dune

• dune 20 Aug 2023 10:20 UTC

  0 points

  0

  in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Ex­plain­ing the vari­a­tion in dis­tress across au­tophilic con­di­tions: body image, dys­pho­ria as ego-dys­tonic pro­cess­ing, and why fur­ries aren’t suici­dally dys­pho­ric: a spec­u­la­tive con­tri­bu­tion to AGP /​ Au­tophilia Discourse

  Wow thank you for the response! These are really good points that have increased my uncertainty in my core hypothesis. I pretty much agree with you but I want to say a few things.

  these autophilias are too rare and that both my and other’s investigations are too brief/​superficial to be helpful for understanding. There is too much uncertainty about what they are like.

  Definitely true for lots and lots of autophilias (god there are a potential infinite library of them truly), but for things like ‘autoanthrophilia’ (furries), or the autozoophilia-like sexuality visible in otherkin /​ therians, there are large communities full of people willing to talk about their experiences with the sexuality and how it impacts them and what sort of thing it correlates with. That being said of course in surveying these communities you’re already inducing a potentially serious selection bias as you mention. Ugh.

  I haven’t yet been able to parse any of the neuroscience on gender identity well enough to believe it.

  Yeah fair, I’m somewhat disillusioned but I think some really high-level patterns have been holding up in a way that I take seriously. I’m probably overconfident though don’t really trust my reasoning abilities here, subjectively I still have a real hunch in it. If anything I think the research I mentioned is probably pretty ‘empty’ in the sense of : obviously the network that activates more when someone feels more connected /​ in ownership of their body is going to activate less when people who have body-dysphoric conditions (like GD) look at their body. Like- you would very much expect that to happen, its hardly surprising or informing. Given that this body-self congruence measure used in those studies also shows GD-like patterns in anorexia, BDD, etc it’s not like this is some special para-Blanchardian model, I can’t see why Blanchard would have issues with this finding, people who don’t like their bodies show it in their body-image-networks, yeah.

  This lead to me making a survey about them and posting it in /​r/​AskAGP.

  Don’t you have a selection bias here already cause of lower dysphoria and stuff like you mentioned? (I don’t know what you’ve accounted for though and I assume you did think of that of course, sorry, would like to see the data). I always had scepticism around the idea of ‘phantom limbs’, in that I felt like a lot of subjects were talking about a much weaker phenomenon than real vivid phantom limbs. I’ve felt vague AGP and furry/​therian-related ‘phantom’ feelings myself but I recognised that these were very far from real phantom limbs and were more just me vividly imagining the sensations of a different body so that it felt bordering on real. This may be projection but I wonder if a lot of people reporting phantom sensations felt those types of vivid imagination. That being said I’m not convinced its a dead end as opposed to just being seriously overreported (for example some (probably not a lot) trans men really do seem to have vivid phantoms I’ve seen scatterings of people in communities I’m in), I continue to think a causal influence on body schema of autophilia is very plausible.

  how does one measure the concepts within the model?

  Shortly after writing the article I realised the lack of established falsifiability criteria /​ measurement ability then proceeded to simply continuously forget to create them ;w; apologies. I have some ideas on this now but nothing finalised. If you’re still interested I could tell you if /​ when I create them but I’m not sure now.

  Thank you again, I intend to write and research more about autophilia and paraphilia and will definitely be better and more empirical next time! (still gonna vomit some more silly ideas out into the world too)