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These narratives were accompanied by slides showing nude models who corresponded in age and gender to the topic of the narrative. The stimuli were not, of course, live persons, but rather audiotaped narratives describing sexual interactions with prepubescent girls, pubescent girls, and so on. All underwent the same test, which measured their penile responses to six classes of stimuli: prepubescent girls, pubescent girls, adult women, prepubescent boys, pubescent boys, and adult men. “The subjects were 2,278 male patients referred to a specialty clinic for phallometric assessment of their erotic preferences. Blanchard further describes the subject population of his recent study: The idea is that, the more erect the penis, the more the man has been stimulated by the particular sexual material being presented to him. In other words, sex researchers studying these men strap a device over the subjects’ penises to measure how swollen or flaccid they become in response to various kinds of pictures and audiotapes. Increases in the patient’s penile blood volume (i.e., degrees of penile erection) are used as the measure of his attraction to different classes of persons.” In phallometric tests for gender and age orientation, the individual’s penile blood volume is monitored while he is presented with a standardized sequence of laboratory stimuli depicting male and female children and adults. Phallometric testing (sometimes called penile plethysmography) is an objective technique for assessing erotic interests in men. “This dataset included measures taken with the same laboratory method used by Freund et al., namely, phallometric testing. He’s been kind enough to do so for us here.īlanchard explains first the laboratory method used: But, because this work is so important (the scientists assembled in Canada were stunned into near silence when they saw the impressive datasets and theoretical work Blanchard put before us), I asked Blanchard to explain the work somewhat more plainly for those who are not scientists. Blanchard’s work suggests that pedophilia and hebephilia look like sexual orientations-that, at least for men, sexual orientation is comprised not just of interest in a particular sex, but in a particular age range as well.īlanchard has published this work online, making it freely available to all comers.
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(Both responses are relatively low.) This past June in Canada, at the major international research conference on sexual orientation science, sex researcher Ray Blanchard (who was trained under Freund) presented substantial new data confirming and expanding on Freund’s findings. The distinguished sex researcher Kurt Freund and his colleagues used a laboratory method (described below) that demonstrated that the sexual responses of gay men to boys were similar to the responses of straight men to girls. In fact, the British Journal of Psychiatry published a major study backing up the “no” answer 40 years ago. So, at the outset, let me give away the answer to my headline question: Do gay men have more sexual interest in children than straight men do? No. But I’ve decided to go ahead and put this research notice out there, so that hopefully the next time this issue comes up, the rational folks talking about it have the data they need to back up their hunches. I’d probably only have to wait a couple of weeks at most.
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I thought about holding off on this post until the next time somebody in the news declares that gay men are to blame for the sexual abuse of children. (PHOTO: AGNIESZKA LOBODZINSKA/ SHUTTERSTOCK)