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The Poverty of Conditioning Explanations for Sexual Interests: Reply to Grey (2019)

  • Kevin J. HsuEmail author
  • J. Michael Bailey
Letter to the Editor
First Online:

We thank Grey (2019) for his recent Letter to the Editor. Grey found our article on furry sexuality (Hsu & Bailey, 2019) to be respectable, disagreed with us respectfully, and opened a conversation that we hope will be fruitful.

Our article reported on a study of male furries, which found that most were sexually aroused both by anthropomorphic animals (i.e., cartoon animals) and by the fantasy of being such animals. We argued further that this furries’ sexuality is consistent with the concept of erotic target identity inversions (ETIIs) (Freund & Blanchard, 1993; Lawrence, 2009). ETIIs have been hypothesized to be paraphilias, in which a man’s erotic target (e.g., women for heterosexual men) is internalized such that they are also sexually aroused by the fantasy of being that same kind of erotic target. We provided evidence that the sexuality of most male furries in our study was analogous to autogynephilia, paraphilic sexual arousal by the fantasy of being a woman and the prototypic...

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Notes

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© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Psychological and Social SciencesPennsylvania State UniversityAbingtonUSA
  2. 2.Department of PsychologyNorthwestern UniversityEvanstonUSA

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