Now, before we move on to what scientists at least strongly suspect about the paraphilias, there’s one important side note to this issue of using controlled experiments in studying the real-time germination of sexual deviancy. For better or worse, when it comes to creating deviant rodents or farm animals, the ethical barriers are considerably less imposing than they are for turning kids into melissaphiles. And indeed, some researchers have managed to plant and cultivate full-blown “paraphilia-like” traits in members of other species by manipulating specific aspects of their early development.
In one study, for instance, newborn male rat pups that were randomly assigned to nurse from a dam (or mother rat) with teats that had been artificially coated with a lemony scent grew up to be “lemonophilic” adults. They could only get erections and ejaculate with females that smelled like their citrusy mothers. In another experiment, scientists switched newborn sheep and goats at birth: The baby goats were raised by sheep, and the baby sheep were raised by goats. Once these animals were reproductively mature, they were reunited with members of their “birth species.” Such an unusual development had a dramatically different effect on the males and the females. For the now-adult males, neither the sheep nor the goats displayed even the slightest interest in the female members of their own biological kind. Rather, their mating efforts were directed to females of their adoptive species. By contrast, the adult females who’d been switched at birth were far less discriminating in their choice of a male sex partner. Unlike the males’, these females’ potential for arousal went both ways when it came to their sheep-goat options. As long as it was one of the two, it had a penis, and it knew what to do with it, the particular species was just a superficial detail to them.
In other words, the males responded to their unusual development in a fundamentally different way from how the females responded to the same aberrant experience. The former underwent a “sexual imprinting” process that wired their arousal pattern in one direction only (toward those they were exposed to while growing up), whereas the latter retained significantly more erotic plasticity. Rats, sheep, and goats are many branches away from us on the phylogenetic tree, so there’s only so much we can make of these findings when it comes to paraphilias in our own species. But keep these animal studies in mind (better yet, earmark this section so you can come back to it), because we’ll soon be encountering examples of what certainly look to be sexual imprinting in early human development, and there are also a few differences between men and women that are eerily consistent with the ungulate gender-difference pattern we’ve just seen.
Rest assured, there are no warped Jungle Book tales lying in wait for you. As far as I’m aware, for instance, no little girls have ever been raised by a community of bonobos, let alone any who eventually grew up to grind their clitorises with female apes. Yet I’d be remiss not to briefly share with you the story of Lucy, a chimp raised much like a human child by the psychologist Maurice Temerlin in the late 1960s. Temerlin reports that once she’d blossomed into a young adult, a favorite hobby of Lucy’s was masturbating to the nude human male centerfolds from the latest issue of Playgirl magazine by carefully spreading out the pages on the floor and then placing her swollen genitals on the image of the man’s penis. (I’m a bit jealous, to be honest. My mom would only pick up the occasional Men’s Fitness for me, and here Lucy was getting Temerlin to purchase a subscription to Playgirl.)
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We human beings can’t sacrifice a few of our own to be raised by another species just to see if it screws up a person’s sexuality. Most parents, loving and responsible bastards that they are, aren’t willing to donate their babies to such an ambitious project.* But we can be grouped in accordance with whatever makes us the horniest (or in other words what we’re “into”). Wherever direct causation fails, taxonomy reigns. So before diving headfirst into the elaborate theories and conceptual issues involving the paraphilias, we should get squared away on some basic organizational matters.
Experts have sought to discipline this unruly subfield of psychiatry by classifying, carving up, and cajoling sex deviants into their own neat and tidy corners of the various diagnostic manuals. There are other templates for arranging the paraphilias, and sometimes also major differences between them (such as the inclusion of “excessive sexual desires” in the ICD-10 but not in the DSM-5). For the most part, however, they’re more in agreement with one another than they are in disagreement. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll use the current scheme in the North American diagnostic manual (the DSM-5) to get a handle on what would otherwise be an impenetrable, unwieldy mass of outrageous case studies and forensic reports. If nothing else, this will provide us with a nomenclature of sexual deviancy, and when you’re dealing with such a thorny subject matter as this, speaking a common language is essential.
The DSM-5 includes only eight specific paraphilias: exhibitionism, fetishism, frotteurism (rubbing one’s genitals or touching strangers in public, typically in crowded places such as subway trains or elevators), pedophilia, masochism, sadism, voyeurism, and transvestic fetishism. Rattling that list off out loud makes it sound—and unfortunately so—like a roundup for a “Things Your Mother Would Disown You For” survey on Family Feud. As we’ve already seen, there are many other varieties of paraphilias. They can be anything under the sun, “including the sun,” as a psychiatrist once quipped.* But the core list is limited to these eight mostly for pragmatic reasons. If every florid fetish or atypical orientation were included in the DSM-5, there wouldn’t be any room left for the many psychiatric disorders that don’t involve the genitals.
Alas, there’s a place in the DSM-5 for even the most unusual paraphilias: the residual ninth category under the heading of PNOS, or “paraphilia not otherwise specified.” Just as we saw with “hypersexuality” or “sex addiction” sometimes being diagnosed with the broad swipe of the DSM-5’s “sexual disorder not otherwise specified,” most of the paraphilias aren’t found explicitly in the DSM-5, either, but instead are tossed into this catchall PNOS bucket. A few of the “philias” that we’ve run into so far (such as zoophilia, necrophilia, podophilia, and acrotomophilia) could be diagnosed under this PNOS heading, and we’ll turn our attention to several additional examples of these more deviant deviances in the pages ahead.
The taxonomy of deviance can get rather complicated. Consider that the same person may have multiple paraphilias, and these can overlap the seemingly snug boundaries laid out in the DSM-5 in the most curious ways. For example, my first exposure to an erotic outlier was with a hebephilic pygophile who also had a touch of frotteurism. A hebephile (from “Hebe,” the Greek goddess of youth) prefers pubescents between the ages of roughly eleven and fourteen, and as for pygophilia, it’s all about the buttocks. Mix these two together and you get the character I happened to chance upon that afternoon long ago. It’s a blurry reminiscence involving a rabbit-like rodent, a department store, and a man aroused by the scraggy body of the twelve-year-old boy that I inhabited at that time. My older sister had wandered off to another part of the store, leaving me alone in the pet section to pick out a calico-colored guinea pig that I’d already decided to call Trixie (which sounds to me now more like a streetwalker’s nom de plume). I believe it was somewhere around the fifth time that the man asked me to bend over to take a closer look at the animals in their ground-level cages while—“Oops, sorry,” he kept saying—casually running his hand against my backside that I got the vague sense that this whole business was about something other than our shared fascination with the species Cavia porcellus, that brave little emblem of so many bad medical metaphors. Given that he used his hands rather than pressed his penis against me—he did have the decency not to do that at least—a pedantic specialist might prefer the term “toucheurism” to “frotteurism.” Both refer to unwelcome, surreptitious contact with strangers in public places for sexual gratification but differ by the appendage being used.
We shouldn’t fault this man for his singular eroti
c profile any more than we should hold him accountable for the particular whorl of his hair pattern, but he hadn’t kept his deviant desires in his head, where they belonged in this instance. Instead, they reached out and grabbed my ass. Now, the field of psychiatry has learned a few good lessons from its own awkward adolescent history with sex. For example, you don’t call a woman a “nymphomaniac” just because she masturbates and likes to have sex, as Horatio Storer did, and you really shouldn’t try to turn a gay man straight by encouraging one of your female patients to fondle him, as Albert Ellis did. This learning curve has led to the APA’s rather lenient modern stance on the paraphilias, too. The basic rule is this: no matter how deviant your deviant desires, if you’re not hurting anyone (or anything), and if your sexuality isn’t causing you personal distress, then you don’t meet the criteria for a mental illness connected to your paraphilia.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was harmed that day. However, had my sister not reappeared right around this man’s sixth groping attempt, and given that I was so naive I might well have done whatever he told me to do (including follow him to his car, all seventy-five pounds of me), he was walking a precarious line even for my relatively liberal measures of harm. So regardless of whether he was perfectly comfortable with being a hebephilic pygophile whose favorite pastime is touching young boys in public places, and he experienced no personal distress due to his sexual nature, the average psychiatrist examining the store’s security-camera footage from that day long ago would call this man mentally ill. And the average citizen looking over that psychiatrist’s shoulder, of course, would call him a criminal.
Of the eight specifically named paraphilias in the manual, five are set aside as exempt from the “personal distress” policy: pedophilia, exhibitionism, voyeurism, frotteurism, and sadism. The guiding thought is that whereas most forms of sexual deviance are harmless enough, these are inherently harmful. Yet the dividing line between “harmful” and “not harmful” isn’t always so obvious. We’ll explore this critically important issue in more detail in the next chapter. (And bear in mind that the question of whether someone has a mental illness is altogether different from that of whether he’s broken the law. The issue is his ability to have behaved otherwise.*)
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Leaving the matter of harm aside for the time being, let’s return to taxonomy. The psychologist James Cantor suggests that we think of paraphilias as being divisible into two broad categories. First, he says, are those in which the sexually interesting object (what’s commonly referred to as the “erotic target”) is something other than reproductively mature, standard-issue human beings. The decadent French poet Charles Baudelaire claimed that he’d acquired a keen taste for female giantesses and dwarves, for instance. (The technical term for an attraction to people of dramatically different heights is “anasteemaphilia.”) Then again, Baudelaire also once claimed to have eaten the brains of a child and that he owned a pair of riding breeches made from his father’s hide, so we should probably take any claims of his love life with a good pinch of salt, too. But other flavorful examples fitting into this first category of unusual erotic targets would include “ornithophilia” (an intense desire for birds), “savantophilia” (arousal to mentally challenged individuals), and “chasmophilia” (the attraction to nooks, crannies, crevices, and chasms, more precisely, those that are not found on the surface of the human body).
The second broad category of paraphilias, Cantor goes on to explain, consists of those in which the most arousing sex act is something other than copulatory or precopulatory (or foreplay) behaviors with a consenting partner. Here you’ll find the “stygiophiles” (who work themselves up into a hot lather at the thought of going to hell), the “psychrophiles” (who wouldn’t mind going to hell either, but only once it freezes over, since their biggest turn-on is being cold and watching others shivering), and the “climacophiles” (who are said to have their most intense orgasms while falling down stairs).
These are all extremely rare. More familiar examples of this second category are frotteurism, exhibitionism, and voyeurism. The influential sexologist Kurt Freund, considered by many to be the father of experimental sexology (not to worry, we’ll spend quality time with him later), saw each of these paraphilias as a sign of an underlying “courtship disorder.” Freund argued that most healthy adult sexual encounters include a stage of “preparatory” behaviors that serve to convey the person’s erotic interest. This isn’t so much the foreplay stage as the one where green-lighting efforts are taking place. “This is the phase of eye-talk and finger-talk when the partners give signals or invitations to one another,” the psychologist John Money clarified. “They flirt, coquet, woo, or lure one another. It is sometimes known as the phase of courtship or, in animals, the mating dance of display.” Freund believed that some individuals essentially get “stuck” on a particular element of this courtship stage, and as a consequence they achieve their greatest sexual satisfaction at, say, the pre-intercourse phase of touching (frotteurism), or that of broadcasting their sexual interest in potential partners by showing their arousal (exhibitionism), or by acquiring privileged visual sexual access to another (voyeurism). According to the model, these paraphilias are exaggerated displays of ritualized courtship. As Money explains, each has somehow come to “push its way onto center field, instead of remaining on the sidelines. It displaces the main event, which is genital intercourse, and steals the spotlight.”
Looking at Cantor’s more general bipartite model of the paraphilias, however, we can see that the first category of paraphilias involves an unusual subject of desire, whereas the second centers on an unusual activity. It’s a useful distinction in thinking about abnormal sexuality, but note that these categories aren’t mutually exclusive. That is to say, someone could be paraphilic in both his erotic target and his favorite sex act. I mean, really, any psellismophilic nebulophile (someone whose most passionate moments involve masturbating in the foggy mist while listening to a person stutter) can see that.
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Sexual fetishism is also a case where the division between erotic targets and erotic paraphilic activities can get somewhat blurred. As we’re about to see, the fetish object isn’t exactly the erotic target; instead, it’s more of a symbolic stand-in for the real erotic target’s genitals. Sexual gratification with the fetish object may or may not depend on a particular ritual, so it’s also not a perfect fit for the category of activity-based paraphilias. Now, fetish objects can be anything imaginable. There have been cases of people fetishizing wheelchairs and crutches, hearing aids, rubber swim caps, and anything else that might serve as a sexual surrogate for the person’s ideal partner. Some fetishists, such as the archetypal “panty bandit,” are prone to theft of such objects, a secondary kleptomania that poses additional problems. Also, many paraphiliacs are unhappy to part with their special collections of fetish objects gathered over the years, guarding them like treasures. Stekel referred to such erotic compilations as the “fetishist Bibles.” An elderly man with a pubic hair fetish (“pubephilia,” aptly enough) had an array so ancient that many of the wiry strands glued to the pages in his scrapbook had long since turned gray. (We can only speculate if those earlier principles of disgust management would apply to any unexpected encounters with the fossilized lice eggs hidden in that volume.)
For the fetishist, it’s the object’s physical connection with the erotic target’s body, as though it has absorbed the person’s hidden “essence,” that makes it so arousing. This is an important point. Brand-new, never-before-worn pairs of shoes, for example, aren’t likely to turn on a shoe fetishist; rather, he’s only going to be interested in those shoes that have actually been worn by someone he finds appealing (or someone he can fantasize having worn them—a secondhand store is the fetishist’s brothel). Likewise, if your fetish object is men’s underwear, you’re not going to tear into the plastic wrapping of that crisp new pair of Fruit of the Looms you picked up at Target the next time you’re
in the mood; you’re going to pull out the semen-stained briefs worn by your favorite porn star that you won in that online auction the other week.
Even for nonparaphilic fetishists, it’s easy to grasp the appeal of feeling or touching something intimately associated with a person you find attractive. I don’t know about you, but I’d certainly be lying if I said that I’ve never been intensely aroused by a Diet Coke can. Back in high school, I once pleasured myself to the empty one discarded by a boy (a straight boy, alas) I had a crush on, since that was about as close as I could get to his lips: something of his essence, to my mind, must have magically been soldered onto it. And in consumer psychology, several studies have found that customers are more likely to purchase clothes that have been physically handled by good-looking salesclerks.* Casual sexual fetishism like this is quite common. What makes someone a “true fetishist” in the clinical, paraphilic sense is that the fetish object has become even more arousing than the actual erotic target that it represents and is now more or less required for sexual gratification.
Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us Page 12
