Wasn't western concept of sexual orientation based on phallocentric notion of sexuality?

[Ksenia]

Yeah, indeed. I see phallocentrism in a lot of sexological textbooks, clinical practice and in culture. First of all, scientists in the field of sexology measure sexual orientation in males by penile plethysmography. You are straight male if your penis reacts to  the nude females, you are gay if your penis reacts to the nude men, and you are weird paraphilic in the other cases or in the best case bisexual. Such approach to female sexuality doesn't work. Michael Bailey tried to measure female sexuality in this way and after that he came to the conclusion that women don't have sexual orientation...

 

Regarding clinical practice. When I tried to live as a man and was in conversion therapy the one of the goal of therapy was to make my genitalia to react to the appropriate sexual target (I suppose that such appropriate target was nude females). Also in the field of paraphilia treatment penile plethysmography is still used, and clinicians tried to make penile reactions of their patients correct.

 

Regarding cultural stereotypes. There is idea that the only right way to have sex is related to genitalia, that straight couples should have PiV, gay couples should have PiA, only lesbians can be pesky. Trans women are weird because they often refused to use their genitalia in intimacy. If person wants to have sex without using genitalia then it can be considered as some sort of surrogacy of sexual relationships.

 

I think such phallocentrism in the field of sexology is related to the logocentrism, the idea that there is some sort of metaphysical center (god, nature, putin). Derrida tried to deconstruct such logocentrism of western philosophy. 

 

I like Deleuze's concept of rhizome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizome_(philosophy)). There is no center in rhizome, it hasn't trunk, origin, every node  can be connected with any other nodes and every node can create new  network-like structure. According to the classical psychoanalysis (it is phallocentric) if a boy plays with a car and put it in a garage then it means that he symbolically prepares to the PiV sex, that car is a symbol of a penis and   garage is a symbol of a  vagina. It is classical western logocentric (phallocentric) approach, that everything should have center. According to Deleuze and Guitari such games with cars have their own value, they don't symbolize something other, something essential and important, some kind of center or logos. I try to understand my whole life using  the concept of the rhizome. And I try to  reformulate my sexuality in this fashion. Yeah, I sometimes want to do weird things, to play some games (even erotic games), but they have their own value and they don't allude to some center, to some notion of phallus. In fact I as  a trans woman even physically abandoned my phallus 😃. So, all my psychophysics is against logocentrism and rigid hierarchical  structures...  

[Sister Mercurial]

That might have been the case back in the day, but these days, it may be more a case of scientists not being sure what to measure as regards women.  I watched various documentaries about sexuality in my late teens/early 20s in an effort to understand why I didn't seem to fit into the whole dating/mating game.  One of them involved a group of 6 women participating in various experiments.  The one that sprang to mind was when they got the women to insert probes that measured blood flow to the vagina, showed them 2 X-rated videos, one rated highly by female audiences, the other by male audiences, and told them to press buttons when they felt aroused.  For 5 out of 6 women, the blood flow responses didn't correlate with the button pushing.  The question that occurred spontaneously to me, given that the actor in the porn the men liked was ugly, was: how much blood flows to the vagina when one closes oneself up in disgust, and therefore, is blood flow to the area a reliable measure of physiological arousal?  Yet this did not seem to occur to the scientists conducting the experiment.  That was ~20 years ago, so I wonder what progress has been made since?  

[uhtred]

Scientists want to have something measurable and things like blood flow and plethysmography can be measured.  The problem is when these physical measurements are assumed to correlate with complex things like "arousal".  It doesn't help that sometimes these tests are used to look for "deviant" desires that the test subject might want to hide.

 

Studying sexuality is difficult because in many situations you can't trust people's self-described feelings, and in some they may not even have words to clearly describe their feelings. (such as being arouse by something the subject actually finds distressing - which  can happen)

[Ksenia]

Quote

That was ~20 years ago, so I wonder what progress has been made since?  

I don't trust to the science in such field which doesn't have clear concepts and definitions, but if you are interested you can read Michael Bailey's paper on the concept of sexual orientation.  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/24028378_What_is_Sexual_Orientation_and_Do_Women_Have_One 

Also there are Canadian gang's studies. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339104539_The_Empirical_Status_of_the_Preparation_Hypothesis_Explicating_Women's_Genital_Responses_to_Sexual_Stimuli_in_the_Laboratory 

 

I was immersed in the field of sexology as guinea pig for years, so I am fed up with their concepts.

 

There is also czech concept of the courtship, that male sexuality is based on some specific type of courtship and females have reciprocal  courtship. Such idea was introduced by Kurt Freund. And sometimes modules (there are 4 modules of  courtship : 1) recognition of sexual target, 2) nonphysical  interaction, 3) physical interaction, 4) genital interaction)  of such courtships according to such model doesn't work or they are absent.  In  mtf transsexuals such courtship pattern can be feminized. Exhibitionists don't have first modules, so they can't participate  in the whole sequence of courtship and they miss the first stages of sexual interaction. And females can also have some anomalies of courtship, they can miss some modules or links between different modules of female courtship can be absent...I don't know how such sexological concepts can be useful. Yeah, they can be useful for people who want to get PhD, but I don't see any practical results at all. Patients are feel as stigmatized freaks after application of such theories. There is also the concept of autogynephilia which literally destroyed and killed a lot of trans women. We should be very critical to sexological and psychological concepts.

 

I don't see that sexological scientific concepts of sexuality are better than concept of queer theory or trans studies.  "Hard" scientists  of sexuality can't claim that their categories are better than psychosocial categories of queer theory, so they don't have a right to impose their categories on vulnerable minorities. It is better to give a right to minorities to create their own categories  which fit them. Also such approach can be better reconciled with postmodern philosophy and complex modern diverse society. No one has a right to claim that they have absolute  truth of sexuality or anything else, it is terrible logocentrism, it doesn't work at all. 

[Philip027]

4 hours ago, Ksenia said:

According to the classical psychoanalysis (it is phallocentric) if a boy plays with a car and put it in a garage then it means that he symbolically prepares to the PiV sex, that car is a symbol of a penis and   garage is a symbol of a  vagina.

How delightfully Freudian. 

[LeChat]

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Hi! I'm just letting you know your thread was moved from the Philosophy, Politics, and Science forum to the Asexual Musings and Rantings forum.

 

If it helps, generally, the PPS forum is for non-asexuality/sexuality related topics related to philosophy, politics, and science. Since there are several asexual forums for various topics on AVEN, related to sexuality topics, having a few non-asexuality forums for other kinds of topics helps the latter be noticeable in non-asexual/sexuality forums. For example, otherwise, all forums could become overtaken with asexual or sexual topics.

 

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