Age-of-consent laws are quite admirably meant to protect adolescents from being sexually exploited by adults (and there are, sad to say, plenty of the latter out there for parents to be concerned about). But there are problems with a hard-line approach to this emotional immaturity argument as well. One might be stigmatized for doing so, but it’s perfectly lawful to have sex with consenting adults who have the intellectual and emotional capacity of an underage child. To take a rather extreme example, the average mental age of an adult with Down syndrome is eight, yet unlike having sex with a seventeen-year-old equipped with a three-digit IQ, being with someone with this or any other developmental delay isn’t a crime, so long as the person is eighteen years of age or older and “consents.” So if we’re really trying to protect the vulnerable from sexual harm due to their mental immaturity, then using chronological age, rather than mental age, to draw the legal line seems a somewhat odd way to go about it. I can assure you after an early dating mishap with one particular—to put it both kindly and mildly—intellectually blunt grown man, these are often orthogonal measures.
Recent work by the cognitive neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore shows in fact that there’s no hard-and-fast threshold at which a person crosses over into a clear brain-based psychological adulthood. The prefrontal cortex, arguably the neuroanatomical region most relevant to sexual decision making due to its executive role in long-term planning abilities, empathy, and social awareness, doesn’t stop growing until we’re in our mid-thirties. For some, it’s still developing well into the fifth decade of life. Those who want to have sex with minors often cite in their defense the cultural arbitrariness of ages of consent. But they’re at least right about that, and these numbers are in perpetual flux even within cultures.
The first such age-restricting statute, Westminster I, appeared about seven centuries before the popular TV series To Catch a Predator first aired, in the year of our Lord 1275, under the heading of a broader rape law in England. According to this new legislation, any man who dared to “ravish” a “maiden within age,” with or without her consent, was guilty of a misdemeanor. English legal scholars interpret the phrase “within age” to mean the age of marriage, which at the time was twelve. Had the man been married to this same twelve-year-old girl, in other words, this age-based rape statute wouldn’t have applied. In the centuries that followed, similar edicts meant to protect children (namely girls) from sexual abuse or exploitation by adults (namely men) started to dust the globe. And wide variations in the age of consent are written across this historical landscape.
In the sixteenth century, for example, the North American colonies adopted from Britain the age of ten as the appropriate cutoff, and this remained in the formal legislatures of thirty-seven U.S. states until long after the Civil War. Of the other existing states in the 1880s, only nine had by then decided that the “advanced age” of twelve was probably a more reasonable number. (One state, Delaware, had even lowered its cutoff to a mind-boggling seven.) Only in the late nineteenth century was the age of consent raised to sixteen throughout most of America, a concession by the social reformers who had spearheaded the campaign and had initially sought to have it changed nationwide to eighteen, which they’d largely accomplish by 1920. Some in the growing feminist movement even hoped to raise it to twenty-one, the age at which women could legally inherit property.*
Tidal changes were happening with Europe’s age-of-consent laws over this time span as well. With the Enlightenment really coming into bloom in the eighteenth century, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s influential ideas on childhood spread throughout France and beyond. His portrayal of children as social tabulae rasae, or “blank slates,” lasted well into the Napoleonic era and replaced the archaic notion of kids as adults in miniature. Inspired by Rousseau, public sentiment came to hold that children were intrinsically pure and became tainted only by the corrupting influence of society. Rousseau also marks the dawn of developmental psychology and the implementation of age-segregated education. Children and teenagers were now seen as having qualitatively different kinds of minds from grown-ups, marching through what Rousseau believed was a universal pattern of cognitive and emotional stages. (Development wasn’t just a matter of acquiring more and more facts, in other words, but the very way in which one processes information and perceives the world changes over time as well.) Yet even at the peak of this radical new moral Enlightenment, the sexual readiness of children was, strangely enough, apparently seen as a separate issue. The age of consent in France during this whole time was a mere eleven, getting bumped up to thirteen only in the year 1863.
By the late nineteenth century, thirteen had also been chosen as the carnal threshold in other European nations, including Portugal, Switzerland, Spain, and Denmark. Today, Spain is the only country in the region to keep thirteen as its age of consent, with other nations variously lifting theirs to fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen, at most. Deplorable tales of child prostitution during the Industrial Revolution spurred moral reformers in England and Wales, meanwhile, to raise the age of consent across the British Isles from thirteen to sixteen, a social cause to combat child exploitation that had also reverberated in the American age-of-consent campaign mentioned earlier.
Similarly wobbly views on sex and adolescents—or rather sex with adolescents—are on profligate historical display elsewhere. It goes in the opposite direction, too. The age of consent in 1920s Chile was twenty, but now it’s sixteen. A century ago in Italy, it was sixteen, too. But today it’s fourteen there. Overall, studying the numbers contained in even the most contemporary international age-of-consent table will give you the impression that you’re looking at a flurry of seemingly random digits between twelve and twenty-one (a sizable range): it’s thirteen in Argentina, eighteen in Turkey, sixteen in Canada, twelve in Mexico, twenty in Tunisia, sixteen in Western Australia, fifteen in Sweden, and so on. “More than 800 years after the first recorded age of consent laws,” writes the historian Stephen Robertson, “the one constant is the lack of consistency.” Just as when we’re assessing religions with conflicting theologies, we can draw only two possible conclusions from Robertson’s observation: either some societies have the one true age of consent and every other has therefore got it wrong, or any given society’s age of consent is based on what its citizens have simply chosen to believe about human sexuality and psychological development. And similar to what any objective analysis of competing religious beliefs would force us to conclude, there’s no evidence that the former is the case for cultural variations in age of consent laws (that there is “one true age”) and every reason for us to conclude the latter is in fact what we’re dealing with.
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In the context of this somewhat scandalous discussion, it’s important to remember that earlier distinction in moral logic, the one that assigns a different harm value to thought and action. Even when it comes to “true pedophiles” (those who are actually attracted to prepubescent children, not adolescents), thoughts alone are abstractions that—as unpalatable as they may be—cannot rape, molest, touch, batter, or bruise. If contained in the mind, desires are intrinsically harmless to children; only when they’re driven into action can harm occur. But there’s also that rather salient personal distress qualification for the paraphilias in the DSM-5 that we went over in the last chapter, and so regardless of whether one’s sexual deviancy is harmful to anyone else, it could still be causing subjective harm to the unfortunate paraphiliac in whose brain it burns. In the world of nonsexual mental illness, for instance, the voice in a schizophrenic’s head may be distressing to that person whether or not the auditory hallucinations are responded to out loud for anyone else to hear. Having to listen to obnoxious personalities belittling you or egging you on all day long isn’t the most pleasant way to live one’s life, after all. Similarly, having a paraphilia can be a living hell even if it’s kept under cranial lock and key. A paraphilia is a way of seeing the world through a singular sexual lens, and this lens
can’t be easily adjusted, repaired, or even, in the absence of a lobotomy anyway, broken. The paraphiliac’s deviant desires are far less treatable than the voices jeering a schizophrenic. (If you’re a schizophrenic paraphiliac, I only wish there were a God around to have mercy on your tortured soul.)
As we saw in the previous chapter concerning gender differences in sexual imprinting and erotic plasticity, once a male’s desires calcify into such a discrete pattern of arousal, it’s a permanent affair. Somehow or another, the paraphiliac must come to accept that, to live with the reality of his “socially inappropriate” psychological existence. A good therapist might be able to correct any obvious bad habits and decision making, or the patient’s overall sex drive can be watered down with libido-crushing medication (such as Depo-Provera), but the unique design of his erotic taste buds remains as deeply etched in his neurons as are the fingerprints on his hands. Quibbling over whether paraphilias should be seen as “sexual orientations” and be recognized as such for political or social reasons is entirely irrelevant in this sense. Of course they’re sexual orientations; a paraphiliac’s brain orients him to an atypical erotic target (or activity), just as other people’s brains orient them to the normal suspects.
And pedophiles aren’t the only ones likely to lead morbidly troubled inner lives. When you’re oriented to erotic targets that can fit in the palm of your hand, for example, and that most people would sooner step on than screw, that’s also a pretty tough row to hoe. These are the so-called formicophiles (from formīca, Greek for “ant”), and the difficulty they face with their unusual paraphilia is exemplified in a 1987 case study by the Sri Lankan psychiatrist Ratnin Dewaraja. The psychiatrist explains how an introverted young man entered his clinic seeking treatment for what the patient had called “my disgusting habit.” I think we crossed that line long ago and you aren’t likely to be shocked by anything at this stage, but a formicophile’s most intense sexual urges involve placing small creatures like snails, frogs, ants, or roaches around his erotic zones (genitals, anus, and nipples, usually), then pleasuring himself to the tiny nibbling mandibles, or perhaps the cold slime trail forming behind a slug as it makes its arduous hike across the twin peaks of his testes. “He was depressed, unemployed, had no friends, and most of the time,” Dewaraja tells us of this bleary-eyed man torn straight from the pages of a Tim Burton film script (if Tim Burton produced niche porn, that is), was “preoccupied with collecting [such specimens].” After a year of counseling, the patient had managed to reduce his formicophilic masturbation sessions to just once a week, down noticeably from the three to four weekly bouts at the start of his visits. “He was [now] engaging in social interactions with women on a regular basis,” Dewaraja writes optimistically, but then adds tellingly “[he] had not yet experienced coitus.”
It’s clear enough that the formicophile in this story had a paraphilia that he didn’t want, given that it was interfering with his life in negative ways. It was subjectively harmful to him because it was associated with his own personal distress. But note that his formicophilia isn’t the sole cause of this distress. If he’d grown up in a culture that revered formicophiles as reincarnated deities, for instance, his experience would likely be entirely different.* In other words, a paraphiliac’s level of distress is usually correlated with the extent to which his society demonizes, ridicules, or shames his form of deviance. Given the objects of their affection, necrophiles are more likely to be demonized than are transvestic fetishists, who in turn are more likely to be ridiculed (mostly in bad British comedy skits). The most shamed (and feared) paraphiliacs today are the pedophiles. A lifetime of having to continually defend, rationalize, or hide for dear life any such unwelcome paraphilia in a society that not only doesn’t understand it but doesn’t want to understand it is obviously going to serve as a petri dish for sprouting personal distress symptoms. These people aren’t living their lives in the closet; they’re eternally hunkered down in a panic room and chewing away nervously at their nails.
Homosexuality is no longer regarded as a paraphilia, but as a gay man who tried to pass as straight for the first twenty or so years of his life, I can assure you that hiding one’s “true nature” from the world is absolutely exhausting. Here’s an exercise in the hypothetical that may be helpful for those of you who fall more along the far vanilla side of the Neapolitan ice cream erotic equation. Let’s say you’ve been placed in a witness protection program and you suddenly have to create a new identity of being gay, which is the most vital part of your cover. You must move all alone to a place where nobody knows you, and you must convince everyone you meet, for your own safety and for the safety of those you care most about, that you’re 100 percent homosexual. Now, don’t try too hard to appear gay, because you’ll give yourself away, so be stereotypical but not too stereotypical, yet don’t ever let your guard down either, since some people will try to trick you into revealing the truth by being “understanding,” and it’s hard to know if they actually do know, too, so err on the side of caution and assume they don’t. Watch what you say, where your eyes go, what you do in your spare time, whom you’re seen with, and careful, now, no matter how close you get to someone in this new life of yours, no one must ever discover that you’re really a heterosexual. All that you know and hold dear—and I can’t emphasize this part enough—hangs in the balance. Whatever you do, and in fact you better make this your mantra, don’t be yourself.
If living under such intense social conditions for the next twenty, forty, sixty, or even eighty years wouldn’t do a number on your nerves (and by that I mean cause “personal distress”), then you’re simply not human. Yet this is exactly how many people today live their entire lives.* It’s also true, however, that many deviants aren’t bothered at all over their minority sexual orientation. This is because the vast majority of the paraphilias are either so rare (such as “lithophilia,” an attraction to stones and gravel), so common (such as foot fetishism), or so trivial (such as “katoptronophilia,” a need for sex in front of mirrors) that passing as normal isn’t so much a hide-for-dear-life sort of problem for these people as it is a “nobody-would-believe-me-anyway” problem, a “you-and-everyone-else-I-know” problem, or a “so-that’s-your-big-secret-after-all-this?” problem.
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Still other sexual orientations are altogether impossible to hide from society’s prying eyes, and this constant scrutiny can be incredibly painful for an individual who doesn’t particularly want any attention. Some people, that is, have no choice but to wear their deviancy on their sleeves, quite literally when it comes to “cross-dressers” in all their varied forms. There are many subcategories of people who wear the clothes of the opposite sex, with each group having a different motivation for doing so. Some of these individuals clearly have sexual motivations, whereas others have motivations that are anything but erotic. And some, well, it’s not entirely clear to scientists what their motivations are, and for reasons we’ll see shortly, that uncertainty continues to be the source of considerable conflict. But whatever reasons one has for needing to transform into the opposite sex, hiding for dear life to minimize feelings of personal distress clearly isn’t an option. Instead, without the right bone structure and a good surgeon, his or her difference is exposed for all the world to see.
That’s not necessarily always such a bad thing, mind you, especially for those who want to do everything but hide for dear life. Let’s first examine a subcategory of cross-dresser that isn’t sexually motivated, or at least for whom lust isn’t the primary inspiration. There are male “drag queens” who impersonate women for their livelihood, for instance, but they don’t necessarily dress this way for any sexual reason. (This is also true for the less frequently seen “drag kings,” female entertainers whose acts are male impersonations.) It’s usually money, a love of their craft, or the thrill of performing (often all three factors, to different degrees) that drives these people to gender bend, not their libidos. Then there are the male “trans
vestites,” whose cross-dressing habits are most definitely libidinal.* For transvestites, the primary turn-on is the feel of female garments (usually undergarments, such as a pair of matching panties and bra from Victoria’s Secret worn discreetly under a Brooks Brothers suit) as they rub against their skin; lustful thoughts of women are elicited by the texture, tactility, and other sensual attributes of the clothing. It’s not as common as sadomasochism, but neither is transvestism rare: around 3 percent of straight men report having become sexually aroused at least once in their lives by cross-dressing.† The “straight” part is a central point here, too; there’s no such thing as a homosexual transvestite since, rather obviously, gay men certainly aren’t going to get turned on by wearing sexy lingerie that makes them think of fornicating with a woman.
Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us Page 16
