Sexual Behavior Is Malleable; Sexual Orientation Is Not

A Quibble with Lyman Stone

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Yesterday,

Lyman Stone

responded to a well-known, and oddly intellectual, escort on the subject of whether generating child p**n by AI will protect children.

The escort argued YES: If you generate p**n with AI, fewer children will be abused.

Stone — a social scientist and writer on all things demographic and pronatalist, as well as Christian father — unsurprisingly argued NO: P**n use, however generated, tends to increase the associated real-life behavior of it consumers.

AI Child Porn Will Not Protect Children

In the process, however, Stone made a controversial, empirical claim:

“I believe sexual interests are highly malleable and usually not well-described as intrinsic, and furthermore that sexual interests in children are plausibly very common or could easily become very common.”

While I respect and admire Stone’s command of social science, these claims are doubtful on the existing sexual-psychological evidence.

Particularly, the existence of a category of sexual orientation is demonstrated by scientific study.

Stone can make his argument against AI-generated p**n without saddling himself with this tendentious claim. He can do so by distinguishing behavior, which is malleable, from orientation, which is not.

Distinguishing Behavior from Orientation

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I do not want to dispute the rest of Stone’s argument. In fact, I am unsurprisingly sympathetic to the idea that we don’t need more child p**n in society at all. My only quibble is with the claim that sexual interests are “highly malleable” and not intrinsic.

The rest of Stone’s argument concerns whether p**n use increases the analogous real-world behavior, or decreases it by satiating the underlying drives.

The escort is a satiationist: The drives exist and will be satisfied in one way or the other, so more p**n will decrease real-world transgression.

But Stone provides a lot of evidence that, as the availability of p**n has increased in society, so have sexual crimes. Likewise, he provides evidence of the representation of certain kinds of acts in p**n correlating with the increase in the practice of those acts.

I completely grant that sexual behavior is malleable. And so, we can ask the question whether p**n use increases or decreases the represented behavior. I trust Stone’s expertise on that subject.

(Though there is also the evidence of South Korea and Gen Z, which have lots of p**n, and much less sex, the “sex recession.”)

However, Stone need not rest his argument on the claim that sexual interests are malleable.

In my back-and-forth with Stone on Notes yesterday, I attempted to demonstrate that sexual interests/orientation are stable and not malleable, though behavior is.

Stone responded vociferously with examples of how behavior is malleable.

Let’s take a look at some of these examples and evidence:

In this paper, the researchers report that p*dophiles have a category-specific pattern of attraction and arousal to children. Researchers call this condition a “sexual preference disorder.” I cite this as evidence that some interests are intrinsic.

However, Stone responds by citing the fact that, of those who commit child sexual abuse (CSA), only 30% turn out to be p*dophiles by orientation. The beginning of the paper features the claim that it is 50% of sex offenders, so I’ll stick with that stat.

On Stone’s reasoning, the other 50% who commit CSA for other reasons demonstrate that sexual behavior is malleable. Therefore, increasing child p**n in society would increase, not decrease, the frequency of CSA.

But this fact only demonstrates the malleability of sexual behavior, not sexual orientation.

Consider the reasons non-p*dophilic individuals abuse children:

“Reasons include sexually inexperienced adolescents, mentally retarded persons, and those with antisocial personality disorders (ASPDs), or perpetrators within general traumatizing family constellations, which seek surrogate partners in children. These individuals are most likely diagnosed with various impulse-control disorders, accounting for their engaging in child sexual abuse (CSA) without a specific sexual preference for prepubescent children.”

So there are reasons that people commit CSA without “a specific sexual preference for prepubescent children.”

The Ambiguity of the Terms “Sexual Interests” and “Sexuality”

Part of the trouble may come from use of the phrase “sexual interests.” After all, those who commit CSA without the associated sexual preference may be said not only to have committed the behavior of CSA but also to have taken a sexual interest in children.

Well, obviously they did.

Then, it appears that that verbal ambiguity about “interests” accounted for some of the misunderstanding between Stone and me. I want to distinguish sexual preference and sexual orientation from the realm of what evidences malleability: behavior and the associated interests.

The other ambiguous phrase is “sexuality.” Stone uses the above evidence to argue that “sexuality is highly malleable.”

The word “sexuality” is used in certain contexts to refer to sexual preference/orientation. According to that usage, Stone would be incorrect.

But “sexuality” is also used more broadly to designate the whole sexual realm of human psychology and behavior. By that standard, Stone is obviously correct.

That only demonstrates that we need to distinguish behavior (and its various motives, interests) from sexual preference/orientation.

The Research on Sexual Orientation

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Let’s place this information about p*dophilia in the broader context of research on sexual orientation.

Contemporary sex research does demonstrate the existence of sexual orientation, category-specific patterns of attraction of human beings for a particular category of persons.

Sexual orientation operates uncontroversially in males. Researchers find that human males generally have category-specific patterns of attraction and arousal to females, males, or both. When presented with sexual stimuli, men evidence physiological arousal to their “preferred sex” and little to no arousal to their “non-preferred sex.” While the number of bisexual males is small, these do exhibit arousal to both sexes. Sexual orientation may be identified, in men, by their pattern of sexual arousal.

Women do not exhibit the same kind of category-specific pattern of arousal, research discovers. Women experience greater arousal to the sex for which they report a preference, but they also experience signs of arousal even to their non-preferred sex. Lesbians do exhibit a pattern much closer to that of males but not as black-and-white. Still, women exhibit higher arousal to their preferred sex, report differences in attraction, and exhibit behavior that is relatively category-specific. (For discussion, see Michael Bailey’s paper, “What Is Sexual Orientation and Do Women Have One?”)

I spell out this research in further detail in my working paper, “Does Sexual Orientation Exist? Implications for Christian Theology,” which I am seeking to publish in a journal.

This science shows that given differences in patterns of sexual preference are a feature of human psychology.

There is also a large correlation between sexual orientation/preference and sexual behavior.

Christians are liable to search for evidence of the changeability of sexual orientation. Once sexual orientation is defined, at least for males, as the direction of their sexual arousal, there is little to no evidence that sexual orientation-change occurs. People certainly can change their self-reported sexual preference or report some level of attraction to their previously non-preferred sex. But the burden of proof is high, and the only reports of sexual-orientation change come from people who are, as Bailey says, highly motivated to report change.

What about the claim that, because 50% of committers of CSA are not pedophiles, that sexual interests are malleable?

For criminals, we have to remember what Stone himself reports, that “all crimes are correlated.” People who lack impulse control or suffer from antisocial disorders are liable to transgress boundaries. It would be unsurprising if these individuals could learn new sexual behaviors from p**n that do not align with their own sexual preference.

I think it follows that, for the subset of the population subject to such problems, the specific form their transgression takes may be influenced by environmental factors, including what kind of p**n they see. But that falls far short of Stone’s claims about the general malleability of sexual interests.

Why Do I Care?

But why do I care? Do I want to defend the afore-mentioned escort? Do I want to defend much-maligned p*dophiles?

I care about sexual-orientation denialism specifically on account of the slander of our same-sex attracted brothers and sisters. I wrote a whole series on that, and I’m hoping my working paper can start to question the current Christian “orthodoxy” that denies the existence of sexual orientation.

But I also care more generally because I believe that Christianity must generally be more sympathetic to human nature by acknowledging the empirical facts about its condition. Currently, Christians are very happy to acknowledge that we are born in sin, “totally depraved” even. But if you name a particular sin and claim to be “born that way,” you get denounced.

I also care because I believe Christians need to learn from secular sources, because that is the main source for learning about human nature. It might be a pipe-dream that Christians would learn from the secular discipline of sexology, but given the number of pet theories Christians and conservatives espouse concerning that domain, they would do well to study up.

I am especially appreciative of the way

Lyman Stone

brings social science to the public discussion. He is, in my mind, an expert at the use of secular sources.

My aim is to draw his and your attention to the evidence for intrinsic, non-malleable differences in sexual preference/orientation.

Sexual behavior is malleable; but sexual orientation is not.

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Sources:

“A Sex Difference in the Specificity of Sexual Arousal.” Chivers, Meredith L., Gerulf Rieger, Elizabeth Latty, and J. Michael Bailey. Psychological Science 15, no. 11 (2004): 736–44.

“Sexual Orientation, Controversy, and Science.” Bailey, J. M., Vasey, P. L., Diamond, L. M., Breedlove, S. M., Vilain, E., & Epprecht, M. (2016). Psychological science in the public interest : a journal of the American Psychological Society, 17(2), 45–101.

“What is sexual orientation and do women have one?” Bailey, J. M. (2009). In D. A. Hope (Ed.), Contemporary perspectives on lesbian, gay, and bisexual identities (pp. 43–63).

The Neurobiology and Psychology of Pedophilia: Recent Advances and Challenges. Tenbergen, G., Wittfoth, M., Frieling, H., Ponseti, J., Walter, M., Walter, H., Beier, K. M., Schiffer, B., & Kruger, T. H. (2015). Frontiers in human neuroscience, 9, 344. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00344