Salon Magazine article on why some guys like trans porn

[Carolynn]

http://www.salon.com/2011/10/21/whats_b ... singleton/

Interesting.

[Anita]

Thanks, Carolynn. Reading about this subject is sometimes difficult, because there are always a lot of speculation and assumptions that go on about this. I've lived out both sides of this--I live with a fulltime trans woman, and I've presented as a woman and dated men.

I know that one thing that bothers me is that transgender attraction can get flack from everyone--straight people, transgender people, and gay people alike. It may bother some of us on here, too. That's OK--people can have strong feelings about this. Just don't bash me for my view of it.

I have mentioned Renee Reyes before. She still has a very popular TG website, that specifically 'talks' to the admirers out there, in a series of articles. Her interest in this has waned the further she gets into her own transition, but she did not stigmatize the admirers. She felt that a majority of these men had a sexual preference for female presentation. They weren’t necessarily exclusively interested in either genetic women or trans women. But if they were going to encounter trans women, they needed to know more about them, and she was presenting her views of who trans women were.

Renee's views are hardly survey-proven, and unfortunately, as Blanchard said, there are few studies on this. So everyone's view of it is often personal and makes assumptions, including what I'll say here.

For some reason, I spent most of my adult life totally unaware of trans women. So I don’t know how I would have felt about them as potential partners when I was say, 25. As oldtimers here know, I deliberately experimented with being bi-sexual in my 30s, and it just didn’t work for me. I wasn’t really attracted to men, and I couldn’t understand their attraction to me, either. I didn’t know that trans women existed; they were invisible, in my world.

It was different when I went out there to present my ideas about being a girl. I read the book mentioned in the article, and like the gay author, I found that straight men were attracted to me as a woman. It was a totally different world. I understood straight men in a way that I’ll never understand gay men, and I understood why they liked ‘female’ me—because I was always attracted to women, too. And this is important, too—I don’t see my female side as some poor imitation of a woman. She may not be biologically 'real,' but she’s emotionally real, and men react to that.

At this point my friends always throw up their hands and say, “But these guys aren’t straight if they’re attracted to YOU.” No, they’re not straight in the technical sense of the word, but neither are they necessarily gay or closeted gay men, either. I have gay friends, because of both family and professional ties, and there’s a different world-view and presentation that goes with that identity. They aren’t interested in female identity at all, for the most part. It puzzles me, but I have to acknowledge that for them, women are not part of their focus. They would have no interest in my Anita-self, the same way that many admirers have little or no interest in men.

[DonnaT]

Thinking back to when I was young and naive about such things, I think there was something about the unknown. Who were these women and why did they have a penis while other women did not.

And seeing two women making out was a turn on, and even more so when one of the women had a penis.

The eroticism lost its flavor once I learned how these women came to be. I imagine others don't lose their fascination with it.

[Carol Ann]

Anita,
I did find the article very interesting and I myself have often wondered why as Carol has been hit on a couple of times very hard.

I like your open and honest opinion about this as I myself still try to find the answer to my personal life style. I enjoy talking to T Girls to get their feelings of why. Life has more questions and anwsers to why

[Anthony Simon]

So far as I know, the standard line (alluded to in the article) is that the men concerned are "really" gay or bi-sexual and don't want to admit to themselves. I've seen an interview with non-op TS who makes that assertion and a Hollywood movie, Q&A, has that idea in it. I know I've felt an attraction for someone I believed to be a TS woman, and it's a very powerful force, in my case more like lust than anything else. And I think it has more to do with unresolved aspects of my gender identity than other things.

Since porn is essentially about lust (rather than love). I wonder about this. To me it's essentially about using the person involved for your own benefit. They're an object. So that makes this sort of thing intrinsically dehumanizing. It is interesting that that is the standard view of CDs and TGs/TSs in general - they are dehumanized by society as sexual deviants.

So you could argue that, on some level, society partially validates the existence of TS porn by its basic attitude to TSs/TGs/CDs. Because it makes such people a legitimate locus for the dehumanized form of sexual interest contained in Porn - after all we're "really" sexual deviants. A properly humanized interest in TSs/TGs/CDs would have to involve a giving of the self on the part of person interested - which would involve self-knowledge and investigation.

[Wendae]

I'm personally facinated by Trannie porn of all types. I've been straight all of my life but I do so wonder at the thoughts that enter my mind when viewing the activities of these folks.

[Anita]

Anthony Simon writes:

Since porn is essentially about lust (rather than love). I wonder about this. To me it's essentially about using the person involved for your own benefit. They're an object. So that makes this sort of thing intrinsically dehumanizing. It is interesting that that is the standard view of CDs and TGs/TSs in general - they are dehumanized by society as sexual deviants.

Porn is an equal-opportunity de-humanizer; it will depict anyone or anything that there's a demand to see. I had lost sight of the fact that the original article was about porn.

You may be right about the "standard view." That is, it's a shame when other groups are downgraded in porn movies, but with us, it's where we belong. Ugh. I would hope that's not a wide-spread sentiment, but it could true of some percentage of the general public.

I am truly sorry that this whole subject makes many otherwise straight men feel guilty for their interest in trans porn. If men are interested in women at all, of course they're going to be interested in trans women, too.
The feminine cues are the same ones.

[Carolynn]

I have never understood porn on an emotional level. While in the military, I attended a showing of porn movies once. There were to be three movies, I left after the first which lasted all of 10 minutes. It had no plot, and I just got nothing from it. I could see and hear obvious evidence of enjoyment on the part of the rest of the limited audience, but I decided I would enjoy a game of cards more, even if it were solitaire, and left. I thought about it, and realized that though I could enjoy movies where the characters were sufficiently well developed for me to identify with, or a well written book where I could get into the characters and their motives and travails, but porn just didn't have the capability to attract me.

I suspect that was due in part to my essential lack of a sex drive, a product perhaps of my dual natured brain organization and genetics and in part due to insufficient response to testosterone, which is needed for a physical sexual response. One must have a sex drive, which is mostly between the ears, in order to enjoy or find porn an arousal device, and it is said that men are more easily aroused by representational visual stimuliii than women. I am not sure that is true, however.

I suppose that my qeustion would be is tranny porn any different from any other porn in its dehumanizing aspects and in its primary desire to create male stimulation?

Comments?

[Absaroka]

Max Wolf Valerio writes about his experience with porn while transitioning. He was surprised at the sudden interest he had. As a lesbian he found pictures of naked women mostly uninteresting. Then when he had been using male hormones for a while he found that suddenly he couldn't get enough of it. It would tend to support the idea that men are just more visual, which ties into his comment that after he'd been using male hormones for a short while things began to appear different visually. His sense of smell also changed.

There are some types of porn I like. Movies do not excite me, photographs do. However I've always been entirely clear that pictures are one thing and real people, with whom I have real relationships, are an entirely different matter altogether. I think a lot of men feel that way.

Zari

[Wendae]

Absaroka.... I've always thought that men are aroused by all of their senses. Smell, sight, touch, taste, fantasy. At least I am.

[Absaroka]

Wendae I'd agree with you entirely.

The folks who study these things say that the sense of smell is the most powerful sense in terms of our emotions.

There have been studies that show men find women who are ovulating and thus in the time of month to get pregnant to be more attractive, although none of the subjects could give reasons why they found those particular women more attractive or could guess as to which women were ovulating. Probably some unconscious cue, either visual or olfactory.

The comment about men being more visual was a comment on why men like to look at porn, while women generally do not find it arousing and have made only limited attempts to develope their own porn.

And of course it is a commonplace that the most erotic part of the body is the brain, or mind, if you go in for the brain/mind dichotomy.

Zari

[Wendae]

Absaroka...After being married for several years I noticed a connection between a particular odor to my wife's breath and her time of the month. Of the 75 employees I had 75% were women as were my collegues. Many women now-a-days have no problem letting you know when it is their time whether or not you want to know. I never found the fact very arousing but, it was good to know when dealing with them.

[Absaroka]

Wendae I wasn't talking about a woman having her period, but when she was ovulating, which most often happens at a different time. For many women it doesn't have very obvious clues, which is why women trying to get pregnant wind up taking their temperature to discover when the fertile window is. Their bodies temperature changes slightly when they are able to concieve. Which I suppose could have a lot to do with all the cues that men are only unconsciously aware of.

The only woman I ever knew who would discuss with me when she was ovulating was my wife, who did so for obvious reasons. As opposed to their matter of fact conversations about the other monthly visitor.

I find it really interesting that my wife's period sometimes synchronized itself to those of her closer girlfriends. I have no idea how the body accomplishes this, but apparently it is reasonably common.

Zari

[Carolynn]

I read somewhere in my browsings in the library that when women ovulate there is a pheremone enhancement that some people may be able to detect. It is common among other animals, but we have lost so much of our sense of smell it operates more on a subconscious level, usually, and combines with visual cues. Women usually seem more attractive and sometimes more "playful".

[Paula G]

Many years a go I used to work in an office where my three close colleagues were all female, they managed this odd synchronization and for one week a month my life was hell.