, there is, as far as you can see from your work, no conscious control over your ability to decide what you're going to be aroused by. You do have conscious control over whether you decide to act on that, and that's a line that you've drawn between child molestation and pedophilia. But that, I mean, this was something that I learned about this girl that I was dating at university f- twelve years ago or something, who was a doctor, and she said, "You know, if I could make one change to the way that the world views other people, uh, one of the ones I think that would be interesting to discuss would be that pedophiles need more sympathy." And, uh, y- my immediate response as someone that was uninitiated was like, "Why? How?" Uh, in the UK there's like a big deal about nonce radar, about looking out for, to catch a predator and there's a bunch of people like that.
- JCDr James Cantor
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
And I was like, after a, it doesn't take very much thought to realize that if you're someone that doesn't have conscious control over what you're attracted to and you're born cursed with a sexuality that the entire world is going to condemn you for, that you can't talk to anybody else about, and that you can't act on, I mean that's, that's a kind of living hell.
- JCDr James Cantor
It's hard to imagine a worse curse. I mean, imagining, you know ... Again, I grew up with, you know, gay in the '80s and '90s, you know, and just lucky not to have grown up in the '50s. Now, this, you know, t- makes that into a cakewalk. Uh, the whole conversation seems like it's gotten harder to have now. I've been having this conversation, I've been doing this kind of research for, we're going on 25 years. There was, in its eccentric kind of way, a lot more tolerance then than now. There was a lot more in media. We didn't have social media, uh, yet, which is, I think, linked. There was a, "Oh, now I get it," and people immediately went the, "Oh, if people didn't choose this, then it was a very simple step to, well, they didn't choose anything." And all we can ever do with anyone is find whatever proportions and fantasies according to what we can do, da, da, da, da, right down to, it's not possible to do some of these either because it'll hurt somebody or it's just not possible in physics. And so we find some fantasy way, you know, and that's, you know, one rule, one ethic, one pre- (laughs) and one principle to rule them all. You know, so there was, uh, uh, that was a story that was possible, was possible. Uh, I'm, I'm getting this award. It hasn't been officially presented to me yet. I'm getting th- this award, Distinguished Contribution from The Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, in no small part for having brought this conversation, uh, uh, to public light. But it's, even though it was accepted then, several documentaries made about it. It's a harder conversation now because that conversation takes 60 seconds of nuance for the, "Oh, now I get it." That doesn't fit in a tweet. And nobody really wants the correct answer, even though everybody else is saying, "You know, that's actually how we're gonna defeat actual child molestation." Or even if we find a way, if we can figure out what in the brain it is, maybe we can prevent it from developing in the first place. Right, w- everybody's saying, "The answer's actually there," but people are using social media just for its virtue sig- virtue signaling. "I'm gonna show you what a child protector I am and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And they're making the situation worse by driving underground the people we want coming in and getting into therapy and so on. So, because I find there's much less honest conversation, and social media is just, as I say, the virtue signaling, the message is a much harder one to get out today than it was 25 years ago. I have no idea where we're going to go with it, and it cuts across political spectrum. It's not left or right. It's attention seekers, no matter what motivation they have for the attention, both left and right, they pride themselves on just how bad they can be to the pedophiles, both sides making the problem worse.
- CWChris Williamson
I'm gonna guess that the concern many people have is that by opening up this conversation and making it less taboo, you are somehow giving a stamp of approval or at least relinquishing a stamp of disapproval in, i- in some form or another. Uh, misunderstanding about the difference between a non-offending and an offending pedophile, and that as soon as you don't condemn it in the worst possible way, w- the most vehemently that you can, that's the same as being complicit or supporting or ...
- JCDr James Cantor
That's, that's the story they give. I'm a little more cyni- a little too cynical to accept that on face value. Again, 'cause basic humans haven't changed now versus 25 years ago. What has changed is now when they say it, they're saying it in front of the entire universe. I don't think they genuine ... I, I don't think the genuine fear is, "If we don't condemn it, it's, they're gonna feel free to do whatever they want." It's that, "If I don't condemn it, I'm not gonna look good."
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. It's an opportunity to stand on the shoulders-
- JCDr James Cantor
Virtue signaling, exactly. It's an, uh, nobody, you know, except this idiot is gonna say, "Hang on a second, you're actually making it worse." Right, there are very few people sitting in a place to be able to say, you know, there are only a handful of experts and we're the ones who can say, "Actually, treating them like human beings is what's going to cause, i- is what prevention is going to come from." If you give somebody nothing to lose, they're gonna act like somebody with nothing to lose.
- CWChris Williamson
Yes. Yeah, I had a conversation with Andrew Gold, and he went to the German, like, German group, uh-
- JCDr James Cantor
The Preventionprojekt Dunkelfeld.
- CWChris Williamson
Yes. Uh, and there's three risk characteristics, I think. The first one is being around children, the second one is being inebriated, and the third one is feeling rebuffed from society, like you have no one to turn to. I'm like, well, you know, it's a personal choice to control the first two, although you could environmentally assist, I suppose, by stopping them from going to an off-license or a children's pool. But the third one is almost exclusively done by society to the offenders. And yeah, I, I, I mean, that's, uh ... To say that your response to-... this conversation is potentially causing greater externalities to the exact group that you're supposed to be trying to defend and protect, is a, like, it's a difficult point to get across, right? It's the same reason, similar sort of reason to-
- JCDr James Cantor
You're much nicer than I am.
- CWChris Williamson
I, look, I, I-
- JCDr James Cantor
It was-
- CWChris Williamson
... try to be different.
- JCDr James Cantor
... possible to get the point across 25 years ago. The difference now is so much of the conversation is people who don't care what the point is. They just wanna look like they are, you know, whatever hero badge, protecting children-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JCDr James Cantor
... doing the research and the work that now they-
- CWChris Williamson
Good for them.
- JCDr James Cantor
... have perfect confidence in their gut reaction.
- 43:43 – 56:50
How to Reframe the Debate around Sexual Orientations
- JCDr James Cantor
- CWChris Williamson
Here's an interesting thing. So most victim groups at the moment are... One of the easiest ways to give yourself the status of empathetic performative carer is to stand up for a victimized group and yet it seems like nobody is choosing to do it for this particular group. That if you manage to reframe the debate, you may be able to use the dynamic that you're seeing online of people wanting to form finger wave for a group and look at how virtuous I am because of that, if you were able to change the way that the conversation is framed, you may actually be able to utilize that desire in a positive way.
- JCDr James Cantor
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh...
- JCDr James Cantor
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
But it's, uh, I think, I guess you've got to redirect the stream incredibly accurately and very carefully.
- JCDr James Cantor
Uh, I think two things are going on and they're not gonna let each other exist. One, uh, is, again, when it was possible to walk people through to the ah-ha, uh, it's often very helpful to go through step-by-step. As I say, start with plain vanilla gay, go through, you know, whatever the different kinds of kinks. Well, what about, you know, well, what's possible for them?
- CWChris Williamson
Well, hang on. Why don't you give us, why don't you give us the, let's say that there's someone that's still slightly unconvinced and you've got your, whatever, 60 seconds or two minutes to walk someone through from start to finish to get to the-
- JCDr James Cantor
Oh.
- CWChris Williamson
... ah-ha moment. What is it?
- JCDr James Cantor
Uh, again, it's pieces of what we've, uh, said already, starting with the basic idea that sexual orientation, especially for men, is a hardwired, innate, immutable, they didn't pick it, or we didn't pick it and it's not going to change. Ka-thunk. Now, so what are we there for? You know, what means of civil right? Are we therefore allowed to get married? Yeah, sure. Have sex in absolutely with anyone we want? Well, no, they have to be consenting. Anywhere we want? Well, not exactly public places. There are restrictions. Okay. And, uh, kinksters. All right. We're now playing with the meaning of consent 'cause part of the hotness is that it's non-consenting and so on, but we have to make sure it for real is. So, it becomes a little bit more complicated but we can overcome that to make sure nobody's getting hurt in a way that they don't mean to be getting hurt. All right. Somebody who's turned on, it's a rare, rare, and fascinating sexual interest, uh, pattern, apotemnophilia. These are people who feel like amputees trapped in the body of a four-limbed person and they want and try and sometimes succeed at having a limb taken off, and if they're otherwise, you know, mentally healthy and productive in society, there are indeed successful productive cases of it. Okay. Well, if it's an adult, control over their own body, if we don't do it they're gonna hurt themselves anyway, but the basic idea that it's built in, they didn't pick it, it's easy to be, uh, sympathetic for that, uh, uh, uh, for such a person. It's easy to, uh, think, you know, uh, uh, there but by sheer luck, you know, go I, I could've been born with that combination too, what, what, what do I wish society would've, uh, would've done with me? And so we get to the more and more stigmatized, more and more yucky, and more and more uncomfortable, and sooner or later we end up with pedophiles. Where now we're talking there are zero potential partners or situations we can create that would be safe for or in which there can be a consenting partner. So, we're gonna go range harder and harder, da, da, da, until we sooner or later or, you know, some real, real, you know, uh, uh, uh, uh, people with sexual sadism, again, the fantasies would hurt another person. Can't be done, so now it's a matter of fiction, fantasy, movies, written stories, cartoons, dolls, uh, uh, uh, whatever. So once a person starts with a, again, plain vanilla gay, you're just born with it, well, where's the line between which one of these do we help? Again, we use consent and harm to another person to decide which of these we can act out, which, and which ones have to stay in fantasy, but where in this line do, are we switching from, yeah, okay, you're allowed to share drawings versus not. What... Scientifically, of course, there is no objective line. You know, so, so far as society is concerned, well, if we're switching to fantasy so nobody's getting hurt anywhere on the line, all right, so it's not out. Sympathy because I could've been born that way too. Well, again, that also works for the whole, the only thing left is stigma. Okay. So, we're okay with them for as long as they're not stigmatized. Wait a second. That, isn't that how we got LGBTQ add-your-letters to begin with? And this is where my, you know, most infamous tweet ever is, is when I start challenging people, if it's not just according to stigma-Well, then if we don't include P, we're hypocrites. What, what's ... You're saying we stigmatize it up to my group and no further? We stigmatize it only when it becomes popular and no further? Well, that's not leadership. That's not rights principles. That's just this year's new version of what's popular and this year's fashion, and ... But it's hypocritical to boot when it ... Now, as I say, and I know exactly how that's taken people, you know, like taking that little thing and saying, "Oh my god, a pedophile apologist," da da da da da da da. It's just that this is entire, I hesitate to say rainbow, but let's go, you know, wide, wide range according to stigma- stigmatize, not stigmatized, and, you know, I can understand why some of these, uh, got stigmatized. Uh, but if that's the only reason, as long as they keep it in fantasy, what, what ... All right, what's the objective other way to decide that doesn't end up with us being hypocrites? And by the way, for the people acting out on the ones that they can't act out on, you know, if we take away the compromise masturbation toys, again, we're just making them more desperate and congratulating ourselves for stigmatizing it so much we drove it underground where nobody can do anything with it. They're happy. Uh, and it, uh ...
- CWChris Williamson
Do you actually think that the P should be in LGBTQ?
- JCDr James Cantor
I use that phrase and I use it purposefully to be provocative. But th- the question I always want to provoke and what I wanted to provoke is, what exactly does it mean to be in there? Popular? Well, it formed because it wasn't popular. Is it a group of, well, didn't have any choice, just do the best you can with what you have? Again, you know, and, and it's, uh, um, you know, again, openly gay myself, I'm very aware of the ancient history and ancient... uh, uh, uh, of the history of it, but just shoving the stigma down to the next group further down the stigmatization list?
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, I guess it, it feels a little bit like, uh, people that use the, if you're feminist then you should be pro-male as well as pro-female because feminism is supposed to be for equality. The question around what is the LGBT group for, is it for including, uh, non-typical sexual orientations into a movement so that they feel less alone? Uh, if, I, I don't know what the broad philosophy, I don't even know if there is one, uh, but if that was the case, then I don't know, maybe there is a case to, to talk about that. I can see why there would be, uh, among many, many, many reasons why people would push back against that. Uh, the existing vestigial concern that some men that are gay are secretly pedophiles that are hiding it, and that lumping P in with G would be, uh, a little bit close to home.
- JCDr James Cantor
Uh, I think a lot of people have a lot of different reasons. Uh, and again, because now in the social media age it's disproportionately the number of people who, who are ... just use it for their own virtue signaling. Uh, there are also people who, of course, are victims of child molestation. They don't know and don't really care if their, you know, perpetrator was genuinely a pedophile or not. Doesn't matter. To such a person, can I blame them for having trouble separating ... Well, I have nothing but sympathy for g- uh, for that situ- uh, for the situation. Uh, but I, I think where a lot of people get ... I think for a lot of people the co- the conversation they're not having is that, uh, uh, to so many folk, being in the LGBTQ alphabet translates necessarily to a specific set of rights. Now, they're often really thinking gay rights. Can get married, gays in the military in the US. You know, I, I can get my wedding cake made at whatever baker I want. You know, just basic civil rights. Uh, but if that's it, well then why do we have B in there? 'Cause they already had half of those. The only part that's relevant to the Bs are the parts that are like the Gs anyway. Well, do the Ts belong in there? Because, you know, GLB doesn't need any surgery for any of this. Doesn't matter. Okay, so the asexuals. What rights is it that the asexuals are going for? R- so, right, so people just kinda stick in the, uh, add to the letters just to show off how many letters they know. Really, it's just a list of, you know, look how hip I am. Groups that are supposed to be, uh, uh, uh, that are supposed to be cool to be either a part of or to recognize use of, but mostly people actually in their heads are thinking basic civil rights and are just adding on other letters, as I say, just out of pedant- uh, just out of being pedantic. Uh, to me, it's a list of the actual atypical sexualities who vary in a wide and broad way in their needs and their features. For some it's getting married. For asexuals that doesn't matter. For bisexuals, it only half matters. For intersexuals, it even depends on the kind of intersexual you are. For cross-dressers it means I'm not exactly sure. And for some people it means-... can we not condemn them at a 10, at a, you know, every time we hear of them, drive them underground, and instead make it possible for them to get therapy instead of passing mandatory, uh, uh, reporting laws? Right, and so it's, to me, just this constellation of different ways to be sexually different, each of which has its own needs and features. I'm the one who sounds LGBTQ, and everybody else is, "You're only allowed in the group if you make me look good." Uh, isn't that the popularity contest we were supposed to be fighting against? People are only willing to fight for a group after it looks good.
- CWChris Williamson
Well, I mean, you see certainly a, a part of that with every month when Pride Month comes up, or every year when Pride Month comes up, and you see that AMD Technology Associates in America changes their profile photo to a rainbow-colored flag, but that the Middle East division doesn't change. And the same thing goes for Mercedes-Benz and BMW and Vari- uh, all of these different companies. Uh, well, why? Well, it's because it's a cheap virtue signal to fight a war where the battle's already been won, and where it's still to be done. And, and maybe this is new territory, may, maybe at some point in the future, this will... But I, I do think that, you know, to try and think of something, like, applied here, there would be a way potentially to utilize the performative empathy desire that we have at the moment that's prevalent on the internet, to weaponize that toward this group, and to utilize that so that people actually feel like it is something that's virtuous to be done. But there is a hell of a lot of stigma to get out of the way first. So going back, going back to
- 56:50 – 1:06:17
Different Types of Paedophilia
- CWChris Williamson
the actual behavior, I know from speaking to Diana Fleischman that there are hebephilia and what's the o- is there, what- what's the other one that isn't hebephilia? What's before hebephilia?
- JCDr James Cantor
Ephebophilia.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep, and there's the one before that?
- JCDr James Cantor
Uh, for adults, teleophilia.
- CWChris Williamson
Right. Okay. Explain what those are and what are the age brackets that are typical for, uh, pedophiles to be attracted to?
- JCDr James Cantor
Yep. Uh, it sounds much more technical than, uh, uh, than it needs to be. Uh, but as you might imagine, when we do research in these populations, you know, there are ranges. You know, there are ones who are attracted to very young kids, pre-pubescent kids, you know, uh, up to about age 10. Those, we would-
- CWChris Williamson
How rare is that?
- JCDr James Cantor
Uh, relatively rare. Uh, 10 to 15 percentage depending on how you measure them. It's not like e- they, they check these off on a survey, so usually we kind of infer it from their sexual offense pattern, from, uh, uh, from child porn on their computer, or the most important and the most objective way is, uh, something called a phallometric test. Uh, it's essentially in a laboratory, to p- uh, laboratory test. We put a blood pressure cuff on their penis and show them stimuli of adults, children, male and female, and record what they react to. Very sensitive, very accurate test.
- CWChris Williamson
How do you get showing a s- research participant images of children to judge the arousal response past an ethics board?
- JCDr James Cantor
Uh, it's, I wanna say, more historical at this point than anything else. Uh, the lab doing this work was, uh, founded by Kurt Freund, who was doing it in the 1950s and '60s, predating ethics boards. And he was, you know, working with sex offenders and demonstrated the accuracy of the test and how it was u- uh, uh, superior to the kind of clinical opinions that, uh, uh, that physicians were, uh, uh, were making, psychiatrists were making. So, of course, he continued doing research on it, continued publishing on it, including information about its, uh, diagnostic accuracy. Uh, so, uh, with that, that was sufficient for the ethics board to, yep, continue to, you know, continue to do the, uh, to do the research. Also, it was completely transparent to the correctional facilities. Most of the people taking the test were sex offenders already convicted and being released to parole and probation, and then the test was part of a clinical decision to decide, you know, is this a genuine pedophile for whom we would use sex drive reducing medications and the kinds of therapies associated with helping them deal with it? Or was this an incest pattern, somebody with, you know, loose boundaries or disinhibited or drug-using? And so those are the kinds of ways to help this person not commit, uh, an offense. So it was a clinical test in a correctional setting. And again, transparent to each of the several ethics committees, the police themselves, and so on, uh, and even predated, uh, uh, predated the, uh, the board, uh, the board.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay, so under 10, around about 10 to 15%.
- JCDr James Cantor
Yep. Uh, are, are definite pedophiles into pre-pubescent kids. Then if they're into pubescent kids, roughly ages 11 to 14, you know, is the next chunk of them, and those are the ones that we call hebephiles. And in doing research in order to try to figure out is there a pattern here related to ped- uh, uh, to age-interest pattern, you know, if we have now three points, we can start making a line. If I have just pedophiles and non-pedophiles, I just have two points. But if I have three points, now I get to s- start seeing patterns, even though only a relatively few of them are gold-plated solid pedophiles. Uh, then the group after that...... again, not much of a- of a- of a corrections problem, but into 15, 16-year-olds and, uh, those were called ephebophiles. Uh, and the age of consent was, I think, it- it was 14 until about 15, 20 years ago. So again, it wasn't illegal so it never really came- came to clinical attention. Then the sexually attracted to regular everyday adults, 17 and up in- uh, uh, in the lab where I did this work, that was teleophilia. And then way at the other end, which really should have become my next research- uh, research- uh, question, gerontophilia.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, like grandma and grandpa? Wow.
- JCDr James Cantor
Yup.
- CWChris Williamson
How common is that?
- JCDr James Cantor
Into daddies.
- CWChris Williamson
Have you got any idea?
- JCDr James Cantor
Uh, seems to be a handful of percent, but it's really, really tough. It's tough to tell. Uh, it's tough to tell and it's tough to tell even when it's genuine. I mean, how much of it is sexual attraction?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JCDr James Cantor
How much of it is, you know, kind of gold digging mixed in? Uh, and how much of it, especially for young people, is really ... Something that doesn't get talked about and I wish I had the time to write about is, especially for young people, uh, if they're into something different, young people are also into a broad range of stuff. Just the color flesh is good enough. You know, a group- group of pubescent boys can met- get erections and masturbate in each other's company, you know, without effort. Not a whiff of gay, uh- uh, about any of them, it's just right when sex drive is so high that end, any- any day will do you. But as we mature and grow older, it really starts to have to be our thing in order to work. And so I think that narrowing or as we get older and our sex drive decreases, it has to be close to our favorite thing in order to ...
- CWChris Williamson
Gotta hit the bullseye.
- JCDr James Cantor
Right. So I think some people perceive, uh, "Well, I could do anything," you know? And so an older person or younger person at the periphery when we're young and our sex drive is high, but we're in- if we're in a phase of life where it has to be our favorite thing, you know, it- it stops being. So I have to wonder, uh- uh, how many of these, uh- uh, older-younger couples or really a younger person just who hasn't yet-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. Well, I mean-
- JCDr James Cantor
... narrowed in.
- CWChris Williamson
Maybe we need to start to take the young playmate models that date the 70-year-old billionaire with a- a little bit more of a pinch of salt perhaps if they're one of these gerontophilias or whatever, the- the older, attracted to older people thing. Perhaps they need their movement as well. Perhaps there needs to be two Gs. I don't know.
- JCDr James Cantor
Well, again, they're adults, you know, do what they like. Uh, but it's rare in women. Again, for women, the- the- the look of the person is just one thread in a complicated ball of wax. So if the person, you know, and- and confidence is often a big part of it and the- the- how much is money is up to question, but a lot of the, you know, uh, uh, confidence and security that comes along with money is often a big attractant.
- CWChris Williamson
What is the common, uh, offending, uh, the- the gender of the- the, uh, person that's usually being, uh, imagined if it's a male pedophile? Is it t- tending to still be heterosexual?
- JCDr James Cantor
Majority heterosexual, but not as much of a majority as you would guess. Uh, for offenders against adults, practically all against women. Uh, for offenders against children, 60%-ish. You know, so it's majority are female, but not really the- almost exclusive.
- CWChris Williamson
And s- significantly overrepresented in terms of male-to-male attraction.
- JCDr James Cantor
Correct. Uh, still some question why. Uh, there is some truth to a person who's atyp- sexually atypical one way is often sexually atypical in other ways. So if somebody's attracted to children, you know, they're closer to 50/50 than the, you know, 2%, 3%, 97% for regular adult gays. Uh, another part of it is that there's just less sexual differentiation in pre-pubescent children. If your brain is attracted to, you know, a childlike form, change a haircut, there's not much morphological difference between a seven-year-old boy and girl, but there's a huge morphological difference, you can see it, you know, across the room between a 20-year-old, you know, young man, young woman. Uh, so it's also easy to imagine that the brain just doesn't care as much if it's attracted to children as when it's attracted to adults because the shapes are-
- 1:06:17 – 1:12:22
Are Child Sex Dolls Ethical?
- CWChris Williamson
a conversation that I had about a year ago, and I- I continue to try and have it, uh, in the right company when I can. Are child sex dolls ethical in your view?
- JCDr James Cantor
Uh, yes. In the- in that I've never heard and I've been a part of many such debates, I've never heard anybody give me any kind of an argument that holds water. It's either, "Oh my god, that's going to cause pedophilia," and I have a stack of brain scans that says, "No, it won't." Or they're just kinda grossed out, which is not an ethical concern. So-
- CWChris Williamson
What do the brain scans tell you?
- JCDr James Cantor
Uh, again, the way that the brain is different and the way that it formed, this isn't anything a person chose. It's, uh, not a person, uh, anything a person can rechoose or roll the dice again. These are not areas or volumes of the brain that change with exercise or, you know, dyslexia skills. Uh, these are, as I say, like-... in every meaningful way is like a sexual orientation. It's just kind of built-in, born with it, and all we can do is accommodate it. So if we have something that might help, no good evidence that it'll hurt, and the only arguments anybody can give is their emotional discomfort, well if emotional discomfort were a good enough reason, we'd be back to the anti-gay days.
- CWChris Williamson
Do you have any evidence to say that it's not a gateway drug?
- JCDr James Cantor
Um, evidence to say that it's not. That's not a question science can answer. Uh, it's called proving the null hypothesis. In science, we start with these things are not related until somebody shows that they are. It's not possible to prove that things are not related-
- CWChris Williamson
But you would be able to-
- JCDr James Cantor
... because it's always possible-
- CWChris Williamson
Yes.
- JCDr James Cantor
... that somebody later will produce evidence that there is. So, as I say-
- CWChris Williamson
Let's see, let's say that you introduced a bunch of child sex dolls into a, uh, non-offending group of pedophiles, and you then saw a greater increase in the number of real, uh, the amount of real-world harm that went on because of the introduction of them.
- JCDr James Cantor
There's, uh, nobody's ever seen that kind of pattern, but I'm not sure any jurisdiction yet has had a situation where they weren't available, all of a sudden there was whatever legal precedent, now they are available, so all of a sudden there are 10,000 of them and we can look for an uptick. Uh, it, that... But there's never been that kind of natural experiment. The predom- The only offense which happens in any frequency, that, that co-occurs in any frequency, is, uh, child pornography use, downloading, hoarding.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- JCDr James Cantor
Uh, when somebody... Uh, there are people who just, you know, throw internet stings, that's the extent of their crime. You know, usually there's a very, very thorough investigation of, you know, any children in that guy's environment, and rarely do they find anybody who was, uh, uh, uh, uh, physically or one-on-one interfered with. Uh, that... Relatively rare. The other way around happens with some, uh, co-occurrence. When an actual hands-on offense comes to light, and then they go through the guy's computers, then, as I say, more often, a couple of percent of the time, a, a substantial chunk of those, they will find child porn. So if we were gonna guess, our best-educated guess would be a similar... would be a similar pattern. That it would be elevated. Somebody willing to break a law is alre- also gonna be willing to break a smaller law, if I can call a child offense that, but to do the relatively innocuous things before they go the distance.
- CWChris Williamson
Yes.
- JCDr James Cantor
But of the ones who, right, find, I'll say, a pro-social, you know, fantasies, written stuff, fiction, whatever, somebody who finds an inoffensive way of doing it, nobody's found, uh, connection going the other way.
- CWChris Williamson
That's interesting to think about, the fact that a, a fiction, a, a story which is written, or I guess illustrations as well, perhaps, is a way...
- JCDr James Cantor
Well, drawings.
- CWChris Williamson
Yes. Drawings, would be a way to... I mean, it's a difficult question to work out. Should there be an, an ethical, no-externality way to help people in this community suffer less whilst minimizing real-world harm? That's a, that's one of the most difficult questions ethically that I can think of.
- JCDr James Cantor
Yup. And it doesn't fit in a tweet.
- CWChris Williamson
Does not fit in a tweet. No, uh, 260 characters-
- JCDr James Cantor
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... is not long enough for that. But it's a fascinating consideration that, okay, do you want people to suffer unnecessarily? No.
- JCDr James Cantor
And as I say, it's the final domino in the series, 'cause the entire sexual, again, I'll use the word spectrum, of everybody's, whatever they're into, all of the kinks, this is the hardest one. If we can unravel this one, all the others are, I don't know if deluded is the right word, but, uh, simpler, less fraught version of this toughest one.
- CWChris Williamson
Let's
- 1:12:22 – 1:24:36
The Transgender Debate
- CWChris Williamson
delve into the spiciest one then. What about people who feel like they're living in the wrong body? What's going on there?
- JCDr James Cantor
Oh, yeah. Never in my life... Uh, I shouldn't say that. The biggest thing that surprises me by, by the trans controversies is how fast they've taken over. I mean, we've seen other situations in healthcare and medical healthcare where the people who were supposed to be in charge and making sure things stick to the evidence, there have been slips in the past. Uh, multiple personalities, you know, the satanic panic, the, the repre- uh, recovered memories. Uh, and even physical medicine, stents, meshes, uh, feeding babies formula instead of, uh, uh, uh, mothers nursing their children. I mean, medicine has, for some situations, made this mistake before. I was...... surprised, alerted, shocked, you know, to see what happened, you know, in... Uh, I wanna say that I was surprised to see what happened, you know, in my own field, but you know, it's sex. We have so many so controversial issues, you know, it's always a matter of time. Uh, but the thing that surprised me is that, uh, unlike, you know, uh, breastfeeding, and recovered memories, and so on, how fast this one pretty literally went viral. That's the thing that shocked me, how quickly it's, uh, uh, it's moved. Uh, people... Uh, uh, the particular phrase, uh, being born in... Uh, in, uh, in the wrong body, and a perfectly reasonable here and there as a, uh, as a metaphor, but people are taking metaphors as literal truths. People are taking subjective evidence and making decisions on it, that we normally would reserve for the most solid and objective evidence. You know, we're sending into surgery, you know, to operate and remove healthy tissue, but giving it, you know, the same bar of evidence that we would use for taking out a tumor. You know, it, it's, uh, all of which is on top of even though everybody, you know, keeps saying, "Oh, you know, you need mental health professionals and you need a robust diagnosis," nobody knows how to do that. We can't predict which of these kids, if any, or of what proportion, will benefit versus not. So, we have the least knowledge, the least outcomes, and the least ability to correctly pick out which one in these 100 will benefit, and we're applying the most dramatic interventions available to us. Uh, now, I'm not an ideologue. I mean, I, it's... I often have been one of the advocates for transition for adults who have lived part of their life, know what they're sacrificing, but we had much more solid evidence for them than for children. But we're treating child cases as if we had the level of evidence and the objective, you know, reliable indications that we just don't have. If in the future we do, great. If we come up with a good way to pick out the correct one and not misdiagnose the other 99, great. But we're not there yet.
- CWChris Williamson
I'm gonna g-
- JCDr James Cantor
We're operating on the wrong ones.
- CWChris Williamson
I'm gonna guess as well that because this has had such rapid takeoff, especially when it comes to transitioning children, we have very little, if basically no evidence to look at what the outcomes are like long term for children who go through gender reassignment surgery or who take hormone blockers to stop themselves going through puberty or to limit puberty once it begins. Okay. What are the life outcomes in terms of satisfaction like for these children when they become adults? And, you know, th- this is a political football that is easy to be kicked around by whichever side. You know, the right will happily roll out somebody that wants to detransition and say that they should have gone through a ton more consent. And then the left will roll out some young 14-year-olds that took their life because they felt like they weren't, whatever. And you just go, "Okay, I, I want to try and cut through some of the bullshit here." Um, I guess that looking at what happens over longer term studies would be one way to do that, take a longitudinal study. But, but given that we don't allow children to vote, smoke, drink, have sex, drive a car. In the UK, you can't buy an energy drink until you're 16 years old. You can't buy a Red Bull until you're 16. You can't have sex, but you can change your gender. Like, that, that to me, it... There is a risk that you're running in trying to find out whether this is right or not in allowing a big swath of children to go through something which could potentially damage them. But on the other side of that, what if this turned out to be like the, the pedophile debate that we were having earlier on. And it's, "Oh, well, maybe the outcomes in this are absolutely great." I don't think that that's going to be the case. I think that I would be unbelievably surprised if it was. I, I have no idea. Well, okay, let's start off. Have you got any idea what is happening in the brains of people who are transgender? Is, is there anything that's a signature which is going on? Are there any common threads?
- JCDr James Cantor
Yes and no. The studies of the brain in trans populations, the study of the brain in sexual, uh, in sexuality have found homosexuality is in the brain, gender identity is not. But very many trans people are also homosexual relative to their birth sex. So, depending on who's in your study, you'll get different confusing mixes, because the stuff in the brain that's there because of homosexuality is easy to mistake for stuff in the brain for trans sexuality. But when you pile it all together, homosexuality is in the brain, both male and female, gender identity is not. But some of the studies compared homosexual transsexuals with heterosexual cis people and said, "See? Trans sexuality in the brain," when, no, what they found was homosexuality in the brain. So, that's the... As I say, people will cite whichever part, whichever studies line up with their belief system. Uh, now, there are other things in the brain. There are other... Uh, uh, that's the part that's relevant for children. Adults show a completely different pattern. When I say adults, I mean people who didn't really start becoming gender dysphoric until adulthood. They knew they were different. They had, you know, some... They were a little bit, uh, odd sometimes, especially socially when they were young.... but basically heterosexual, usually married off and almost always male. Uh, had a wife, has kids, and then in their 30s or 40s decide, you know, before it's too late. A Caitlyn Jenner kind of a profile. Would never have picked the person out of a crowd, not a whiff of femininity about them until they get to a point in life where, you know, before it's too late, "I gotta try this." Uh, completely different pattern, ooh, completely different pattern from the highly effeminate or tomboyish ones in kids where they stick out like a sore thumb and when they come out as gay, you go, "Surprise, surprise." That adult onset type also seems to have a, uh, brain signature to it, but unrelated to homo- uh, to sexual orientation, unrelated to homosexuality. It's related to a pattern unto itself and related to a paraphilia. The trans community hate, hate, hate this idea, because it makes that kind of trans person seem less genuine, when the evidence doesn't say that. The evidence actually is much stronger for their transition than the kids. But for, it's called autogynephilia. These are kind of like men who are not just into searching for, the brain looking for women in the environment. It wants to project signals of that femininity to the environment. It's like they're attracted to the woman within. And that motivates a large chunk of cross-dressers. Not the, you know, drag queen-y type, but the more, you know, it's part of their sex thing. Uh, for, uh, people with other atypical sexualities, again, it will z- often have a cross-dress-y or fetish-y element to it. And for some people, you know, it's strong enough and concrete enough that they actually live perfectly healthy, perfectly healthy lives as female. And that fetish is called autogynephilia. Dirty word in large chunks of the trans community. And a popular idea in other chunks. Take your pick. Okay, so they also seem to be different in the brain, but because of the paraphilia rather than because of the sexual orientation. And I think because they're mostly the activists, they want to treat the children the way they wish they were treated when they were that age, even though these are unrelated phenomena. They have nothing to do with each other. So, the brain is in there, but, uh, it's not in there in the, "Ah, you have a trans brain." That's, that's not it. It's, "You have a gay brain." And for some people it's kind of like, "You're so gay, you really might be happier living as the other sex." And for some people it's, "Yep! You're really autogynephilic. You might be so one autogynephilic you might actually be happier living as the other sex." So, unrelated motivations. They just, when they describe their subjective experience, they use the same words. Like if a doc, uh, a patient comes in, "Doc, I have a headache." Stress headache, head injury, migraine. They will all say headache, their descriptions will sound the same, but the best thing for these people are completely unrelated to each other.
- CWChris Williamson
I have a friend who is trans and we threatened/encouraged her to, uh, go to a strip club at some point. And the fear in her eyes o- at the potential of having to see a, a lady potentially naked in front of her was huge. Is that s-
- JCDr James Cantor
Uh, y- your friend was trans which way?
- CWChris Williamson
So, male to female still with the male bits.
- JCDr James Cantor
Okay.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, but just did not want to see a vagina at all. That seems like the, I, I don't know what that is. That seems like the opposite of autogynephilia, but it's not-
- JCDr James Cantor
Your friend is naturally feminine or-
- CWChris Williamson
Yes. Yeah.
- JCDr James Cantor
Okay.
- CWChris Williamson
Very, very much so.
- JCDr James Cantor
Yeah, yeah, that, that, that, I see that pattern.
- CWChris Williamson
Why? What's going on there?
- JCDr James Cantor
(sighs) Uh, when I run into people like that, patients, friends, randoms, uh, it's, like, again, kind of gay shtick but dialed up. And again, uh, a lot of my gay friends, you know, breasts are one thing, but a vagina is just icky.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Yeah, okay. I know what you mean. What about
- 1:24:36 – 1:32:14
Correlation of Transgenderism & Autism
- CWChris Williamson
the correlation between the trans community and autism?
- JCDr James Cantor
Fascinating. Uh, I think this is another one of those Z producing both X and Y. I think the thing in the brain that's atypical, it... The part of the brain that, uh, uh, uh, manifests, uh, social relatedness, mirror neurons, our natural herd instincts, something unusual with, as I say, the social instincts, which include the sexual instincts. And with that a bit off, you know, that gives us autism, can also give us borderline personality disorder, which is, again, very extreme hyper-emotional kinds of relationships. And, you know, certain kinds of, uh, uh, uh, fetishes and autogynephilia, which again, is just a neurologically based social set of instincts. So, I think of that mass of tissue didn't develop in the usual way, these things start correlating because they're all related to that same...... clump of social neuroanatomy.
- CWChris Williamson
What did you mean when you said that gender identity is not in the brain if autism is something which is in the brain? Am I being thick here?
- JCDr James Cantor
Uh, it, you know, autism is in the brain and it's autogynephilia, the sexual interest pattern-
- CWChris Williamson
Yes.
- JCDr James Cantor
... that's in the brain.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay.
- JCDr James Cantor
But having that sexual interest pattern and just using it as masturbation fantasy, living-
- CWChris Williamson
Right.
- JCDr James Cantor
... a perfectly happy life versus I have it and want to change my body.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. So it seems to me, correct me if I'm wrong, it sounds to me a little bit like your proposed stance when it comes to people that are trans is that it is, uh, a- an overshooting of s- of- of- a continuation of sexual orientation, like, just way, way, way beyond where we see gay or lesbian at the moment. Is that right?
- JCDr James Cantor
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
Right.
- JCDr James Cantor
As a matter of fact, sometimes we'll even joke, uh, uh, joke about it. Remember the Kinsey scale, zero to six? Now and then you'll meet somebody who's an 11.
- CWChris Williamson
Right. Okay. That's an interesting way to frame it. Um, okay, so autism.
- JCDr James Cantor
So the difference between het and homo is very big, but the difference between cis homo and trans homo is very slight. So we can detect these differences, but we can't distinguish these two from each other. Maybe in the future we will, but right now...
- CWChris Williamson
And this is why a- a lot of my gay friends, Douglas Murray, Andrew Doyle, uh, both of them have concerns around the trans movement being rehabilitated homophobia. And, uh, I think it's Andrew that uses this example of a- a guy who is a father and he had a son that was super effeminate and wanted to transition and wanted to become a girl, and then they, I don't know if they went through surgery or not, but they certainly at least renamed this boy into a girl. And they interviewed the father afterward, and he said, "Do you know what it is? I'm just really happy that I don't have to see my little boy mincing around the garden anymore." And you go, "Oh. That- that's- that's just homophobia." Like, that's, "Y- you just really didn't want a gay son, and for you it's easier to believe that you've got a trans daughter than a gay son."
- JCDr James Cantor
I hear that story a lot. Again, I don't want to say, you know, I have no idea what proportion of cases that represents, but I hear that story and that kind of story over and over again, that there's some secondary reason or there's some tangential motivation that makes this a path of least resistance-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Is it-
- JCDr James Cantor
... rather than the best among the options.
- CWChris Williamson
Is it India or some Arab country that's got the highest rate of trans-
- JCDr James Cantor
Iran.
- CWChris Williamson
Iran. Yeah, because you're not allowed to be gay, but you can be trans. So this i- that's like a- a government mandated bureaucratic version of- of that. Okay. Well, I mean, that- the fact that you see it as a- a- almost like a single continuation, like a single continuum, sorry, from, um, trans female to trans male with everything in between, and it's just sexual orientation. Sexual orientation takes you so far, the degree of aversion to the other sex is so great that you sometimes want to almost r- y- you do want to repurpose your own body in order to fit the way that you see the world.
- JCDr James Cantor
It's- it's fascinating. Uh, and it goes together with several of the other fetishes, the- i- the paraphilias. Uh, we often think of these- them as having, you know, three dimensions, you know, attracted to male versus female, attracted to old versus young, and attracted to, you know, person out in the environment versus being that person. And so we also get people, you know, if they're attracted to young, the pedophiles. We also get, you know, the age play fetishists, you know, the diaper fetishists. They want to be the child.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh-
- JCDr James Cantor
They're attra-
- CWChris Williamson
... that's turned inward.
- JCDr James Cantor
So we have, as I say, so you can be attracted to women in the world. You can be attracted to the woman inside. You can be attracted to children in the world. You can be attracted to the child inside. So e- as I say, and my guess, fantasy on my part, is that this is a mirror neuron thing. This is part of our, you know, social neuroanatomy that's just tweaked or twerked or not quite right and it has these various- various side effects. Uh, now of course, the idea of, you know, projecting sexual receptivity, well, that, you know, long predates our species. So the cross-wiring between, you know, what sexual clues to give off and what sexual clues to be on the lookout for, you know, these are parallel nerve fibers. It's not hard to, you know, if they didn't myelinate properly, if they didn't densify properly, if there were just too few of them, they work like a- a- a- it's like a hologram. If you take out half a hologram, you don't get half of a picture. You get the whole picture, but a bit blurry. That's how the brain works. So if you just are missing a few of the neurons, you know, if it's a lower density, you know, these can't distinguish as clearly what I'm supposed to be projecting versus what I'm supposed to be on the lookout for, and we kinda get these... And that's why if you're into one sexual atypicality, you may be into several others at the- at the same time.
- CWChris Williamson
What I'm-
- JCDr James Cantor
So as I say, these- these interests kinda clump. Somebody who's attracted to amputees-... stump fetishists, they're called. And then the one with the long funny name, apotemnophilia. They want to be the amputee.
- 1:32:14 – 1:41:19
Suicide in the Trans Community
- CWChris Williamson
so what about the relationship between the trans community and suicide? Because this a lot of the time is-
- JCDr James Cantor
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... seems to be one of the, uh, propositions that's put forward about why transitioning is so important, uh, that, uh...
- JCDr James Cantor
Yes. It's really, really ... what can I say out loud? Unfortunate is to understate it. Uh, how ... the situation and the myth of the situation, and this is another one where the myth of that situation can easily be making the problem worse. Nobody was talking about, you know, trans and suicide until 2018, and it started with a particular paper, first author's name was Toomey, survey which claimed, you know, headlines all over, you know, large proportion, 40%, you know, o- uh, uh, of these kids, you know, uh, uh, attempt suicide or, uh, uh, uh, had, uh, ideas about suicidality. Oh my God, we have a correlation, and everybody was after the causality races. We have a correlation, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, transphobia is causing these people- uh, these kids to commit suicide. Not what the paper said. In fact, practically the reverse of what the paper said, and the paper itself, and then the headlines describing the paper getting it backwards. The biggest, biggest, biggest mistake people are making is that they are confusing suicide to be a synonym for suicidality. Again, to the public, those are synonyms. To an expert, these are different phenomena. Suicide, very, very rare, mostly male, mostly middle-aged, mostly impulsive, and mostly with lethal means in a person with a sincere intent to die. Suicidality is the ideation, the threats, the calls for help. It represents an indication of distress, not an intent to die. Mostly female, mostly adolescent, mostly uses a, a, a, a, a, uh, I don't wanna say insincere, they are sincere cries for help, but what they need is attention and therapy. It's not an intent to die.
- CWChris Williamson
Less lethal.
- JCDr James Cantor
Rarely lethal at all. Uh, lethality is elevated. I mean, it's higher than baseline, but it's not the 40% of these kids are gonna kill themselves, which is the, you know, emotional political manipulation of it. That's not true. This is, as I say, genuine psychological distress for which they need therapy. Unfortunately, what it's being used as is essentially, "Give me what I want or I'll kill myself." Oh my God, that makes a, whatever they were asking for, a medical necessity. Uh, no. When a kid has a tantrum, giving them the lollipop will keep them quiet for a minute, but that's not good parenting. It's we need to deal with the tantrums and the... Now, the 40 percentish, that's not a trans thing. GLBT in general. It is an adolescent stress thing. Adolescents with any mental health problem in the book, roughly 40% if you ask them some time in their life will have had some suicidal ideation. I don't wanna say it's normal. Again, it's a cause for therapy. It's not they're on their way to death if we don't do anything. Also, the idea strikes me as a bit weird that, you know, people are saying, you know, it's 5, 6, 7 percent of the population, 40% of them are suicidal, and no one ever noticed until five years ago? Uh, as I said, the whole story is a bit crazy. Uh, anyway, uh, so the story is about suicidality, kids in genuine distress. But they keep saying, you know, when they put out a survey saying, "Oh my God, it's the kids who transition not as distressed." And as I say, we're going from the correlation to causality races. Uh, da, da, da, da, da. All of the clinical criteria, you know, you need a robust psychological assessment, and if a person with, you know, profound men- uh, uh, mental health issues, you have to take care of those, uh, those first. So those kids wouldn't be getting transition services. They're getting filtered out by the gatekeeping system. So what happens when I take a survey of everybody? I get all of the people, some of whom were rejected because they weren't healthy enough, and I get the ones who transitioned from who the poorest functioning ones were filtered out. So when I take a survey, the ones who transitioned have higher, uh, have higher mental health. Not because transition gave them higher mental health. It's that the ones with better mental health were allowed to transition in the first place.
Episode duration: 1:48:13
Install uListen for AI-powered chat & search across the full episode — Get Full Transcript
Transcript of episode vqdlv3qEuyY
Get more out of YouTube videos.
High quality summaries for YouTube videos. Accurate transcripts to search & find moments. Powered by ChatGPT & Claude AI.
Add to Chrome