Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us

by Bering, Jesse

  In 1963, a team of developmental psychologists (non-Freudian ones at first) from the City University of New York began a long-term study with a group of 131 children, observing them from birth until the age of six. Funded by the National Institutes of Health, this study aimed to examine how the mother-child relationship affects the latter’s emotional development and coping in a complex social world. To get at this, the investigators would unobtrusively film the pair interacting—during a feeding session when the subjects were babies, for instance, or later, while the mother and child played together—and then they’d analyze the footage to see if the child’s adjustment to the outside world correlated with the quality of these caregiving exchanges. And indeed it did: children with the most secure attachments to their mothers (also to their fathers, the researchers learned along the way) fared better in school and beyond.

  That was the end of that study. But then decades later, in 1994, an entirely different team of scholars (here’s where the neo-Freudians enter the picture) managed to track down most of the original child participants from the 1960s. Now in their early thirties, these people were quizzed by the psychoanalysts Henry Massie and Nathan Szajnberg on pretty much everything they’d been up to since the initial study ended. A tall order for a study, given that a quarter of a century had come and gone in the interim. Yet the results from this ambitious follow-up were fascinating in their own right. For example, the kids from those old 1960s-era home movies who’d shown the most secure attachments with their moms were now the adults in the sample that had the healthiest social relationships. For those who’d tied the knot, this included their marriages as well. But the most intriguing line of questioning for our purposes involved what was not recorded in the lab, namely those very personal events from these people’s early childhoods that might relate to their now-adult sexuality. Most of the subjects were remarkably bland in this regard, or at least they weren’t willing to divulge any particularly juicy secrets. The one exception to this was a handsome, articulate, and happily married advertising executive who reluctantly confided while sitting across from the interviewer: “The only quirk in my sexual life is that I find it very exciting to fantasize sex with a woman missing a limb.” He hadn’t managed to find an amputee wife, but he did find an intact one who was happy enough to simulate an amputated leg (method unknown) whenever they made love.

  At first, the man had no idea how or why this peculiar desire had come to absorb his carnal consciousness. He recalled getting aroused by thinking about a woman missing a limb at the age of five or six and even innocently sharing this observation with a playmate around that time. On further reflection, though, he had an epiphany in the interview room, and Massie and Szajnberg decided that the event he was suddenly recalling was indeed the immovable “first cause” of the man’s acrotomophilia.

  What makes this case unique is that the careful notes collected during the attachment study all those years before allowed the man’s recollections of his alleged sexual imprint to be independently verified through the details contained in his old subject files. And consistent with the time frame believed to be involved, the paraphilia took root when he was exactly five years and three months of age. It was then, in 1968, when the records show that the couple next door had moved briefly into his family’s home while their own house was being renovated. As the subject was being asked about this seemingly trivial incident, it dawned on him that the attractive neighbor woman had been wearing a full leg cast and that this had transfixed his boyhood attention. One day, the husband and wife sat at the kitchen table as he’d played with his toys beneath it. He could see the woman’s wounded appendage resting on the man’s lap. The man sat stroking his wife’s leg like a sick dog. “When’s it coming off?” the boy overheard. Because the subject didn’t understand that the man was referring to the cast rather than to the leg, his literal interpretation of this frightening sentiment, which happened at an age when little boys believe their fathers are going to castrate them out of jealousy (remember, these are neo-Freudians scrutinizing the incident), solidified into a paraphilia in which women amputees are eroticized heroines who’ve martyred one of their own limbs to save his penis. The grainy odor of the plaster cast and the image of a smooth leg stump had seared into his brain like some Proustian memory trace waiting to be enlivened by pubertal androgens.*

  Perhaps for the simple reason that it features a missing body part, acrotomophilia lends itself more readily to Freudian interpretation than other paraphilias, which explains the surplus of such stories. But I’d like to share one more, given that, in addition to being another display of male sexual imprinting, it’s the most concrete manifestation of the castration complex that you’ll ever hear. As a little boy, “Mr. A.,” as the psychiatrists Thomas Wise and Ram Kalyanam refer to a mild-mannered forty-nine-year-old accountant, had become aroused by the medical photographs of nude, amputated women in his physician father’s impeccably organized home library. After college, Mr. A. had served overseas in the military and sought out all the amputee prostitutes he could find while he was abroad, which was in fact a substantial number. He was back on American soil by the time he was twenty-eight and, a few years later, married to a woman who’d lost her leg to osteogenic carcinoma as a teenager. Yet because she was self-conscious about her own physical condition, whenever he’d fondle and kiss his wife’s stump, she’d swat him away. Years into their marriage—and apparently never having had a meaningful conversation with her husband about his acrotomophilia—Mr. A.’s wife became enraged on discovering his amputee-porn collection.

  With his acrotomophilic sexual outlets unplugged in this way (he wasn’t going to cheat on his wife, and he could no longer pleasure himself to his preferred porn), he was presumably being deprived of the anxiety buffer that had soothed his subconscious castration fears all this time. In response to this, argued the psychoanalysts, Mr. A. regressed to the Oedipal stage by assuming the role of his jealous father, and on doing so he began fantasizing about cutting off his own penis. “This fantasy became a preferred masturbatory stimulus,” they relay, “the exciting element of the idea was the actual cutting off of the penis as well as the image of the penile stump.”

  Now, I must say, the thought of achieving an orgasm by manipulating one’s erect penis while picturing that very penis being severed is one of the most formidable cognitive hurdles I can think of. Nonetheless, Mr. A. persevered and turned this dream into a reality. What he didn’t anticipate, apparently, was just how much it would hurt—and bleed. Nor does it seem to have been a particularly erotic experience for him. He ended up calling 911, and the quick-thinking EMTs were able to retrieve the source of his interminable woe and pack it on ice. A team of perplexed urologists did manage to reattach the now permanently floppy phallus, but it was thereafter reserved for delivering the kind of pleasure associated only with voiding a full bladder.

  * * *

  The neo-Freudians have certainly dominated this psychiatric terrain, but the paraphilias have been explained by a smattering of other theories over the years as well. Unfortunately, all are just as challenging to test as the hypothesis that a middle-aged accountant with an amputee fetish just cut off his own penis in a last-ditch effort to quell his subconsciously unresolved castration anxiety from his preschool days. Throughout the 1980s, for example, the sexologist John Money laid out his “erotic love map” theory of the paraphilias, arguing that everyone is born with a default set of navigational instructions for ending up as a “normal heterosexual adult,” but disruptive social events in early childhood can cause this standard route to branch out in wildly unpredictable ways. Money believed that the paraphilias emerged not from imprinting per se but from growing up in a sexually unhealthy social environment.* He cast aspersions especially on what he saw as an unforgivably puritanical United States, which he felt was the country most likely to produce paraphilic citizens due to its great sexual restrictiveness. Money reasoned that the sexuality of the child is forced to find its
way to adulthood under chokingly repressive conditions akin to a “polluted smog in biological warfare.” “Like a cluster of wild mushrooms that can push through the paving of an asphalt court,” he wrote (he really did like his metaphors), “[the erotic love map] cannot easily be sealed over. However, it can encounter abuses that interfere with its normal expression. The normal heterosexual play of childhood may be hampered by too much prohibition, prevention, and punishment. In that case the standard heterosexual love map does not develop properly in the brain.”*

  Money’s ideas weren’t entirely speculative. Along with his conviction that sexually oppressive societies were to blame for any such deviance, he was also among the first sexologists to observe that paraphilias are entirely unheard of in tribal societies.”† The Ila-speaking people of Africa, for example, encouraged prepubescent girls to handpick a boy “husband” at harvest time and to live as “man and wife,” which included experimenting with actual intercourse. The Western world, Money argued, churns out an abundance of lascivious undesirables through its own foolish doing. I think he’s right in some sense. Complaining about our plague of sex deviants is indeed bizarre when considered in that light, given that we’re only reaping what we’ve sown as a sexually confused, and often hostile, community. John Money pitied these erotic outliers and saw paraphiliacs as victims of their own diseased culture who are not to be blamed for their divagations from normal desire:

  [Paraphilias] are not voluntary choices. They cannot be controlled by will power. Punishment does not prevent them, and persecution does not eradicate them, but feeds them and strengthens them … The paraphilic person is a survivor of catastrophe … The tragedy that deprived the paraphiliac of heterosexual normality was the neglect and/or abuse of the rehearsal play and development of early life, and the paraphilic substitute that took its place. The triumph was that lust … was saved from total wreckage by being transferred to some other less prevented and at the time less censored, but paraphilic rehearsal. It was a hollow triumph, alas, for in later years, it would bring more tragedy, as a paraphilia so often does.

  Money’s theory of the diverted “erotic love map” relates to more recent efforts to explain paraphilic origins through the so-called Zeigarnik effect. Whether you’re a paraphiliac or not, you’ve had your fair share of encounters with this irritating psychological experience. The Zeigarnik effect refers to our brain’s relentless search efforts in the wake of some interrupted goal or activity. As a humdrum example of this feeling of getting psychologically stuck on something, imagine going out to the movies and seeing that new flick that everyone’s been raving about; you’re totally absorbed in the film, but just as it gets to the part where everything is about to come together in the plotline, the theater’s fire alarm goes off. You’d be experiencing the Zeigarnik effect out in the parking lot while waiting for the manager to confirm it’s just a false alarm, with all your frustrating thoughts about how the story is going to end chafing away at your brain. It’s a bothersome feeling.

  When the idea of the Zeigarnik effect is extended to the paraphilias, the theory is that if a child’s inchoate sexual feelings somehow get stimulated (which is natural), his brain will launch into a problem-solving mode if his curiosity fails to be satisfied. It’s easy to see how this could happen. As a consequence of our enshrouding sex in mystery and the forbidden, children sense a conspiracy of silence regarding unspeakable acts and untouchable parts, and sex, ironically, is therefore made all the more salient and attention-getting to them. With adults seemingly hiding something so gravely serious and ever so important, the enigma only widens. Wherever they look, they’re reminded of this shadowy unsolved “problem” that nobody talks about and which, therefore, keeps nipping away at them. (Interestingly enough, many of the original sexologists, including Havelock Ellis, believed that those children who are the most naturally inquisitive and bright—the intuitive problem solvers—are also the ones most susceptible to developing paraphilias.)

  What to make of this, though? Most of us see four- to nine-year-olds as asexual, but if this is indeed when irreversible male sexual imprinting occurs, our denial that children have any capacity for sexual feelings may actually increase the odds of us brewing deviant little darlings. After all, an eroticized Zeigarnik effect is more likely to occur given that the child’s ostensibly “sexless” world is, in reality, to them over-sexualized in cryptic ways. Perhaps when paired with a genetic predisposition for sexual imprinting, some little boys’ nagging cognitive efforts to solve the grand riddle therein will seep into parts of their environment that wouldn’t otherwise be sexual. These misplaced sex cues can inveigle deep into brain networks linked to their arousal, and voilà, a paraphilia is born. In other words, we might want to reconsider the “appropriate” age at which we, as a society, provide clear sex education to children.

  * * *

  More than half a century ago, Alfred Kinsey lamented the state of the paraphiliac and such other “perverts” and deviants, reflecting specifically on his society’s delusion of having made much moral progress when it comes to thinking critically about human sexuality. “We no longer burn those who were possessed of devils at birth,” he wrote, “but we still hold the individual responsible for the spirits that take possession of him after birth.” Unfortunately, that sad social commentary is still true for us today. But I’m convinced it really doesn’t have to be so. The more we understand about each other, the less we have to fear.

  FIVE

  IT’S SUBJECTIVE, MY DEAR

  While we are dealing here with pain, it is a pain the masochist is capable of transforming into pleasure; a suffering which he, by some secret alchemy he alone possesses, can turn into pure joy.

  —Jean Paulhan, Preface to Pauline Réage’s The Story of O (1954)

  If you were to tell me the first thing that comes to your mind when I say “S&M,” there’s a decent chance that it would be the Fifty Shades trilogy. Or perhaps you’d describe some sensual scene lit by flickering candles: an ice cube to a perky nipple, wax dripping onto a shivering naked abdomen, a guillotine mask, a pony harness, a strangled scrotum, and a spring-loaded mouth gag … well, now you’re just getting carried away, you perv. In any event, this dominant-submissive (or “master-slave”) dynamic is more common than you may be aware. Around 11 percent of us, irrespective of our gender, have had an experience with sadomasochism. Five percent of men and 7 percent of women also report regularly including “verbal humiliation” in their erotic repertoire. And that’s just those who’d ever admit to such things on a survey.

  Most so-called sadists in the S&M community aren’t really that sadistic; nor are most “masochists” willing to commit too much to their masochistic roles. Emphasizing the relative harmlessness on both sides, John Money referred to the average bondage-and-discipline fan as a “velvet dragon.” Although sadism is included in the DSM-5 as one of the harmful paraphilias, clinicians aren’t going to favor a mental illness diagnosis for some theatrically inspired woman who likes to occasionally tie up her “prissy little bitch” of a consenting husband and sink her teeth into his buttocks. These things might smart and induce some wincing, perhaps a few tears, but they’re not exactly going to lead to reconstructive surgery or to a major medical claim. Rather, to determine if the patient’s kinkiness qualifies her as a genuine sexual sadist, psychiatrists look for two things: the pain she inflicts must be real rather than playful, and she derives her most intense pleasure from the suffering of a nonconsenting other. Usually, such a person—that’s to say, a paraphilic sadist—will only come to our attention after she’s committed a serious crime, with the courts ordering her to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.*

  That’s sensible enough, since it hurts so good except when it doesn’t. For horrendous incidents in which deranged individuals attack innocent victims, pain and nonconsensual sex almost always go together. When these two criteria are applied to S&M outliers far off the beaten path from the rest of that community, however, there�
��s often plenty of real pain and suffering, heaps of it even. Yet the receiving party has also consented to the sex act. Don’t forget that all-important fact about the subjectivity of harm and how it varies from person to person. Cultural differences come into play here as well.† And with an extreme masochist the issue of harm can get especially tricky. Screw on your forensic cap, for instance, and consider how you’d analyze the particularly gruesome case of Der Metzgermeister (the Master Butcher) of Rotenburg, Germany.

  Before the more recent case of the Cannibal Cop (in which the New York City police officer Gilberto Valle was found guilty of planning to kidnap, murder, and eat a woman—or eat and then murder, the correct order of those last two verbs isn’t clear), there was the tale of Armin Meiwes. That name might dimly light up in your frontal lobes as a distant headliner best forgotten, but to remind you—and apologies for doing so—Meiwes, a computer repairman by trade, was the German cannibalistic sexual sadist who, in the spring of 2001, found a willingly edible sexual masochist for himself named Bernd Jürgen Brandes. “Looking for a well-built 18- to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed,” read Meiwes’s personal ad on the Cannibal Café website (which, you’ll probably be glad to know, is a website no more). And Brandes, it seems, was looking to be thoroughly digested. That old psychopath Cupid couldn’t have arranged for a more tragic crossing of these lovers’ paths. (Oh right, where’s my head? After our terminology lesson in chapter 4, you’re probably starving to be told the technical name for this cannibalism paraphilia. It’s “vorarephilia,” from the Latin vorare, “to swallow or devour.”)