The Human Zoo: A Zoologist's Study of the Urban Animal

by Desmond Morris

  Turning to the human animal, the significance of imprinting is clear enough. During the early months of its life a human baby passes through a sensitive socialization phase when it develops a profound and long-lasting attachment to its species and especially to its mother. As with animal imprinting, the attachment is not totally dependent on physical rewards obtained from the mother, such as feeding and cleaning. The exposure learning typical of imprinting also takes place. The young baby cannot keep close to the mother by following her like a duckling, but it can achieve the same end by the use of the smiling pattern. Smiling is attractive to the mother and encourages her to stay with the infant and play with it. These playful, smiling interludes help to cement the bond between the child and its mother. Each becomes imprinted on the other and a powerful reciprocal attachment develops, a persistent bond that is extremely important for the later life of the child. Infants that are well fed and cleaned, but are deprived of the ‘loving’ of early imprinting, can suffer anxieties that stay with them for the rest of their lives. Orphans and babies which have to live in institutions, where personal attention and bonding are unavoidably limited, all too frequently become anxious adults. A strong bond cemented during the first year of life will mean a capacity for making strong bonds during the adult life that follows.

  Good early imprinting opens a large emotional bank account for the child. If expenses are heavy later on, it will have plenty to draw upon. If things go wrong with its parental care as it grows up (such as parental separation, divorce or death), its resilience will depend on the attachment quality of that first vital year. Later troubles will, of course, take their toll, but they will be minor compared with troubles in the early months. A five-year-old child, evacuated from London during the last war and separated from its parents, when asked who he was, replied: ‘I’m nobody’s nothing.’ The shock clearly was damaging, but whether in such cases it will cause lasting harm will depend to a large extent on whether it is confirming or contradicting earlier experiences. Contradiction will cause bewilderment that can be rectified, but confirmation will tend to harden and strengthen earlier anxieties.

  Passing on to the next great attachment phase, we come to the sexual phenomenon of pair-bonding. ‘Falling in love at first sight’ may not happen to all of us, but it is far from being a myth. The act of falling in love has all the properties of an imprinting process. There is a sensitive period (early adult life) when it is most likely to occur; it is a relatively rapid process; its effect is long-lasting in relation to the time it takes to develop; and it is capable of persisting even in the conspicuous absence of rewards.

  Against this it might be argued that for many of us the earliest pair-bondings are unstable and ephemeral. The answer is that during the years of puberty and immediate post-puberty, the capacity to form a serious pair-bond takes some time to mature. This slow maturation provides a transition phase during which we can, so to speak, test the water before jumping in. If it were not so, we would all become completely fixated on our first loves. In modern society the natural transition phase has been artificially lengthened by the undue persistence of the parental bond. Parents tend to cling on to their offspring at a time when, biologically speaking, they should be releasing them. The reason is straightforward enough: the complex demands of the human zoo make it impossible for a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old individual to survive independently. This inability imparts a child-like quality which encourages the mother and father to continue to respond parentally despite the fact that their offspring is now sexually mature. This in turn prolongs many of the offspring’s infantile patterns, so that they overlap unnaturally with the new adult patterns. Considerable tensions arise as a result and there is often a clash between the parent/offspring bond and the freshly developing tendency in the young to form a new sexual pair-bond.

  It is not the parents’ fault that their children cannot yet fend for themselves in the super-tribal world outside; nor is it the children’s fault that they cannot avoid transmitting infantile signals of helplessness to their parents. It is the fault of the unnatural urban environment, which requires more years of apprenticeship than the biological growth rate of the young human animal provides.

  Despite this interference with the development of the new pair-bond relationship, sexual imprinting soon forces its way to the surface. Young love may be typically ephemeral, but it can also be extremely intense—so much so that permanent fixations on ‘childhood sweethearts’ do occur in a number of cases, regardless of the socio-economic impracticability of the relationships. Even if, under pressure, these early pair-bonds collapse, they can leave their mark. Frequently it seems as if the later search for a sexual partner, at the fully independent adult phase, involves an unconscious quest to re-discover some of the key characteristics of the very first sexual imprint. Ultimate failure in the quest may well be a hidden factor helping to undermine an otherwise successful marriage.

  This phenomenon of bond confusion is not confined to the ‘childhood sweetheart’ situation. It can occur at any stage, and is particularly likely to harass second marriages, where silent and sometimes not-so-silent comparisons with earlier mates are frequently being made. It can also play another important and damaging role when the parent/offspring bond is confused with the sexual pair-bond. To understand this it is necessary to look again at what the parent/offspring bond does to the infant. It tells it three things: 1. This is my particular, personal parent. 2. This is the species I belong to. 3. This is the species I shall mate with in later life.

  The first two instructions are straightforward; it is the third that can go wrong. If the early bond with the parent of the opposite sex has been particularly persistent, some of their individual characteristics can also be carried over to influence the later sexual bonding of the offspring. Instead of taking in the message as ‘This is the species I shall mate with in later life,’ the child reads it as ‘This is the type of person I shall mate with in later life.’

  A limiting influence of this kind can become a serious problem. Interference with the sexual pair-bonding process, stemming from a persistent parental image, can lead to a particular mate-selection which, in all other respects, is highly unsuitable. Conversely, an otherwise thoroughly compatible mate can fail to achieve a full relationship because he or she lacks certain trivial but key characteristics of the partner’s parent. (‘My father would never do that.’— ‘But I’m not your father.’)

  This troublesome phenomenon of bond confusion appears to be caused by the unnatural levels of family-unit isolation that so often develop in the crowded world of the human zoo. The ‘strangers-in-our-midst’ phenomenon tends to clamp down on the tribal-sharing, social mixing atmosphere typical of smaller communities. Defensively, the families turn in on themselves, boxing themselves off from one another in neat rows of terraced or semi-detached cages. Unhappily there is no sign of the situation improving: rather the reverse.

  Leaving the question of bond confusion, we now have to consider another, stranger aberration of human imprinting: our own version of mal-imprinting. Here we enter the unusual world of what has been termed sexual fetishism.

  For a minority of individuals the nature of the first sexual experience can have a psychologically crippling effect. Instead of becoming imprinted with the image of a particular mate, this type of individual becomes sexually fixated on some inanimate object present at the time. It is not at all clear why so many of us escape these reproductively abnormal fixations. Perhaps it depends on the vividness or violence of certain aspects of the occasion of our first major sexual discovery. Whatever it is, the phenomenon is a striking one.

  Judging by the case-history records that are available, it appears that the attachment to a sexual fetish occurs most frequently when the initial sexual consummation takes place spontaneously or when the individual is alone. In many instances it can be traced to the first ejaculation of a young adult male, which often occurs in the absence of a female and without the usual pair-b
onding preliminaries. Some characteristic object that is present at the moment of ejaculation instantly takes on a powerful and lasting sexual significance. It is as if the whole imprinting force of pair-bonding is accidentally channelled into an inanimate object, giving it, in a flash, a major role for the rest of the person’s sexual life.

  This striking form of mal-imprinting is probably not quite so rare as it seems. Most of us develop a primary pair-bond with a member of the opposite sex, rather than with fur gloves or leather boots, and we are happy to advertise our pair-bonds openly, confident that others will understand and share our feelings; but the fetishist, firmly imprinted with his unusual sexual object, tends to remain silent on the subject of his strange attachment. The inanimate object of his sexual imprinting, which has such enormous significance for him, would mean nothing to others and, for fear of ridicule, he keeps it secret. It not only means nothing to the vast majority of people, the non-fetishists, but it also means little to other fetishists, each having their own particular speciality. Fur gloves have as little significance for a leather-boot fetishist as they do for a non-fetishist. The fetishist therefore becomes isolated by his own, highly specialized form of sexual imprinting.

  Against this, it can be said that there are certain kinds of objects that do crop up with striking frequency in the fetish world. Rubber goods are particularly common, for instance. The significance of this will become clearer if we examine a few specific cases of fetish development.

  A twelve-year-old boy was playing with a fox-fur coat when he experienced his first ejaculation. In adult life he was only able to achieve sexual satisfaction in the presence of furs. He was unable to copulate with females in the ordinary way. A young girl experienced her first orgasm when clutching a piece of black velvet as she masturbated. As an adult, velvet became essential to her sexually. Her whole house was decorated with it and she only married in order to obtain more money to buy more velvet. A fourteen-year-old boy had his first sexual experience with a girl who was wearing a silk dress. Later, he was incapable of making love to a naked female. He could only become aroused if she was wearing a silk dress. Another young boy was leaning out of a window when his first ejaculation occurred. As it happened, he saw a figure moving past in the road outside, walking on crutches. When he was married he could only make love to his wife if she wore crutches in bed. A nine-year-old boy was playing with a soft glove against his penis at the moment of his first ejaculation. As an adult he became a glove-fetishist with a collection of several hundred gloves. All his sexual activities were directed to these gloves.

  There are many examples of this kind, clearly linking the adult fetish to the first sexual experience. Other common fetish objects include: shoes, riding boots, stiff collars, corsets, stockings, underclothes, leather, rubber, aprons, handkerchiefs, hair, feet, and special costumes such as nurse-maids’ uniforms. Sometimes these become the essential elements necessary for a successful (and otherwise normal) copulation. Sometimes they completely replace the sexual partner. Texture appears to be an important feature of most of them, often because pressures and frictions of various kinds are significant in causing the first sexual arousal in an individual’s lifetime. If some substance with a highly characteristic tactile quality is involved, then it seems to stand a strong chance of becoming a sexual fetish. This could account for the high frequency of rubber, leather and silk fetishes, for example.

  Shoe, boot and foot fetishes are also common and it seems likely that here, too, a pressure against the body could easily be involved. There is one classic case of a fourteen-year-old boy who was playing with a twenty-year-old girl who was wearing high-heeled shoes. He was lying on the ground and she playfully stood on him and trampled him. When her foot rested on his penis he experienced his first ejaculation. As an adult this became his only form of sexual activity. During his life he managed to persuade over a hundred women to trample on him wearing high-heeled shoes. Ideally the partner had to be of a particular weight and the shoes of a particular colour. The original encounter had to be recreated as precisely as possible to produce a maximum reaction.

  This last case shows very clearly how masochism can develop. Another young boy, for example, had his first sexual experience spontaneously while wrestling with a much larger girl. In later life he was fixated on heavy, aggressive women who were prepared to hurt him during sexual encounters. It is not difficult to imagine how certain forms of sadism could develop in a similar way.

  The attachment to a sexual fetish differs from the process of ordinary conditioning in several ways. Like imprinting (or the traumatic experiences I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter) it is very rapid, has a lasting effect and is extremely difficult to reverse. It also appears at a sensitive period. Like mal-imprinting, it fixes the individual on to an abnormal object, channelling sexual behaviour away from the biologically normal object, namely a member of the opposite sex. It is not so much the positive acquiring of sexual significance of an object such as a rubber glove that causes the damage; it is the total elimination of all other sexual objects that creates the problem. The mal-imprinting is so powerful in the cases I have mentioned that it ‘uses up’ all the available sexual interest. Just as the experimental duckling will follow only the orange balloon and completely ignore its real mother, so the glove fetishist will only mate with a glove and completely ignores potential mates. It is the exclusivity of the imprinting process that causes the difficulties when the mechanism misfires. We all find various textures and pressures stimulating as accessories to sexual encounters. There is nothing strange about responding to soft silks and velvets. But if we become exclusively fixated on them, so that we develop what amounts to a pair-bond with them (like the shoe-fetishist who, when he was alone with girls’ shoes, ‘blushed in their presence as if they were the girls themselves’), then something has gone drastically wrong with the imprinting mechanism.

  Why should a small, but nevertheless considerable number of human animals suffer from this kind of mal-imprinting? Other animals, under natural conditions in the wild, do not appear to do so. For them it only occurs when they are caught and hand-reared under highly artificial conditions, or when they are kept in enclosures with alien species, or when special experiments are carried out. Perhaps this gives the clue. As I have already emphasized, in a human zoo social conditions are highly artificial for our simple tribal species. In many of our super-tribes sexual behaviour is severely restricted at the critical stage of puberty. But although it becomes hidden and closed with all kinds of unnatural inhibitions, nothing can hold it back completely. It soon bursts through. If, when it does so, there are certain highly characteristic objects present, then they may become over-impressive. Had the developing adolescent become gradually more experienced in sexual matters at an earlier stage and had his initial sexual explorations been richer and less constricted by the artificialities of the super-tribe, then the later mal-imprinting could perhaps have been avoided. It would be interesting to know how many of the extreme fetishists were solitary children without brothers and sisters, or, as young adolescents, were timid and shy of making personal contacts, or lived in a rather strict household. Future research is needed here but my guess is that the proportion would be high.

  One important form of mal-imprinting that I have not mentioned is homosexuality. I have left it until now because it is a more complex phenomenon and because mal-imprinting is only part of the story. Homosexual behaviour can arise in one of four ways. Firstly, it can occur as a case of mal-imprinting in much the same way as fetishism. If the earliest sexual experience in an individual’s life is a powerful one and Occurs as a result of an intimate encounter with a member of the same sex, then a fixation on that sex can rapidly develop. If two adolescent boys are wrestling together or indulging in some form of sex play, and ejaculation occurs, this can lead to mal-imprinting. The strange thing is that boys often share early sexual experiences of one kind or another and yet the majority survive to become adult heterose
xuals. Again we need to know much more about what it is that fixates a few but not the majority. As with the fetishists, it probably has something to do with the degree of the richness of the boy’s social experience. The more restricted he has been socially, the more cut off from personal interactions, the blanker will be his sexual canvas. Most boys have, as it were, a sexual blackboard on which things are lightly sketched, rubbed out and re-drawn. But the inward-living boy keeps his sexual canvas virginally white. When finally something does get drawn on it, it will have a much more dramatic impact and he will probably keep the picture for life. Rough-and-tumble, extrovert boys may become involved in homosexual activities, but they will simply put them down to experience and pass on, adding more and more experiences as they progress with their socializing explorations.

  This leads me to the other causes of persistent homosexual behaviour. I say ‘persistent’ because, of course, brief and fleeting homosexual activities occur for the vast majority of both sexes at some point in their lives, as part of general sexual explorations. For most people, like the rough-and-tumble boys, they are mild experiences and are usually confined to childhood. But for some, homosexual patterns persist throughout life, frequently to the almost total, or total, exclusion of heterosexual activities. Mal-imprinting of the type I have been discussing does not explain all these cases. A second, very simple cause is that the opposite sex behaves in an exceptionally unpleasant way towards a particular individual. A boy terrorized by girls may well come to regard other males as more attractive sexual partners, despite the fact that, as mates, they are sexually inadequate objects. A girl terrorized excessively by boys may react in the same way and turn to other girls as sexual partners. Terrorizing is not the only mechanism, of course: betrayal, and other forms of social or physical punishment from the opposite sex, can work just as effectively. (Even if the opposite sex is not directly hostile, cultural pressures placing powerful restrictions on heterosexual activities may lead to the same result.)