The World Of Unusual Sexual Orientations - Dr James Cantor - #550

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. James Cantor. He's a clinical psychologist and sexologist specializing in hypersexuality and paraphilias. There are a broad range of things that turn humans on. Some are common, some are uncommon, and some are very illegal. James' study of paraphilias exposes him to some of the world's most interesting and unusual sexual desires, with the goal of working out why they even exist. Expect to learn how asexuality could evolve at all, why some able-bodied people feel like they should be amputees, why adults like to be dressed up as babies, the link between left-handedness and child abuse, what James thinks about depression in the trans community, why it's become increasingly impossible to have conversations about dangerous sexual desires, and much more. This episode does get into some pretty spicy and extreme territory when it comes to sexual orientations. And if that is the sort of thing that's going to make you feel a little bit uncomfortable, I advise skipping this one, going back and listening to one of the 549 other episodes that are available. And I'll see you on Saturday. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr James Cantor.
Dr. James Cantor, welcome to the show.

**James Cantor** (1:39)
Pleasure to be here, thank you.

**Chris Williamson** (1:41)
Your research area, paraphilia and associated phenomena, what is paraphilia?

**James Cantor** (1:50)
Well, I study what makes anybody into whatever it is that they're into. When I started, the big question was, and including for myself, what made me gay? What makes a gay person gay? You know, I started with the same curiosity that we all did. I just kind of tripped over the course of my career to an opportunity to start asking the bigger version of that question. Nevermind gay, what makes, you know, all of the others? How does the brain know what to be attracted to or not to be attracted to? And so that then led me to the paraphilias themselves, which are sexual interest patterns, but not just preferences, not blonde versus brunette or top versus bottom. I mean, people who are, it's meaningful to call these sexual orientations unto themselves. They show these are interest patterns like exhibitionists, pedophiles, tuturists, some kinds of cross dressers when they when they funded sexually arousing.
These are profound, profound sexual interest patterns that these people have. And as I say, it seems to show every sign of being innate and immutable. So what's up with that? So the paraphilias, you know, we still debate over, you know, does this one count? Does that one count? But the general idea are these other, other than sexual orientation, other than male versus female, all of the other atypical sexual interest patterns, the really, really built-in, practically born with it kind of interest patterns. So that, that I guess is my non-technical definition of it, allowing room for, we don't exactly know where the boundaries are.

**Chris Williamson** (3:46)
What about asexuality, the least sexual of the sexual paraphilias?

**James Cantor** (3:51)
Yep. There's no good, simple answer. I don't think it's an it. The term is a bit of a catch-all. People these days especially are kind of mixing up medical language, you know, in a medical diagnosis where we've identified the cause of something, with psychiatric diagnosis, which doesn't identify the cause. Psychiatry is different from other branches of medicine. In psychiatry, they label the symptoms, you know, we just call the symptom depression or sadness depression, but whether it's caused by one thing or another, that doesn't matter. You get the same diagnosis, as I say. So psychiatry is unlike the rest of medicine in that it labels just the symptoms. So for the paraphilias and the others, that's, as I said, kind of an open question exactly where the line goes. When do we diagnose it? When do we not?
Is it in the person's favor? So it's not, as I say, it's not such a simple question. So for asexuals, well, it's not posing a problem for anyone else. And there can be way more than one thing leading a person to think that that label kind of fits them. Now it could be somebody just with a low sex drive, you know, but low sex drive is not, pardon the pun, very sexy label for it. But asexual is something that it's a label they can use. All of a sudden they have a support group and people kind of have a big...

**Chris Williamson** (5:27)
It's a banner that you can wave.

**James Cantor** (5:30)
The important part, the part that's very easy to be empathetic for is that it socially tells people how to interact with them. You know, don't start introducing them to potential partners, you know, that they're not gonna be interested and don't take it personally. So it serves a... Can serve a certain legitimate social function. Flip side, there are just regular everyday people with regular everyday insecurities about, you know, whatever it is about their sexual life. And rather than risk rejection, rather than play at that game and risk losing, they adopt the label asexual just to get out of the whole thing. You know, that's not such a healthy reason. You know, if I had such a person in therapy, it'd be reasonable to help a person get over their insecurities. Or for some people, especially on the autism spectrum, there are people who have, you know, social skill deficits. And it's really social skills training that would lead to more self-confidence. And so they don't need a label of asexual. And then, you know, people just as they get older and sex drive drops, again, will adopt the term kind of as a euphemism for low sex drive. So although they kind of have in common a signaling to the people around them, you know, how to interact properly or how to interact in a way that they want to be interacted with, we oughtn't or no scientist should, you know, take it at face value to mean literally that the person lacks a sex drive either. A lot of people can adopt the label for other kinds of reasons. All of which is to say, it's not like we have proof that it doesn't exist either. I mean, if you could be attracted to one pattern, attracted to another pattern, I can imagine attracted to neither. But the last one, and again, because of the very strange seat that that I get to sit in, the other one is that somebody is attracted to something unusual that they don't want to cop to.