Sex differences in sexual orientation
A new research article inspires musings about, among other things, Neil Gaiman
This week I’ve been thinking about sex differences as they play out in sexuality and sexual behaviour. One reason is a very good overview article by Michael Bailey on Colin Wright’s Substack, “Reality’s Last Stand”. The article draws together what is known about sexual orientation in men and women, where it comes from, what is correlated with it and how its nature differs between the sexes. I’ve started reading the papers it links to, and am already learning a lot though I’m nowhere near finished. There will apparently be a follow-up article specifically on autogynephilia, which is sure to be extremely interesting too.
Sex Differences in Sexuality: A Key to Understanding Autogynephilia
I highly recommend reading the article, and if you have time the linked papers, and won’t try to sum them up here. I’ll just share a few, rather random, reflections they inspired.
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The first thing that struck me was the explanation of what researchers find when they measure physiological arousal in the two sexes, and the three sexual orientations. (Read the article for how this is done; some research subjects really do go above and beyond for science!) Men, it turns out, are bimodal, almost all responding to one sex only – which means researchers can’t use videos of heterosexual intercourse to tell anything about male sexuality. Instead they measure subject’s arousal while watching videos of two women together, or two men together. Most men respond to one type of video or the other, but not both.
Women have a completely different pattern, with most finding videos of two women, or one man and one woman, equally arousing, but videos of two men off-putting. Lesbian women respond somewhat more strongly to two women together than to heterosexual couplings, but still find the latter sexy.
In the article and the papers I’ve read so far Mike and other researchers discuss what this implies for the meaning of “sexual orientation”. For a man, it means the type of person who arouses him, and Mike hypothesises that men understand, indeed form, their sexual orientations rather straightforwardly: by observing their own differing mental and physiological reactions to attractive people of both sexes. For women, orientation must be different, since we don’t have an either/or pattern of arousal – but what, then, is it? It has to be more complicated.
This is a really big difference between the sexes, and I’m pretty sure hardly any of us know about it. It made me think of the way other people’s interiority is concealed from us, specifically when it comes to sexual desire, which has a pre-rational, pre-cognitive quality. Think of someone you find extremely attractive: the attractiveness is right there in front of you. You see what you see, and feel what you feel. It’s the same for acts we find sexy: they have an obvious, undeniable character that seems to need no justification. Meanwhile, what interests other people seems incomprehensible.
There Is No Safe Word
And that made me think about the recent coverage of Neil Gaiman, and the multiple allegations by various women that past sexual encounters with him were not entirely consensual on their side. These started to surface last year, and now there is a new article with further allegations in New York Magazine. The gist is that several women allege that they were in one way or another manoeuvred by Gaiman into situations we can broadly describe as creepy or worse, then had sexual encounters they didn’t want – and sometimes said no to – including ones that caused significant pain and injury and that were deeply humiliating.
Gaiman has published a statement in response. And it’s important to note that several of the women continued to exchange flirty messages with him in which they said, after encounters they now describe as non-consensual or bordering on such, that they had enjoyed themselves.
The best response articles I’ve read to date to the NY Magazine article and Gaiman’s statement are from Kathleen Stock in UnHerd, Marina Hyde in the Guardian and Kat Rosenfield on her Substack. What I want to add to these is that I find it quite plausible that Gaiman is being honest when he says he recalls the encounters as consensual and mutually pleasurable. This isn’t to say he’s right! My point is twofold: first, the observation about the “needs no explanation” feeling of sexual desire, and second, a simple matter of incentives.
For the older, richer, famous man in an encounter with a penniless, starstruck young woman, there’s no incentive to give a moment’s thought to what she desires, or what a sexual encounter feels like from her side. It’s really easy, if you don’t make the effort to remember that other people’s interiority is fundamentally different from yours, to think that an experience you enjoyed is one that they enjoyed too. If anything is to change here, it’s the incentives.
When I researched paedophilia for an article I wrote years ago, some interviewees also talked about how paedophiles’ desires also have this pre-rational, pre-cognitive flavour. A reminder: paedophiles are people, almost always men, whose primary sexual arousal is to prepubescent children. This is an overlapping but non-identical group to sex offenders against children, who often offend against post-pubescent minors because they don’t care about the age of consent or simply because physically mature children are just as attractive to them as adults, but more vulnerable and easier to manipulate.
Actual paedophiles “see” sexiness in children just as non-paedophiles see sexiness in adults. Regardless of what you think causes paedophilia, a paedophile’s response to a child isn’t something they can “unsee”, any more than the rest of us can look at an attractive adult member of our target sex and not register that they are attractive. It’s like the way that if you are a native speaker of a language you can’t choose not to understand words spoken clearly and audibly in that language, or if you are a fluent reader you can’t choose to look at words on a page and not see what they say.
I’ve written before about what is known about the motives of those who sexually abuse children, and what can be done to make such offending less common. As I explained in the second of those articles, paedophilic men, like all men, are prone to the “sexual over-perception bias” – a tendency to interpret signals from people they think sexually attractive as come-ons. I wrote:
In the case of paedophiles, the sexual over-perception bias is exacerbated by children’s natural playfulness and tendency to be physically affectionate, which a paedophile can easily see as a come-on. Add in the general tendency of humans to believe what they want to believe, and you have a dangerous cocktail.
The more I think about it, the more I think that what I’m calling the pre-cognitive quality of sexual desire means that paedophiles can very easily convince themselves that everyone sees the same thing as they see when they look at children, and the rest of us are liars and hypocrites.
Heterosexuality – and more recently homosexuality and bisexuality – are ordinary characteristics we’re all familiar with. So we don’t tend to ruminate about why other people don’t find the same sex as us attractive. For all that it’s obvious to me, indeed unmissably so, that certain men are gorgeous, I don’t bother asking myself why my husband can’t see it. We’re both straight, and that’s that.
I know this is obvious! I just mean, it would never occur to me to think a straight man (or a lesbian) who claims not to be able to see what is attractive about an attractive man is lying to me. But paedophiles know their desires are shameful and stigmatised by wider society. So they prod at this difference between what they see and feel and what other people claim to see and feel. And it’s all too easy for them to conclude that when the rest of us say we do not experience children as sexy, we are either in denial or lying outright.
The result is a tendency among paedophiles to think that they are courageous heroes, set apart from a hypocritical and repressed mainstream of people who won’t admit to their true desires. This is disturbingly supportive of self-justifying thoughts and offending behaviour.
The other story this week I want to comment on was about a man who took offence after being asked to swap seats with a woman so he wouldn’t be sitting next to two unaccompanied minors on an Air France flight. He complained to a court in Norway, which ruled that the airline’s policy to move passengers around whenever possible to make sure unaccompanied minors weren’t sat next to men was “discriminatory”.
This ruling is obviously ridiculous: as Air France told the tribunal, men account for almost all sex crimes. Feeling people up on public transport is no exception, and is extremely common. Almost all the victims are women, and children of both sexes. I have had it happen to me – on a bus in Dublin, when I was 14 – and witnessed it happen to a girl of about 10 or 11 when I was about 17, on a train in London.
Men who do this get very good at concealing it, using their coat or a bag or newspaper to conceal where their hand is. This is even easier on a plane than on a bus or train. The victim will probably have their seatbelt fastened, and even if they don’t they can’t change seat or get off. On longer flights there are blankets to help hide a roving hand. If it’s an overnight flight or it’s landing in the dark, the lights will be dimmed. For a man who gets his jollies this way, being sat next to an unaccompanied child on a flight is a stroke of fantastic luck: the perfect setup for an opportunistic crime.
The Air France policy – which is standard and shared by other airlines – is obviously a sensible, proportionate and necessary child-safeguarding measure. A man who feels offended by it – still more a man who goes to court about it – is profoundly self-centred and selfish. As for the Norwegian tribunal! Anti-discrimination law is meant to stop treating some people worse than others because of prejudice and stereotypes, not to harm the most vulnerable among us – children – by forcing us all to pretend that genuine, meaningful differences don’t exist.
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And finally, I can’t stop thinking about the clips of Democrats talking about the Republican Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act (which Democratic opponents are referring to as the House Republican Child Predator Empowerment Act). They sound genuinely deranged – honestly, they may actually be deranged, if they believe anything of what they are saying. Do they not understand they are providing excellent material for attack ads the next time they stand for election? I understand why they voted the way they did – stupidity, cowardice, ignorance, brainwashing, political polarisation... – but not why they are willing to say this stuff on camera.
Normies across the US: Let’s protect girls by keeping their sports and locker rooms single-sex.@TheDemocrats having a normal one:
Genital inspections!
Taliban!
Sexual assault!
Little girls’ underwear!!
(excluding 2 Texas Dems Gonzalez & Cuellar 🙏 for voting for girls) pic.twitter.com/qyri84irPj— WomenAreReal (@WomenAreReals) January 14, 2025
Interesting column, and you’re very eloquent, and accurately described a phenomenon which people absolutely don’t grasp.
But first; Bailey’s measurement techniques for sexual arousal are not measuring the same physiological response, so they are unconvincing - you can’t compare organs which are not the same between two people, full stop.
Further, he only uses visual pornography, not written. Men prefer visual (skin mags) women prefer written (romance novels). Full stop.
The entire study is predicated on seeing if women have male-type responses to male pornography. Answer: no.
Both sexes have cheek flushing during arousal. When a study measures that I may be curious. He reads like pseudo-science.
Your perspective on seeing sexuality is however the first time I’ve seen written what I’ve observed over my entire life.
People cannot conceive that a man could find another man sexually attractive because it’s literally impossible for them to do so. Same for Lesbianism.
As a child I could not conceive of Heterosexual sex, I thought it was an elaborate charade. The fixation on women’s breasts for other teen boys was so strange that I was sure it was just a game, something they agreed to do like being interested in football.
You’re quite eloquent on this, in fact.
Pedophiles seeing children as inviting sex. Men and women seeing each other inviting sex. Lesbians seeing sexual invitation from other women, and Gay men from other men.
But people out of these pairs cannot see what the pairs see at all. Not even close, not even conceptually.
It’s so bad that when perfectly good writers - Anthony Burgess, in Earthly Powers - writes a gay character, it is so false it’s comical.
Luria wrote in “Higher Cortical Functjons in Man” about phenomena where people could not see certain colors if they grew up in environments where those colors didn’t occur in childhood.
People who are sexually attracted to something have a response set up, and cannot transfer that response to other situations, even conceptually. It’s a profound observation actually, because we operate by analogy in so many other types of thinking.