Many autogynephiles attempt to dispute the existence of autogynephilia by claiming that women are also aroused by their own attractiveness. This article will help clarify why it is that autogynephilia is a male-specific sexual paraphilia, and hopefully leave readers with a deeper understanding of the phenomenon.
Autogynephilia is best understood as the male heterosexual attraction to the female form inverted onto one’s own body.
Women cannot be heterosexual men, and definitionally cannot experience heterosexual male attraction to the female form. Thus, women cannot be autogynephiles.
While this is the most simple explanation, I’d like to get a little bit deeper into the weeds and explain it more thoroughly.
Four distinct phenomena
To begin, we must disambiguate between a number of different experiences. These are:
1) Finding yourself attractive
The experience of finding yourself attractive is fundamentally subjective, as beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Your assessment of your own attractiveness does not necessitate any feelings of sexual arousal. For example, a person of any sex or age might get a new haircut and think it looks good, or assess that a particular piece of clothing is flattering on them. They may experience a boost in confidence and self-esteem, without any sexual implications. Believing oneself to be attractive is an extremely common human experience. Hopefully, most people feel this way at least once in their lives.
2) Being aroused because others find you attractive
Being aroused by the idea that others find you attractive is an empathetic experience. It doesn’t require a person to be in any particular physical state, nor does it require one to find oneself attractive. A person in any physical condition of either sex who has a poor self-image can nevertheless notice that another person is responding positively to them, and respond positively to that fact. It’s even possible to be so empathetic that you can predict that someone will respond positively to you before they even see you. The locus of your arousal in this case is someone else, specifically someone else’s response to you. For this reason, we will call this phenomenon reciprocal arousal. Again, this is an extremely common human experience — people want to be wanted. If you have ever been turned on by your partner’s sexual desire for you, you have experienced reciprocal arousal. Arguably it is the backbone of any healthy and mutualistic sexual relationship.
3) Being aroused because you find yourself attractive
Being aroused because you find yourself attractive is called autophilia.1 The locus of one’s sexual arousal is oneself. It does not require that a person be in any particular physical state. Autophilia can range from brief moments of self-directed lust, to something resembling a sexual orientation. Autogynephilia is a type of autophilia. All autogynephiles are autophiles, but not all autophiles are autogynephiles.
4) Being aroused because you find the idea of yourself as a woman attractive
And finally, being aroused because you find the idea of yourself as a woman attractive is called autogynephilia. A necessary precondition is that one is sexually oriented towards women. The locus of one’s sexual arousal is oneself, and the state of embodying a female form (that you are attracted to) is prerequisite to feeling arousal.
Male-constructed femininity
The autogynephile views the female form through his own eyes, the eyes of a heterosexual male. Here, the agent is a man, and the object of his desire is the image of the feminine body constructed in his own mind. The only thing that sets the autogynephile apart from a normal straight man is that he experiences an erotic target identity inversion wherein, instead of being attracted to an idealized female other, he is attracted to the idealized female self.
17th rule of misogyny: Men are better at performing femininity than women are because they invented it and it gives them a boner.
The sexualized way a heterosexual man relates to the female form is fundamentally distinct from the way a woman relates to her own body. This distinction is evident when you observe the “femininity” that autogynephiles attempt to embody. What we see is a bimboesque archetype — one which was created by men to sexually please themselves. Autogynephilia is, in essence, when straight men try to become the porn they jerk off to.
Things that are not female autogynephilia
Straight women are conditioned to understand and center the perspectives and desires of straight men. As a result, they are very good at seeing themselves through the eyes of a hypothetical man — a phenomenon some feminists call the internal male gaze.
“You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” — Margarette Atwood
Returning to the four distinct phenomena we began by listing: when a woman dresses up and feels sexually excited by it, she is experiencing the first and second phenomena simultaneously. She thinks she looks good, which is non-sexual when she is taken in isolation, and then is aroused by the idea of a man finding her attractive. In this case of arousal, the agent is a woman, and the object is a hypothetical man’s positive response to her.
Debunking “Autogynephilia in Women”
The nature of a woman’s internalized male gaze is not something men experientially understand, nor is it something they are likely to be aware of unless they are familiar with feminist scholarship. The only study which purports to identify “autogynephilia in women” was designed and carried out by a man.2 In designing his study, Charles Moser directly adapted questionnaires designed for men without considering the unique cultural conditioning of heterosexual women. Moser is guilty of making a male-as-default presumption. Because of this, his self-described “Autogynephilia Scale for Women” (ASW) does not measure what he thinks it does.
Out of the 9 questions on the ASW, none of them isolate the phenomenon of autogynephilia from the phenomena of reciprocal arousal and generic autophilia. In fact, questions 4, 5, and 8 on the ASW are directly querying women if they have ever experienced reciprocal arousal — i.e. been aroused by a partner’s potential response to them. Questions 2, 3, 6, and 7 are querying women if they have ever been aroused by conforming to male-constructed feminine beauty standards, thus asking them if they have experienced reciprocal arousal via the internal male gaze. Question 1 is asking women if they have ever had any generic autophilic experience, and question 9 is asking if they have any clothing or texture-specific sexual fetishes, which is entirely unrelated to autogynephilia. An accurate title for Moser’s ASW would be the “Reciprocal Arousal, Internalized Male Gaze, Autophilia, and Material Fetishism Scale for Women” — though that doesn’t have a nice ring to it. Thus, the findings in the Moser paper are irrelevant to the question of whether women can be autogynephiles, as the survey he designed fundamentally could not answer the question he was researching.
Why women can never be autogynephiles
To be an autogynephile, it is not enough to be a woman and find oneself attractive, nor to be a woman and enjoy that others might find you attractive, nor even to be a woman with an autophilic paraphilia. One must have an autophilic paraphilia focused on that fact that one embodies a woman.
However, when you are a woman, the fact that you are one is simply taken for granted. It is something that is both incidental and foundational to your existence. You cannot imagine existing any other way. (This is something that the autogynephile cannot comprehend, because he is both not women and yet fixed on the idea of himself as one.) A woman cannot become sexually fixed on embodying a woman because in her case “embodying a woman” is literally just existing.
Inventing the female autogynephile
The worst thing you can do to an autogynephile is remind him that he is a heterosexual man — it ruins the immersion in his fetishistic conception of himself as a woman. Autogynephiles are thus highly motivated to construe their paraphilia as a normal female experience: if all women experience autogynephilia, then the autogynephile’s fetishistic arousal becomes a sign that he truly is a woman.
Inventing female autogynephilia is thus a way for autogynephiles to turn something that could trigger self-awareness and ruin the fetishistic immersion into something that instead reinforces it. It should not surprising to see autogynephiles reassuring each other that it is normal for women to experience “euphoria boners” when wearing women’s clothing,3 though it was surprising to learn that male researchers had given these men something to latch onto when doing so.4
In conclusion
This essay has hopefully elucidated the male-specific nature of the autogynephilic fetish, and disambiguated it from the reciprocal arousal straight women experience from their partners and via the internal male gaze. And while the idea of autogynephilia in women is fundamentally nonsensical, it should be noted that, even if it were possible for a hypothetical female autogynephile to exist, she would still be as distinct from male autogynephiles as lesbians are to straight men.
Pranzarone GF. Dictionary of Sexology.;10. Entry for “autophilia.” Accessed September 19, 2023. https://archive.ph/x2kx
Moser C. Autogynephilia in Women. Journal of Homosexuality. 2009;56(5):539-547. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/00918360903005212
I personally do not think Moser set out to collude with fetishists to whitewash their fetishes. Do not attribute to malice that which can be explained by simple ignorance.