Dazed takes the gay test
“Multiple studies show that is an important predictor of the likelihood men who have sexually offended will reoffend,” Seto tells me. Seto worked at Freund’s lab - the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto, publishing several book chapters and articles with Freund, before Freund took his own life in 1996 after a battle with lung cancer. “One benefit of the plethysmograph is that it can produce an objective measure of sexual arousal to children, which is beneficial for both risk assessment and treatment planning,” says Michael Seto, a psychiatry professor at the University of Ottawa and the editor-in-chief of the Sexual Abuse journal.
He later apologized in 1977.Īs he moved away from “treating” homosexuality, Freund focused his PPG studies on the detection and diagnosis of sex offenders. He determined that men couldn’t change their sexual preferences, and started advocating for the decriminalization of homosexuality, which was achieved in Czechoslovakia in 1961. However, by 1957, Freund concluded that his early experiment was a failure. Because of his work in this field, Freund was commissioned by Czechoslovakian army commanders in 1953 to create a device that would identify anyone who was attempting to evade military service by pretending to be gay - those not turned on by erotic photos of men during Freund’s PPG were enlisted in the army. In the early 1950s, Kurt Freund, a Czech-Canadian physician and sexologist, was treating men for homosexual tendencies by administering aversion therapy, a psychological treatment in which a person is subjected to discomfort (like nausea-inducing drugs) while exposed to a particular stimulus (e.g., an erotic scene between two men). It’s because of the latter usage that the procedure even exists. In the past, it was also used to conduct gay aversion therapy, and has even been wielded on Army hopefuls to determine their sexuality. Today, the PPG is typically used to monitor sex offender’s sexual preferences - primarily to establish if they’re pedophiles - but it can also be employed as a treatment for erectile dysfunction. Then, in 2009, it made an appearance in Louis Theroux’s documentary, A Place for Paedophiles, which takes viewers inside Coalinga State Hospital in California, where sex offenders who have completed their prison sentences spend their subsequent years. In 2007, the PPG was featured in the reality series, Rock of Love, with Poison’s lead singer Bret Michaels (for the uninitiated, it was a Bachelor-esque show in which female contestants rated Michaels’ test results to win a date with him). Supposedly, this determines which images stimulated them.
As they’re shown certain images or sounds - for example, naked people of varying ages - the gauges expand if the penis engorges with blood (monitored by the mercury sending electrical impulses to the PPG device). The person being subjected to the procedure is hooked up to a monitor, and has a rubber band-type gauge filled with mercury attached to their penis. The phallometric assessment procedure is used to measure a person’s sexual arousal by monitoring the amount of blood in their erection in response to certain visual and auditory stimuli. Joseph Plaud, a clinical and forensic psychologist based in Florida, has been administering these tests - called penile plethysmographs (PPGs) - for over 30 years. The test’s subjects are typically sex offenders, and the test will supposedly prove it. After measuring their own dicks, these men are usually invited into a solitary room, where they’re asked to attach a device to their penis that claims to measure who or what they’re sexually attracted to. In police stations and forensic labs across the world, men are being subjected to what’s become colloquially known as a “ penis lie detector” test. The article has now been updated to reflect this. However, the two published several book chapters and articles together in the 1990s. Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article stated that researchers Kurt Freund and Michael Seto had never worked together.