Talk:Paraphilia/Archive 1

message: I don't think autogynephilia should be listed here. It's more a theory (and not a very well accepted one)... Should it be removed? Dysprosia 23:31, 1 Dec 2003 (UTC)
replies: text: It looks like the wording has been altered now - is that a more acceptable wording?  Seems to me the issue is not that the concept might exist (I'm sure there are people who exhibit such a trait) but that some try and use it to 'explain' transsexuals.  This 'explanation' is not widely agreed with. I also have issues with the listing of Non-consensual and criminal paraphilias which seems to ignore wording higher up the page.  Specifically, only non-consensual exhibitionism is illegal (and the word is definitely used these days, at least colloquially, to mean with consent also), and necrophilia is neither necessarily non-consensual nor is it illegal in all jurisdictions, though one or both are often true.  There's also the issue that quite a few other paraphilias CAN involve illegal or non-consensual acts. --Morven 00:40, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, it's much better now. Dysprosia 00:44, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)
thread_title: Autogynephilia

message: It is important that ones extremely atypical POV does not become presented as fact within an article space. Consuming feces is NOT becoming increasingly socially accepted, altho some of the others are. Some of what I removed could be quite appropriately replaced with valid content milder in its ... sympathies Sam Spade 07:03, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Rewrite

message: [P0M:] The current version has a strident and moralistic point of view. The objective of an article on paraphilias should be to explain what a respresentative group of them are, and how they are understood to develop. P0M 03:35, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: The current version has/had a NPOV, presenting facts and general consensus on the subject. Sam Spade 03:39, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: [P0M:] Asserting that something is neutral does not make it so.P0M 03:48, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Recent changes

message: :"There is a trend amongst many of left-wing politics, particularly moral relativists and the politically correct, to diminish the negative associations of a wide variety of taboo topics, this being only one." 
User:172 removed this from the article with his usual civility and insightful reasoning, and while I think its an important thing to mention, I don't think the article is so lacking without it as to make it an urgent matter. I figure we can take our time, and discuss the passage. Sam Spade 07:31, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Spade's comment seems pretty reasonable. Let's not forget to add something ~ Dpr 03:24, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Removed

message: "Lie well outside the norm" needs to be explained more. Is the claim that paraphilias are practiced by a statistically very small proportion of the population?  If so, that may not apply to all things typically called paraphilias, and certainly not to anything called "kinky sex". Some, particularly some of the milder forms of BDSM (erotic spanking, etc.) are relatively popular, though it's hard to gauge just how popular.  Perhaps the claim is instead that they lie outside the popular societal conception of "normal sexual behavior"? I'm not sure how to best describe this. --Delirium 05:51, Apr 13, 2004 (UTC)
:I re-worded it based on the APA's definition of what a paraphilia is which more narrowly defines it and removes much of the questionable (dare say POV) aspect to the passage in question. Lestatdelc 00:44, Apr 14, 2004 (UTC)
::It seems that "outside the norm" was changed to "not part of normative". However, the article on normative states that "such statements are impossible to prove or disprove, thus forever banishing them from the world of the scientific." If it is a mental health, and thus psychiatric, term, then it is scientific, in a sense, and there is a contridiction. Hyacinth 04:54, 11 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Norms

message: The article has been noted as {TotallyDisputed} since 2004-04-07 (marked as such by Sam Spade).  Has a reasonable compromise been reached yet?  If so, can the dispute header be removed?  If not, what else needs to be done? - Korpios 04:56, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: How you like them apples? Sam [Spade] 05:06, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: The two edits you made before pulling the dispute header seem fine, so I guess that wraps that up.  Thanks! - Korpios 05:31, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I made a couple after, have a look. I use dispute headers rather than edit warring, it seems to work alot better. If someone insists on deleting good info, or inserting bad info, and reverts my repairs, I simply dispute and move on until the time is right, returning to make the necessary repairs. Sam Spade 05:37, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: No problems there, only improvements IMHO.  I don't have any issue with noting homosexuality's history under the paraphilia/illness umbrella/definition, since that's fair NPOV.  Hell, it's a fairly important part of the history of homosexuality. - Korpios 05:47, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree w my edits as well of course, just being careful. If you hear some people talk I'm a raving nut who'd like nothing better than to beat gays over the head w my king james bible ;) Sam [Spade] 05:54, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Nah, trust me, I'd bitch/modify/revert if I thought they were out-of-line.    I can't see a good rationale for leaving a (neutral) mention of homosexuality out of the article, and I'd defend its inclusion if it came up. - Korpios 05:58, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Dispute?

message: I feel the recent edit by Outerlimits might've gone too far.  For one thing, it contradicts itself:
:Early, late, and current definitions of paraphilia do not include homosexuality.
is immediately followed by:
:For a brief period of time homosexuality has been included as a paraphilia [...]
Eh? Also, while mentioning that the DSM never technically called homosexuality a paraphilia, that's probably exactly because homosexuality was removed before the term "paraphilia" was inserted into the DSM as a category, as mentioned by Outerlimits; IMHO, an extremely strong case could be made that homosexuality would've been placed under the paraphilia category had it remained. In general, the inclusion of a neutral mention of homosexuality in the article is necessary; based on the definitions given in the intro, it's quite NPOV to mention that homosexuality might be considered one by some. - Korpios 06:22, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Have another look, its a bit better I think Sam [Spade] 06:30, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Homosexuality

message: Exactly where did you hear paraphilia described as "a gift from God"? I am becoming concerned about these recent edits. Sam [Spade] 06:56, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Paraphilia isn't. Homosexuality is so described by the Metropolitan Community Church. - Outerlimits 06:58, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Metropolitan Community Church will need to be mentioned in regards to any statements of that sort. Shall I place a mention of Fred Phelps as well? Sam [Spade] 07:04, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Sure, why not. Give us the benefit of Fred's erudition. Don't forget the Catholics for demon possession, though you many want to point out that they've given that up. - Outerlimits 07:12, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I was trying to make the point to you that neither are relevant here. Sam [Spade] 07:20, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: The point is the fact that someone called homosexuality an "illness" is also irrelevant here. What would be relevant here is if someone called homosexuality a "paraphilia". Outerlimits - 07:32, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: "Gift from God"

message: Do you have any evidence that Paraphilia is statistically normative? I take issue w that insinuation. Sam [Spade] 07:06, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: You've misread that insinuation. The point being made is that paraphilia is defined by societal (or "moral") norms, and not statistical norms. - Outerlimits 07:12, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Do you have any evidence of that? Sam Spade 07:19, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: That paraphilia is "not part of societally normative arousal/activity patterns"?  I think that's actually right on the money.   - Korpios 07:22, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Of course, I was refering to it's statistical status, and that "paraphilia is defined by societal (or "moral") norms, and not statistical norms". Sam Spade 07:23, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: No one did statistical studies of which sex acts people actually participated in in order to decide which acts would be classed as  paraphilias: rather they translated societal (moral) norms into medical jargon. - Outerlimits 07:27, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Normative

message: While necrozoophilia is described as sexual attraction to the corpses or killings of animals, or necrobestiality, necrophilia is just plain the sexual attraction to corpses. The article on Necrophilia partially associates the paraphilia with serial killers and the desire to control.
I think it's a fact, that a lot of cartoon pornography exists, that focuses on sexual arousal through the destruction of human life/bodies. Is this part of necrophilia or another paraphilia not mentioned here? Sorry, I know this got bad formatting, but wikipedia is too slow, so I won't figure out how to do it right. --Ados 20:44, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Necrophilia and destruction centered pornography

message: Well said. There is, however, another possibility involved that may be relevant: The religious account is presumably that some people decide to do things of a sexual nature that go against natural law. The clinical categorization approach apparently attempts to be value neutral and simply to define the behavior that may be problematical in some social contexts -- either for the individual or for the community. The third kind of account attempts to understand and explain what the "para" is actually based on. In so doing, it may give insight into the apparently unexplanable behaviors of some groups of people, and it may even give indications of life situations the avoidance of which can minimize the development of problematical desires and behaviors.  This account says that a paraphilia can result when life events impact and distort the ordinary maturational and learning development of an individual's sexuality. For instance:
*Trauma during the earliest instances of organism can make the trauma-producing event (or some part of it) an expected component of sexual arousal and/or climax.
*Association of sexual arousal and climax (coming out of adolescent sex play, for instance) with other behavior and stimuli that are connected in other mammals (and probably in humans although by now "civilized" out of us) can make them expected components of sexual arousald and/or climax.
*Alleviation of socially conditioned feelings of guilt by some compensatory mechanism, and thereby the reduction of inhibitions against sexual activity, can make the compensatory mechanism a needed or at least very rewarding component of sexual arousal and/or climax.
Understood in this way, one can separate etiology from questions of danger to individuals. An individual who only can enjoy orgasm in cases where either s/he or his/her partner is punished to "pay for the sin" and balance the books as it were may be entirely innocent in regard to the original trauma that established this condition. Nevertheless, his/her need to produce suffering may have very severe consequences that the society ought to deal with to protect its individual members (including the person suffering from this paraphilia). (金) 
The explanations for problematical behavior of the first group rest on authority, not science. The assertions of the second group do not attempt to explain, only to categorize in a value-neutral way. The assertions of the third group are all testable by scientific means, although there are ethical limits to what can be done experimentally with humans.  As this kind of behavior may involve elements of the "nature and nurture" matrix, determining whether life events really cause a given paraphilia may depend on careful studies of identical twins. As both paraphilias and identical twins are uncommon, accumulation of enough positive instances to inspire faith in some etiological theory might take a great deal of time. However, it only takes one good negative instance to shoot a theory down, so it would be unreasonable, I think, to consign these ideas to the scrapheap for quasi-science.(金)
The issue of the degree of disfunctionality of these behaviors has one foot in the factors of human interaction in which all societies probably agree (e.g., it is bad to kill your neighbor for no valid reason) and the other foot in factors upon which societies may disagree.  Public nudity, for instance, may be arousing for an individual and offensive for bystanders in large parts of the world. But in some parts of the world, especially before Christianity and other such religions carried their messages to those places, the public nudity of an individual who needed it to experience arousal might never become an issue. (The fact of arousal "on the beach" rather than in the beach house might become an issue, but that is a slightly different angle on the problem.) (金)
If something is a "paraphilia" only in a certain society, it hardly seems to me that it could be a real condition of the individual. In fact, I can't think of any way to finish the sentence: "Only among members of this one group is _____ considered a paraphilia." Calling something a paraphilia seems to me to necessarily imply that some causal contingent factor produced a detour in the normal course of an individual's development.(金)
On the other hand, the "normalcy" of life events is a statistical idea. What happens in cases wherein the precipitating factor is so common in a given society that the vast majority of people are programmed by it? For instance, it may be biologically perfectly unexceptional for human beings to be able to engage in intercourse in the daylight and in view of other people. But in a given society such sexual interaction may be so strongly inhibited that darkness and privacy become necessary for intercourse to even be initiated. (金)
The key ideas seem to be plasticity, problematicity, and frequency of appearance.  Attempting to evaluate how far a given behavior is removed from the "intended purpose of sexual intercourse" may be a fruitless exercise, as, from the perspective of the individual, all such behaviors may be things needed by the individual to achieve intercourse in the first place. That question is indeed likely to be relative to the culture.   金 (Kim) 02:03, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Kim