pervert, terminology of
Peters, Elijah and Milo
pheromones
pig-man hunts of New Haven
Pizarro, David
Plato
plethysmography
Plymouth colony
podophilia
polyamorous relationships
polygamy
pornography; child; gay male; Internet
postmenopausal women
prefrontal cortex
pregnancy; teenage
pre-homosexuality
Premack, David
preparation hypothesis
preparatory behaviors
Pretty Baby (film)
prisons
procreation
prodigy
prostitution
Protestantism
Psychiatric Quarterly
psychiatry
Psychological Bulletin
psychrophilia
pubephilia
puberty; age of menarche; hebephilia; Tanner Scale
Puritans
pygophilia
qualitative studies
Quinsey, Vernon
rabies
radiotherapy
rape; animal; law; “moral cleansing effect,”
Réage, Pauline, The Story of O
religion; bestiality; medieval
Rétif de la Bretonne
Rind, Bruce
Rivière, Lazare
Robertson, Stephen
romance
Rome, ancient
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
rubber boot fetish
Ryan, Christopher, Sex at Dawn
Sade, Marquis de
sadism
sadomasochism
Salem, Massachusetts; witch hunts
Sambia people
Sandusky, Jerry
Santorum, Rick
Sartre, Jean-Paul
Satan
satyriasis
Savage, Dan
Savile, Jimmy
scabies
schizophrenia
Schlessinger, Dr. Laura
science
secretions; disgust; see also specific secretions
semen; in food; -ingestion ritual
seminal nature
Seto, Michael; Pedophilia and Sexual Offending Against Children
sexually transmitted diseases
Shakespeare, William; Othello
shame
shoe fetish
sight
Sirionó Indians
skellum
sleep
slippery slope effect
smegma
smell; disgust; gay sex; incest; pheromones
sneeze fetishists
social media
Socrates, Phaedrus
Sodom and Gomorrah
sodomy
solipsism
sound
South Africa, baby rape in
Southeast Asia
Spain
Spencer, George
sperm
Stekel, Wilhelm; Sexual Aberrations
Stevenson, Richard
Storer, Horatio
Studd, John
stygiophilia
subjectivity; children; harm; orientation; pedophilia
substance abuse
suicide; gay teen
sweat
Sweden
symbolic disgust
Symonds, John Addington; Sexual Inversion
syphilis
Szajnberg, Nathan
Tanner, James, Foetus into Man
Tanner scale
taste; aversion
taxonomy
tears
teenagers; age-of-consent laws; disgust; homosexual; masturbation; pregnancy; sex with
teleiophilia
television
Temerlin, Maurice
Terence
terror management theory
testicles; monkey
testosterone
Thailand
theory of mind
tickling
titillagnia
touch
transsexuality; autogynephilia theory; FTM; MTF; terminology
transvestic fetishism
tribal societies
Trivers, Robert
Tromovitch, Philip
TSO (total sexual outlet)
Ulrich, Heather
unusual erotic targets
urine; retention
urophilia
vagina; odors and fluids; preparation hypothesis
vaginismus
Valle, Gilberto
Vanity Fair
Viagra
Victorian era; hypersexuality
virginity
Voltaire
vomiting
vorarephilia
voyeurism
Wakefield, Jerome
Walking Nudes Test
Wegner, Daniel
Weinberg, Martin
Westphal, Carl
White, Edmund, A Boy’s Own Story
White, Ryan
white bear effect
Wilde, Oscar; ephebophilia of; indecency trials
Wise, Thomas
Wogeo tribe
women; age of menarche; average number of orgasms; casual sex; disgust; Féré stereotypes about lesbians; hypersexual; imprinting; madness from the womb; masturbation; medicalization of female lust; nymphomania; odors and fluids; paraphiliacs; pedophiles; postmenopausal; sadists; sex differences in arousal; transsexual
Woodruff, Guy
Xenophon, Symposium
Yeats, William Butler
Zeigarnik effect
Zgoba, Kristen
zoophilia
Zucker, Kenneth
ALSO BY JESSE BERING
Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?
The Belief Instinct
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jesse Bering, Ph.D., is a frequent contributor to Slate and Scientific American. His writing and research have appeared in New York magazine, Cosmopolitan, The Guardian, and The New Republic, among other publications, and have been featured by NPR, Playboy Radio, and more. The author of The Belief Instinct and Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?, Bering is the former director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University, Belfast, and began his career as a professor at the University of Arkansas. He lives in Ithaca, New York.
Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2013 by Jesse Bering
All rights reserved
First edition, 2013
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bering, Jesse.
Perv: the sexual deviant in all of us / Jesse Bering. — 1st Edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-374-23089-0 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-374-71063-7 (ebook)
1. Paraphilias. 2. Sex. I. Title.
HQ71 .B3567 2013
306.7—dc23
2013021856
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Scientific American is a trademark of Scientific American, Inc. Used with permission.
eISBN 9780374710637
*Boethius’s Consolations went largely unnoticed until Chaucer translated the mystic’s treatise in the fourteenth century. Thomas Blount’s seventeenth-century definition of “pervert” likely originates in turn from Chaucer’s earlier translation of that 524 text.
*Ellis was also a vehement supporter of eugenics and even held court for a while as the president of the Galton Institute, an organization that sought to improve the fitness (or reproductive quality) of our species’s genetic stock through carefully regimented human breeding. The heritability of kinkiness didn’t seem to be of any special concern to him.
*Believing that sexual fetishes get their start in chi
ldhood experiences, Ellis recalled his mother playfully thrusting a younger sibling’s wet diaper in his face when he was nine years old. Several years later, while strolling with the pubescent Havelock through the grounds of the zoo gardens, Mrs. Ellis lifted her skirt and squatted to relieve herself behind some bushes. Havelock remembered how the sound of her urine stream meeting the composted earth had titillated him as a twelve-year-old boy. Before long, he’d be scientifically measuring the distance and trajectory of his schoolfellows’ pee—“my own vesical energy being below the average,” he noted with a characteristically morbid self-analysis. His curiosity culminated in an empirical study: “The Bladder as a Dynamometer,” American Journal of Dermatology 6 (May 1902).
*See, for example, the French novelist André Gide’s firsthand account of his traveling to Algiers with Wilde to procure adolescent boys for sex not long before the trial: If It Die: An Autobiography, trans. Dorothy Bussy (New York: Modern Library, 1935).
*Getting wind of Ellis and Symonds’s soon-to-be-published book, the Manhattan psychiatrist Allan McLane Hamilton put out his “Civil Responsibility of Sexual Perverts,” American Journal of Psychiatry 52 (1896). Whereas Ellis had mostly a shoulder-shrugging philosophy about homosexuality, Hamilton felt that it was so corrupting a disease that anyone found in a committed gay or lesbian relationship should be separated by force. “I hold that under such circumstances not only may the aid of habeas corpus be implored for the purpose of effecting a separation, but that in aggravated instances the physician should, in manner specified, bring the matter before the attention of a committing judge” (511).
*In The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 1978), the philosopher Michel Foucault traces the origins of homosexuality as biological essence rather than action to a rather obscure 1870 paper by the German neurologist Carl Westphal. Westphal had described several patients with “contrary sexual feelings” that today we’d recognize clearly as being gay men and lesbians. It’s splitting hairs really, but in my reading of the historical literature, it was only with the extensive treatments of the subject by later sexologists such as Krafft-Ebing and Ellis (combined with the further reach of their popular books) that homosexuality as a psychosexual condition became widely accepted among Western clinicians.
*The new medicalization of homosexuality did offer some gays and lesbians a certain degree of legal protection against overzealous prosecutors who sought to jail anyone caught in a same-sex erotic tryst, especially since consensual adult homosexual acts would remain against the law for some time to come. In many places, a psychiatrist testifying on behalf of the defendant that the latter suffered from the mental illness of “inversion” could mitigate the legal punishment for such unlawful homoerotic dalliances.
*It’s a pity to me that a person’s critical thinking would be ceded so completely to the Bible, but religious individuals point to Matthew 5:28: “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
*For a rare glimpse into the “average” person’s private sexual fantasies, see the psychologist Brett Kahr’s book Who’s Been Sleeping in Your Head? The Secret World of Sexual Fantasies (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
*Or what Ellis called “retifism,” after the eighteenth-century French novelist Rétif de la Bretonne, who wrote that as a boy he would “tremble with pleasure” and blushingly lower his eyes before a pretty girl’s boots “as if in the presence of the girls themselves.”
†I’ll go into more detail about the developmental origins of fetishes in a later chapter, but in a study with gay male podophiles who were members of the “Foot Fraternity,” the sociologist Martin Weinberg found that most of the men could trace their passion for feet back to a specific childhood event. Quite often, these were innocent experiences of playing with their parents’ lower extremities. “Sleeping upside down with my parents,” reflected one man, “and finding my dad’s feet in my face.” “I used to tickle my dad’s feet,” recalled another. “I enjoyed his laughter very much … he would feign enjoyment as part of the game.” Another reminisces: “At about five or six years old, removing my father’s shoes and massaging his hot feet … the soft, warm feet and the pleasure he seemed to experience—usually going to sleep—and I could kiss and lick his feet.” See Martin S. Weinberg, Colin J. Williams, and Cassandra Calhan, “‘If the Shoe Fits…’: Exploring Male Homosexual Foot Fetishism,” Journal of Sex Research 32, no. 1 (1995): 17–27. These men just happened to be gay, but it works the same way for straight podophiles. In a detailed psychoanalysis of a “child foot fetishist,” a team of neo-Freudian sleuths tried to unravel the case of a sixteen-year-old boy who’d been enamored with his mom’s feet since he was a toddler. She originally thought it was cute, but by the time he was six, his fascination with his mom’s extremities had become sexualized. “While licking the feet,” write the psychiatrists, “he regularly had an erection and played with his penis.” See Jules R. Bemporad, H. Donald Dunton, and Frieda H. Spady, “The Treatment of a Child Foot Fetishist,” American Journal of Psychotherapy 30, no. 2 (1976): 303–16.
*One group of enterprising scholars isolated the “vaginal vapors” of ten different women to see if all vaginas smelled alike. There were some strict rules that the open-minded women who volunteered for the study had to follow: no douching for a full week before the scent sampling, no intercourse for forty-eight hours prior, and absolutely no garlic or heavy seasoning in their foods, since these substances leak into genital fluids. The sniffers’ ability to differentiate the vaginal odors by female donor led the authors to conclude that, indeed, depending on the particular mélange of inhabitants occupying an unwashed groin, every woman on the planet has her own signature smell. See Louis Keith, Paul Stromberg, B. K. Krotoszynski, Joan Shah, and Andrew Dravnieks, “The Odors of the Human Vagina,” Archives of Gynecology and Obstetrics 220, no. 1 (1975): 1–10.
*There are notable individual differences in disgust sensitivity. Consider some examples from an assessment scale developed by the psychologist Peter de Jong. How willing would you be to “lie beneath bedclothes below which you have masturbated the day before and which show obvious smudges” or to “touch a soiled, unwashed towel that is possibly used to wipe off sperm/vaginal fluid of an unknown person after sexual intercourse (e.g., a towel in a hotel)”? (I know you’d prefer some additional information. If we’re talking about a towel used by a male supermodel at a Four Seasons, rather than one wiping off a drug-addled, unhygienic pimp at a hovel at a Motel 6, that could make a big difference. But we’re playing the all-else-being-equal game here.) Interestingly, women with a history of vaginismus (the difficulty in allowing vaginal entry to a penis, a finger, or other object despite wanting to be able to do so with their partners) are significantly more disgusted at the prospect of touching these soiled objects than are control subjects. “From this perspective,” says Jong, “the difficulty in penetration in women [with] vaginismus may at least partly be due to a disgust-induced defensive response.” Another way to think about this is that such women are resistant to the local anesthetic. See Peter J. de Jong et al., “Disgust and Contamination Sensitivity in Vaginismus and Dyspareunia,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 38, no. 2 (2009): 244–52.
*This was right around the time that the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality as a mental illness from its official diagnostic manual (the Bible-like Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). Various methods of conversion therapy, however, remained common for years to come in private clinical practices.
*Note also that the odds fall decidedly against the lustful male “gambler” if he has a sexual fetish or paraphilia deemed criminal or socially inappropriate. The underlying psychology of lust serving to lower moral standards is the same for all men, but such disinhibition places the deviant at a distinct disadvantage in this sense over other males.
*Fessler and Navarrete’s data deal with disgust and not value judgments per se,
but the findings hint that women’s moral dumbfounding (“It’s wrong because it’s gross”) may also peak when they’re ovulating.
*It works the other way around too, whereby people try to symbolically decontaminate themselves from the stain of their own lust. One of the most disturbing examples of this “moral cleansing” effect is the phenomenon of baby rape in post-apartheid South Africa. A widespread “virgin myth” among some men in that society held that the only way to cure an infected man of HIV was to have sex with a virgin. This led to some men seeking out the most “virginal” and morally pure sex partners possible (meaning, sadly, infants and toddlers). “Not only was the child violated … [by] the unmitigated and undiluted brutality of the perpetrator,” writes the sociologist Deborah Posel, “but the risk of transmission of the HIV virus doomed the child to the prospect of death.” Deborah Posel, “The Scandal of Manhood: ‘Baby Rape’ and the Politicization of Sexual Violence in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” Culture, Health, and Sexuality 7, no. 3 (2005): 246.
*Although the Victorian age is when the term “nymphomania” (“female disease characterized by morbid and uncontrollable desire”) gained in popularity, coinage of the word is credited to the French physician D. T. Bienville in his 1775 thesis Nymphomania; or, A Dissertation Concerning the Furor Uterinus. In Greek mythology, nymphs were minor female deities who were usually depicted as nubile young maidens guided by their amorous passions and mating indiscreetly with mortals of both sexes.
*Whoever “Burt” was (or is), it’s worth commenting on just how extraordinary was his refusal to defer to Ellis’s psychiatric opinion for those times. To assert that one is not mentally ill, when practically all the world informs one otherwise, requires either an uncommon degree of self-delusion or an inhumanly defiant moral clarity. The ironic thing is that almost all experts today would unhesitatingly credit Burt with the latter.
*There’s still no clear evidence that individual differences in sex drive are genetically determined, but it remains a viable hypothesis. A cluster of “hypersexuality” (the modern term for excessive sexual desire and equally problematic as a scientific construct, as we’ll see shortly) was found among interrelated Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn in the late 1980s. See Nancy J. Needell and John C. Markowitz, “Hypersexual Behavior in Hasidic Jewish Inpatients,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 192, no. 3 (2004): 243–46.
Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us Page 27
