Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us

by Bering, Jesse

  As an example of how difficult it is to infer the causal origins of pedophilia when you’re dealing only with correlations, consider the findings from a questionnaire given to thirteen hundred anonymous men in Finland. Men who reported having childhood sexual interactions (such as “playing doctor”) with other children were now more likely, as adults, to express a sexual interest in children under fifteen. On the surface, this might look like evidence of male sexual imprinting. And it may well be. But there’s another way to interpret this correlation that’s just as plausible. It could be that these men weren’t imprinted by these early experiences; instead, they were pre-pedophilic boys who’d been more motivated to engage in sex play with other children.

  There’s also no clear evidence to support the common assumption that being molested by a pedophile causes victims to become pedophiles themselves. There are data showing that being molested leads to a greater likelihood of sexually abusing a child oneself (the disturbing “abused abuser” cycle effect, which is usually explained by some neo-Freudian power-and-control theory or model of social imitation), but this doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the victim turned perpetrator’s own erotic age orientation. If anything, if the abuse occurs at a sensitive period of male development and leads to the child’s incidental arousal, he’d be more likely to develop a paraphilic attraction to harmful adults like the offender or to erotic cues that resemble the abusive event—an unsettling imprint in its own right.

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  Similar to the huge gap in the sex ratio for all the other paraphilias, there are very few certifiable female pedophiles. Some sexologists aren’t convinced they exist at all. You’re probably shaking your head in disbelief on hearing that, given the abundance of stories in the media about predatory “pedophile” female teachers. But remember that a pedophile is someone whose primary attraction is to prepubescent children. Although the word is often used to loathingly describe any adult who has sex with someone under the age of eighteen, a female teacher caught in a sex scandal with her hairy-chested high school student is no more a pedophile than a twenty-year-old having sex with a forty-year-old is a gerontophile. That’s to say, unless they’re, respectively, very late bloomers or have been smoking a whole lot of meth, most older teens aren’t prepubescent and most forty-year-olds don’t look anything like an elderly person.

  Yet although they may be incredibly rare, case studies indicate that a handful of “true pedophiles” do exist among women. There are very upsetting incidents in which women have sexually abused shockingly young children. And although the act of child molestation itself isn’t a direct indicator of pedophilia, targeting young children, combined with recurring fantasies limited to sex with prepubescents, is indeed so. In his book Pedophilia and Sexual Offending Against Children, Michael Seto describes several such women. In one case, a young mother reported herself to child protective services after she performed fellatio on her one- and three-year-old sons and found herself masturbating to the memory of the incident.* Another woman performed oral sex on a pair of four-year-old girls in her care and became aroused while bathing them; her sexual fantasies were similarly confined to young children. By and large, however, the data on this mercifully slim demographic indicate that the majority of female child molesters aren’t pedophiles but usually are timid women who’ve been coerced by pedophilic men into joining them in committing their crimes. More often than not, these women are also the victims of abuse (in all its various forms) and have a mortal fear of adult males. Consider also that women represent less than 1 percent of all child porn offenders, an astonishingly (and tellingly) low percentage given that women are thought to consume around a third of all porn generally.

  To scientifically confirm that a particular woman is a pedophile, researchers could use vaginal vasocongestion to measure her arousal to images of nude models of different ages, just as they do for men using the penile plethysmograph (as we’ll see shortly). But this is a subject area driven by forensic investigations, and in case you haven’t noticed, sex offenders are vastly, overwhelmingly male. Nevertheless, a speculative hypothesis that’s been floating around for a while, and one stemming from those female genital hyper-responsiveness data we reviewed earlier, is that women should be more likely than men overall to display sexual arousal to children and the elderly. It’s an empirical question, and I’m guessing it’s also one that won’t get answered anytime soon, since ladies won’t exactly be lining up to help researchers answer it. Yet even if it were found to be true, the crime data clearly show that females are still about as likely to act on their subconscious and unwitting genital arousal by eight- and eighty-year-olds as they are to date a bonobo. Remember, Meredith Chivers’s ready-for-anything “protection hypothesis” assumes that vaginal responses to any and all sex cues—even highly unappealing ones (ape sex, rape scenes, naked men if you’re lesbian, naked women if you’re not, and possibly kids and octogenarians too)—would have evolved to reduce physical injury.

  Again, a woman’s genitals can be in stark disagreement with her desires.

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  The erect penis, by contrast, is a direct window into a man’s erotic soul, or even more to the point it’s a divining rod to his reservoir of specific desires. We’ve already come across a few studies during our journey in which the penile plethysmograph has been put to use in evaluating various scholarly questions about human sexuality. Its more common use is a forensic one, with the courts ordering sex offenders to undergo testing to distinguish the “true pedophiles” from the opportunistic offenders.* But this erection-detection machine was originally invented for another reason altogether. In fact, the scientific measurement of tumescence to ascertain a man’s erotic tastes (a penis lie detector, of sorts) got its start in the most unlikely of places: the Czechoslovakian army.

  In the 1950s, the Czech military approached the psychiatrist Kurt Freund, a practicing physician with a clinic in Prague, for help with a problem. It seems that a growing number of army recruits had been fibbing about being homosexual to avoid compulsory service, since openly gay men didn’t have to enlist. So the top brass hired Freund to develop a reliable method of separating the gay wheat from the camouflaged straight chaff. They had come to the right man for the job. Like the army officials, Freund distrusted self-reports of people’s sex lives. He was also more interested in the palpable biology of desire than he was in those fuzzy psychodynamics devised by a similarly named theorist from Vienna. Instead, what Freund needed here was a concrete measure of sexual orientation. And he quickly realized that a single dumb erection in a man would be more useful for the army’s specific needs than an hour of prevaricating conversations with him in the clinic. The penis, Freund observed, could forever render impotent the art of the verbal lie when it comes to secret desires. (Freund also knew a thing or two about creating ruses in order to survive, or at least how to keep a low profile. Not only had he lived through the Holocaust as a Jew caught in the thick of the Nazi occupation of his native country in the early 1940s, but he somehow managed to avoid being deported to the concentration camps altogether. His parents and younger brother weren’t so fortunate, however. All three perished at Auschwitz.)

  The specifics have gotten more complicated in the decades since Freund first hand-delivered his sparkling new penile plethysmograph machine to the homophobic generals, but the basics of the procedure have remained largely the same: A man sits down in a chair, his penis is connected to an erection gauge that can pick up very subtle changes in tumescence (the device is so sensitive that it can detect a blood-volume increase of less than one cubic centimeter, which most men wouldn’t even experience consciously), and he’s then shown randomized images of nude models representing distinct erotic categories.* The scientist, meanwhile, measures what’s happening with the man’s own equipment as these photographs appear. In the first instance, the nudes were chosen to expose the fake gays in the army’s recruiting pool, so they were simply static images of attractive men
or women. But once the device had effectively ensured that any soldiers whose organs saluted vaginas were in place guarding his nation’s borders, Freund began to see other applications for his new invention, including using plethysmography to identify closeted pedophiles. After all, if a straight man were asked outright if he finds some pretty seventh grader sexually arousing, he might say something on the order of “Oh, her? Well, she looks like a nice girl, but I wouldn’t say she’s ‘attractive.’ I mean, she’s a bit young, isn’t she?” What Freund wanted to know was the extent to which his penis concurred with that socially appropriate verbal sentiment.

  Nowadays you can get similar results from looking at a man’s computer hard drive, which police often do in the case of child porn investigations. But Freund’s device is still routinely used to confirm (or rather to “diagnose”) the defendant’s erotic age orientation. Today, your plethysmography experience in a lab in Toronto, for example (where Freund relocated in 1968 after being targeted by his country’s Communist Party as an intellectual dissident), would probably look something like the “Walking Nudes” version of the test originally devised by Freund but perfected by Ray Blanchard. That name may ring a bell, since it was Blanchard who came up with the controversial autogynephilia theory of MTF transsexuals. As a young psychologist then working in the Canadian prison system, Blanchard also became one of Freund’s most trusted North American collaborators. It was a relationship that would last until 1996, when, crippled by excruciating pain from an incurable lung cancer that had spread to the lymph nodes in his neck and was now threatening his brain, the inventor of the plethysmograph swallowed a fistful of muscle relaxants and pain pills with a bottle of wine and fell dead to the floor at the age of eighty-two. Yet despite the device’s controversial use, it has lived on. And by the time Blanchard’s Walking Nudes Test (which I’m about to strap you into) appeared in 2002, forensic investigators had anticipated almost every trick in the book that a pedophile with his penis caught in a Freundian trap might use to throw them off.*

  The first part of the test, of course, involves the most essential part of all: your own telltale penis. Begrudging or not, under court order, it will be expertly hooked up to the device by a knowledgeable technician. The lights will then be dimmed as you settle into a cozy reclining armchair. “Make yourself comfortable,” you might be told sympathetically. You’re even kindly given a blanket for your modesty. The more tranquil your surroundings, after all, the less anxiety there will be to interfere with your arousal to whatever it is you’re about to see. (In the pioneer days of plethysmography, it was even fairly common to give the man some alcohol beforehand, just to loosen him up. “A certain degree of relaxation can possibly be achieved this way,” explained the hospitable Freund.) If you’re the extra-nervous sort and normally can’t get it up under these types of conditions, or if you have some trouble experiencing erections due to your health or age (impotent old men can be child molesters too, don’t forget), well I’m sure you’ll do just fine, since it’s become increasingly routine these days for technicians to give their male subjects a hefty dose of Viagra before getting started.

  If you’re worried about your penis’s poor behavior—you’ve learned over the years that it’s not always so obedient to what it should be doing—you might feel like closing your eyes and refusing to look. To pull your emergency erotic kill switch, maybe you can whip up some disgusting images in your head featuring genitals with STIs. Perhaps the right incestuous scene will do it, like performing oral sex on your orgasmically groaning grandmother … and toss in a nasty case of genital warts for her too while you’re at it (it’s not a pleasant thing to imagine nor, sadly, the thought of a loving grandson, but you know, it’s a good last resort when you’re in a locker room filled with hot naked straight guys). This metacognitive technique works the other way around also; in this case, if you’re not attracted to grown-ups, you could picture in your mind’s eye a child whenever a nude adult pops up on the screen. In Nabokov’s Lolita, for instance, the hebephilic protagonist Humbert Humbert was able to consummate his marriage to Lolita’s clingy thirty-year-old mother, Charlotte Haze, only by imagining that it was her twelve-year-old daughter (“light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta”) that he was really having sex with. “Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve,” Nabokov wrote, “but it was Lilith he longed for.”* But if this is your big strategy, it’s not going to work in the Walking Nudes Test, since, oh yes, I forgot to mention there’s a retinal camera trained on your pupils to make sure you’re watching intently.†

  And what you’re going to be watching so intently on the three separate projector screens before you are films of three smiling models of the same approximate age and wearing only their birthday suits. Each will be advancing slowly, tantalizingly, directly toward you. That’s to say, these visual stimulus sets comprise nude children and adults serving as erotic ambassadors, or perhaps “martyrs” is a better word here, for the pedophile, hebephile, and teleiophile categories.‡ As the models approach, the camera will zoom in on their genitals. All the while, just as it was in the days of Freund’s original test, the forensic technician will be monitoring your genitals.

  These aren’t prurient images; the erotic triptychs are more anatomy-lesson film clips than porn. But not only does the Walking Nudes Test add movement and the illusion of the models’ personal attention, it pads the image bank with multiple models from each age group rather than just a single representative. So, for example, if you’re a hebephile, the odds of your seeing at least one of the pubescent nudes as a genuine “nymphet” or “faunlet” (Nabokov’s term for the male version of a nymphet) are increased. Consider, then, that for the youngest ages, parents have volunteered their five- to ten-year-olds’ gooseflesh to serve the purpose of weeding out the pedophiles from among the thousands of sex offenders (like you) taking part in this forensic study. Likewise, on any given trial you’ll see the three sacrificial nude adolescents heading your way whose parents have agreed for their bodies to be used to detect men who grow tumescent for pubescents. Finally, of course, there are the naked adults perambulating for your viewing pleasure (we’ll see about that, you sex offender, you), each of whom is a shining example of a fit, reproductively mature human being with a full suite of secondary sexual characteristics. You’ll be exposed not only to models of your preferred gender, by the way, but both girls and boys, women and men, to sort out exactly what’s behind that first slot machine window of yours, too. (There’s some evidence that pedophiles are more likely to be bisexual, for instance, than are men of other erotic age orientations.)*

  All of this is to say that your penis is about to pigeonhole you into a crucial category: Are you a pedophile, a hebephile, or a teleiophile? Bear in mind (and this may help some of you men breathe easier) that the Walking Nudes Test, and every other version of the phallometric method, is meant to determine your primary age of attraction, not necessarily your exclusive age of attraction. That’s to say, it’s not uncommon for a teleiophile to exhibit some tumescence in response to the images of pubescents, or even, occasionally, to those of the prepubescent children. This is why an adult teleiophile may recall being attracted to a fellow seventh grader at the time, though he wouldn’t dare think of a twelve-year-old girl now in that way; even back then, he was still more attracted to his busty twenty-three-year-old science teacher than he was to the girl his own age, but he also wasn’t entirely erotically immune to that cute twelve-year-old female, then or now. Nor is every pedophile or hebephile entirely phallically unresponsive to adults. The question is which age category is going to induce your strongest arousal response when your erectile averages are compared across the board. (This is generally the case with all the paraphilias; paraphilic men are often capable of some degree of arousal to erotic stimuli outside their particular kink, but the kink is undeniably their most trusty trigger.)

  * * *

  Most men, it’s safe to say, know perfectly well wha
t their erotic age orientation is before ever setting foot in the lab scenario I’ve just described. Yet that know-thyself reality can get a little confusing, given that children develop physically at such different rates. Some teenagers come with all the trappings of an adult—trappings colloquially known as “jailbait.” It’s been declining for years, but today the average age of menarche (a girl’s first period) in the industrialized world is around twelve. But there’s tremendous variance. Genes, socioeconomic status, stress, parental relations, diet, and a host of other complex factors are behind huge individual differences in female maturation, not only within the same society but in the very same suburb. Somewhere, a precocious fifth grader is shifting nervously in her chair after having to use a tampon in the school restroom while adjusting her bra; a more flat-chested girl, meanwhile, is pulling into the parking lot of the high school up the road, having recently gotten her driver’s license but still waiting patiently for her first period.* Male development varies dramatically as well. I distinctly recall bragging to a friend in eighth grade about how I’d started sprouting a few odd hairs in my armpits, to which he replied in a voice deeper than my father’s what a chore it had become to have to shave his beard every day.

  Chronological age is of course all that matters in the legal sense. As we learned in the last chapter, it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference whether some chain-smoking, heavily tattooed fifteen-year-old with two kids looks more like a twenty-four-year-old escort; she’s still clearly a minor in the eyes of the law. By contrast, for researchers studying the erotic age orientations, chronological age is almost entirely irrelevant. What’s far more important to them is “biological age.” These two constructs—how old one is (chronological age) versus how old one looks (biological age)—generally go hand in hand, but, again, it’s not a perfect fit. A month of hormones working overtime can mean big physical changes to an adolescent’s appearance. It could also mean that the man growing aroused by that particular adolescent isn’t a hebephile but a teleiophile responding to the very adult physical cues being broadcast on the body of a child. In this area of forensic psychiatry, then, researchers want to know the age-related physical “type” that a man is most attracted to, not simply the specific chronological age of a person who happens to arouse him.†