In other words, over many human generations, men who underestimated the threat of disease from casual sex outnumbered those who were duly cautious about their chances of getting infected. Natural selection plays the numbers game. And overall, more men would have survived impulsive sexual decisions than not, thereby replicating their genes. So those old rubs about “thinking with the wrong head” do, in fact, accurately reflect the crude, stereotypically impassioned male, but there’s evolutionary logic to such idiocy. Many of us alive today, men and women, are the descendants of males whose heedless passions effectively short-circuited their long-term reasoning abilities.
A study by the psychologists Hart Blanton and Meg Gerrard is especially telling in this regard. These authors asked a group of straight male undergrads attending a large Midwest university to rate the likelihood of their contracting HIV from having unprotected sex with one of nine hypothetical women. The participants had only two bits of information to go on. First, they were informed about the total number of men that each of these women had already slept with (either one, three, or eight previous male partners). Second, they learned about this hypothetical woman’s use of condoms in the past (either “extremely good,” “pretty good,” or “not very good” about using protection).
Men who were presented with just the black-and-white facts about these fictitious females came across as responsible and mature. They concluded, logically, that their risk of acquiring HIV from having unprotected sex with the hypothetical women would increase as the number of previous amours stacked up and condom use declined. By contrast, those men who were presented with these very same biographical facts, but who also had these facts paired with images of attractive female models and were instructed to first fantasize about having sex with the ladies depicted, almost completely ignored all those “boring” details of the characters’ past sex lives. Since the provocative image of her had managed to get them sexually excited, in other words, these men saw only minimal HIV risk in having unprotected sex even with the woman who had the most prior partners and the “not very good” history of condom use.
Men who are in such an intoxicated state of desire aren’t only liable to make (really) bad decisions that put their health on the line but also more prone to making poor decisions that can have serious long-term consequences for their social lives. Lust is a sort of mental fog in which men temporarily lose, or at least lower, their standards. And by “standards,” I mean in the sense of whom (or what) a highly aroused man is willing to have sex with as well as the moral values that he’ll place into temporary quarantine just to satisfy his pressing urges. Again, from an evolutionary perspective in which sex for men was so cheap, that was indeed the best adaptive bet. But a bet also meant a gamble, and just as lust can undermine effective risk assessment in acquiring sex-borne diseases, this biologically adaptive mechanism of lust relaxing a man’s standards in these ways came with the old gambler’s proviso that there’s always the chance one could lose everything.*
Examples of such bad endings, of passionate encounters hastily born and ending up in elaborate murder plots, suicides, sex-offender registries, lengthy prison sentences, complex love triangles, or a disgruntled fling breaking into your house and boiling your child’s pet rabbit on your kitchen stove (that’s a pop-culture reference from way back in the 1980s, for any confused youngsters out there), abound in human cultures. In the previous chapter, we saw how the concupiscent brains of Genet’s town officials in The Balcony occupied a very different social space from that of their frigid alter egos. The bizarre goings-on at the madam Irma’s whorehouse, however, were just playful romps compared with the scenes unfolding in Georges Bataille’s cult novella, Story of the Eye. More slasher flick than love story, Story of the Eye is a tale about two teenage sexual psychopaths. “That was the period when Simone developed a mania for breaking eggs with her ass,” the now-adult narrator recalls fondly of his sweetheart. (The book was first published in 1928, so this was breathtakingly scandalous in its day.)
The penultimate scene in Story of the Eye involves the lewd and lascivious pair luring an unsuspecting priest into a decadent violation of his celibacy vows. Once Simone works him up into an unholy state in the confessional booth, the highly aroused priest—an honorable man of faith corrupted by this bewitching adolescent temptress—puts his sterling morals on the back burner for a moment. Bataille writes vividly: “His body erect, and yelling like a pig being slaughtered, [the priest] spurted his come on the host in the ciborium, which Simone held in front of him while jerking him off.” In The Balcony, Irma observed how the mental fog that caused the town’s male officials to be perverts clears up instantly once the sex act is done. Bataille’s priest in Story of the Eye felt this same instantaneous impact of moral clarity. Only it hit him a little harder. “Now that his balls were drained,” Bataille tells us, “his abomination appeared to him in all its horror.” (It’s just downhill for the priest from there, too. He’s immediately strangled, gets one of his eyes gouged out, and then Simone even puts it inside her … well, I’ll stop there. But hence the title of Bataille’s book.) It’s certainly on the extreme side, but Bataille’s Story of the Eye is the archetypal tale of a good man being led over the edge by his own irrepressible lust.
Nearly a century later, the social psychologists Dan Ariely and George Loewenstein confirmed this same psychological effect in a controlled experiment. Fortunately, their 2006 study included not a jittery priest, teenage sexual psychopaths (at least not that we know of), or even a ciborium but thirty-five of your average straight male undergrads from UC Berkeley. It was a straightforward experiment. Simple, really. Roughly half of the participants (the control subjects) completed a questionnaire at home about a variety of sex acts, or more specifically about whether they could ever see themselves partaking in the act under consideration. These were the types of questions you might overhear in a school cafeteria being bandied about as philosophical quandaries by a bunch of eighth-grade boys. “Could it be fun to have sex with someone who was extremely fat?” for example, or “Can you imagine getting sexually excited by an animal?” “Can you imagine having sex with a 60-year-old woman?” and “If you were attracted to a woman and she proposed a threesome with a man, would you do it?” You get the idea. These were sex acts, in other words, that only a select group of deviants would claim as appealing. And, alas, no such individuals could be found in the control group of Ariely and Loewenstein’s study. Rather, as you’d expect, these college-aged males expressed disgust and disdain for such unpopular bacchanalian festivities.
Remember, however, that only half of the participants had been randomly assigned to the control condition. The rest were given a more hands-on assignment. Prior to answering the very same questions, these other men were instructed to masturbate to their favorite porn at home—get as excited as you can, they were basically told, but do kindly refrain from climaxing. Once they got to the highest possible summit of this needful, aching state of arousal, they turned their attention to the items in the questionnaire. Interestingly, their responses turned out markedly different from those of the controls. These lustful men were much more “open-minded,” not only for the examples from before, but also for sadomasochism, fetishism (shoes, sweat, cigarettes), rape, and pedophilia. Our old friend Havelock Ellis would have been especially delighted about their answering affirmatively, proudly even, to the token urophilic question, “Would it be fun to watch an attractive woman urinating?” Most men, as these data show, are only a lustful cogitation or two away from morphing into “real perverts” who “go against what is right.”
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When it comes to human evolution, men’s sexual arousal is of course only half of the equation. Women also appear to come equipped with their own specialized arsenal of disgust-related adaptations, ones similarly designed in the female’s best reproductive interests. Given the comparatively higher parental investment cost of casual sex for a woman in the ancestral past, for instance, one
might expect female sexual arousal to actually ramp up, or at least to strengthen, her moral resolve. After all, whereas the main adaptive problem for men involved diluting their disgust in order to be able to have fruitful sex with even the most unpalatable of prospects (that is, lowering their standards), women would have instead benefited from an even more sharpened sense of disgust because it navigated them away from undesirable reproductive partners. A man who, intentionally or otherwise, happens to impregnate some poor random woman through casual sex one particular day (say, a specimen from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, one of those spicy Parisian ladies with an “aggravated misfortune” such as “a missing tooth or a nose eaten away”) can just impregnate a more genetically fit one the next day. If not, he can always try again the day after that (or perhaps later that evening). By contrast, a woman who has just been impregnated by an undesirable man (quite possibly that very same undesirable whom we’ve just met) can’t move on to better mating prospects so quickly. It will be a considerable period of time before she can try to get pregnant again—and with a baby in tow. With all of those imposing biological costs entailed for women, a comparative pickiness in sex partners became paramount to female genetic success. And sexual disgust for male undesirables in all their misshapen forms—morally, socially, and physically—was instrumental to solving this uniquely female adaptive problem.
Results from a study by the anthropologist Daniel Fessler and his colleague David Navarrete support the notion that women’s disgust for “biologically suboptimal unions” flares up especially when they’re ovulating. These researchers asked hundreds of reproductive-aged women (who, naturally, were at various phases of their menstrual cycles at the time) to fill out an online questionnaire concerning a broad range of hypothetical hookups. Many of these hypotheticals closely resembled those earlier questions from Ariely and Loewenstein’s study of disgust in aroused men. Fessler and Navarrete’s list included, for example, “a 20-year-old woman who seeks sexual relationships with 80-year-old men” and “an adult woman who has sex with her father.” Their hypothesis was that the female participants’ disgust at the very thought of such “biologically suboptimal” pairings would vary as a function of their state of fertility, reflecting a psychological adaptation that helps to discourage women from making maladaptive decisions when the stakes are greatest. Indeed, those ladies who were “high in conception risk” while responding to the questionnaire were significantly more repulsed by deviant couplings involving bestiality, extreme age-disparate unions, and incest than those at less fertile periods of their cycles. Furthermore, just as we’d expect with our local anesthetic model from earlier, these women were no more or less disgusted than their not-quite-as-fertile cohorts when it came to items featuring more general yuckiness (such as thoughts of maggots on a piece of meat, picking up a dead cat, or stepping on an earthworm with their bare feet). Rather, it was only the cases of sexual deviancy that made these very fertile women’s disgust ratings really stand out.
Fessler and Navarrete’s study wasn’t a “within-subjects design” (which means they didn’t check to see if the disgust ratings of the same women fluctuated over the course of their own menstrual cycles). However, with a randomly drawn “between-subjects design” (which means they compared the disgust ratings of different women as a function of their present fertility status), there’s every reason to assume that these cyclic effects in female disgust sensitivity also apply at the “intra-individual” menstrual level. In other words, when she’s more likely to become pregnant, and therefore poised to make critical mating decisions that are either biologically adaptive (such as sex with a healthy, successful, similarly aged partner who’ll help to support the child), maladaptive (such as sex with an octogenarian who might not even survive the length of her pregnancy), or simply a poor use of her time (such as sex with a sea turtle), the average woman becomes significantly less “open-minded” about sexual deviancy than she may otherwise be.* But assuming that her male partner is human, and given that his genitals aren’t crumbling away from disease, he’s not any older than her great-grandfather, and he’s more or less a reasonably decent mate, the lustful mind-set of a fertile woman encourages her to have productive intercourse, with that reliable disgust anesthetic making it all possible.
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So far, we’ve been talking about disgust in its more literal forms: as a contamination-avoidance mechanism with an elaborate pulley-and-lever system that evolved to help us make biologically adaptive decisions in the heat of the moment. But disgust has also come to have powerful symbolic elements, and these, too, are meaningfully tied to human sexuality. The often-dramatized, heartbreaking image of a woman crouched in the corner of a shower and frantically trying to scrub her body clean after being raped is indeed supported by empirical evidence. Seventy percent of female sexual assault victims report a strong impulse to wash afterward, and a quarter of these are still washing excessively for up to three months later. For women, simply imagining an unwanted sexual advance can serve to turn on this “moral cleansing” effect. In one study, two groups of female participants were told to close their eyes and picture being kissed. The members of one group were instructed to imagine being aggressively cornered and kissed against their will by an undesirable male. The members of the other group, by contrast, were asked to envision themselves making out with an attractive man in a consensual embrace. Only those women who’d been randomly assigned to the coercive condition chose to wash up after the study.*
In many cases, it’s as though the person’s very sense of self has been contaminated as the result of being sexually assaulted. Here’s one young woman, for instance, describing the emotional aftermath of her childhood molestation:
I could stand and stare at myself in the mirror and just want to be sick, I couldn’t make sense of it, I couldn’t understand that it was me it had happened to. And it was so bloody disgusting that I felt as though I was going to be sick … I stood in a bathroom and looked at myself in a mirror and tried to understand that it was me, it was so revolting, I think it ended with me sort of, I don’t know I just switched off. I felt like the filthiest, most disgusting child in the world. It was really disgust, disgust beyond description. (Italics added)
When symbolic disgust gets into one’s core identity like this, the psychological sanitation process is never an easy one. There’s now a residual grime on the person’s subjective filter through which she perceives herself, and if left untreated, these effects can permanently darken and sully the individual’s entire sense of being. The insidious consequences of disgust in generating feelings of hatred and loathing of others that we saw earlier (such as in the political ploy of fanning hatred for gay men by a rhetorical emphasis on anal sex) typically lead to a behavioral avoidance of the object of one’s social distaste. In fact, the measurable physical distance placed between oneself and the hated target (such as in an elevator) can show this effect empirically. No matter which way our own worldview happens to tilt, we usually don’t stand too close to people whom we believe harbor opinions or attitudes that are morally repellent to us, nor do we seek to place ourselves in the immediate vicinity of those who’ve engaged in social behaviors we strongly believe are offensive and wrong. Avoiding such a morally “disgusting” person gets far more complicated, however, when the primary source of your symbolic disgust is you. After all, there are only three ways to escape the self—depressive sleep, drugs, and suicide. And none of these, needless to say, is healthy.
Once a person feels tainted this way by an act judged to be especially unacceptable by his or her own society (either as the victim of the act or as the offender who feels genuine shame and remorse after his lust got the better of him), these rankling feelings of symbolic disgust can quickly metastasize into malignant self-hatred. Sexually abused children, for example, are far more likely than their peers to develop an exhaustive suite of psychopathologies later in life. Suicide rates skyrocket, and correlations have been found with everyt
hing from chronic depression to self-harm (such as cutting), substance abuse, eating disorders, paranoia, hostility, and psychoticism.
The most common way of managing the damage is to channel the harmful, caustic emotions elsewhere. Usually, this involves directing the symbolic disgust outward—away from the self—and toward those perceived to be responsible for sullying the self. A study by the psychologist George Bonanno, for instance, showed that the coping strategies of adults who’d been sexually abused as children could be reliably gauged by unobtrusively observing their nonverbal facial displays during a therapy session. Those who, as kids, hadn’t disclosed their sexual abuse to others (for example, it was discovered by another adult and only then reported) and who blamed themselves displayed far more “non-Duchenne” (or fake) smiles than did those survivors who blamed their abusers. This latter group was more clearly identifiable by their facial expressions of disgust—a palpable moral loathing—whenever speaking about those who’d harmed them.
Although such powerful symbolic disgust responses are all too real in the damage they can do to a person’s well-being, you may be surprised to learn that their precise parameters have no basis in a moral reality. Unlike food-borne or disease-ridden pathogens that human beings have evolved to combat through adaptive responses and that require absolutely no enculturation (we don’t have to “learn” how to get diarrhea or vomit, for instance, after wolfing down a burger infected with E. coli, nor do we require lessons on how to go about experiencing a precipitous drop in desire on seeing—or smelling—our sex partner’s worrisomely encrusted genitalia), what induces the symbolic disgust response is defined by prevailing cultural forces. That’s to say, for the most part we’ve learned to morally loathe whatever it is that we’ve come to do; this information isn’t genetically inborn but socially acquired. What might have made a Japanese person commit ritual suicide in the eighteenth century because he couldn’t stand to live with himself and his shameful social offense would for most of us today be quickly forgotten as a trifling incident. Given their sheer emotional intensity, it’s easy to mistake feelings of symbolic disgust for an immovable moral reality that exists outside our own subjective heads. But they don’t.
Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us Page 7
