All: Is autogynephilia normal in natal women?

kwallio · 2021-05-29T01:53:12+00:00

I think this is a men writing women issue, men imagine women to do all sorts of stupid shit that women basically don't do, or don't do when men aren't around, and then men treating these male fantasies as reality.

Women are definitely socialized to imagine themselves as an object, but I doubt except for a very few women don't get much of a sexual thrill out of it. To me the idea of putting on a feminine appearance and acting "sexy" is just another chore, like cleaning the kitchen or going grocery shopping or something.

Penultimate_Penance · 2021-05-29T00:59:16+00:00

From my experience it's not normal at all. My clothes are just clothes. My body is just my body. The things that autogynephiles find arousing revolt me to be honest. I am revolted by a lot of male sexuality, especially when it involves dehumanizing and objectifying women. Autogynephiles take the dehumanization to the next level, they somehow manage to be even more disgusting and revolting than the average man.

A lot of bitterness gets built up after a lifetime of being told what to wear, what not to wear, ways I shouldn't move to avoid harassment/tempting the men. I wish female bodies weren't sexualized at all in day to day life and that was all kept strictly to the bedroom.

BiologyIsReal · 2021-05-29T02:26:33+00:00

Women can't be AGP by definition. AGPs are sexually attracted to the idea of themselves as women. Women don't need to imagine how things would be if we were women because that is already our reality. The female equivalent of autogynephillia would be autoandrophillia. However, AGPs often don't like to recognize they really aren't women, so they try to pass their sexual fantasies as normal women sexuality.

Houseplant · 2021-05-29T03:31:35+00:00

No. It’s doesn’t even make sense. Imagining your own female body doing sexual things is hardly the same as someone who’s arousal comes from the imagining a female body part.

For women that’s just their body. For men, it’s a woman’s body as an object.

worried19 · 2021-05-29T06:34:58+00:00

Definitely not. Your "yes" example is basically just performative sexualized femininity, viewing yourself as a sexual object from the perspective of a male third party (aka the male gaze). This seems to be something that happens to some women in sexual situations due to socialization and porn culture. However, that is not autogynephilia.

It is not normal for women to be sexually attracted to their own bodies. Women don't get aroused looking at themselves in non-sexual contexts or wearing normal clothes. They are not turned on by the mere existence of their vaginas and breasts. No woman is getting wet putting on a bra for work in the morning or inserting a tampon.

PhilosopherTentacles · 2021-05-29T05:12:34+00:00

Paraphilias are almost exclusively diagnosed in men, only rarely in women. I've never known a woman who experienced or presented as AGP. (Not even sure how that would be possible for a woman outside of comorbid dissociative identity disorder or schizophrenia or something similar . . . in which case it probably wouldn't even be considered a paraphilia.)

emptiedriver · 2021-05-29T14:23:56+00:00

While one person always has a hard time speaking for a larger group - what an individual woman experiences isn't necessarily true of all women - we can say that it's pretty widely agreed that fancy lingerie, uncomfortable corsets and straps and garters and all that, are almost always bought by women who are trying to please men. Women who are happily single (cat ladies and such) or long married (mothers or dusty old wives) or lesbians aren't stereotypically known for those kinds of male-pleasing gear. To females, it's not necessarily what makes a woman attractive, and that cat lady in sweat pants may be super hot if you'd just engage with her. But males seem to get caught up in shiny pink bras.

That makes me wonder what skimpy clothing women are getting excited by while staring at themselves in the mirror. Sitting there, talking to themselves in boxers and a tee shirt, enjoying the way the light falls against their own clavicle? I'm not buying it.

It's more akin to the female version of men flexing in the mirror.

If you're talking about getting dressed up to look hot for men, yes, even to a further degree. There's very little female-female sexuality that is based around pole-dancing, heel-wearing, frilly satin leotarded ladies. That's just a male fantasy...

adungitit · 2021-05-30T19:44:34+00:00

Women are brainwashed to think of themselves as objects and to view themselves through male lens, because this is the only way in which they are allowed to experience sexuality. To not engage in this means to disappoint the male partner and fail at sex (which is equated with the male gaze and male sexual desires) and also to lose your only worth as a woman, the only thing you can actually be valued for because you're automatically seen as a failure at everything else. Women are attracted to the idea of not being rejected by society, which is why they entertain patriarchal ideas about themselves as objects. When a woman feels so insecure in herself that she dare not even leave the house for a few minutes without a face full of makeup, that's a result of her not wanting to feel like garbage by society telling her she has no worth as a normal human being (because if she were a normal human being, she'd be a man). This is entirely different from actually being attracted to the idea that she's a subhuman. Men on the other hand don't think about the women they're attracted to at all beyond what other men's fantasies tell them, and this does play into the idea of women as literal subhumans.

Men perceive women as objects first, humans second. For women, that is by necessity reversed.

SnowAssMan · 2021-05-29T11:31:07+00:00

Whenever gender realists bring that up they are trying to undermine autogynaephila, or make it seem like it proves that they are women, since women supposedly feel the same way about themselves.

The problem with that is, it's the wrong comparison. These men are attracted to women, so why compare them to women who are attracted to men? Anyone making such a comparison demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding, as usual stemming from ignoring sexual orientation

If you're going to try to compare them to women, the women in question would have to be lesbians. Autogynaephiles tend to be hyper-feminine, while lesbian women tend to be anything but. Autogynaephiles get turned on doing "ladies'" things, like shaving their legs, while lesbians are the female demographic least likely to engage in stereotypically feminine practices, like shaving their legs.

MarkTwainiac · 2021-05-29T19:20:15+00:00

I hear that what women experience is more a sense of status and confidence that comes with being sexually attractive. It's more akin to the female version of men flexing in the mirror.

But the topic here is autogynephilia, right? From what Anne Lawrence, Blanchard and J Michael Bailey have written, what AGPs do a lot in front of their mirrors isn't "flexing." It's jerking off whilst dressed & "dolled up" in the attire and accoutrements they wear to help them imagine themselves as women.

I have no scientific sources to back this up, but from being a woman for a long time, knowing lots of women and asking many women, I am pretty confident that masturbating in front of mirrors is not customary female behavior.

VioletRemi · 2021-05-30T11:42:45+00:00

Aytogynephilia is impossible in natal women just by definition.

Thinking of yourself as a woman (female) during sex or putting yourself on a woman's (female) position when watching porn while being a woman (female) yourself - is the norm.

I think there was already such post in this sub, but was deleted because of trolling. There were big answers to it. I found only version of it in GC sub, tho: /s/GenderCritical/comments/7m8p/can_cisgender_women_biological_females_be/

whoamiwhowhowhowho · 2021-06-03T19:13:59+00:00

I'm late but here goes. I sometimes enjoy looking attractive even if I'm alone, and I can see how someone might think that's roughly analogous to AGP or how it might turn up looking like AGP in a study that doesn't differentiate well, but it seems qualitatively different to me from the way I've heard AGP described. Most importantly, it's not physically arousing. It's a psychological boost to feel attractive, and I might enjoy how I look aesthetically in a similar to way to how I find a beautiful woman pleasing to look at as a straight woman, but it's not physically arousing like the self-reports of trans women who become aroused when wearing feminine clothes.

Aside from all that, it makes sense that a woman would conceptualize herself as a woman who is being desired in ways that women are typically desired. That is entirely different from someone becoming aroused at putting on a skirt or being recognized as a woman, and I'd be shocked if you found a female human anywhere who experiences that. Being recognized as female and wearing standard women's clothing are day-to-day aspects of life for most women, and most men do not typically sexualize women specifically based on those characteristics, so males becoming aroused at things happening to them that are so mundane to women and not typically considered sexual sounds like its own category to me.

worried19 · 2021-05-30T23:20:14+00:00

By the way, guys, there's still an active thread if you want to talk more about masculinity and femininity and sexuality:

https://saidit.net/s/GCdebatesQT/comments/5f0q/both_do_you_believe_there_are_sexual_components

It's cool that Saidit doesn't automatically archive threads after 6 months like Reddit does.

mitter_matter · 2021-06-11T15:27:17+00:00

So if a man leaves the gym feeling really good about his body and how his clothes fit it, is that not a sensual experience? His desire is in no way connected to his confidence and feeling in his body? Would people struggle to understand that and describe it as either "lewdness" or men's "attraction to their own bodies"?

Why is female sexuality always treated as so exotic and incomprehensible?

The statistic that always inspires these weird conversations is something about women replying affirmatively to fantasizing about their bodies. Do men's fantasies never involve how their body feels and is looked at and touched, like living both parts? Maybe not because their imaginal realm is stunted by porn. But it's not the same thing as wanting to have sex with yourself. Christ.

theory_of_this · 2021-05-29T10:03:31+00:00

I don't think it's normal but I think there is some overlap on the extremes.

It's like I'm a crossdresser and it's partly erotic. It's both identity and eroticism. I want to express it and it puts me in the mood for sex play.

How do I rationalise that?

I think there is some "trans" component in me. I can feel like there is some desire for "female sexual display." I know gc would find this offensive and disgusting but I'm trying to rationalise it and the wider world. In that sense I have that component but I don't think I'm female.

It seems reasonable to me that there is natural sexual orientation and sexual display in a dimorphic animal.

That sexual dimorphism can also produce sexual variation at the edges which has dynamic effects. In that sense I am essentialist and also essentialist about the small percent of gender variant people.

For example gay men and straight women are attracted to men. However that attraction to men does not manifest in exactly the same way. They have more sex partners and use more visual porn. They also are probably attracted to more divergent gender expression, and even the strong masculine expression is more "fetishistic."

There are women who express their attraction to me in a similar way but they are rarer.

I think human sexual display might have a similar pattern.

To me this makes more sense than the Blanchardian model which has too many holes. But I could of course be completely wrong :)

So I don't think male and female sexuality is a perfect mirror. So the mirror muscle flex isn't going to be identical. What populations find attractive about men is not the perfect mirror of what they find attractive about women.

I know a lot of this disgusts gc and I can see the reasons. But I don't think disgust is a good arbiter of morality. Homosexuality of men and women still triggers disgust in right wing people. The science might be debated but the pattern looks strong to me. People who disapprove of gay people often use disgust and moral disapproval interchangeably.

I know gc finds the idea of men in dresses with erections in female areas especially...well everything. I'm certainly not here to justify that and I don't think crossdressers in general approve of these people.

I know trans people often find crossdressers disgusting too. Which is another topic.

Do I think men are more fetishist, prone to paraphilias? Possibly. But why? I don't think there an be genes or hormones for all the paraphilias. That's absurd. There might be one natural trigger. For instance higher "sexual drive" that triggers a higher rate of manifestation.

And yet if you look at mainstream popular erotic for straight women you will find lots of things associated with paraphilias. This is often coming from women and with mass appeal.

I am essentialist but I think the triggers of differences have to be a small number and also likely to manifest in both sexes, even if the rates are different.

Another issues here is "essentialism."

The autogynephilic theory comes from the Blanchardian model. Which is very essentialist.

So it is odd to see it casually used by gc at times because in its model men are naturally masculine and women are naturally feminine. Only some gay men can be naturally feminine and some gay women naturally masculine. There isn't much room for dismantling gender in that.

As I discussed with another commenter here recently, gc often finds it impossible to justify femininity at all without invoking men as the cause, while not using the same rule for masculinity. Femininity in straight women is to please men, femininity in gay men is to please men, femininity in straight men to please the same men. Which argues into a position that everyone ought to be masculine.

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