outlawroad: linearbbq: outlawroad: You’re...

12th November 2011

Post reblogged from Attempted Danger with 22 notes

linearbbq:

outlawroad:

You’re right, although I doubt that there’s an actual biological method for altering sexual orientation. We don’t even have a viable way of lowering sex drive, although that’s probably because nobody in the medical/scientific community believes that lowering sex drive is something we should want or be able to do. I don’t know where science would even begin to figure out why we’re attracted to a particular gender instead of another or both or neither. We can certainly map out what happens in the brain when we feel sexual attraction or romantic attraction, but the cause? That’s really tough. And until they figure out that cause, there’s really nothing science can do to influence the attraction one way or another.

The bolded portion is completely untrue. Setting aside drugs like SSRIs that have decreased libido as a common side effect but aren’t usually prescribed for that reason, cis male sex offenders commonly receive injections of Depo-Provera, testosterone blockers, or other hormone treatments to eliminate their sex drives. See, for example, this article about voluntary use of SSRIs and testosterone blockers for pedophiles in the UK, a Polish law mandating chemical castration for pedophiles, and a similar law in Louisiana.

Of course, the same drugs have also been used as a “treatment” for homosexuality — most famously for Alan Turing, who ultimately committed suicide because of it. Plenty of people in the medical and scientific communities think that lowering sex drive is something we should want to do, and they’ve been doing it to cis men — and, in some cases, using it as a weapon of institutionalized heterosexuality — for the better part of a century.

Yes, but in all of those cases, they seek to lower sex drive as punishment, in a controlled environment. They view the lowering of libido as a bad thing for the subject; it’s done to people whose sexuality society wants to control. But if someone wants access to a libido-suppressant out of their own personal interest, they couldn’t just go to their doctor and ask for it in those terms. They couldn’t have it prescribed to them like they could with Viagra. Their desire to lower or kill their libido would be questioned and labeled unhealthy or symptomatic of some fear, trauma, etc surrounding sex. The medical and scientific communities wouldn’t support libido inhibitors for the general public, and there’s not a specific medication manufactured for that purpose, the way libido enhancement drugs are designed specifically for the purpose of heightening your libido. I’ve looked. I wouldn’t count drugs like anti-depressants that can sometimes incidentally result in a low libido because like you said, in that case it’s a side effect and not the purpose of the drug. A very unpleasant side effect, according to most people.

The comment that I was addressing said simply that doctors and scientists aren’t interested in ways to lower libido and don’t know how to do it, period. That’s patently false and erases the blatant oppression and medical abuse faced by many men who experience same-sex attraction. That was my point.

Doing a few Google searches turns up a ton of people expressing a desire to lower their sex drive, for reasons ranging from religion to lack of sexual outlets, as well as medical and psychological literature and casual articles talking about how to do it. To give just one example, there’s an article about it on LiveStrong, which is a pretty darn mainstream health website. And — I didn’t know this until I started Googling, so mea culpa — drugs like SSRIs are actually prescribed as a primary treatment for people who are troubled by the way their sex drives affect their lives, and want to decrease them. The cases I’m reading about are mostly people who think that their libido is higher than average, rather than people who don’t consider themselves hypersexual but do want libidos as low as possible. Still, being troubled by the extent of your sex drive is something that’s being recognized and treated by at least some doctors, and the threshold for “too high” is something that’s determined on an individual basis, since there are pretty much no objective measures of libido out there — the general philosophy seems to be “if it’s bothering you, then it’s too high”.

(I will add anecdotally that I know of trans guys whose doctors have lowered their testosterone doses because they wanted to diminish their sex drives as much as possible — which is effectively the same thing as cross-hormone treatment for cis guys — which is exactly the same treatment that I was talking about in my previous post.)

And, for the record, Viagra doesn’t lower libido, as in the desire to have sex — it increases physical ability to have an erection, which is not the same as sex drive. There’s no such thing as a “libido enhancement drug” currently on the market. If anything, we know more about suppressing libido clinically than we do about increasing it. Funny, huh?

Source: acesecrets

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