The Jordan Harbinger Show - 815: James Cantor | Exploring the Complexities of Sexual Orientation

Episode Date: March 23, 2023

Dr. James Cantor (@jamescantorphd) is a clinical psychologist and sexologist whose research centers on the development of sexual interests, including sexual orientation and paraphilias. He maintains the Sexology Today blog, which focuses on the current state of sex research. What We Discuss with James Cantor: What makes people gay? The differences between gay men and gay women. What should society do about pedophiles who choose to live lives of celibacy rather than act on their urges? Is there a link between autism and gender dysphoria? What's the deal with asexuality, paraphilia, vorarephilia, and that thing you think about when nobody else is around? And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/815 This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Give or take a few men in the tribe, it's not going to change much. But evolution is about women. If women were into it, men would evolve it. And so we are plan B. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with scientists and entrepreneurs.

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episodes on sexuality didn't get me canceled, why not push the envelope just a little bit more, right? Dr. James Cantor has been engaged in sex research for over 25 years, focused on what makes people sexually interested in what they are sexually interested in. Today, we're going to Uncover what makes people gay. Yeah, you heard me. We'll also discuss fetishes and other atypical sexualities. Last but not least, we explore some disorders such as pedophilia, which I feel the need to highlight, has nothing to do with what makes people gay or homosexuality.

It's a fascinating subject. I just, since I put those two things a paragraph apart, I don't want to get a zillion emails about this or something. This topic is really interesting. I know it's repulsive. I agree with you that it is. The topic should be repulsive. that's kind of the point. But man, I learned a lot about pedophilia.

There's a sentence I never thought I would say. Again, pedophilia is discussed. Your choice about kids in the car for this one. And as you listen, I remind you to always choose curiosity over judgment. And hey, if you can't, we've got over 800 other episodes to choose from, so maybe go over there now instead of writing me a 13-paragraph email about how I'm a terrible person. All right, here we go with Dr. James Cantor. I was a little bit on the fence about having you on because you're very controversial.

and I don't want to get canceled because I like my career. But, you know, we are all about curiosity over judgment here on this show. And I'm very careful not to fan the flames of anything anti-gay or anti-trans or anti-s something that might give actual bigots more fuel than they already seem to have either online or in person. But it's sort of hard to imagine you'd be anti-gay for reasons we'll probably get into on the show. Or we'll become a parent at some point on the show. And also, you come so highly recommended by other people. know, as well as other people who are in your actual field, such as Carol Hooveen, who I just sort of

sanity checked. And I was like, okay, is this a guy where people are going to go, why are you having cooks on? And she's like, no, he's great. Speaking of people who are canceled, Carol Hoven really likes you. Yeah. And she's great. And she, as you know, her career is just, I mean, she cried a lot on the show because people don't like science. And we'll get into that discussion, too. Are they like science if they agree with it? Oh, and she said, and I quote, James can be highly provocative, but is always very fact-based, which I think is probably a pretty good compliment. That's about as high praise as I could ever ask for. There you go.

I don't think I'm controversial. I'd hesitate. It's not like there's anything about me or my life that's particularly noteworthy. That's true. But I'm a scientist studying, you know, some extremely controversial issues. I study the nature of sexuality. There is no neutral to that, no matter what, you know, the science. science says there are going to be people of one belief pattern, people of another belief pattern.

And if they can't disagree with the science itself, I have no choice, but to start with the ad homonyms and say, oh, it must be him and him biases. He's just from the other side. I want to know where the line is. Now, sometimes that's a very delicate question. And so when I'm talking about very fine distinguishing, saying, well, maybe overcorrected a bit, oh my God, you're like one of the extremists from the other side. No, no, no, no. I'm just, Right, I'm running the entire range of numbers, but in a war between the zeros and tens, each side is trying to accuse me of being biased by the other when all I can think is if both sides hate me does not make me the most objective. Yeah, oh, interesting. Yeah, that's a good way to look at it. I actually, I kind of like that because I don't talk about politics here on the show, at least not intentionally or directly. And

a lot of people on the right and a lot of people on the left are like, you know, I like that about you. But the people who are on the extreme left and the extreme right are like, you know why you're a piece of crap? It's because you don't and it's like agree with my extreme views, essentially. They don't say that, but they phrase it differently. You think what they're saying is what they're saying. In psychology, we call it verbal behavior. There is no content to it. This is just, Me using you to make me look good, me using you to make me look good, me using you to know, what the words are. That's just the excuse.

The point is, look how much better I am next to you. And so let's show how evil you are, you know, so I can bask in the opposing light. The content of the argument, they're not interested in the issue. They're interested in looking good in front of their, you know, cool kids at their lunch table. That's true. It's weird when it happens in a private email because you think, hey, shouldn't you be posting this on social media so you get points instead of just in my inbox where I delete it or reply with a totally different off-topic subject to distract you from you having a meltdown in my inbox

while you're seated at a red light typing this or whatever. Anyway, I hate to caveat things this much, but you're used to this by now, I would assume. As I said, nobody becomes a sex researcher naively. It's fascinating, fascinating stuff. And this is a new world. The science and the teaching of the science has changed. I started this now, you know, 25 years ago, before the social media age, you know, where most public conversations were, you know, taken place on relatively legitimate media. Things were long form, long articles, long interviews, and people had time to, you know, take step by step by step. You know, they didn't hire documentaries about the research I was doing. You know, and audience by audience, you know, the response was almost always, oh, oh,

I get it now, and there was progress. That stopped once social media started. It's the lowest comma denominator, the floor has fallen out of it. It's much, much lower. Now that any idiot can say anything, every idiot does and there's no filter. So the crazy stories become more and more common because it's so easy to see them. So people, you know, they're just going with the popular idea rather than with the idea that has the best evidence behind it.

Few people are engaging with the idea itself. It's just, oh, here's an excuse for me to demonstrate my outrage and therefore demonstrate how holy I am by how offended I can look. What is it that originally drew you to this field of study? I mean, what's a story about how you became a sex researcher? Dumb luck, really? Okay. It's, you know, I just just grew up regular everyday gay kid in my bizarre, regular everyday

gay kid kind of way. Tough beginnings, awfully bullied childhood, Jim Clark. and I never got along. But by the time I, you know, came out and was ready to, you know, become part of the world, I kind of wanted to pass that forward. I just decided I wanted to be a psychologist, you know, and become a therapist. And this was now in the 90s. This was in the height of the HIV era.

Oh, yeah. Right. This was my way to, because I was so comfortable by then talking about it. As I said, that's how I saw myself integrating and living my life and finding and falling in love with Prince Charming. So met that Prince Charming. We're 32 years together now. Wow. It's weird even to say it out loud.

Yeah. Right. No, I'm older than I think I am. Those were the days. It was a very, very different planet from now. Yeah. Wow. And then at the end of my PhD program, time for one's internship, you know, one year of

apprenticed practice before you're graduating your own psychologist. And one of the top internship sites was here in Toronto at what was then called the Clark Institute of Psychiatry. And, you know, they only had two sex-related clinics. One was their gender clinics. Or I thought, you know, perfect. That was exactly in line with the kind of stuff that I saw myself doing. And the other was the sexual behaviors clinic, which dealt with atypical sexualities and sex offenders and so on. I didn't pay much attention to it, but I needed a second rotation. Well, the people in that second rotation were just planning to start a branch of brain research where, wait a second. I used to do that kind of research. I know how to, and all of a sudden,

everything just came together. I was the right person with the right background in the right time, and then I began the head of the research, and that's when I started doing, all right, I had the question everybody else, you know, gay did, you know, what makes me different? You know, was gay in the brain or not. Again, this was the 90s that wasn't well known. Yeah. But the top researchers figuring out how sexuality develops were at that same institution. And so they got me thinking, you know, what they were thinking. What makes anybody attracted to whatever it is they're attracted to? Gay, lesbian, old, young, kinky, not, how does the whole thing work?

And so they broadened me from just trying to understand myself and why am I different to the grand question, you know, what makes all of us, what creates the sexual diversity and what can we learn from each of these different ways to be sexual atypical, you know, what different kind of clues do they give us? And, you know, a bunch of grants, bunch of studies later, that's what got me on, you know, those two odd branches of expertise. It was really just a series of lucky running into the right people at the right time and running with it. It's amazing to me that we can do all these amazing things with science and DNA hormones. We're maybe going to colonize Mars in a hundred years. I mean, I don't know. But we just don't really know

seemingly a lot about what makes people, some people, attracted to the same sex as opposed to the opposite sex or attracted to younger people or older people, or do we actually? And nobody's talking about, well, you're talking about it. But I never hear about this. Again, that's a change. From young folk today, we don't hear about. All we hear about it is what it means to me and how it makes me feel about myself. Right. And if you make me feel, you know, uncomfortable or challenge how I feel about myself, you're evil. I don't have any work to do, of course, you know. Right. So to me, it's a conversation that was happening and stopped. From young people today, they just never heard the conversation, but from a generation older, again, this is one of the things that social media

has gotten in the way of. There were books. There were documentaries. It was constantly in the news. I was getting interviewed all the time. Well, I still get interviewed all the time, but different topics. But the main questions were, what makes all of us tick? And then when media and everybody else started worrying about how is this going to play out on Twitter tomorrow, all of a sudden, oh, no, we're actually in business here to be popular and just getting the news across and getting the information across. That became second fiddle. In the 90s, there were kids in my school who we just kind of knew we're gay. Like, and, you know, we made fun of kids. for everything back in the day.

I mean, you could have blue shoes instead of red ones, and then the next day you had the red one, you know, whatever. And we made fun of you for that. But there were kids where we were like, that guy is going to turn out to be gay. And so when people would, as adults would say, being gay as a choice, us 13-year-olds would be like, I don't know, man, Aaron definitely would not choose this

because we torment him. And he's our friend, but we torment this guy. And he's a kid. And like, eh, so it's weird because if you ask young people who grew up in the 90s were like a gay gene or whatever, of course. and yet adults really just wouldn't accept this. But I would love to hear from an actual scientist, that's you, what makes people gay? Why are some people gay as far as we know?

It is a fascinating, absolutely fascinating question. It's also a really, really good practice question if somebody wants to learn the scientific method. I mean, if you want practice and trying to shut down your emotions in your politics and just apply good old-fashioned, this is how inductive logic works. You mean my anecdotal example from middle school? is not scientifically rigorous? It's a mix. I don't want to pretend that science education today is what science education was 30 years ago.

Gay men seem to be gay for a slightly different reason than lesbian women tend to be lesbians. Now, the big question that a lot of people ask is, you know, is it in the genes or not? Is it in, you know, the brain or not? But really what people are asking are, is it innate?

Right. Did you choose it? Are you born with it? Most people really don't care Right, if it's in your DNA or... Right, is it genetic, epigenetic? Right, the details of the biology, people really want to know, essentially, are you just born with it? Is it innate?

And is it immutable? Can it change? Right, like, did you come out of the womb that way for whatever reason, or did you just watch way too much West Side story? Did something happen to you? Right, you know, relationship with father, you know, old psychological ideas. Right, yeah. And so those were, I would say, a legitimate debate. but a tainted one.

You know, for some people, it's just curiosity. For other people, it's, there's a reason. You know, if they were, for example, the true conversion therapist of those days, religiously motivated, they needed for the answer to be something happened to you. Otherwise, it would make, it would put them out of business. It would say there's no point.

Right. Right. So then people would then balance whatever or like or dislike whatever science, according to the implications it had for whatever their conflict of interest was. Also, if you're born that way, how hard is it to argue that God doesn't want that and that they should be able to change you? It's like, well, if you were born that way, you know, it cuts into the business model, big time. Whether it's financial business, religious business, popularity business, right? You know, people were not being, there were many people

not objective about that. They weren't genuinely curious. They had a, you know, it was a means to an end. So often when, you know, somebody would say, ah, it's not in the genes, oh, therefore it's not an a, dot, dot, dot, dot, it turns out to be one of the, you know, it turns out to be one of these indirect kind of mechanisms that interacts with DNA, but not in the obvious you inherit it from mother or father. You know, there's a simple gene. You know, it's not like that. There's a constellation of vulnerabilities which interact with a constellation of other things that seem to happen after conception, but early during development, you know, roughly the first third of trimester, you know, when the brain is really just forming. And again, it turned out to be a fascinating answer.

worked it out was, you know, my advisor back at the clerk then became Cam H. Ray Blanchard was the one who figured it out. And again, it's one of these wonderful examples of this bizarre, unrelated, stupid little statistic that nobody should ever, you know, pay attention to. But as he pulled at that little thread, all of a sudden, oh, wait a minute, if that means, which means, which means, and the whole thing unraveled. Interesting. The odd little statistical tidbit that he found was that gay men were more likely to be later in among the children. They were more likely to have more older brothers than younger brothers. They were later in the birth order.

Sisters didn't matter. Adoption in and out of the family didn't matter. It was how many, you know, male fetuses and only male fetuses preceded you in the womb, even if they were aborted. I was going to ask, yeah, did they have to be born? No. Okay. Interesting. Right.

Right, you know, so it wasn't, you know, in what line were you raised? It wasn't, you know, amount of household. It was something. And just over and over again, it was only explained by how many male and only male fetuses went through that womb before you did. Again, yankin and yankin and yankin. So what he was eventually able to figure out was that it's an immune response of the mother. Women, two X chromosomes. And a female fetus. you know, in her, you know, her daughter, two X chromosomes. When there's a male fetus growing, that's X, Y, there's a Y chromosome. And the various proteins that come off of the Y chromosome are foreign to the mother's body. She doesn't have a Y chromosome of her own. Her immune system starts doing what an immune system does. Inactivate these proteins that are foreign to your body. The purpose of right, those proteins are, that's part of masculinity,

the brain of the kid. So if mom's immune system starts interfering with those proteins, whatever it is in the brain, right, that's associated with sexual orientation, seems to get, you know, interacted within a way so that the brain and body, you know, there are other, again, minor, minor statistical differences, were not masculinized in quite the same way. Huh. Now, of course, something that can be genetic is the mother's immune system, but is not a gene for gay that gets passed, you know, from parent to child. It's this protein sensitivity set of complexes. But the basic idea, as I say, it's a fascinating example of who would have guessed. Nobody hypothesized it. It was just one of those pull at the strings until

exclude all the other possibilities until the one left explains everything. It was just a fascinating, fascinating. It is fascinating. So why would this be, what's the word? Is it a adaptive? Why did we evolve this or why is this persisted? Is there some benefit to the mother's immune system for doing this? Or is it just a side effect that's not gone for some reason? My guess is it's a side effect. A powerful immune system itself is adaptive. And so, you know, right, so the kids in general would get that. So it's, you know, a standard evolutionary interpretation that, you know, it's worth sacrificing one every, however many children in order to have that much stronger of an immune system in the whole family. Do the chances of a gay male baby increase,

let's see, like, eight older brothers? Are you X number of times more likely, or is it just like one does the trick? The odds go up about 30% per child, but the probability starts, in statistics it's called the base rate starts low. It starts at about 2%. And then the second son would be about 2.6%. I see. So it's a 30% increase in the odds, but it's still a low number. And so after that would now be,

whatever works out to, like 3.4 and so on. Right, okay. So you would have to have, you know, over a dozen kids. And, you know, after a dozen kids, if one turns out, okay, nobody's too surprised.

Yeah. I mean, just, that's just statistics at that point. Exactly. Why doesn't everybody know about this? Because the nature versus nurture debate was such a huge thing in the science of,

what's the technical term, gayness. All kinds of books. Everybody was talking about this. As I say, and it stopped. Part of it was during the HIV era. I mean, first things first. Right, you know, we were dying 30,000 a year. First things first, we got exactly.

So, you know, a lot of science, a lot of attention and research money went there, and I can't disagree with that. I see. But when that, I'll say, you know, came under rough control around 2000, that's now when transissue. and social media kicked in. It was just there was something else that was new and flashy. This old stuff wasn't so useful for virtue signaling anymore.

If you want to demonstrate, you know, your political creds. And if you want the attention that comes with being an extremist, there's a new even funkier kid on the block. And so I think that sucked up a lot of the attention. Because it was really not motivated by science, it was just, you know, pure attention seeking that it's largely worked. Although I think sex research was probably one of the hardest hit research fields. Ed's certainly not the only great failure of science, education, and scientific thinking going on.

As I say, I think social media, a 280-character limit has led to a 280-character thinking cap. Nobody wants any subtle, detailed. you have to think about it for a second. It's just collect the likes and block whatever you don't like. So I think a lot of the anti-scientism and take your pick, whether it's political events that people are denying exist, you know, from anti-vaxxers to, you know, the Capitol Hill riots and so on. It's just, now that everything is a plebiscite to decide whether it's true because it's popular, controversial science, right, was the first, first lost. And of course, sex research has always been one of those. We talked about gay men, women right now are going, what about lesbians? You said it

early. Of course. What about lesbians? There doesn't seem to be any analogous birth order effect among women are for lesbians. Oh, okay. Lesbians are women. Two X chromosomes. There's no foreign protein for the mother's body to react to. But there does. seem to be substantial biological evidence of a shift, you know, from brain anatomy, you know, early hormone levels and so on. They're more masculine eyes, you know, that, again, these are minor statistical things that nobody will see with the naked eye, but if you look at whole populations, you know, the normal curves are shifted just a bit. So it seems to be an analogous kind of, they're masculinized a bit where gay men seem to be a little bit less masculineized.

than straight men, but we haven't figured out why. We don't know if it's just, you know, whatever, stress levels, nutritional levels, something else going on in the mother. The mechanism that causes that hasn't been identified. So for the birth thing only works for males. I see. So if you're on the market to make your name in the sex research field, figuring that one out is probably a good, good target. Fascinating question. It's, well, it's sex. All we have is fascinating questions. That's right. You just have to learn to suffer. are the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? Of course.

What do you think of this whole uproar of or about, and I'm going to paraphrase here from a news article I saw earlier, trans kids and kids being pressured to transition. And this to me sounds like a huge ruckus that probably is almost completely imagined by the media to get clicks, but what do I know? I just don't, how many miners are really going through these types of surgeries? I just seems like it's overhyped for outrage. It's outrage porn. I kind of want to call it overcorrection versus over correction.

Okay. It's both sides are referring to the others and describing the others as caricatures. There's several different phenomena going on, and nobody's or very few people are aiming to understand what's going on. It's accepting and rejecting facts according to, you know, whatever matches, whatever they think is going on. But there are actually a couple of things going on, and there are a couple of different audiences, each with their own conflict or lack of conflicts. I think it is very, very fair to say that substantial numbers of kids are ending up undergoing risky and untested procedures with there really being no tangible benefit to it. People with various mental health concerns,

instead of addressing those mental health concerns are getting shunted and just like, oh, that's a transition, da-da-da-da-da. And some will undergo medicalized transition. Some won't. And people are arguing over those numbers according to whatever their political needs are. But really, the biggest problem is the opportunity cost. Most of these kids need to be in therapy addressing whatever it is that's making them, I hate my body. And they're not getting that therapy. Everything is, is it I hate my body because I'm sex?

Is it I hate my body because I'm non-binary? No, you hate your body because you're a 12-year-old over-exposed to social media images of perfect men and perfect women. Of course, you hate your body, but the answer isn't necessarily, which isn't to say it's no one, but everybody's saying yes or no according to whatever their political views and their own principles are, rather than the very incomplete evidence saying, we don't really know, but here's our best. guess, but we're only guessing, you know, when a guess usually isn't a good enough reason to start, you know, interfering with and cutting off healthy tissue. You know, the bar for evidence, right, this is objectively healthy tissue. This isn't a tumor we're removing. So the bar, you have to

come out with some pretty solid evidence that this is going to do the kid good before we do it. Not just we have a survey. My patients told me, we're not talking giving aspirin or a painkiller, come talk to me tomorrow, we're talking to remove procedures that can lead to stuff, and we need to be really, really sure before we do it. For the numbers, because the money, the prestige, the likes, and the stigma is so powerful, clinics aren't telling the truth about the numbers. Clinics are not even recording the numbers. Really?

At least in the U.S. In European systems, you know, healthcare is a public system. You know, it's publicly paid for. There's one insurance company and it, you know, the government. And it keeps track of how many at what rate, how much money, you know, how many, there's tracking. Not in America. So on one hand, you know, we have clinics advertising themselves, you know, and coming out with policies that say, you know, affirm is the way to go. You know, that's the thing.

Don't affirm the kid, you know, awful psychological. They're going to, you know, get suicidal if you don't affirm them. But as soon as there's any challenge to it, all of a sudden, oh, no, we only transition very, very select few. They're saying that it's everybody when it's one audience, and they're saying it's hardly anybody when it's the other audience, but nobody is recording any numbers in order to give any objective answer. So are there a lot?

Are there not in the U.S.? Nobody knows. But it's a legitimate question to ask, and it's how many kids are undergoing medical procedures unnecessarily? How many does it take before? or we expect the system to kick in. And that's the other big difference between the U.S. and the European systems. The European systems have kicked in.

That's their job. It was, you know, the regular medical establishment was kind of overreaching a bit, lowering the bar, broadening the envelope without evidence. And then, again, the government runs the show. That's its job to run the Department of Health. They yanked it back. in the U.S. that the medical establishment has failed in its job of self-monitoring. So now we have the government coming in with laws to regulate the physicians, and of course,

physicians don't like government regulation. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Dr. James Cantor. We'll be right back. A lot of you have commented that I have a lot of eclectic guests. How do I find these people? It's always because of my network. Everybody's a warm introduction for the most part. I'm teaching you how to build your network.

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Now, back to Dr. James Cantor. It's hard because I'm obviously no expert on this whatsoever, but it seems like a younger person would maybe need some life experience to know, are you gay, are you straight? Are you actually in the wrong body? At what age do they have enough life experience? But man, I'd also really hate to deny this gender affirming care to somebody who knows what they know. And then they end up looking like me with a freaking Adam's apple and a five o'clock shadow and this ripping body of a Greek god that I now have. And they turn and then like, but I want to be a female. And I told you guys this 10 years ago. And I looked like Jordan Harbinger.

Thanks a lot. You know, that would be cruel. So it's really hard to make this distinction. seemingly. Type 1 error versus type 2 error. You know, we transition people that we shouldn't be. You know, we're sterilizing them, putting them in really a body that isn't theirs, you know, and mistake the other way. Right. We're giving, you know, some people would say these are just cosmetic differences. You know, ultimately we're, you know, most of the rules are about wait until you're 18. It's not you can't do it. It's wait until you're a grown up. Neither of these is too acceptable. Yeah. The only choice we have is use the best evidence we have to figure out where's the line. But the people on either side of it, they don't want a fair,

subtle, well, it depends, you know, some cases one, some cases the other. They want, if I'm a person for whom transition was the right thing, you know, it's very easy for me to imagine, these kids are just young versions of me. It was the right thing for me. It's the right thing for everybody. That's my lived experience. I can appreciate where they're coming from, but that's not how we do science. It's not, you know, chemo was right for me, chemo was right for everybody. It's, right, we need something more objective than that. Flip side, there are people who have, you know, for whatever their political beliefs are,

they will not recognize any trans person under any circumstances. Where is the evidence, you know, those of us trying to figure out where the objective line is, like I was saying before, both sides hate us because it's not all one or the other, especially with how little information we still have available. I've heard it in the past, and I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, so correct me if I'm wrong. Is there a link that you can draw between autism and gender dysphoria, or is that, and by the way, countdown to me getting canceled, whether that's even something you said or not. Is that something that's showing up in the data?

Yeah, study after study after study after study. Really? Trans organizations are not at this point, it's no longer getting denied. The debate, like many of these debates, are over what does it mean? As I say, people have ceased to become interested in what the truth is. It's, how do I use this in image making in order to make myself look good and make the other side look bad? But the objective question, the scientific question is really, well, this is a factor that's completely unlike. We only have little research.

But the research we have was not on mostly autistic kids. we can't say that the information we have applies to this group. And it's not just autism. It's every single objective variable we have says that this is a different demographic, different epidemiological pattern, different mental health profile, different in every objective variable we have. The only one where they're similar is the one subjective statement. I want to be a boy, girl, non-binary.

The only thing they have in common is their expression of, I hate my body because of it's sex. But when we have a completely new profile, we can't take for granted anything about this group. It's not just autism, although that's become like the modern ADHD. You know, again, I'm wondering how much of this is an overcorrection of it having been, you know, underdiagnosed before. I'm not sure we've found the comfortable point, you know, between over-diagnosing and under-diagnosed. Did we not see it before or is now it just so buzzy that people are getting slapped at the label over and over? I think it's both. As I say, I think it's overcorrection meets overcorrection. I think it was underdone and then it just became this hot, fatty new thing. And so every, you know, misbehaving kid is

quickly getting, quickly getting labeled. So I think it's very similar. As I say, I think it's a bit of a pendulum and we haven't yet found the objective midpoint, is my suspicion. It's not just autism. isn't the only, you know, factor that's very common in these kids. Roughly 50% of them in general now have some, you know, substantial, you know, diagnosis. And the most common diagnoses, what they really have in common is difficulty processing and engaging in their social environment. That's, of course, you know, one of the primary symptoms of Asperger's and autism, of several personality disorders, of kids who are, you know, kind of gay or lesbian, don't fit in

and haven't yet, you know, come out and figured out, you know, how to fit it. What all these things have in common are kids with some additional challenge getting in the way of their socially integrating. I get the demographic, these are mostly teen bio-females, exactly the same demographic that does demonstrate greater social sensitivity and, you know, more careful navigation and complexities. that's so if somebody has those two strikes against them the I don't want to say normal but the familiar young teenage girl doesn't feel fit in I hate my body or I hate boys are looking at me now that I'm growing breasts and so the well I'm just non-binary I don't want to be compared to perfect women you know I don't want my breasts they're making me uncomfortable I don't want to play the game because if I don't get you know a boyfriend then I'm not so I think the ones who have additional social troubled are now being given this narrative saying, you don't have any issue at all. It's all external to you. It's the rest of the world that has the problem. And here's this

way you're going to get fixed from the outside, where really the constellation of issues suggest much more the way to help these kids is help them not hate their bodies, help them practice and develop the social skills and address the real issues. Right. So rather than, you know, helping them overcome their challenges, we're enabling those challenges. I would imagine that opinion is not very popular in certain circles. I must have to say that's pretty much true of everything that comes out of my mouth. I have no sense, and there's never going to be a way that I get a sense of, you know, how large those groups are. I hear from the ones, you know, who, it doesn't matter what I say. I'm just an opportunity for them to show, you know, their peeps, you know,

what good members of their cohort they are. But I do get an awful lot of Dr. Cantor. Thank you so much. It was so important. You know, I can't speak out because I'll never have a survey that I can believe. But I have every reason to believe that there is a very, very large, very, very silent majority. But we don't hear for them because, you know, they're not on social media or they know better than to get in the middle of one of these debates and risk becoming a subject of controversy of their own.

Right. You know, I can just open my mouth because I'm immune to this. You know, there's not a lot anyone can do to me. I'm very sympathetic to cancel culture folks who don't have a platform like this where they're going to have a bunch of people on their side. I mean, it would be really bad if you're, if you're a regular school teacher and you get canceled, your career is over. If I, if people try and cancel me, I, I can try to fight it out. I mean, maybe we're vulnerable in different ways, but it's unlikely I'll lose my entire audience for something, whereas if you're a teacher, you just get fired by the administration, and now you're screwed. So, yeah, it's not worth the risk. Or perfectly, perfectly private

people, you know, people who are, you know, engaged in, you know, again, I don't want to talk about any of the ones that are currently in court because they're currently in court, but people who, you know, on their own time, unaffiliated with whoever their employer is, endorse whatever view with whatever group, somebody finds it on social media, rights to their, you know, regulatory body, if they're a clinical professional, this person shouldn't be practicing because they believe whatever it is that they said,

and they're getting, they're losing their licenses. Sure. Huh? Yeah. And again, I'm just a little bit more liberal than Bernie Sanders. I'm an old-fashioned, right, you know, ACLU, what the ACLU used to be, kind of liberal. I don't care if you don't say it.

The way to diversity is for a bunch of people to be disagreeing. To say that I'm not going to deal with you on this issue because you disagree with me on that issue, that's not a liberal. Yeah, that's interesting. That's an interesting point. I think you're in a tough position. And I want to move on because I know you don't just study LGBTQIA plus or what I can't remember all the letters. I hope that covers it. I saw that written somewhere.

So hopefully that's not a sarcastic label. But your studies of parapheria are pretty. fascinating. First off, what does paraphilia even mean for those of us not sitting in front of Dictionary.com right now? That's the technical, medical, scientific word we use for the highly, highly atypical sexual interests, you know, things that are far beyond fetishes. You know, they're so strong, they're practically sexual orientations to the, uh, unto themselves. Okay. So one of those would be what, pedophilia. Is that fallen under that? Yeah, yep. That's the one. Of course, that gets the most talk about because it's the most, you know,

interfering with other people and the most, you know, has the potential. will cause among the most danger, the most harm. Sure. I had someone right into Feedback Friday, which is our advice segment on the show, and he was concerned, he said, I'm attracted to women that are much younger than me, which I'm pretty sure is a euphemism for stuff, because he talked about doing searches on the dark web, and he's wondering if it was caused by abuse he had as a child, and I didn't really think about that until I started reading a little bit more of your work.

What about pedophilia? I mean, is this nature or nurture or also both? That's an excellent question. First, to understand really anything about pedophilia, I call this the number one rule. One has to very, very carefully specifically and dramatically point out that pedophilia is not the crime. Pedophilia is not a synonym for child molestation. Pedophilia is the sexual attraction pattern.

The person is into kids the way the rest of us are into adults. By itself, you know, having fantasies, having the attraction, that by itself doesn't hurt anyone. child molestation and child pornography, you know, those are the issues. Those are the crimes. Those are the things that interfere with people. And of course, that range of crimes, you know, goes from nambi-pambi inappropriate to, you know, sadistic, really, really damaging the child. So pedophilia, again, is nobody's fault. Nobody asks to be attracted to whatever it is that they're attracted to. and the best they can do is learn ways to manage it, because what choice do they have? We society essentially need them to lead celibate lives.

My personal point of view is that it would be a pretty good idea if we helped them do that because we can't change pedophiles into non-pedophiles. All the evidence, you know, we've been trying that again since Freud, but nothing we try works. So as I say, the number one rule is that what you're turned on by is different from you do. You know, people can have all kinds of, you know, sadistic fantasies, rape fantasies, but keep them fantasies. And these are, of course, the people who are attracted to really young kids, you know, I'm almost sympathetic. Again, through no fault of their own, they have to leave a celibate life. Yeah. Okay, the people who commit the behaviors. Large chunk of pedophiles,

oddly, not the majority. Roughly a third. Huh. Two-thirds of actual child molesters actually prefer adults, incest cases especially. Really? They kind of use the kid as a surrogate, but they actually prefer. They're more attracted to adults than to children. That's actually the majority case. Is it an access issue? We definitely need to take care of the paedophilia, but it's not, as I say, these are not synonyms. Usually these happen, you know, in the context of really, really unhealthy family dynamics, you know, drug use, alcohol abuse. It happens, as I say, in really, really tough, tough households. But it's not really motivated the way pedophilia is motivated.

These people would prefer adults and end up doing something, you know, again, range from inappropriate to really sadistic. The problem with the whole group is less about the sex attractions they have and more about whether they're a psychopath, whether they're antisocial, whether they give a shit about other people's well-being. If they're attracted to kids, you know, when they're a psychopath, that's who they'll hurt. If they're a psychopath and not attracted to kids, that just means their victim is going to be an adult. The real problem, right, is the psychopathy and the antisociality and so on. It's not exactly the paedophilia. But when you get somebody with both,

right, now we really, really have a problem. Yeah. But for having been a victim of abuse, like a very, very old idea. Very classic idea goes back, you know, to the 1800s. I was very young then. And I can't say it was a crazy idea. You know, it's just kind of based on the usual like makes like that if you were abused as a kid, now you're just, you know, reenacting what it is you've been exposed to. So to a Freudian, that makes perfect sense. And even to behaviorists, that kind of made sense. But no good evidence for it. It seems to be, we haven't figured out what in the womb seems to trigger this sequence of events. But the subtle clues that we've run into, again,

all lead back to whatever it was. It was in the womb. Wow. The stuff that happens to a person, that can create a psychopath, or at least somebody who doesn't give two shits about other people's well-being. Yeah.

I was going to say it switches on the epigenetic, like if you're maybe predisposed to it and you have a terrible childhood. Good for you. Yes, that is exactly it. So it's if you grow up in a kind of how, household with nobody controls their behavior. Everybody's really impulsive. Nobody's a particularly responsible that can unleash or at least fail to help a person learn the self-discipline and

ethics that it takes to control and live a celibate life, realizing that, no, acting out on just because it's hot and feels natural to you, no, it's going to hurt someone. Again, it's that overlap, which seems to produce the trouble. So if the person is aware of it and asking questions about it, they're very, very rarely the people who put anyone else in harm's way. Their attractions are genuine. I wish systems were better set up to help them come in and get therapy, sex drive, reducing medications, you know, whatever it is that would help them, as I say, live a celibate life. Or for people who have a range of attractions that go from old or young, you know, to live a happy life within an acceptable age range.

Right. So it sounds like one cannot choose to be, sorry, let me rephrase this. One cannot choose to not be a pedophile, but one can choose to not be a child molester. One is still in control of one's behavior. Right. Even though one is not in control of one's sex interest patterns. So we should make it easier for people who know that they have an attraction to children to do something about it instead of driving them underground by saying,

oh, you must be a child molester if you feel this way, which is kind of what one of the things that this guy was writing in about was he was like, I would never hurt anyone, but I'm also, who am I going to tell about this, not my fiance, because she's going to think I'm a child molester. What I'm not, I'm not a child molester. That's what he was saying. He's like, this is terrible. And he just never knew anything about, which I also had never thought about this. I'd never really thought about the difference between somebody who's attracted to children and somebody who's an actual child molester. I'd never thought about those being different things. Of course, the only exposure anybody gets to them are when there's a crime.

It hits the papers. I mean, it's not like, you know, it's only because I am who I am and I do the research that I do that patients do come to me as part of my being a clinical psychologist exactly in order to ask for that kind of help. You know, I've helped, you know, establish and advise organizations, you know, for self-help groups and support groups for these people to give each other the support that they need. And so I can't blame the public for not knowing the full story. But the post-social media decrease in willingness to take a deep breath.

And let's think about this for a second. People for their emotional and political, you know, extremesses are actually making the problem worse. For example, with mandatory reporting laws is probably one of the biggest examples. usually we have doctor-patient confidentiality, including, you know, psychologists and other mental health professionals. But we are required to report, you know, instances where there's a specific person to protect, you know, if the person's going to kill themselves, if the person is threatening, you know, realistically, you know, threatening to hurt another person, that we have to report, you know, to save the other person. But when the laws or the interpretation of the laws is

that if someone tells you they're attracted to children and you must report that, well, that just makes the person not come in to get help in the first place. So instead of having pedophiles out in society coming in, getting therapy, getting support, getting feedback, getting sex drive, reducing medications, now we have pedophiles circulating out in society completely in the dark receiving, no help from anybody. There, feel better? It makes you look good for being tough on them, pedophiles, but all you've done is drive them underground. It's already got to be such a hard thing to admit. I think, look, if I were a

pedophile, the last thing I do is go around talking about it. And now you find that there's not even a safe place where you can go to talk about it because of mandatory reporting laws, I should say, in certain places. Right. So, oh, man, that's just, you're right. Yeah, that does not make me feel better because then you have somebody who's responsible but also has those urges and they're like, oh, I'm just going to binge watch stuff on Netflix when this comes up. And it's like, well, that's not really a sustainable way to handle this problem. Going back to the nature versus nurture thing, are there correlations of things in the brain like you mentioned with gay men, older brothers? Like, if somebody comes out and they have red hair and one of their eyes is blue and one of their eyes is brown, are they more likely to be a pedophile?

And apologies to any gingers with two different colored eyes. It's a random example that has no basis in fact. What you're describing was, you know, my postdoctoral project. That was my question is, how can we find, you know, we were in, we were just unraveling, or Blanchard was, you know, just finishing his unraveling of identifying, okay, you know, homosexuality, you know, that's in the brain. And now, next question. What would be an equivalent way of finding undeniable evidence? The only explanation is that this is biological. What kind of clue, right, could we look for?

We started with, you know, relatively ambiguous things which showed that it was in the brain, you know, different IQ patterns, you know, just different patterns of strengths and weaknesses, which correlate to different parts of brain size and brain growth. So we nailed those down and then, you know, brain scan studies. Ah, okay, we saw it specifically in the regions of the brain, blah, blah, you know, related to, you know, mirror neurons, other connective parts of the brain. but I needed some back-in-time variable. You know, birth order, right, you know, gives me, or gave Blanchard, you know, back-in-time to what happened in utero. Sure. In some objective way where, you know, a person had no reason to change or not remember siblings.

You know, so it was pretty solid objective and the only explanation was something biological. The one I ran into is something we called minor physical anomalies. Again, itty-bitty things. nobody would ever notice. Everybody has a couple of these, but they show something unusual was going on early during development. Cleft palate. Earlobes attached to the head. The ratio of the length of your second digit versus fourth digit. Again, minor, minor physical anomalies, things that nobody really would ever notice, we have to go with calipers and measure it. They seem to be stress related during pregnancy, and the amount of nutrients that are available to the mother and therefore to the fetus during growth.

So when there are, you know, moments of famine, the growing body prioritizes what's important in order to maximize the viability of the fetus. So, as I say, stresses and those kinds of indirect effects, these are signs of. Interesting. And that's what we found. So it's the combination of the adult brains have differences and whatever. it was that happened, whatever chain of events it was, the first links of that chain had to be before birth. You know, there's nothing during life that changes your earlobes and that attaches

your earlobes, you know, unless somebody detaches their earlobes. So that was the, aha, it has to be biological. And again, we don't have a smoking gun line to attach it. You know, it's not as complete as Blanchard's long-named Y chromosome stuff. But, But, yep, it's biological and it's in the brain, and that's no the theory to be. Wow. Well, I'll tell you who's detaching their earloes. People with Cliff Pallet and two equally sized or whatever fingers are right now looking at. As I say, you know, some number of those is normal.

It's not all of you. The average is whatever. It's called the wall drop scale. I think there were 16 things on it, 20 things on it. Normal, regular everyday people have two or three, you know. But when you were sitting five, six, and seven is, you know, significantly above average as a group. How do you find out if some, I mean, do you just rely on self-reporting for pedophilia? Because it seems like that's a real small subset of people who are going to go, hey, I have this,

that's got to be less reliable. Is there a way to be like, that guy definitely, I mean, an offender who's in prison for it is pretty reliable, but what about somebody who's not, who hasn't offended? Again, now being an offender in prison, two-thirds of them are not pedophiles. Oh, right. Yeah. So that's even less reliable than so. self-reporting, probably. Exactly. You know, so it's an indirect variable by a group of people, all of whom had offenses against children and a group of people, none of whom had offenses against children, you know, even if only a third of these are pedophiles, you know, for some analyses, that's enough that the groups will be different and I'll be able to see that something's different,

even though the pedophiles are getting watered down a bit by the non-pedophiles in that group. Kurt Freund, famous, famous sex researcher, two generations before me. He would sit at head of running joke. Had you know when a sex offender is lying? When his lips are moving. Do not pay any attention to self-report. We just habitually ignore it. For scientific purposes, we give it really no credence.

Even when people say negative things and stigmatized things about themselves, very often those are people with obsessive levels of guilt, with their own needs for attention and they're making up stories. And it's not true. As I say, OCD, you know, they have a fear that they might be a pedophile. They're not. But they'll, right, out of this guilt complex or psychotic disorder, again, even when people are admitting negative things, we don't take that at face value either. So that's just part of being a sex researcher. We don't trust anybody's self-report. The objective way is actually very simple, physiological test invented by Kurt Freund called philometry.

That has to do with the penis. That much I know. That is exactly what it is. Penile plethysmography. Dick measuring. That is exactly what it is. And the most accurate type, well, the type, which is accurate, is called volumetric. You know, instead of just a, you can either measure the circumference of the penis,

which is kind of like putting a band-aid on it, and then you show the person, you know, pictures of adults, children, males, females, and the computer measures were, react to. The accurate one measures volume. You actually put a cuff around the penis and then a whole glass cylinder over it. So as the penis gets more blood into it, it pushes air out of the cylinder. And the amount of air that comes out is now the change in volume of the penis. And that's a much, it's a very sensitive and a much, much more sensitive measurement. So when a person, right, so a person can say they're into whatever it is they say, but if they're getting bigger erections for that category, we classify them in that category. Yeah, that makes sense. I was laughing because I was

remembering the volume, you know, middle school physics where you put something in a in a cube full of water and then you measure, I think when you take it out, how much water's left in the cube, something like that. And I'm just thinking like, put your penis in the glass, sir. So you better hope that their fetish is not having their penis in a glass of water because then you have noise in your results or an air vacuum. You're exactly correct. Rare, rare, rare. Yeah. But every once in a while, there are a gorgeous, diverse. Talk about a rainbow range of sexual interest patterns.

The guy around the lab always had really, really good stories about the atypical patients. But now imagine a patient whose fetish is masochism. Oh, yeah. So, like, can you put that cuff on tighter? He's turned on by the humiliation. Right. I should love. Right.

And they would just get a full erection because what's more humiliate or an exhibitionist? Oh, right. Like, can you call the interns back in here for this? Oh, sir, we don't need their help. No, no, no, no. We need their help. Right. So, you know, guy drops his pants full erection and we can't test it because, you know,

we need higher and lower, you know, for each category. And he's just, sir, we're not doing the test in the parking lot. You can come inside. No pun intended. Right, exactly. How much conscious control do people even have about what they are attracted to or what they're aroused by. I would imagine not much. Pretty limited. I mean, the best really we can do is distract ourselves, you know, from some stimulus that's right

in front of it. You know, if there's whatever, we're in some professional situation and the person in front of us is really hot, you know, extra effort to focus on their eyes. But if you're into it, you're into it. If you're young, you know, every freaking instinct, you know, there's five billion years of evolution telling it a reality. You know, there's only so much upper brain we can manage. As we get older and sex drive, you know, calms down a bit. It's easier. But what we're attracted to, we just kind of observe it.

You know, we might be willingness to indulge in it, you know, help push it a bit. For somebody who's paraphylic, for somebody who's into kink, you know, if they're not interested in ordinary things, it can be a conscious decision to explore, push the envelope a bit and see how you react, because it's not, as I say, so predictable is when you're into just regular vanilla stuff. But by and large, men especially, we really don't have much control. Women, much, much more complicated story. Men are simple. You know, we're pretty, you know, stimulus response, give or take a few men in the tribe,

it's not going to change much. But evolution is about women. If women were into it, men would evolve it. And so we are plan B. For us, sex is often a craving. For women, it's more of a mood. It's more, you know, there were more things wrapped up into it. It's not just, are they hot or not.

Yeah. It's also expectations for the future and what will my friends think. You know, it's this great, big, complicated, not always, and there are always exceptions. But for men, we could fuck our worst enemy if they're hot enough. It's really, really easy to put everything else aside. where for women, there is no aside. That's, again, acknowledging exceptions. But by and large, it's all part of it.

So that also gives women, you know, more of an opportunity to manipulate their own mood and create a scene or an environment or something that, you know, evokes that mood more than for us, it's they're hot or not, we're stressed or not, and our own insecurities. That's also a big one. This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Dr. James Kent. We'll be right back. If you'll like this episode of the show, please do what other smart and considerate listeners do.

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on the website as well over at jordanharbinger.com slash AI. Treat yourself and pat yourself on the back while you do it because you're supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Dr. James Cantor. Back to the pedophilia for just one second here. What about, I know these guys have to live in as mostly guys, right, that are pedophile. Is it mostly men? Practically all.

Okay. There's the debatable case every now and then over whether a woman qualifies, but we don't have a very effective equivalent of a phallometric test. Oh, yeah. With the kind of sensitive, right. There are some, you know, we can do a little bit. but women tend to respond relatively broadly, where men are, you know, our brains of a hot, not when it comes to sex. For women, it's just...

Right, got to light candles in the laboratory and place them. It's not even that. It's that women will very commonly respond to everything. Really? Right. There seems to be a very general response, and it's these other factors, anticipation, opinions about the person that really... Right, okay. ...are kind of the gatekeeper.

Sure. to whether the whole mechanism turns on. The best guess we have is an evolutionary purpose for females. Females are going to get raped, men, very unusual. So to lubricate, which is really what, you know, the device is measuring, is also a defensive response. If it is going to be a negative encounter, she's less likely to be wounded. She's less likely to, you know, physically be harmed if there's enough of a blood

engorgement and lubrication response. There's less damage. So in her, right, even though the response is physiologically very, very close to what she would show during sexual arousal, it does nothing to do with sexual arousal. It's the opposite. It's just that, right, showing any stimulus, being, you know, be physiologically prepared, but that's not. Right. Interesting. That's the best guess we have, but it's just a guess. It's still just a guess. If men who are pedophiles should live a celibate life, which of course, I think everybody agrees. agrees with that. This is so gross even saying this. Should child sex dolls be allowed? Is this something that could help pedophiles or would it just make the problem worse? I'm pro-sex doll for two reasons. Okay. One, free speech. Even if we take as the answer, we don't know. Free speech. You need evidence to show harm before we block stuff out. We don't, you know, block stuff out because I can imagine.

Yeah, I mean, I'm certainly icked out by it and grossly uncomfortable, but that's not like a scientific ethical concern. Right. The purpose is where is the line? Well, the line is going to be where you feel it. This is why we have to, right, if it were just your emotions about it, well, then it would be a very easy thing to debate. You can't talk about nothing, because it's always somebody that makes something. Where on the slippery slope? All porn we have to do away with. Well, it's like violent video games. Do they cause violence? Do they not? Or do violent people, right, you know, engage in them? Or really, again, what I think it is, I think video games are displacing. productive social interaction, much the same way that I think social media has displaced

genuine face-to-face interaction. So I really have to wonder if there's similar processes. Again, nobody's looked really, really solidly, but as best as we can tell, you know, there's no difference between areas that ban them versus areas that don't. You know, we don't find, you know, a greater or lesser likelihood of offenders versus non-offenders having them in their back, that's not, if anything, we find the opposite. People who are trying to be good find ways of just masturbating that don't hurt anybody. Well, what else are they going to be doing? But it's a lump of freaking latex.

It's not going to make them more pedophilic. We can't make them more pedophilic any more than we can make them less petaphylic. It's not going to turn them into psychopaths. Right, I see. The question would be, does it make them more likely to actually offend because they're getting closer to that. And if the answer is no, then there's no harm in it, even if it's really gross for everyone else. Let me ask the equivalent. All right. So does an artificial doll that looks like an adult woman make somebody more likely to rape an adult? To rape an adult? Yeah,

probably not. Right. So we're going to ban them just in case? Yeah. If anything, right, having outlets, you know, having an alternative, you know, male sex drive is a male sex drive. You know, being able to get off is relaxing. That's usually how just. You know, having a sex drive is relaxing. That's usually how just about everything in human sexuality works. It's soon, well, about masturbation in men especially works. It's soothing. If we take away methods of self-soothing, you know, now there's nothing between them and... Right, you can't scratch the itch at all.

Right, there's no... We're removing all the off-ramps. We're removing all the alternatives. If somebody wants to run the experiment, fine. worth running it, but again, from my point of view, the oneness of proof is if you're going to ban it, you need evidence first, and that requires running the experiment. Yeah, that would be an interesting way to get your PhD and very uncomfortable at most dinner parties to explain how you ended up there, I suppose.

Maybe not the ones y'all are having. Oh, no, perfectly. Oh, God, you're choking on the center of every dinner party? I can only imagine. No, it is very, well, maybe in the gay world, you know, it's just, it's because it's not social media. at a dinner party where it's just a dinner party, you know, and we're having a regular everyday conversation and people are nice to each other and they will go for the, oh, now I get it because they're not posing for their followers.

Right, that's true. But if I said exactly the same thing on social media, then it's however people want to use it in order to either attack me because they don't like my view on whatever it is. They don't like my view on or I'm just an opportunity for, you know, them to do their virtue signaling. Look how much better I am than that guy. Yeah. So again, it's on social media it can't happen. But in the real world, real audiences, real thinkers, see the logic. What about asexuality? For me, I know a couple of people who say this

and, you know, good friends of mine, no shade on them. But it's, is that really what's going on? Or is it like they're just so stressed out? They have low sex drive. Or is it because in some of them, again, I hope they're not listening. Some of them are a little socially awkward. So I feel like they almost chose that because it's just easier than getting rejected all. the time or dealing with dating apps and all that other crap. Are there asexual people who are just hormonally this way and not as a result of their circumstances? I think each of those phenomena exist, but it's not like we can take a survey and believe what people are saying. You know, the person who's using the label just to get my mother to stop asking me, why am I not married?

Right. Or the ones who are insecure, you know, I'm never going to, you know, so I won't bother. they're not going to say that or even admit it to themselves on a survey. So whenever I do see surveys and, you know, and whatever proportion identified as a sexual, again, when it comes to sex, I put very, very little faith into anyone's self-report. My intuition is exactly what you said, is that people are using it for the social purpose, for the secondary gain that the label gives them. I think it's less about the clinical accuracy of the term, as much as it is a way of saying to one social circle how to interact with them. You know, I actually forgot one other category is maybe people who are attracted to something they don't want to admit they're attracted to.

And this comes into play when people write in and say something like, I am part of XYZ strong church. And I had in the past but attracted to men, but my fiance and I are working through it. and I've prayed the gay away, and I'm not attracted to men anymore, but I don't have a high sex drive, and I'm thinking, well, that's because you are not attracted to the woman you're with. You're gay, but you don't want to let that out of the box. So now you're asexual because that's the only acceptable kind of condition for you. Yeah. I see that kind of thing play out all the time. Again, I don't want to say it's every single asexual or everybody who uses the word is in that scenario,

but just a person telling me their story, maybe. yes, maybe no. But of course, you know, to bring it full circle when it comes to trans issues, it's all based on that's just what the kid says. Absolutely zero objective evidence. Despite, you know, that we know that most of these kids, you know, there's interpretations of their experiences changes. Changes often. There's new phenomenon of these, you know, socially challenge, you know, kids that came out of nowhere. It's social needs. It's social, media mediated, people with social integration difficulties having trouble saying that they don't fit in socially.

Oh, yeah, that's transsexual. No, that's a social issue, and we need to help with the social brought on by these other social, but we're not giving them the help they need. We're giving them, you know, the 10-year-old's explanation for why I hate my body. You're going to have an informed discussion with a 10-year-old about, we'll put you on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, so you'll never experience an orgasm. How does a prepubescent child give informed consent to never experiencing something their brain is unable to process? A child cannot imagine an orgasm until after puberty. Again, I have no principle. I have no ideology saying never do it, but a 10-year-old say-so is not good enough evidence. It's I need something objective.

I know you've done research on, and this is probably not the technical term, but what do I know? FURIES. First of all, what is that? What is going on with these people? And I'm trying not to be a jerk about it, but it is very odd. It's a very unusual one that I think is probably super niche. Of the ones that I've met, they seem to interact again with this kind of socially challenged, kind of Asperger, autism, spectra, me, awkward, don't really know how to interact with whatever male, female, whatever that they're attracted to. And I really can't escape the notion that wearing a mask adds enough distance to help them feel more comfortable. in a social interaction and feel less rejected because the person rejected them without seeing the real them. The behavior seems to be much more about finding their comfort zone in an indirect way, rather than challenging themselves to increase their comfort zone. And cute little furry animals where people can just pet each other's tail or scratch each other's ear, again, gives a simplified way to interact in a cuddly or affectionate kind of way, but without pushing their comfort zone into something that

would become more traditionally romantic or erotic. Got it. That's the usual pattern that I see, but a lot of it is just nerdy. Yeah. For people who don't know, and I may botch this definition, furries are people who they wear animal suits, like you would see like a mascot, like a football game mascot, and they go, there's conventions and that's, they can only be intimate, and I put that in air quotes because you're wearing a suit when you're wearing something like that. Am I close? Yeah, pretty much. They run the whole

gamut. For some, it's the entire for suit, they call it. For some, it's just a, you know, wily coyote head. Or for some, it's just a head of whatever animal and a tail. For some, you know, its entire, you know, invested really into it. They're almost a comic book, villain lizard or or whatever it is. And they will often imbue it with extra social meaning and use it as an example. They will start using identity language in order to explain it. But again, there's no good objective evidence to say that it is anything to do with identity or even acknowledging just what identity means so much as that's just today's language in order to justify it. Because once I say it's my identity, then you're not allowed to challenge it. Right. Okay. Interesting. And I know we're running out of time here,

but I'm going to pronounce, I'm going to botch this pronunciation as well. Vorahrophilia, wanting to eat or be eaten? Vorophyllia, yes. Literally be eaten by somebody else or to eat somebody else. This is a wild fetish. I mean, it's some Jeffrey Dahmer type stuff. What's going on there? That's a little scary.

The Vulcan half of my brain before getting scared says, oh, that's interesting. That's a clue. These aren't random things. that we humans, human males, are getting attracted to. What's why attracted to these kinds of things and not those kinds of things? To me, these are the, remember the four Fs? No.

The ancient, ancient lizard brain, you know, limbic system. Feed, flight, flee, and sex. Yes, got it. Is the running joke. But these are all, you know, five billion years. well, not quite that old, but pretty much since sex was invented, these are ancient, ancient behaviors, you know, long preceding mammals, never mind humans.

But tiny, hitty-bitty little pieces of the right now. Imagine if the thing that goes wrong in the brain is something very simple, like a cross-wiring. The sex pieces of the brain are adjacent to the feeding parts of the brain. Instead of trying to think of some, you know, abstract, what is the meaning, what is it trying to say, what happened to him, It's just, these are two adjacent parts of the brain, so if whatever body of neuron overgrows a little bit, undergrows a little bit, the feeding instinct is getting tied into the sex instinct.

Huh. Right, so they're just experiencing sexual arousal in association with feeding. With pedophiles. Again, ancient, ancient, ancient, ancient species. Care for the kids. not too far from the instinct to reproduce in the first place. Even though, right, the behaviors from our conscious point of view, these are essentially opposite things.

From the brain's point of view, these are, again, lumps of jelly very close together. Nerves grow a little close, a little far, and the brain is blending, rather than looking at the kid and go, oh, you poor dear, can I help you? Our voices go up, we naturally become, completely unconscious. We just natural, you know, our nurturing instinct just kicks in when we see a kid.

Well, again, but for them, just crosswire it. They perceive the brain immediately interprets, you know, head-to-body ratio, large eyes, it's a kid, but it triggers the sex instincts instead of, or in addition to. Right. So even though from our conscious point of view, these look entirely opposing, these can't go together, these are just ancient instincts getting linked when they're supposed to be independent. So all of a sudden to me, these are not, yet in a bizarre and weird and they're just fun to talk about. But the particular things that we see versus don't see, I think represent clues telling us to how the whole thing works. The other one, all of these things have pairs. For some people, they want to be eaten. Some people want to do the eating.

Some people are sadistic and want to rough you up. Some people are masochistic and want to get roughed up. Some people are attracted to children. We also have diapers who are turned on by being the child. All of these things have corresponding. Right, in, out, erotic target. Again, so the cluster of what we see, these are clues that tell us. How does the whole thing...

go together. That's when I knew I needed to be a sexist. There's something going on here. And if we could just quiet down the, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's icky and weird and people got hurt. True. Vulcan thinking cap on. What does this tell us about what's going on?

Yeah. Well, there certainly is a whole wide world out there, isn't there, Dr. Cantor? You must take a lot of flack for this stuff, I'd imagine. What consequences have you seen personally, professionally, as a result of your work in this area, you know, negative consequences. Personally, I really can't say, I can't say any. You know, a lot of my friends would almost have said that this is inevitable. I'm a New York Jew and I was born to debate.

Oddly, I found a bizarre niche that I never thought that I would. And again, it's because the people who have been around me have been around me now for decades have known before the social media age and all of this just kind of figures. professionally, I'm not sure which parts have affected me and which parts have merely been. The field has changed in a way that it's not fun anymore because of the culture that's taken it over. Twenty years ago, there were many other people who, like I, were just fascinated by these ideas and could see, oh, this actually could lead to meaningful ways of actually preventing child molestation. oh, these good ways to, you know, we might be able to find whatever, what the mechanisms are that lead to paedophilia in the womb and actually even stop it before it develops.

Don't know, but if that ever happens, it's going to start with the work that I was doing. People saw that very quickly. My field, again, because it has so many sensitive topics, I think it was hit first, but it's true for science in general. So many people have become so afraid of how this is going to look or how this is going to make them look that, No one's talking about anything challenging. People are only willing to talk about, you know, nice, charming, easy, already popular. And it's just ended meaningful progress on some of the most challenging issues confronting us because nobody's willing to talk about them.

I had indeed had experiences mostly over social media, actually, I would have to say, is really where they happen. Again, it's mostly disappointing. People who, for example, agree with me on trans issues. 20 years ago, feminists had a problem with me because I was a biological essentialist, you know, born gay, not born gay, born lesbian, not born, and they were social constructionists.

You know, they picked being feminist and the idea that we were born the way we, that's just not how, you know, the postmodernist and social constructionists of the 90s and early 2000s thought. So I was, you know, persona non-grata among the radical feminists. Well, now here I am saying that, you know, most of these trans kids really aren't trans. The science is being, you know, misinterpreted and misapplied, which is exactly in line with the feminist establishment.

And so I'm their darling. All right. Did all of a sudden they decide science was the way to go? No. It science happens to be convenient to their political ends at the moment. However, also within that establishment, even though, again, I'm widely acknowledged as one of the top experts on, you know, development of transsexuality and the various things that could lead to transsexuality and I'm testifying in court and so on all the

time. There are some radical feminists who, nope, don't like what he says about paedophilia. He's a pedophile, apologies. I won't work with him. Well, again, this is, that's not how a liberal thinks. I'm sorry, we have to agree on everything in order to agree on, in order to work together. That's not a liberal. So that kind of thing has changed, but I haven't changed, and it's not like, you know, I've had taken any particular professional hits for it. Mostly, the only metaphor I have was from one of the Star Wars sequels where the galactic Senate collapses. Yoda realizes what goes on. He can feel, you know, everybody getting destroyed, and so he has to go, you know, fly to the swamp planet, waiting for the next generation for civilized society to be reborn.

I have a certain feeling like that. You know, there are a couple of people around willing and able to swallow their emotions and politics in order to get the right answer, whether you like the answer or not. But the entire spectrum, left, right, rainbow, take your pick, are, you know, loving, hating me, according to the utility. I'm just saying what the science says. whether it fits with their politics is whether they like the science and therefore whether they like me. I haven't changed. What I've said hasn't changed. The people in the conversation have changed.

Well, thank you very much for coming out, if you'll pardon the pun, and sharing your expertise here with us today. I know that this stuff is super fascinating and I'm hoping the audience really enjoys it because I know that I love talking about and hearing about this stuff. it is hard to avoid stepping on toes, especially with this kind of science, but here we are. Go step on the freaking toes. We're not going to, as I say, we're not going to be able to find the lines and get the details if we're not willing to do the challenging stuff. Thank you.

My pleasure. Take care. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show about the evolved strategies of human mating. So I'm an evolutionary psychologist, and I'm very well known in my scientific communities. I talk to people about mating all the time. and I learn something practically every day from people. So our predictions of what is going to make us happy are known to be off base. Sometimes people pay a lot of attention to the mate attraction process

and not enough attention to the mate retention process. Men and women have overlapping mating psychologies, but in some domains, dramatically different mating psychologists. It's become fashionable to try to argue that men and women are really identical, in their mating psychologists, in their sexual psychologies, but they're not. I think that's, it's one of these kind of ideologically driven agendas, and we know scientifically that the areas in which they differ. You know, I think one of the myths is that somehow we're supposed to meet the one and only when we're at a very young age and live perfectly happily ever after for the

next 50 years with no bumps in the road, and I think that's just naive. There's a new body of research that talks about the dark triad, and the dark triad is also more likely to cheat. Dark triad is high narcissism, high Machiavellianism, and high psychopathy. People who are both men and women who are high on these dimensions are much more likely to cheat. You want to avoid those in a long-term mate for sure. Avoid emotional instability and avoid narcissism and potential mates. To learn more about what people want in a mate, successful tactics of mate attraction, and more with Dr. David Bus, check out episode 758 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.

What an interesting guy and a fun guy. Honestly, he's a riot even off camera. His grandmother said, I knew it when he came out as gay, which is kind of a funny reaction from your grandma. Also, when he told her he was going into sex research, she said, well, if you're going to be thinking about sex all day, you might as well get paid for it, which again, I kind of want to meet this guy's grandma. I think I'm a little bit too late. want to dive more into lesbians, gay women.

There's a lot of differences between gay women and gay men, just from the perspective of hormones and what, quote, unquote, makes somebody gay. There's more comfort issues involved with women. It's more social, psychological. It's probably an entire show, honestly. So, yes, some is hormones, some is psychological, or more psychological.

But here's the thing. It's really hard to differentiate between these causes and factors, right? Where does psychological begin and hormones end or vice versa? I don't really know. I'm not sure that the line is even that clear. As far as pedophilia, I was on the fence about this one, right? But it's just too damn interesting to leave out. And I find that this episode really made me think.

You know, once you appreciate the distinction that actual pedophiles can't help it, I start to appreciate what it must be like for a person to realize that through no fault of their own, that they are attracted to children, which is by all accounts in every society probably that's ever existed, not okay and horrible and probably punishable by death. And then they have to choose to live a life of celibacy rather than really, really hurt somebody else. And in making that distinction, I just suddenly found myself feeling sympathy

where I didn't think any would ever live. I also found it interesting that people who write pornographic fiction involving children, yuck, are not necessarily offenders. Same for people with child porn on the computer. However, people who are offenders, have a much higher chance of having child porn on their computers. And it seems like maybe somebody who's willing to break a severe law or a norm,

ethically, morally, legally, they are likely to have also committed something seemingly lesser, right, like porn on their computer. So if you're an offender, you've kind of already crossed the Rubicon, but if you're not an offender and you have this stuff on your computer, you certainly have, I would say, a disorder that should be treated, but maybe you're not also a molester. I don't know, just a whole bucket of uncomfortable topics right there and sentences I never thought would come out of my mouth. Dr. Cantor has taken a lot of flack for his research and ideas, surprise, surprise, and people have come after his medical license several times.

So if you're thinking about cancel culture, this guy's the epicenter of this. This really is a sensitive topic. I hope we've handled it appropriately. I'd love to hear from you if you agree or disagree or you have thoughts on this episode. Y'all know how to reach me. Again, big thank you to Dr. James Cantor. All things Dr. James Cantor will be in the show notes at George. Jordan Harbinger.com. Our chat, GPT, Bach, can answer just about anything we've ever discussed on this program.

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