What often gets overlooked in Wilde’s account is the fact that “the love that dare not speak its name” referred to a specific type of homosexual relationship. Sexologists today would label Wilde’s well-known affinities as evidence of his “ephebophilia” (attraction to teens or adolescents).* Wilde’s intent in the phrase being especially applicable to courtships between men and teenage boys is clear when one reads his full elaboration on the stand, where he goes on to describe this unspeakable love:
As there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Michelangelo … It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.
Wilde’s description of such a mutually beneficial, intergenerational romance is ironic today, because “the love that dare not speak its name” is now more unutterable than ever. The modern ephebophilic heirs of Wilde, Plato, and Michelangelo are not only mocked and pilloried but branded erroneously, as we’ll see later, as “pedophiles.”
Much like Wilde facing his detractors, the early sexologists found themselves confronted by angry purists who feared that their novel scientific endeavors would open the door to the collapse of cherished institutions such as marriage, religion, and “the family.” Anxieties over such a “slippery slope effect” have been around for a very long time, and in the eyes of these moralists an objective approach to sexuality threatened all that was good and holy. Conservative scholars saw any neutral evaluation of sex deviants as a dangerous stirring of the pot, legitimizing wicked things as “natural” variants of behavior and leading “normal” people into embracing the unethical lifestyles of the degenerate.* Merely giving horrific tendencies such as same-sex desires their own proper scientific names made them that much more real to these moralists, and therefore that much more threatening. To them, this was the reification of sexual evil. In a scathing review of Sexual Inversion, for instance, a psychiatrist at the Boston Insane Hospital named William Noyes chastised the authors for “adding three hundred more pages to a literature already too flourishing … Apart from its influence on the perverts themselves no healthy person can read this literature without a lower opinion of human nature, and this result in itself should bid any writer pause.”
Looking back now, it becomes evident that Ellis and Symonds’s careful distinction between homosexual behavior and homosexual orientation was an important step in the history of gay rights. It may seem like common sense today, but for the first time ever homosexuality was being widely and formally conceptualized as a psychosexual trait (or orientation), not just something that one “did” with members of the same sex.* This watershed development in psychiatrists’ way of thinking about homosexuality had long-lasting positive and negative implications for gays and lesbians. On the positive side, homosexuals were no longer perceived (at least by experts) as fallen people who were simply so immoral and licentious that they’d even resort to doing that; instead, they were seen as having a psychological “nature” that made them “naturally” attracted to the same sex rather than to the opposite sex.
On the negative side, this newly recognized nature was also regarded as inherently abnormal or flawed. With their inverted pattern of attraction, homosexuals became perverts in essence, not just louses dabbling in transgressive sex. Whether or not they ever had homosexual sex, such people were now one of “them.” Also, once homosexuality was understood to be an orientation and not just a criminal behavior, it could be medicalized as a psychiatric “condition.”* For almost a hundred years to follow, psychiatrists saw gays and lesbians as quite obviously mentally ill. And just as one would treat the pathological symptoms of patients suffering from any mental illness, most clinicians believed that homosexuals should be treated for their unfortunate disorder. I’ll come back to “conversion therapy” in later chapters, but needless to say, such treatments, in all their shameful forms, certainly didn’t involve encouraging gays and lesbians to be themselves.
The die had also been cast for the disparaging term “pervert” and its enduring association with homosexuality. Not so long ago, some neo-Freudian scholars were still interpreting anal intercourse among gay men as an unconscious desire in the recipient to nip off the other’s penis with his tightened sphincter. “In this way, which is so characteristic of the pervert,” mused the influential psychiatrist Mervin Glasser in 1986, “he [is] trying to establish his father as an internal object with whom to identify, as an inner ally and bulwark against his powerful mother.” That may sound as scientific to us today as astrology or etchings on a tarot card, but considering that Glasser wrote this thirteen years after the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, it shows how long the religious moral connotations stuck around even in clinical circles. Glasser’s bizarre analysis of “perverts” is the type of thing that gay men could expect to hear if they ever sought counseling for their inevitable woes from living in a world that couldn’t decide if they were sick or immoral, so simply saw them as both.
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Today the word “pervert” just sounds silly, or at least provincial, when it’s used to refer to gays and lesbians. In a growing number of societies, homosexuals are slowly, if only begrudgingly, being allowed entry into the ranks of the culturally tolerated. But plenty of other sexual minorities remain firmly entrenched in the orientation blacklist. Although, happily, we’re increasingly using science to defend gays and lesbians, deep down most of us (religious or not) still appear to be suffering from the illusion of a Creator who set moral limits on the acceptable sexual orientations. Our knee-jerk perception of individuals who similarly have no choice over what arouses them sexually (pedophiles, exhibitionists, transvestites, and fetishists, to name but a few) is that they’ve willfully, deliberately, and arrogantly strayed from the right course. We see them as “true perverts,” in other words. Whereas gays and lesbians are perceived by more and more people as “like normal heterosexuals” because they didn’t choose to be the way they are, these others (somehow) did.
A subtle form of this flawed logic can even be found in the reasoning of some atheistic evolutionary biologists. When weighing in on the marriage equality debate or on other gay rights issues, many scholars like to mention the simple fact that homosexual acts are common in other species, too. This is to say, “Oh, relax, everyone, gays and lesbians are fine because, look, they really aren’t that weird in the grand scheme of things.” There’s good emotional currency in animal comparisons, and I like this tack very much for its rhetorical effects. Yet it’s fundamentally wrong, because it simultaneously invokes a moral judgment against those whose sexual orientations are not found in other animals. Furthermore, even if we were indeed the lone queer species in an infinite universe of potentially habitable planets, it’s unclear to me how that would make marriage between two gay adults in love with each other less okay.
Same-sex behaviors in other species are interesting in their own right. But are we humans really that lost in the ethical wilderness that we’re actually seeking guidance from monkeys, crawfish, and penguins about the acceptable use of our genitals? We engage in the same questionable reasoning when citing other nonmonogamous species to support our views on polyamorous (or “open”) relationships (this was in fact a message central to the popular book Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá).
Even though we may be operating with the most humane intentions, when we’re thinking about sex and morality, it’s all too easy to fall prey to a philosophical error called the naturalistic
fallacy. In effect, the naturalistic fallacy assumes that that which is natural is therefore okay, good, or socially acceptable and that which is unnatural is, in turn, bad and unacceptable. Those who use examples of same-sex liaisons in other species to justify the social acceptance of gays and lesbians are every bit as guilty of the naturalistic fallacy as the religious conservatives who perceive some sort of “obviousness” in these behaviors being morally wrong due to their “unnaturalness.” After all, sex acts with reproductively immature juveniles and forced copulation are also commonly found in nature—in fact, much more so than homosexuality. Yet these more impolite details about the sex lives of other species haven’t led to many moral arguments (or at least persuasive ones) for human adults having sex with children or men raping women. And they shouldn’t. But we need to be careful here, because in cherry-picking features of the natural world to defend one social category—in this case, gays and lesbians—we risk shaking the whole tree.
This problem of the naturalistic fallacy is even more apparent when the “acceptable” form of human sexual deviance occurs alongside “unacceptable” forms in the very same species. Bonobo chimpanzees (Pan paniscus) are one of the most frequently mentioned examples of another primate exhibiting a natural tendency to engage in homosexual acts and to have multiple sexual partners. Given our close genetic relationship with bonobos (we share around 98.6 percent of our DNA with them), they’re often used to showcase the “naturalness” of human homosexuality and the “unnaturalness” of human monogamy. These apes are most notorious for their passionate displays of “GG-rubbing” between females (genito-genital friction involving two female bonobos ecstatically rubbing their clitorises together), but mutual masturbation between males is also common. Such homoerotic encounters are believed to be central to the bonobo’s relatively nonaggressive nature, in that sex is used as a sort of peace offering for dialing down rising social tensions in the group before things turn violent. As the primatologist Frans de Waal notes, what’s especially interesting is that bonobos’ “sociosexual behaviors” would get humans arrested. (This is clear from his article titled “Sociosexual Behavior Used for Tension Regulation in All Age and Sex Combinations Among Bonobos,” which was published in the journal Pedophilia.) Not only are “consenting adult bonobos” being “naturally” gay and promiscuous with each other, but you’ll also find, for example, adult male bonobos “naturally” fondling immature males alongside adult female bonobos “naturally” mouthing the genitals of juvenile females.
When religious or social conservatives commit the naturalistic fallacy, by contrast, the issue of procreation usually takes center stage and the philosophical error is embarrassingly salient. The trouble with confusing morality with reproduction applies equally to any sex act that can’t produce offspring, but it’s most commonly seen, unsurprisingly, in arguments against homosexuality. Many social conservatives enjoy pointing out to those of us who just can’t seem to grasp these more challenging aspects of biology that whereas having intercourse with the opposite sex can produce offspring, having intercourse with the same sex cannot. This is usually extrapolated to mean that gay sex is obviously unnatural, and so it’s obviously just plain wrong (translation: arrogantly ignores God’s intentional design).
Given that nature is mechanistic and amoral, and not the product of intelligent forethought, this entire position is a nonstarter. To draw from the assembly-line principles of reproductive biology any moral directive or prescription for what human beings should and should not do with their genitalia is to assume that a Creator intentionally engineered our reproductive anatomies. That pre-Darwinian view—that a preconceiving mind is needed to account for the evolution of our body parts and that this divinely penned blueprint should in turn dictate our social behaviors—lies at the malformed heart of the religious argument against homosexuality (one that’s usually expressed in the form of some awful rendition of the “Adam and Steve” fundamentalist refrain).
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We’ve become so focused as a society on the question of whether a given sexual behavior is evolutionarily “natural” or “unnatural” that we’ve lost sight of the more important question: Is it harmful? In many ways, it’s an even more challenging question, because although naturalness can be assessed by relatively straightforward queries about statistical averages—for example, “How frequently does it appear in other species?” and “In what percentage of the human population does it occur?”—the experience of harm is largely subjective. As such, it defies such direct analyses and requires definitions that resonate with people in vastly different ways. When it comes to sexual harm in particular, what’s harmful to one person not only is completely harmless to another but may even, believe it or not, be helpful or positive. If the supermodel Kate Upton were to walk into my office right now and tie me to my chair before doing a slow striptease and depositing her vagina in my face, I think I’d require therapy for years. But if this identical event were to happen to my heterosexual brother or to one of my lesbian friends, I suspect their brains would process such a “tragic” experience very differently. (And that of my not-very-amused sister-in-law would see my brother’s encounter with said vagina differently still.)
It’s not just overt sex acts that people experience differently in terms of harm but also sexual desires. For the religiously devout, this entire conversation is a lost cause.* But once one abandons the notion that one can “commit” a sin by thinking a thought, it becomes quite clear that sexual desires—no matter how deviant—are intrinsically harmless to the subject of a person’s lust, at least in the physical sense. Mental states are “mere breath on the air,” as the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote. Sexual desires can, of course, be thought bubbles with thorns and wreak havoc on a person’s own well-being (especially when they occur in the heads of those convinced such thoughts come from the Devil and yet they just can’t stop having them). Still, it’s only when this “mere breath on the air” is manifested in behavior that harm to another person may or may not occur.
Treating an individual as a pervert in essence, and hence with a purposefully immoral mind, because his or her brain conjures up atypical erotic ideas or responds sexually to stimuli that others have deemed inappropriate objects of desire, is medieval in both its stupidity and its cruelty. It’s also entirely counterproductive. Research on the “white bear effect” by the social psychologist Daniel Wegner has shown, for instance, that forcing a person to suppress specific thoughts leads to those very thoughts invading the subject’s consciousness even more than they otherwise would. (Whatever you do, don’t—I repeat, do not—think about a white bear during the next thirty seconds.)
Our moral evaluations should fall upon harmful sexual actions with the heaviest of thuds, but not upon a pituitary excretion that happens to morph into an ethereal image in the private movie theater of someone’s mind.* It’s easier to agree with that statement in principle than it is to put it into practice, however. Simply having knowledge of another person’s deviant desires can interfere with our ability to be so logical. If somehow you became aware that your friendly middle-aged neighbor, the one with the Honda Accord, the white picket fence, and the adoring golden retriever, derives intense sexual gratification by masturbating to violent rape fantasies, and that the mere sight of a horse’s penis in one of her many glossy copies of Equus can bring the cheery, rosy-cheeked woman who works at the bakery up the road to a mind-numbing climax, would this alter your perception of them as respectable members of your community? Neither one, to your knowledge, has ever harmed a living soul due to his or her deviant desires (nor is there any reason to think they’d ever act on them, since they seem to have successfully refrained from doing so up to this point), yet it’s still hard to keep from pulling out our moral yardstick and applying it to their “mere breath on the air.”
In the real world, one reason we mistakenly conflate sexual desires and sexual behaviors in our moral evaluations of others is that the actual distanc
e between the two can be measured by the neuron. That is to say, while it’s true that sexual desires don’t always turn into overt actions, it’s also the case that behaviors are strongly motivated by what’s on a person’s mind. Using our knowledge of a person’s sexual desires to morally judge him or her constitutes a philosophical error, but from an evolutionary perspective, it’s the sort of bad philosophy that often leads to adaptive social decision making. Even if his history is unimpeachable, declining an invitation from that neighbor of yours with the violent rape fantasies to join him for a romantic dinner at his place tomorrow night—just the two of you—seems prudent if you’re an attractive female. And assuming I had one, I’m afraid that even I’d be slightly reluctant to let the horse-loving bakery worker near my impressive stallion.
This better-safe-than-sorry bias is morally rational (it’s designed to protect ourselves or those we care about from harm), but it’s not morally logical (it’s a form of prejudice against someone on the basis of his or her sexual nature, not a decision based on anything the person has actually done). When it comes to high-risk social decisions such as who’s going to babysit the children or whether or not to go out on a date with someone you barely know, negative stereotypes can have adaptive utility. But just because something is adaptive doesn’t mean it’s ethically defensible. (Assuming so would be to commit the naturalistic fallacy.) After all, it works the same way for any minority social category. Whether it’s the color of one’s skin, how much a person weighs, or the particular accent a person speaks with, negative stereotypes are shortcuts in our social reasoning that crop up mostly under time pressures and as the stakes rise. In the case of those with deviant sexual desires and our attempts to avoid harm, caution may be warranted, but we also shouldn’t follow our emotionally driven intuitions so blindly that we’re wholly unaware of our failure in moral logic. Overgeneralizing the frightening attributes of the most negative examples of a hidden social category (such as a religious denomination or a sexual orientation) to everyone in that category leads to disturbing effects in which we become overly paranoid about the unseen monsters in our midst. In sociological terms, we submit to “moral panic.” Since unsavory carnal desires can’t be easily detected, everyone is potentially now one of “those people.”
Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us Page 3
