Why Do We Have Fetishes? (2018 Rerun)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Hey, deserve your listeners.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
We've had podcast episodes before in which we talked about
paraphilias in which people exhibit preference or compulsions for sado
masochism or voyeurism or exhibitionism other kinds of and then
it can get a little darker, like wanting to actually

(00:29):
harm other people while having sex. And we talked about
them in detail. But what we didn't get to is
perhaps why we evolved these things, because you know, it's
hard to nail that down. But I thought we would
have y've all laur on the podcast and see is

(00:51):
an expert on these sorts of things. Welcome to the podcast,
you've all, thank you for having me. This is the
Psychology and Staudtle Podcast. I'm your host, doctor Kirk Kanda.
I'm a therapist and a professor. You've all can you
introduce yourself please?

Speaker 3 (01:04):
Yes, I'm Uvallo. I live in Colorado in Boulder, and
I have a PhD in culture studies which I wrote
about the evolution of the capacity for fervor and awe
and religious conversion and right now I'm turning that into
a book.

Speaker 1 (01:20):
So what will the book be called?

Speaker 3 (01:22):
Well, the current title is either the infatuated primate or
the awe inspy primate.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
The episode today is about the sexual perverted primate, so
help us understand that.

Speaker 3 (01:36):
Well, So we need to situate that within a context.
So let me start by introducing a thing called sexual imprinting,
which is in animals. Primarily we see it in birds,
but probably exists in many other and many mammals as well.
And sexual imprinting, like other types of imprinting, means that

(02:01):
there is a sensitive period in development when the bird
will decide or you know, it's not that it's conscious,
but the bird will determine who it is that she
wants or he wants to have sex with.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
Yeah, it's similar to the more well known phenomenon of
some birds imprinting on who is their mother that they're
going to follow around. So I think most people know
that if you are there at a particular time for
a young bird and you're giving food, and you're giving

(02:40):
warmth and attention, then that bird will imprint on you
and believe that you're the bird's mother or you know,
some version of that, and will follow you around just
like they would follow around their mother of the same species,
or saying that there's a similar process for sexual press friends.

Speaker 3 (03:01):
Yes, so if you take an egg of one species
and you put it into the nest of another species.
There are certain species that will as they grow up,
they all will become sexually interested in the species that
was adopted them. So that's the mother and siblings that
raise them, probably a father as well, and not be

(03:26):
imprinted on their own species.

Speaker 1 (03:28):
Interesting.

Speaker 3 (03:29):
Yes, And another example of imprinting that people are familiar
with is phobias. So you have a tendency for a phobia,
but then around age five, if you're scared of spiders,
you'll become a rachinophobic. If you're scared of heights, you'll

(03:49):
become right. So it is a strange combination of nature
and nurture. It's neither nature nor nurture. It is a
nature program that says, take information from the environment and
incorporate that.

Speaker 1 (04:05):
Right.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
And it makes sense, right because it's a more flexible
system that allows an organism to adapt to the reality
of their life once being born, rather than being rigidly
programmed so to speak to one instinct.

Speaker 3 (04:23):
Yeah, well sometimes yeah, So this would be a selection
for plasticity, in this case, a very specific type of plasticity.
But sometimes you don't want it, right, So the cuckoo
who is raised in another nest, you don't want the
cuckoo to be imprinted on its adoptive family, but to
another cuckoo, right, right, So sometimes it's such a valative

(04:46):
and sometimes it's not.

Speaker 2 (04:48):
It's fine for it to be raised by the other words,
but in order to reproduce, it has to be, you know,
driven towards other cuckoos.

Speaker 3 (04:58):
Yeah. Now, today they do say that the mother cuckook
visits with the the baby periodically, so it's it's more complicated.
But uh, it seems like we have sexual imprinting in humans.
And so that I'm not the first one to say this.

(05:21):
The first one to say this is a woman called
Hannah arn Son, and she wrote her PhD about this,
and she also wrote a chapter in a book called
Maladaptive Maladapting Minds. So, but there are certain certain things

(05:43):
that that it is that I will add that she
doesn't mention. So one of those things is that we
notice a huge increase in sexual variability around the eight century, right, Okay,
so the Marquis de Sade is right late in the

(06:07):
eighteenth century and.

Speaker 1 (06:11):
In Western culture.

Speaker 3 (06:12):
Yeah, only in the West. Yeah, maybe Japan, but I'm
not sure what's going on there. But before that, we
don't really see. I mean, there are sort of strange
anecdotes in the ancient world of you know, people having
sex with animals, but you know, the Kamasutra is very
different than the Fifty Shades of Gray.

Speaker 1 (06:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (06:35):
Right, So it seems like the increase in variability and
sexuality coincided when humans started hiding sexuality from children and
when privacy became a thing.

Speaker 1 (06:48):
Interesting I think about that. Yeah, it makes sense.

Speaker 3 (06:51):
Yes, So normally forever, kids always saw people having sex
around them, right, and privacy is surprisingly recent.

Speaker 2 (07:01):
Yeah, because in the you know, the ninety nine point
nine percent of people lived in very small homes that
didn't afford different rooms for different people, and there would
be twelve children, and you couldn't avoid at least occasionally

(07:23):
viewing or hearing or having some awareness of the way
that your parents, you know, when your parents were having
sex and the way they were, or your older siblings
or maybe even just other people in the village or something.

Speaker 1 (07:36):
You would there was just a lot less privacy.

Speaker 3 (07:39):
Right, Yeah, And actually there was no privacy and there
was no concept of privacy. Really for damasses. If you
go to Versailles, for example, the hallway goes through the rooms.
There is no you can't. The rooms are connected in
a way that two you have to go walk through
the rooms. Because they don't need privacy, right and they

(08:02):
don't think about it. But once you have privacy, and
once you start hiding sexuality from children, which you know, accelerates.
It's maybe among aristocrats in the eighteenth century, which is
the Marquis de Sade, but nineteenth and twentieth century becomes
more and more common.

Speaker 1 (08:19):
Of course, in the way, why did they start doing that?

Speaker 3 (08:23):
So that's a part of Victorian morality, and it is
it comes with a certain interpretation of Christianity about children
being pure. Children sometimes are good, sometimes are bad, and
you're thinking of sexuality as something bad, which also they
change back and forth. But there was a coinciding of

(08:46):
seeing children as good and sexuality is bad, and so
they needed to protect children from sexuality. That's I'm not
an expert on this history, but that's my understanding.

Speaker 2 (08:58):
But the Victorian cultural movement, shall we say, is a
well known cultural phenomenon in the West.

Speaker 3 (09:05):
Yes, and they stop talking about sexuality altogether, especially with children,
but in polite company, right, so as coinciding with the
hiding of sexuality from children, children do not are not
able to be imprinted on the sexual act.

Speaker 2 (09:29):
Right, mean that we evolved to have plasticity around being
imprinted by seeing other people have sex.

Speaker 1 (09:38):
Is that what you're saying?

Speaker 3 (09:39):
Yes, and or even knowing about sex? I mean there
are kids today who do not know I mean that
do not know what the genitals of the opposite sex
look like until they're you know, late teens, So you
obviously would not be able to imprint on that if
you're sensitive. Period is you know, four, five, six, seven,

(10:04):
which is now. There are reasons to believe that around
age six something happens regarding sexual imprinting, because when you
have when you set up a couple to marry each other,
an arranged marriage, and you meet the husband and the

(10:25):
wife when they're six year olds, they will not be
attracted to each other. Right, when they're eight year old,
nine year old, they will or they might right, yeah,
But before that it seems like they would treat each
other like siblings, so they will not be sexually attracted.
But it seems around age six or something around there,

(10:48):
something regarding that kind of sexual imprinting happens. So it
could be that other other types of sexual imprinting, and
I'm going to talk about three or two or three
separate imprintings that take place. So first of all, and

(11:09):
this might or might not have anything to do with imprinting,
but that's sexual orientation, right. So we know that if
identical twins one of them is homosexual, the chance that
the other one would be homosexual is fifty percent, So
that's a lot bigger than random, but also not one
hundred percent. So it could be that there is some

(11:32):
element of imprinting, but it's probably probably not. No. The
other two types of imprinting is one of them is
what is the sexual act?

Speaker 1 (11:42):
Right?

Speaker 3 (11:43):
What do you want to do with a member of
the opposite sex or the same sex? And that is
where you get all the paraphilia, right yeah, And it's
a huge variety, right Yeah.

Speaker 2 (11:58):
And I should say that I in my episodes on paraphilia.
The whole concept is problematic in my view, particularly as
it's laid out in the DSM five, because there are
some things that most of us can decide, uh, most
of us would agree that should be identified as pathology

(12:22):
like the pleasure in harming other people while having sex,
which leads people to wanting to rape people to have
their sexual needs met. This is harmful, it's obvious, and
it's it's we could deem it as pathological, particularly if
it's something that they can't really control or can't be

(12:43):
adjust to. And but in the same chapter there are
other things like like sado masochism for example. Now I'm
trying to remember what there's like nine of them. I'm
trying to remember. I should have I should have read
up on it. But do you know the one the
aphelias that are in the d s M, not the
d s M.

Speaker 3 (13:03):
I have here a book called Who's Been Sleeping in
Your Head? The Secret World of Sexual Fantasies by Brett
Carr ok a h R where she does a big survey. Okay,
so I can read you from the table of contents.
So he has threedom. You know, orgies. There's cheating, right,

(13:25):
there's people who want to cheat or want to be cheated.

Speaker 1 (13:27):
One.

Speaker 3 (13:28):
There's fantasies of celebrities. There's exhibitionism, uh, fetishism, transvestism, homeo vort.

Speaker 2 (13:39):
Right, right, so transsism, right, just dressing up as a
in a way that culturally speaking, is expressive of another gender.

Speaker 3 (13:51):
M hm.

Speaker 2 (13:52):
To call that, you know pathological is I think highly problematic.

Speaker 3 (13:58):
But isn't in the DSM. And I felt that it's
only uh described as a problem if someone has a
has a problem with it. Someone as a problem.

Speaker 1 (14:09):
Well, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (14:11):
Well the reason why it's a problem is because society
sees it has a problem. You know, the fact that
I dress up quote unquote as a masculine person, I
don't have a problem with that because no one bullies
me or ridicules me, or tries to kill me or
thinks I'm a bad person because I'm dressing quote unquote

(14:31):
in the cultural decidedly way that men are supposed to dress.
So of course, if I dressed as a woman, then yeah,
you know, a good portion of society is going to
treat me badly, Yeah, in some covert ways. And so
to say that just because there's a you know, because
the problem that they say is you know, a problem

(14:52):
at home, school or work or something, right, And it's like,
if I dressed up as a woman at home, school
and work would be problems. I would feel ashamed, I
would be oppressed. I would I would you know if
I dressed as a Yeah, if I dressed as a man,
I would have less problems. So you see the problem there, Right,
It's like putting those together, you know, dressing as a

(15:17):
culturally non you know, as as the other gender or
some other expressive way in the same paragraph or you know,
chapter as wanting fantasizing and wanting and actually raping other people.
I just find to be really problematic because raping other
people and the harm there is not a cultural aspect,

(15:39):
you know. We you know, we definitely do ostracize and
stigmatize and oppress people who rape people.

Speaker 1 (15:45):
But I think most of us would say that's okay,
you know, like.

Speaker 3 (15:49):
Of course, and pedophiles even if they don't rape people.

Speaker 2 (15:54):
Right, Well, so that's a whole other conversation in terms
of pedophilia versus sexual station. Right, you have people who
think or fantasize about having sex with And I didn't
realize there was a whole debate until I started talking
about this on the podcast that there are people, there's
there's a political movement so to speak, of people who

(16:14):
are pedophiles. They fantasize or have a preference for having
sex with some some younger age or person. It could
be you know, eleven year olds or five year olds
or whatever, and they never act on it, and they
say that there's nothing wrong with them having the fantasy.

(16:35):
You know, people have fantasies about its, People have fantasies
about raping people and or about being raped. And most people,
once they wrestle with the implications and learn that there
are people out there who just fantasize and never do
anything with it, you know, it could agree that they're
you know, we shouldn't throw them in jail or call

(16:55):
them nasty words. As long as they're not harming other
people then and they're not buy porn that exploits other
people and all that kind of stuff. Then you know,
many people agree that that they shouldn't be pathologized. And
so so anyway, whereas in our culture of you know,

(17:16):
we're still probably half Victorian, you know, we just label
all of that as problematic and gross and perverted and
a moral and against nature.

Speaker 3 (17:28):
And illegal in some case. Right, so we were talking
about the imprinting regarding the sexual act, right, it seems
that that might not be changeable. And this is studies
done on pedophiles because there are some imprintings that are changeable,

(17:51):
for example, phobias. Right, you can cure phobias, but it
seems that you cannot cure pedophilia or change it.

Speaker 2 (17:59):
Yeah, I mean I guess in the same way, in
the same way. I mean I guess in the same
way that we can't change the way you feel about
your mother. For example, you know if your mother was
there for you, breastfeeding you or feeding you and holding you.
And you know, from the time you're born until you're three,

(18:23):
there's a certain feeling that we all have around our
mothers or father whoever it was, that you know one
or more people who really were there for us during
that time. It's a special imprinting bond that children and
you know, adults will have towards towards their parents.

Speaker 3 (18:43):
And it includes a sexual repulsion things like that, what
do you mean, No, you're not attracted to.

Speaker 2 (18:50):
Your mother, right, Yeah, And we have tried to change
that sometimes because you'll have kids who have their parents
die for example when they're too or their parents give
them up for adoption, or they're in an orphanage early
in life, and then age two there they go into

(19:12):
a family and what we find is that that you know,
critical window for imprinting is gone, has passed, and the
person never really attaches in a healthy way to those
other adults, no matter how wonderful and loving they are.

(19:35):
I specialized in this in the beginning of my career.
For some reason, I had a lot of Korean adoptees
in America, and I think it's because I'm half Asian,
so they thought, well, you know, he's an Asian guy,
so maybe he connects with Asian adoptive parents or adoptive kids.
So a lot of Asian, a lot of Korean kids

(19:55):
adopted into white families, and they I learned over time,
over working with dozens of people, that I could predict
the level of defiance and difficulty with the teenager based
on at what age the Korean kid was adopted into
the family. So if the kid was adopted at day

(20:17):
say like ninety, you know, three months, then the dysfunction
would be a lot less than if the kid was
adopted after.

Speaker 1 (20:25):
One and a half years.

Speaker 2 (20:27):
Yeah, and past like one and a half years adopted
in the family, the dysfunction would be tremendous. You know,
the attachment problems, the lying the defiance, the lack of
motivation to please any authority figure, the drug use, the
criminal behavior was just it was just a you know,

(20:50):
off the charts for a lot of these kids. Not
that all kids are doomed, you know, if they're adopted.

Speaker 3 (20:57):
But also it depends on what happens to them before
they were adopted. So if they did have a loving family,
it might not be as bad as.

Speaker 2 (21:06):
If exactly maybe for some reason. If I remember, right
in Korea, there were actual orphanages with nurses who have
shifts and don't necessarily bond with one.

Speaker 1 (21:20):
Child, you know.

Speaker 2 (21:21):
Yeah, so, and I worked with other adoptees too. It's
not just Koream kids. It would be like kids from
the old Yugoslavia.

Speaker 1 (21:29):
Or something like that. It was, it was the same thing.

Speaker 2 (21:32):
But anyway, so, so there's a critical window for sexual
present that you're.

Speaker 3 (21:38):
Or a sensitive period. I think it's it's sometimes referred to.

Speaker 1 (21:41):
Okay period, Yeah where you are?

Speaker 3 (21:45):
Yeah, were you.

Speaker 2 (21:46):
And you're saying it's is it zero to seven or
is it like four to seven?

Speaker 3 (21:53):
I would I would guess maybe three to seven. But
again this is just guesses.

Speaker 2 (21:57):
Right, Well, that's consistent with how so it's interesting that
you're bringing this up. You know, at the beginning of
the podcast, I'm like, we didn't talk about. But now
that I remember, I remember hypothesizing in a much less
you know, evidence based manner and technical manner what you're
talking about. Because in my experience personally and professionally, the.

Speaker 1 (22:22):
The time between.

Speaker 2 (22:25):
Usually around four or five six years old, maybe a
little older, there's if you experience something, so the so
tell me if this is correct.

Speaker 1 (22:35):
Or not in terms of how the theory goes.

Speaker 2 (22:38):
Because I was talking about foot fetish, and the story
or the possible story that I talked about was you're
four years old and you're small, and you're playing on
the ground with your legos and you're under you might
even be under the table playing and your mom has

(23:02):
her friend over and you're under the table. And because
we're in a Victorian I guess I didn't include this
part of it, of like, because.

Speaker 1 (23:12):
The lack of sexual right, because the.

Speaker 2 (23:16):
Four year old is not being exposed to missionary you know,
naked missionary.

Speaker 1 (23:21):
Uh uh, you know.

Speaker 2 (23:23):
Visual right, there's there's this lack of anything related to
to sex in terms of the way it's you know
that that way and so he is open to input.
And so he sees this foot and he you know,

(23:45):
it is at least ancillarily if that's a word related
to sexuality, because you know, the foot is related to
the leg, which is related to the vagina, right, And
so for this young boy, if if he was born
with the pre disposition for heterosexuality, then because he has

(24:05):
no access to vagina or visual vagina, this foot is
like a close enough a version to what his body
is set up.

Speaker 1 (24:15):
To imprint, you know, I didn't use the imprint.

Speaker 2 (24:18):
And so so he looks at this foot and he
gets this sexual charge at the age of four. You know,
he doesn't know what it means. You know, he doesn't
think of it as sex, but he gets a jolt
of energy looking at this foot and that in print,
and then kind of rinse and repeat that experience. You know,
like three weeks later, he sees the same woman with

(24:39):
her foot and he gets another charge from it. Well,
that might develop into an adult fetish of feet, where
in order to have an erection or an orgasm somehow
fantasizing about feet or high heel shoes, or even being
in contact with feet and high heel shoes is.

Speaker 1 (24:59):
The only way or one of his preferred ways. Am
I saying this?

Speaker 3 (25:02):
Right? Yes, yes, but there will be there is another
imprinting that that still needs that we need to discuss about,
and that is who the foot is connected to. So
you can say that the one imprinting regards the sexual act,
but then another imprinting regarding the type of person. So

(25:23):
for example, you know, if if.

Speaker 1 (25:27):
Like a white woman or yeah.

Speaker 3 (25:29):
Or a woman with large breaths or with small breasts
or taller or so, you you might be interested in,
let's say, voyeurism, but you then you're separately imprinted on
the type of person you want to be very ristic with.

Speaker 2 (25:48):
Right, right, And this the the sort of obvious evidence
of all this to me is various different intense fetish
is that people will have men and women for things
that have nothing to do with our species. You know,

(26:08):
a couple one hundred thousand years ago, you know, like
panti or high heel shoes for example, or panties. Right,
we didn't have panties, you know, even just until recently, right, So,
and other kinds of you know, other kinds of things
like that, like some people get turned on by guns.

(26:31):
They have a sexual association with you know, assault rifles
or something, or with dressing like the other quote unquote gender.

Speaker 1 (26:41):
You know, even just one hundred and.

Speaker 2 (26:44):
Fifty years ago, the way that quote unquote men and
quote unquote women dressed in our Western society was completely different.

Speaker 1 (26:52):
And yet and.

Speaker 2 (26:54):
So so today you have people who will be turned
on by playing with those gender associations and the only
way and since it's so visceral and biological, right, I mean,
there's nothing more biological than sexuality, right, I mean, having
an erection or having you know, sexual arousal in your

(27:16):
genital region is a biological thing and for many people,
largely out of our control. And so why would panties
are dressing as another gender or high heeled shoes be
the primary focus if it weren't for in printing, right?

Speaker 3 (27:35):
That's right? Yeah, And it shows up at the right time,
and it leads to a thing that that bread Carr
in his book refers to as the masturbation paradox, which
is people who are unhappy with their sexual desires, so

(27:57):
they wish they didn't want that, you know, they want
not to want their own sexual desires. They would rather
have another sexual desire. So it's a strange what he
calls it, refers to it as the masturbation paradox.

Speaker 2 (28:14):
Right, So I'm assuming what he's talking about is that
as you become more lonely, you resort to masturbation because
you don't have any other way of having a sexual no.

Speaker 3 (28:27):
So, well, so he talks about a woman who she's
a Holocaust survivor and she has Holocaust fantasies that she
only can orgasm when thinking about those, and she really
wished she had other fantasy, right, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:46):
And because she masturbates and gets orgasmic visual pleasure from those.

Speaker 3 (28:56):
From things she wished she didn't.

Speaker 2 (28:59):
It further associates those things she doesn't want to associate
with sex with sex.

Speaker 3 (29:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (29:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (29:06):
And in Israel in the nineteen fifties there was pornographic
magazine four which was Holocaust.

Speaker 1 (29:14):
In interesting called stalag Yeah, because you're four years old and
you're in the camps, and.

Speaker 3 (29:23):
Then when you're twenty in Israel in the fifties, you
might be imprinted on a camp situation, you know, Holocaust
in situations.

Speaker 1 (29:34):
What were the what were the visuals in that?

Speaker 3 (29:38):
Well, first of all, you can you can google it
and see but it's it's cartoons, but you know, set
of masochistic situations with you know, scanley clad women and
either dominant or submissive roles, things like that.

Speaker 2 (29:54):
So I'm guessing that's pretty controversial that you would have
sur divers of the camps wanting pornography that involves the camps.

Speaker 1 (30:06):
Yeah, yeah, I had never heard of that before.

Speaker 2 (30:09):
But yeah, if there's ever an example of imprinting right, yes,
totally goes against all your political and moral and socially acceptable.

Speaker 1 (30:21):
More a's and yet people still did it.

Speaker 3 (30:27):
Yeah, and those magazines sold apparently. Yeah, it's it's quite tragic. Now,
another way that this makes sense is within the context
of evolvability. So, uh, do you know then you know
what evolvability is.

Speaker 1 (30:47):
Did we talk about that last time in terms of.

Speaker 3 (30:49):
Maybe I mentioned it.

Speaker 2 (30:50):
Like an openness, like the like the evolution of evolution
or something.

Speaker 3 (30:56):
Yeah, yeah, but evolvability one of the things. A lot
of things to it. But one of the things is
that when things are good, you want to stay the same,
you want the variation to be low, right, and when
things are bad, you want to increase the variation, or
when something has recently changed, you want the variation to increase.

(31:17):
So a famous example is the twentieth century domestication of
foxes in the Soviet Union, where initially all the foxes
looked the same, but those are silver foxes. But when
they started selecting them for tameness or for lack of aggressivity,

(31:39):
they suddenly you had a huge increase in the way
they looked. So suddenly you had curly tail, and you
had different colorations, and you have the you know, flop
years and things like that. So because and this is
a mechanism that increases evolvability or enhance its evolvability, which

(32:00):
is a timely increase in variation.

Speaker 1 (32:03):
Yeah, and so the idea is that.

Speaker 2 (32:06):
Many organisms, if not all, have this mechanism that kicks
in when there is an incursion on the environment. Somehow
the you know, in terms of you know, the it's
hard not to use like problematic language, like the DNA
detects a problem in the Yeah, of course.

Speaker 3 (32:29):
As well, it's the selection pressure has changed.

Speaker 2 (32:32):
Right, and and somehow the DNA there's a mechanism in
the in the in a lot of DNA sequences that
quote unquote detect that it's not detecting, but it's some
response responds to it somehow to say, like Okay, now,
variate in lots of ways, not just you know, because
we don't know exactly what variation is necessary to adapt

(32:56):
to this environment. That you know, increase the amount of
mutations this well variation, Yeah, and.

Speaker 3 (33:03):
So also mutations that that we see a lot in plants.
I don't know how. I think there's also evidence in animals,
but in plants, Yeah, when there's stress, as their stress
they're about to die, they mutate. So mutation is not random.

Speaker 2 (33:17):
Right, And and there always has to be a balance
between the amount of mutations versus stability, because if if
you have too many mutations, then your your species is
likely to to.

Speaker 3 (33:32):
You evolve too too fast. If you evolve too fast,
you can there can be a few horrible winters and
then you might forget something that it took you a
million years to learn.

Speaker 1 (33:41):
Right.

Speaker 3 (33:41):
But if you evolve to slow, then you evolve to
slow and you don't adapt. So there is there needs
to be a balance. But one of the things that
enhances this is a timely increase in variation. And what
we see with sexual perversion is that there was an
inheritance mechanism in place that children saw people having sex

(34:08):
became imprinted on that and that continued right from generation
to generation. And at some point the eighteenth nineteenth century
in the West, and I would guess that studies would
say would would tell us that people in certain third
world countries that are still see sexuality as children, that

(34:31):
they would not have as big a variability in the
types of pornography that people there watching, but in places
like England that you will have huge variability. So once
you change this inheritance mechanism from generation to generation, and
suddenly things have changed, and so it makes sense that

(34:56):
as a response, there's a huge increase in variability. Right,
so suddenly you have foot fetishists and all things like that,
which you know, you we would have if a Roman
emperor was into shoes or something, we probably would have
heard of it, right, But it is a modern phenomena,

(35:17):
but it is real, real pho.

Speaker 1 (35:20):
Well, it is interesting to think about.

Speaker 2 (35:21):
I mean, I'm a bit of a mildly ignorant or
mostly ignorant amateur historian about Roman history. And there are
some Roman emperors and generals who were at least reportedly.

Speaker 1 (35:39):
To have had some interesting paraphilias.

Speaker 3 (35:42):
Yeah, there are, and there's people who dressed as women.

Speaker 1 (35:47):
Right, so you could like Nero for example.

Speaker 2 (35:51):
I mean, it's always you know, historians will say, like
it's hard to know if it was propaganda or not,
but there's you know, at least some evidence that that
Nero and some other problematic emperors had perophilias around rape
and around killing people while having sex, you know, or that. Yeah,

(36:12):
And it just popped in my head. And of course
it's a complete speculation. But when during the time, there
were a lot of slaves and it was it wasn't
uncommon to have sex with slaves, and slaves were also
routinely beaten and sometimes killed, And so I wonder if
that's where the perophilia comes from. It's like four years old,

(36:34):
and you're watching your dad or your uncles or your
cousins or friends rape and kill slaves, and that produces
a perophilia around.

Speaker 3 (36:43):
That, Yeah, for sure. But still even with that, they're
not hardly as common as they are today, and certainly
not among the general population.

Speaker 2 (36:52):
It seems well, right, I mean, it would only in
Roman society be for very small percentage of the people
in society, and and it didn't show up very much anyway.

Speaker 1 (37:04):
Yeah, that's interesting.

Speaker 3 (37:05):
And it might be also, you know, stories that try
to defame those people.

Speaker 2 (37:14):
So all is the recommendation that all children should watch
their parents have.

Speaker 3 (37:19):
Sex, well, either their parents or certainly maybe the recommendation
that they will they will see depictions of the opposite
sex that are not photoshop. You know a friend of mine,
he grew up in Morocco, and he was he would

(37:41):
go to baths, you know, public baths with his mother
until age twelve. He would be around naked women. But
those are real women, and today he is attracted. He's
not attracted to same women, so it's you know, he is.

(38:04):
I don't know if that's good or bad for him.
But we do have people who are imprinted on completely
unnatural body forms, right.

Speaker 2 (38:14):
Right, and porn in general is is not you know,
a typical depiction of actual sex.

Speaker 3 (38:21):
Yeah. Absolutely, So it could be that we should not
only have, you know, make sure that kids don't watch porn,
but make sure they watch realistic sexual behavior. But of
course you cannot today, in today's climate, you cannot. You
cannot suggest that.

Speaker 1 (38:40):
And we could suggest that we can't.

Speaker 2 (38:42):
We can't expect it yeah, but we you know, I
think I think we can suggest it, but I mean
I can get behind that. I'll suggest it that parents
out there figure out some way of exposing children when
they're young tous of bodies and of sexuality that is healthy,

(39:04):
and not to think of it as as somehow perverted
or creating something bad for kids.

Speaker 3 (39:11):
It might actually, on the other hand, you might have
kids that grow up like that, and then they'll be
the only vanilla kids, and older friends would be you know,
different kinds of perverts, and they will be the boring ones.

Speaker 2 (39:27):
Well that's interesting. It's like, yeah, that's interesting. I mean it,
there is a there. I do talk with people who
are in relationships and they will need to have they
both need pornography, you know, And so I wonder if

(39:47):
it's because of that imprinting when they were young.

Speaker 3 (39:50):
Uh, it could be. There are also people whose sexual
fantasies are impossible to fulfill, you know, right, there are
people who are you know, attract to humans, who are
you know, the size of a smurf, and there are
no people like that. And for that, I think either
either pornography or hypnosis is a possible possible solution.

Speaker 2 (40:15):
Yeah, And you know, you're not saying this, You're not
saying the opposite of this, but should be mentioned that
fantasy is fine, that there's nothing wrong with with fantasizing
about smurfs. You know, you can fantasize people. I've done
some recent episodes on fantasies about rape for both men

(40:37):
and women, fantasizing about being raped and fantasizing about raping others,
and I'd never really thought about it in depth before
until I looked at the research, and something like half
of women have, you know, occasionally fantasized about being raped,
and something like ten or fifteen percent regularly fantasized about it,

(40:58):
and yet none of them would want to be raped, right,
And then something like a third of men have have
fantasized at some point about raping women or men. And
and yet so if a third of men have occasionally
and say, you know, ten five percent or something regularly

(41:20):
fantasize about it, the percentage of men who were people
who actually rape other people, you know, chorus of sexual activity,
it's pretty low. It happens a lot, and the few
individuals who commit those crimes are abusing dozens, if not
hundreds of people, which creates this huge, you know, problem

(41:41):
in our society. But anyway, my point is is that
fantasizing about those things, as long as it stays fantasy,
is totally fine.

Speaker 3 (41:50):
There's yeah, you can and you can set up a
role playing, you know, a consensual, non consent kind of a.

Speaker 1 (41:56):
Thing, right right.

Speaker 2 (41:58):
There's two kinds of rape fans, even just rape fantasy.
There's the consensual rape fantasy and the non consensual rape fantasy.
The consensual rape fantasy is like you, she wants to
but she can't admit it, you know, it's sort of like,
you know. An interesting statistic that I found in my
research was that in the harlequin novels, the romance novels

(42:23):
that are predominantly consumed by women, I can't remember the
exact stat but it was something like seventy percent of
these of the books have some one or more scenes
of rape, essentially what we what we would consider to
be sexual assault and how you know, And similar to

(42:44):
fifty shades I did, I've never read fifty stades grade?
Was there was there non consent or was there sort
of consensual ish rape in fifty stages of grade?

Speaker 1 (42:52):
Do you know?

Speaker 3 (42:52):
I don't know. I assume I'll tell you about nineteenth
century pornographic novels that you know I read about. I
haven't read any of them, but one of the recurring
themes is that there's a woman, a virgin, and she
gets kidnapped by you know, the sultan or some something

(43:16):
like that, and at the first time they have sex,
he rapes her, and after that she's she is into it. Right,
So the like you know, the Taming of the Shrew
kind of a thing where the first sexual experience for

(43:37):
the woman is rape, but the next one she actually
enjoys it. So it's a weird, weird thing to see
and and all of this, of course is just in
the West. I think these is pornography from England, but
right right.

Speaker 2 (43:51):
The idea goes is that women in our society, particularly
in the past, were caught between a rock and a
hard place in that they had a normal sexual desire,
but society said if they acted on that desire or
even had desire in them, that made them immoral, a slut,

(44:13):
a you know, a like a prostitutors. And they didn't
know what to do with that. So a way out
was to be raped, and then you can you can
say afterwards. I didn't want to do it. I tried

(44:34):
to say no, but he's bigger or had a scimitar
to my throat. I couldn't couldn't say no. And and
then you can get some sexual pleasure from that. And
so that's where and a lot of the romance novels
have that in it.

Speaker 3 (44:51):
So the last thing I want to want to talk
about is that if we are right, and Hanna Aronson's right,
and this is sexual imprinting in humans, what that means
is that your sexual fantasies do not mean much about
you at all, right, that they are not in printing, yeah,

(45:12):
and that you're not accountable for them, right, And that
it's not because I think that it's not a moral shortcoming.
You're not a sick, perverted, terrible human being. Yeah. And
it's not even if you have, you know, a fantasy
of hurting people who doesn't mean you're a bad person
or but just in general people, I think that people

(45:36):
who do not understand why it is that they have
the sexual fantasy, why are they you know, exhibitionists or
whatever it is that they're they're into, they can really
feel a lot of guilt about it and have a
lot of So there'll be a lot of second order
problems that come from a not understanding right of that

(45:59):
it's imprinting, but understanding it as imprinting, and from pedophilia,
at least some of the imprinting is unchangeable. It's unclear whether.

Speaker 2 (46:09):
Yeah, I mean, there's this huge association as most people
know that if you are sexually abused or exposed to
that sort of thing as a young person, then your
chances of being attracted to children later in life is increased,
and therefore your chance of abusing children increases. And yeah,

(46:34):
it makes and I that makes total sense. And I
did a whole episode on pedophilia as well, And there
are other routes, like one listener pointed out that for
some people, it's that they are immature emotionally, and when
they are developing as a teenager and having strong sexual urges,

(46:55):
they don't feel comfortable with people their own age, and
so their first sexual target it's our people younger, because
they just feel more comfortable with younger people because emotionally
they're on that level. But for other people who say
you're four years old and an older cousin or an
adult or somebody sexually, you know, abuses you, then you

(47:19):
grow up and associate. Well, that's interesting. I mean, I
guess the sort of direct correlation of a quote unquote
fetish is people who like older people, right, They like
to have sex with people who are or or powerful
people or people who you know are in power over.

Speaker 1 (47:42):
Them or something. So there's that in printing.

Speaker 2 (47:46):
But what about Yeah, but what about being imprinted with children?
Would that be some sort of you know, someone who's
also a child that's having sex with you know, like
an eight year old at having sex with seven year
old or something.

Speaker 3 (48:06):
Yeah, So I'm not sure it could be that that
there you know, that pedophilia specifically with something that you
were exposed to as you know, adult to child sexuality.
But I don't know, and I it seems to me
like pedophilia is pretty rare compared to some of the

(48:26):
other fetishism that are paraphilias.

Speaker 1 (48:31):
Yeah, it's hard to lie, it's hard to know people respond.

Speaker 3 (48:35):
And if it's age six, people won't remember right or
might not remember right right. And now that the so
there's one problem with people not understanding themselves. And I
think that can be a very very can be very
difficult problem for some people. And the other problem is
people not other people not understanding each other. So there

(48:57):
is there are people who would justifiably complain that men
are attracted to unnatural female beauty standards, right and come
and complain to the men, telling them that you should change. Now,
it might be that if it's imprinting, then that generation

(49:21):
is unchangeable. We can help the next generation, you know,
can help put depictions of you know, real looking people
for the next generation to see.

Speaker 2 (49:31):
But it's a runaway feedback loop because as you today
have young you know, particularly younger men, just using men,
heterosexual men as an example, being attracted to completely unrealistic
female beauty standards, they end up consuming and creating a

(49:55):
high demand for pornography that is like that, and even more,
you know, even more and more so like that, And
then you like the handicapped principle, so to speak, the
perfect pornography, you know, depiction, and then you're a younger person,

(50:16):
you know, ready to be imprinted. And if ninety nine
point nine percent of pornography out there that is available
to you to be randomly exposed to is of that nature,
then you're not.

Speaker 3 (50:29):
Even pornography, just regular Maybia depictions.

Speaker 1 (50:32):
Of people, right, like advertisements or something.

Speaker 2 (50:35):
Yeah, And so it just and then that creates the
next generation who are even who are imprinted on an
even more unrealistic standard. Because one of the things that
I think about sometimes when I think about this idea
is that and it's hard to you know, tell exactly
because it's it's a it's not a hard science. But

(50:55):
like when when you look at models in the seventies,
they look more natural. I mean, there's a more natural
sort of vibe to the seventies, you know, because it.

Speaker 1 (51:05):
Was they have pubic hair import yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:08):
And just you know, frizzy hair and just you know,
not so great skin or not not sort of the standard.

Speaker 3 (51:18):
Today they don't have the body make up kind of
stuff that, right, I assumed.

Speaker 2 (51:22):
They and obviously not photoshop, right, and how there and
and so what a lot of people of today will
look at that and they'll be like, h gross, you know,
just look at you know, the models of the seventies
men and women, and and they'll.

Speaker 1 (51:39):
Just be like, oh, that's so gross.

Speaker 2 (51:42):
And like like male chest hair you know, was huge
in the seventies and eighties, you know, Burt Reynolds, I
mean how old are you, you've all I'm forty three, okay,
so we're the same age. And you remember all that
chest hair magnet p I you know, that was that
was the epitome of manliness.

Speaker 1 (52:00):
Was ches there.

Speaker 2 (52:00):
I can't remember the last time I saw what se Yeah,
of course, Harry dudes, you know, and today you got
Channing Tatum and you know, all the other heart throbs,
justin Bieber, and they don't have a they don't have
a you know, a follicle on their body. So it's

(52:26):
it's it's interesting to see that, you know.

Speaker 3 (52:30):
Yeah, and we do, we do see historically and geographically
that the things vary, but we we only recently have
this kind of photoshop and and surgical augmentation that we
have today. So we'll we'll see where where that goes.

Speaker 2 (52:49):
Well, because you know, as you were saying, it's like,
we can't possibly expect society to even hear us, let
alone change. Uh, it's probably just going to get worse
and worse and worse.

Speaker 3 (53:02):
Right, And today we have a situation where the ideal
female body is different body when the woman is clothed
in a magazine like Vogue, or when the woman is
naked in a magazine like Playboy, those are different types
of women.

Speaker 1 (53:16):
Yeah, completely, which is insane. Yeah. Does this have to
do with race preference too? In sex?

Speaker 3 (53:23):
It might be, And of course you have to remember
that you sometimes have negative assort of matings, so people
are attracted to something that's exotic. And it could be
that some of the imprinting is flexible, that it's like
phobias that are changeable and others it's not so. Yeah,
but it could also be part of race preference. And

(53:47):
there are people who are attracted or unattracted to certain
races and also certain accents which are surprisingly sexual that
I might think that if I'm unattracted to a certain race,
I'd be racist, But you might not be.

Speaker 2 (54:02):
Right, right, I mean, certainly racism plays a part in
all of that and in what we're exposed to, you know,
like in the United States, and I'm guessing in a
lot of Western societies that racism against black people is
strong enough so that pornography or depiction or models black models,

(54:28):
or black pornography actors and actresses are not hired and
not preferred, and so for it just creates this you know,
imprinting and culture around seeing particular, people of different races
as more or less sexual depending on their race or

(54:49):
a different kind of sexuality. A thing that Asian people
sometimes complain about Asian men is that they're seen as feminine,
seen as not very macho, you know, even though the
two and a half billion Asians on the planet, uh,

(55:09):
some of them are the most macho people you've ever met,
you know. But in America anyway, the United States, it's
they're scene as nerds, good at math, the model minority,
and that's not associated with what we consider to be masculine.
And they will complain about always being put into the

(55:32):
friend zone because you know, they they're seen in a
certain way, you know, and.

Speaker 3 (55:38):
Asian and Asian women sometimes have the opposite, right.

Speaker 1 (55:43):
Right, they're over sexualized, you know.

Speaker 2 (55:46):
And and yeah, anyway, and I also it makes me
also think about milf, you know, mother, I'd like to
you know, fu pornography. It's if I remember, right, a
couple of years ago or a year ago, I was
looking at statistics on pornography search terms that were the

(56:09):
most popular, and I.

Speaker 1 (56:10):
Believe like milf is like frequently one of the most.

Speaker 3 (56:14):
Popular and incest things.

Speaker 2 (56:17):
Yeah, well that's a whole other kind of thing. But
the milf pornography is an older woman or what's perceived
as an older woman, you know. And so you wonder
about the imprinting of young heterosexual men who grow up

(56:37):
without any stimuli, as you're saying, of other kinds of sex,
and their primary sexual object is is their mother, you know,
seeing their mother on dress or you know, just being
in contact with their mother's body. And then later on
in life they have a preference for older women, you know,

(56:58):
women who are mothers.

Speaker 3 (57:00):
Yeah, or the mother's friends or aunts or right. Yeah.
So into this book Who Has Been Sleeping in Your
Head by Brett Carr, which is a big He did
a huge survey of thousands of people where it's sort
of a completing the Kinsey surveys of kin ask people

(57:21):
about what they do, but he didn't ask them about
what they think about. And in this big survey he
only asks what people think about and the variation is unbelievable.
But he has a chapter where it's a list of
sexual fantasies that are it's unclear whether the person is

(57:42):
straight or gay. So it's I think it calls that
one the strap on paradox. The man who wants to
a woman to wear a strap on and have sex
with them, is he gay or not? Or is he straight?

Speaker 1 (57:56):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (57:58):
I think it's straight, but you know, either.

Speaker 1 (58:02):
Way, Yeah, I was like, why who cares?

Speaker 3 (58:05):
You know, like, yeah, of course, of course who cares?
But and and regarding all of them, I'm not judging anything.

Speaker 2 (58:13):
And there is ye're saying you think they've they've been
imprinted or have a preference for men.

Speaker 3 (58:20):
That it's it's unclear how they got to it, but
somehow they got imprinted on on on on on.

Speaker 1 (58:30):
That right, wanting to be penetrated.

Speaker 3 (58:35):
With with a fallacy by a woman. Yeah, And there's
there's a term I think that's from a savage. He's
a columnist sexual sex.

Speaker 1 (58:49):
Comnist dance Savage here in Seattle.

Speaker 3 (58:52):
Yeah, so I think that's his term is a kink karma.
And the way it goes is that the person who
breaks up with his significant other because they tell them
about their foot fetish, they're going to end up with
a significant other that doesn't tell them about their dogdo
fetish or something a lot worse. Right, Yeah, So yeah,

(59:15):
I should be completely non judgmental about this if it's
if it's imprinting as I think it is.

Speaker 2 (59:21):
Well, and you know, there's zero harm in a man
having a wife or a partner or woman who puts
on a strap on and has sex with him.

Speaker 1 (59:34):
I mean, you know, we've all seen Deadpool. That's what
he was into.

Speaker 3 (59:37):
That's right, or they try it out.

Speaker 2 (59:39):
I think, yeah, I think it was, you know, because
I think in one and two he liked that.

Speaker 1 (59:47):
Kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah, interesting. So is there any
part of this we didn't get to in terms of
your theory?

Speaker 3 (59:53):
No, I think I think we you know, and as
I mentioned, some of this stuff was said before, but
a lot of it was not. So you know, if
anybody wants to write an academic article, you just you know,
give give me a little credit or something. But you know,
I'm happy that I think a lot of people really

(01:00:15):
would benefit from understanding this.

Speaker 1 (01:00:17):
And it's called sexual imprinting.

Speaker 3 (01:00:19):
Yeah, sexual imprinting is and those are the famous animal experiments,
usually birds.

Speaker 2 (01:00:27):
Yeah, and it's a well known phenomenon among animals obviously, and.

Speaker 3 (01:00:35):
With pandas, right that there's pandas that weren't I didn't
want to have sex with each other, but they were
sexually attracted to human caregivers. So there was that that
aspect where it was also also sort of came.

Speaker 2 (01:00:52):
Up right because with pandas it was as huge concern
as their numbers are dwindling and their sexual I can't
remember the exact terms, but they they have said in
the wild they have a very short window of ovulation,
I think, and and the sexual mating processes is pretty

(01:01:13):
tenuous and even in the wild, and they were having
a really hard time getting pandas in captivity to not
only have sex, but also to have to get pregnant,
and so they would be concerned. And and because they're
so delicate and so or not, there's so few in number,

(01:01:36):
I'm guessing that these caregivers would as humans. Okay, Well,
when they're babies, we need to take care of them
because we need to make sure that they live, because
we can't leave them to the chance of their real parents,
because they might not pay attention to them, or if.

Speaker 3 (01:01:51):
There if the baby was adapt abandoned, or if the methodized,
or then they'll get rescued and end up in the zoo.

Speaker 2 (01:01:58):
Right and so you know, we'll say care of it,
you know, and make it and it'll live. But it'll
want to it'll have a human fetish.

Speaker 1 (01:02:06):
Yeah, uh so is it a is it an accepted.

Speaker 2 (01:02:13):
Phenomenon in the evolutionary psychology and all of its ancillary
or you know, associated schools of thought.

Speaker 3 (01:02:23):
Well, as I said, imprinting in general is an interesting
mixture of nature and nurture. So it's yet one in
a long list of examples where the distinction between nature
and nurture is doesn't work and actually misleads. So one
of the examples is imprinting. And there's the experiments are

(01:02:47):
not ambiguous, you know, they're pretty straightforward, and they're very
easy experiments to do. I actually know a girl that
grew up with with farm animals, and she put the
duck egg in the chicken nest, and then she had
ducks that.

Speaker 1 (01:03:03):
Would rape chickens, you know, right.

Speaker 2 (01:03:07):
And so it ducks in ducks rape each other. I mean,
the male ducks rape the girl.

Speaker 3 (01:03:14):
Yeah, they're the only animal that we think then maybe
dolphins as well, but that might actually have rape in
addition to humans of course.

Speaker 1 (01:03:24):
Oh interesting.

Speaker 3 (01:03:25):
Yeah, they used to think that all sorts of animals
rape each other, but then they realized that that's actually
not not the.

Speaker 2 (01:03:31):
Case because it looks like rape. It looks like because
like lions are having sex, the male is like biting
the lions on the back of the neck.

Speaker 3 (01:03:40):
But then they found out more and more that the
female can always stop it, and many times they do
and it's not. But with ducks, ducks and maybe dolphins,
that's where they still think there might be rape. Yeah,
So in this case, the poor chickens were raped by
ducks who were imprinted on sickens when they were hatched.

Speaker 2 (01:04:02):
Right, Yeah, duck people out there listening, if you want
to be completely mind blown, look up duck penises and
how they work exactly. It is one of the most
strangest biological forms that has ever been created on this planet.

Speaker 1 (01:04:24):
The duck penis is it's like a weird, curly feathery
and it grows and it looks super delicate and thin,
you know, and feathery, but it grows like you know,
I don't know how long it is compared to its body.
But it's all this evolutionary direction that male and female

(01:04:51):
ducks have been going. Where the female duck.

Speaker 2 (01:04:54):
Has been evolving of vagina that has different dead ends
and stuff in it. Uh, the male so if she
if the girl duck sort of sits a certain way,
the male is likely to go down one of the
dead ends in the vagina wow and not impregnate her.

(01:05:14):
So she can so even though she's being raped, she
can sort of sit a certain way and not be
impregnated by him.

Speaker 1 (01:05:20):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:05:21):
So it's been this arms race between penis and vagina
for Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:05:27):
I forgets that she does have a way to shut
it all down, right right, The Republicans.

Speaker 1 (01:05:32):
Think, yeah, I mean, come on, you know, yeah, that's so.

Speaker 2 (01:05:40):
Is it accepted in the evolutionary psychology world that sexually
so there.

Speaker 3 (01:05:45):
Are there are people in the evolutionary psychology world that
still believe in things like, you know, nature nurture division, or.

Speaker 1 (01:05:56):
You know that the.

Speaker 3 (01:05:57):
Way we evolved is unrelated to the way we develop,
So how we changed from a monkey to us, and
how we changed from the zygo.

Speaker 2 (01:06:06):
To that's the vast majority, or at least the most
vocal you know that, you know, it's like you they'll
explain rape behavior in humans by saying that we evolved
to rape people, you know, or or foot fetish. It's like, well, well,
I find they often avoid certain topics that are hard
for them to explain from that nature perspective. So I'm

(01:06:28):
guessing they avoid the foot fetish thing or the.

Speaker 3 (01:06:31):
Because that was not selected for in the savannah.

Speaker 2 (01:06:33):
Right, or the high heel fetish. It's like, how could
you explain that through nature? But yeah, they often will say, well,
men evolved to rape, you know, and that's or.

Speaker 1 (01:06:48):
Gang rapes.

Speaker 2 (01:06:49):
You know, they'll explain gang rape behavior as innate in
men that you know, we likely gang raped women on
the savannah, you know, you.

Speaker 3 (01:07:00):
Know, it could be with imprinting. Many times the imprinting
is not neutral. So for example, there are people who
it's easier for them to be imprinted on humans in general,
on snakes than it is on cats. Right, phobia imprinting, Right,

(01:07:22):
it takes a lot less of a stimulus to get
you to be afraid of snakes than the stimulus that
will make you afraid of cats.

Speaker 1 (01:07:29):
Right. And just to expand that for people who don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:07:31):
And I've talked about this before and so correct me
if I'm wrong, But based on what you're saying, and
I think my understanding is evolved over time, we're quote
unquote born with a susceptibility to a phobia for snakes,
but we don't.

Speaker 1 (01:07:43):
We're not born with the with the phobia of snakes.

Speaker 3 (01:07:47):
That's what it looks like.

Speaker 2 (01:07:48):
If in a certain period of time, when we're young,
we have an experience of fear associated with snakes, then
that will then will are given the opportunity to develop
a fear for snakes. Where but whereas we don't have
a fear of we don't have a biological We're not

(01:08:10):
born with a biological disposition for being having a phobia
of trees, for example.

Speaker 3 (01:08:15):
Even though that too can happen, right, right, you don't
just a stimulus needs to be Yeah, it's to be
more significant now. Of course, phobias do run in families,
and the chance that you will have a phobia is
maybe determined in part by your parents. But what the

(01:08:35):
content is looks like it's not related to the parents.
But and except they said, maybe, uh, you know, needles.
But many times the kid becomes imprinted on the phobia
because he sees his parents being afraid of something. Right,
So if you see your parents afraid of a snake

(01:08:57):
or a dog, you might be imprinted because of their fear.
And that looks like they actually you inherited the fear
of dogs from them, but it's not you just were imprinted.

Speaker 1 (01:09:11):
Well you did, you have to have didn't, right.

Speaker 3 (01:09:14):
Yeah, but they wasn't. There wasn't genetic inheritance. Yeah, you
did inherit it, but the inheritance was a cultural inheritance.

Speaker 1 (01:09:20):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:09:22):
I for me, for the sort of slam duck on
this for me is that when I grew up, I
grew up in the woods and there were snakes and
spiders and bugs and all sorts of critters.

Speaker 1 (01:09:35):
And I have no phobia.

Speaker 2 (01:09:38):
Like you could put you know, you could put twenty
spiders on my arms and I'd be like, oh, spiders,
you know, and snakes too, like I I mean, I
know some snakes can kill you, and I guess I
know some spiders can kill you. But but I just
so I can be self preserving. And you know, it's
not like I'm ill logical or something, but but if

(01:10:00):
a spider lands on me, or there's a spider in
my house or something like, it just it doesn't get
to me at all.

Speaker 3 (01:10:05):
Yeah, but it could be that you don't have any
disposition to phobias at all, do you have? Are your
parents phobic?

Speaker 2 (01:10:14):
I mean they they lived with me in the woods,
so I'll not heights or I mean, I mean, my
mom doesn't like animals touching her, so so i'd call it,
you know, I call my mom mildly phobic.

Speaker 3 (01:10:31):
Maybe. Yeah, so in my family, my mother has phobia,
as my sister, my father, and brother don't. But I
know that when I was five, my brother was born,
and because of that, my parents didn't do a bug
spray in the house. And there are cockroaches, and I
remember my sister when I was a little kid, telling

(01:10:52):
me that they climb on me when I'm asleep, And
until today, I have somewhat of a phobia of.

Speaker 1 (01:10:56):
Cockroaches, just of cockroaches.

Speaker 3 (01:11:02):
Now, I don't think that they're going to harm me
in any way. I'm not. I'm fully aware of the
irrationality of the fear.

Speaker 1 (01:11:08):
But yeah, is not other bugs just cockroaches.

Speaker 2 (01:11:11):
Yeah, Is that why you moved a Boulder because there's
no cockroaches?

Speaker 1 (01:11:15):
No, No, because any cockroaches to my knowledge at Boulder, Colora.

Speaker 3 (01:11:19):
Now that there might be in some buildings that they
live in the building, but you know, but they don't. Yeah,
they can't survive the winters.

Speaker 1 (01:11:27):
So yeah, they're not Seattle either.

Speaker 2 (01:11:33):
The very few times that I've seen them in Seattle
that it's downtown in a very you know, dirty city environment.

Speaker 3 (01:11:42):
And they're probably generations living within the same building.

Speaker 1 (01:11:45):
Right. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:11:47):
One time it was in a Japanese restaurant I saw
and they were tiny. They were like, I don't know,
like a millimeter long cockroaches that were climbing up the
wall in this in this one trail. It was like
they were on sort of wagon train or some kind.
And then another time, I was a security guard downtown
Seattle and I had to roam this building to make

(01:12:09):
sure that everything's okay. And I went to the bowels
of this old building downtown Seattle, Pineer Square, and I
opened this door and I flip on this light, and
I had no idea what I had seen because I'd
never seen big cockroaches before. But it took me like
ten seconds to process what I had seen. But what
I had seen was there was a sandwich in the

(01:12:30):
middle of the floor and there were hundreds of cockroaches.

Speaker 1 (01:12:35):
This might freak you out, by the way, Yeah, well,
I'm not that that.

Speaker 2 (01:12:40):
Hundreds of cockroaches eating this sandwich and when I flipped
on the light, they all ran for the recover and
and I so, you know, I flip on the light
and I just see all this movement. I'm like, and
then and then nothing, you know, And then I I'm like,
what did I just hallucinate something? Because they moved fast? Man,
croaches not fast when they want to be they can

(01:13:02):
fly to they can fly too. And they were different sizes.
There were the big ones and small ones, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:13:11):
So it's it's I used to be worse, but it's
getting better, and today it's it's pretty mild. Yeah, but
you know, phobias, you can get rid of them right
with using.

Speaker 1 (01:13:21):
Yeah, I've talked about on the podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:13:23):
I had ABI a PTSD around medical procedures that developed
I don't know when I was thirty ish or something,
and it was intense and it took me ten fifteen
years to slowly expose myself, you know, ever so slowly
to the to those you know, stimulate lie to habituate

(01:13:48):
to it. But for the first I don't know, seven
or eight years, I didn't even want to work on
it at all because it was so terrifying.

Speaker 3 (01:13:55):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:13:56):
It took a while for me to actually, Okay, I've
got to get over this because I'm getting older, I'm
going to have to.

Speaker 3 (01:14:02):
Be And people who come to America and they say,
you know, when the kid gets a shot in America,
then they spray him with you know, anaesthesia. You know,
they numb the place, and there's a lot of focus
on not causing any pain. And some people belittle dad
and they say, you know what, you know, that's that's

(01:14:23):
they're all, you know, why are they so so weak?
But I think it's really important because people will develop
phobias of doctors and that kills you. People die because
they have phobias of doctors. So yeah, it's important not
to traumatize five year old d you know, three year
old with young kids as little as possible.

Speaker 2 (01:14:45):
Well, to me, the and I'm not an expert on this,
but my impression of the action of say, giving a
young child a vaccine is to uh, have a physician
or whoever is administering it, be someone who really understands

(01:15:08):
children and you know, distracts them.

Speaker 1 (01:15:12):
Or is happy and like, hey, we're going to do this.

Speaker 2 (01:15:15):
It might hurt a little bit, but it's okay, you know,
and just you know, all it's not necessarily yeah, not
necessarily the pain. It's like, the way we often do
these things is like, Okay, we're going to go into
this very scary room with all these scary noises and
bottles of god knows what, and there's going to be

(01:15:35):
a scary stranger who's gonna like.

Speaker 3 (01:15:37):
And the parent is going to be really tense and
expecting you to be traumatized, so they're gonna you're gonna
catch it emotional cotagent from them.

Speaker 2 (01:15:46):
Right, And the kid is trapped because there's no flexibility there.

Speaker 1 (01:15:50):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:15:51):
And you add all those things up, and you know,
you rinse and repeat that a few times at the
age of four, and you're gonna hate needles.

Speaker 1 (01:15:59):
And it's interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:16:00):
Yeah, it's so interesting to think about all the different
ways in which we as humans have a combination of
nature and nurture and how we as a society just
and many scientists just completely misunderstand that.

Speaker 3 (01:16:17):
Yeah. So that's why you know, I'm all about returning
to Aristole, where everything important is habits, not acts, not rules,
habits which habits are all about being neither nature nor nurture. Right,
It's Blaze Pascal said it's human nature to have second nature, right,
So our first nature is to have a second nature

(01:16:38):
and so yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:16:41):
You know we have we our first nature is to
sexually imprint on whatever is put before.

Speaker 3 (01:16:47):
Us, and that becomes second nature, right.

Speaker 2 (01:16:51):
Yeah, I mean ducks don't have that, but you wonder,
you know, if if ducks had a society, right, and
maybe that's what that whole you know pithy statement means,
is because of a society and culture and abstract thinking,
we and we have choices in terms of what we
expose ourselves to and our children too.

Speaker 3 (01:17:08):
Yeah. And an interesting example from evolution about this is
songbirds that the female songbirds when they're babies, they hear
their father's song, right, because the father plays, you know,
plays a role in raising them, and they get imprinted
on those songs. And if you take orphans that you know,

(01:17:29):
and you raise them separately where they're never imprint they
don't hear the songs. They have horrible songs that nobody
wants to you know, nobody's interested in them. But they
they do get their father's song normally in normal situations,
and then they would elaborate on it or they would
add So it's an interesting place where you still have imprinting.

(01:17:53):
It's not full sexual imprinting, right, because they still may
be attracted to their own species, but the song imprinting
is very very clear.

Speaker 2 (01:18:03):
Yeah, and it's not as if they don't sing at all.
They have an instinct to sing. But it's just horrible.
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:18:11):
I talked about Justin Bieber earlier.

Speaker 2 (01:18:13):
I have no idea. I haven't looked into his life.
I'm very unaware of his life. But the one of
the questions that a lot of people had, I don't know,
ten years ago or something, was why Justin Bieber became
what a lot of people thought of to be a douchebag,
Because when he was young, you know, and starting his career,

(01:18:36):
he was this cute, innocent, seeming, you know, floppy, blonde
haired kid. And then as soon as he had a
chance to express himself, as he became eighteen nineteen, he became,
you know, this tough and he's small, but he's like
trying to be muscley, and he has all these tattoos

(01:18:58):
and he takes his shirt off lot, and you know,
there's just this sort of total shift in And maybe
it was some decision that him and him and his
you know, marketing agents figured out, you got to get
you're an adult now.

Speaker 1 (01:19:10):
You got to be tough.

Speaker 2 (01:19:11):
I don't know, but a lot of his fans and
a lot of society turned on him at that point
because it was like, why is he being so you know,
hyper masculine when he's when his image and his the
way he looks is just so different, you know, And
I was confused by it too, mildly. And then I

(01:19:31):
learned that his dad was hyper masculine in this way.

Speaker 1 (01:19:35):
And I could be wrong about all this, but.

Speaker 2 (01:19:37):
I remember a long time ago thinking, oh, you know,
when he was growing up, I didn't have this term,
but he was imprinted in terms of masculinity and sexuality
by his father, and once he had a chance to
be old enough to actually be like his father, then
he actually became his father.

Speaker 3 (01:19:55):
Yeah, so this might not be classical the way we
use imprinting. For in printing, there needs to be a
sensitive period, So it needs to be a point, you know,
an age where you're a lot more affected by it
than at other ages. And this might have been just
a general millieu.

Speaker 1 (01:20:13):
Just general learning about masculinity.

Speaker 2 (01:20:15):
But you know, you could imagine when Bure was four
and his dad was walking around the house and looking
a certain way, then that would you know that would
affect things.

Speaker 3 (01:20:25):
Yeah, or you know, watching media, you know it might
be masculine depig Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:20:31):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:20:32):
Yeah, it just seems to have so so was Freud
right and that we all want to have sex with
our parents?

Speaker 3 (01:20:38):
No, I don't, I don't think. I mean that that
theory is based on on the assumption that our development
copies are evolutionary history. I mean so that you know
how in the when we're fetuses or embryos, we started

(01:21:03):
looking like a bacteria and after I would look like
a tadpole, and that we look like a fish.

Speaker 1 (01:21:08):
And that's that would look like a mouse, and right, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:21:11):
So they thought that we're actually going through evolution, but
we're not. Right, but his that a lot of his
theory is based on that assumption. That is today completely
But yeah, we don't. We're not sexual in a regular
sexual way as kids. So it's I mean, but it

(01:21:33):
seems related.

Speaker 2 (01:21:35):
I mean a sort of a three percent way or
something in that we are looking towards our parents as examples.
We're born with a mechanism to look outwards for examples
of sexuality.

Speaker 3 (01:21:51):
Yeah, but I think if it's imprinting, then it shows
up at age three, four, five, six, whenever it does,
but it's not there before.

Speaker 2 (01:22:00):
Right, But the notion of the oedipus or the electric complex,
if you know, there's a there's a ring of truth
to it, although most of it is not supported by
science or observation or you know what most people would
consider you know, established or consensus around evolution and development
of children. But the notion of that which was quite

(01:22:23):
controversial to this day, I guess particularly it's the time
that you know, a young girl looks to her dad
in a sexual manner, a young boy looks to his
mom in a sexual manner.

Speaker 3 (01:22:37):
Yeah, well that also that this is also a problem
with attachment theory, that there is this assumption that we
raise our children the way chimpanzees do, which is where
the child is always with the mother. But humans are
collective breeders. We are elo parents, we have grandparents, we
have aunts, we have friends of the family. A kid

(01:22:59):
is not just exposed to his mother and father at all,
and if they it's really bad, if they are right.
So it could be that it's it's not it's the
female presence or the male presence when you were young,
but the female and male presence is a lot more
than just your father and mother, right, I.

Speaker 2 (01:23:18):
Mean, yeah, the way Freud talked about it, he was
narcissistically and you know, jumping the gun on some very
firm ideas. You know, he didn't he didn't state it
as such, but you have to wonder if he knew
what we.

Speaker 1 (01:23:34):
Know today, if you would have modified things.

Speaker 2 (01:23:38):
But at the time, right, the primary female person in
a child's life was their mom because of the way
that societies were set up back then, I guess, And
so maybe that's what he was talking about. But the
idea is the same in terms and not does it
fit within Victorian mores, which is that one children are

(01:24:02):
developing sexually, which is abhorrent to a lot of people,
and two that the children are actually looking at adults
for information. They have an instinct to look towards adults
for information around sexuality. And so you know that I

(01:24:23):
one could argue that Freud had those tenants however he
got to them, if it was completely misguided, And of course,
you know, the broader context of the whole thing is
rather chilly. I mean, most people agree that Freud must
have been attracted to his mom because he's pretty adamant
about it.

Speaker 3 (01:24:39):
Well, he also, I think, in a footnote somewhere, says
that we're naturally homosexuals and then we turn into heterosexuals later. Right, Yeah,
he said a natural state is a homosexual state.

Speaker 2 (01:24:51):
Well, it was an immature state, is you know the
way he sought it, and too mature is to become heterosexual.

Speaker 3 (01:25:00):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:25:01):
So anyway, yeah, I'm I'm drawing that connections.

Speaker 3 (01:25:06):
Yeah. Well, and and you know that that childhood affects
our sexuality, I think, which is I guess Freud's one
of his his contributions is where this is at?

Speaker 1 (01:25:18):
Right? Right? Yeah? Interesting? All right, any of the last words,
you've all.

Speaker 3 (01:25:23):
No, I think did the pretty thorough job on this
or maybe hopefully.

Speaker 2 (01:25:29):
Yeah, well out there, let us know what you think.
You can email me at contact at psychology in Seattle
dot com. You can email you've all lore at why
you v A L L A O R at gmail
dot com.

Speaker 3 (01:25:46):
Correct, that's right, So why you the L A and
then the O? Uh there is no A followed by
oh doesn't show up in English too much so or
at all? Right, just like Loos, the country of Laos. Yeah,
so it's L A.

Speaker 1 (01:26:01):
O R yeah, you've all how do you say your
how do you pronounce your last name?

Speaker 3 (01:26:07):
That's that's with an Israeli accent.

Speaker 1 (01:26:09):
You don't do the R. It's not a hard R
at the end. Oh, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:26:15):
It can be a different accents. But yeah, it's in America.
It's the American rye, which I'm not that good.

Speaker 2 (01:26:25):
Yeah, my last name in Japan is pronounced Honda, and.

Speaker 3 (01:26:31):
So is that how the car is pronounced as well?

Speaker 1 (01:26:34):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:26:34):
Okay, yeah, so but we americanize it for the sake
of everyone.

Speaker 1 (01:26:41):
That's Honda.

Speaker 3 (01:26:42):
Yeah. I mean my parents chose lower because they couldn't
stay Liberman for whatever reason. But now I can't go
back to Liberman because I have very critical of the
Liberman's in the you know, in popular Senator Liberman.

Speaker 1 (01:26:59):
Why couldn't your parent to be Lieberman?

Speaker 3 (01:27:04):
The Cold War sent my dad to sell arms to
Uganda in sixty eight, and as an Israeli soldier representing Israel,
he couldn't have a disporatic name. He needed to have
a Hebrew name and so on the condition he could
only go to Uganda if he would change his name

(01:27:27):
to a Hebrew name. So him and my mom pecked lao,
which means towards the light. But he wanted to go
to Uganda, and it was interesting to go to Uganda
for three months in nineteen sixty eight.

Speaker 1 (01:27:41):
You went with him.

Speaker 3 (01:27:42):
No, no, I wasn't born yet.

Speaker 1 (01:27:44):
Oh yeah, you were born. Yeah? Is that a lot
common last name in Israel and Israel?

Speaker 3 (01:27:49):
Yeah, it's not uncommon.

Speaker 1 (01:27:52):
Interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:27:53):
Well, thanks for joiningy 'valez as always, it's fascinating and yes,
I always learned a lot, and I know our listeners
do too.

Speaker 1 (01:28:02):
Great, Thank you, thanks for joining us out there.

Speaker 2 (01:28:05):
Everyone, please take care of yourself because you deserve it,
and make sure that you don't judge yourselves for what
you've been imprinted with sexually or otherwise

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