Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us

by Bering, Jesse

  *The term “sex addiction” is contentious, and much of the debate over its use stems from sheer linguistics. Critics of this wording argue that the construct of addiction should apply only to a brain-based chemical dependency on endogenous physical substances—namely, alcohol and other drugs—and they point out that it’s illogical to speak of “addiction” for evolved drives like sex. Saying that porn is “like a drug” works as a metaphor, in other words, but natural sensory experiences are not pharmaceuticals.

  *Note that just a few short decades ago, “culturally tolerated … homosexual behaviors” would definitely not have been part of that sentence.

  †People with deviant sexualities (such as zoophiles, pedophiles, fetishists, exhibitionists, and voyeurs) can also be at the “hypersexual” end of the spectrum (in fact, individuals with such dispositions typically have unusually high sex drives), but Kafka’s proposed “hypersexual disorder” applied only to “normophiles.”

  *Precise figures on Internet porn are notoriously contentious, largely varying by the methodology used to ascertain such data. In their book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire (New York: Dutton, 2011), for example, the neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam give a more conservative estimate of around 4 percent of all websites being pornographic.

  *The accuracy of these figures can always be doubted, of course, since it’s not as if there were hidden cameras in men’s bedrooms. Still, ensuring participants’ anonymity and confidentiality, combined with similar rates across multiple studies, tells us that these TSO figures are reasonable approximations of what’s happening behind closed doors.

  *The Aka’s belief in seminal nurture can be contrasted with that of the Gikuyu people of Africa—and of many Westerners too, for that matter. The Gikuyu believe that penile-vaginal intercourse during pregnancy can harm the fetus (it can’t, by the way), and so Gikuyu men with expectant wives are required to tie up their foreskins into a special tassel called a “bush,” allowing no more than two inches of penetration.

  †The “Human Male” and “Human Female” parts of Kinsey’s titles should really be placed in scare quotes today, given what we’ve since learned about the range of cultural variation in the sexual practices of other human societies such as the Aka.

  *Religious upbringing and related beliefs about sex also play a moderating role. One study found that male hypersexuals who sought treatment were likely to be members of organized religions and to report that religion was important to them. See Rory C. Reid, Bruce N. Carpenter, and Thad Q. Lloyd, “Assessing Psychological Symptom Patterns of Patients Seeking Help for Hypersexual Behavior,” Sexual and Relationship Therapy 24, no. 1 (2009): 47–63.

  *Some sexologists have since pointed out that “paraphilia” is in fact a misnomer when applied to deviant desires. They prefer to use the more arcane term “paralagnia,” since lagnia is Greek for “lust.” This is indeed a better fit given that the main issue is what stirs people’s genitals, not love per se. Both love and lust are basic ingredients that must be mixed together in order for any decent romance to occur, and they can affect each other in fascinating ways. But neither is dependent on the other, and it’s only lust that we’re focusing on here. In any event, with these minor points cleared up, we’ll be sticking with the more common “paraphilia” and its typical use in describing unusual sexual desires.

  *At seventeen, I distinctly recall promising to myself how I’d “go to my grave” without telling another living soul that I was gay. (Except, perhaps, for the closeted lesbian that I’d marry and with whom I’d swear a blood oath to never, ever, under any circumstances, reveal our dark secret. Preferably, she’d be on the tomboyish side just to make it doable.) Two things changed me. First, I almost died myself in an Atlanta hotel room of an accidental insulin overdose, and this spurred me to live a more open life. Second, science: the power of reason over shame and fear gave me a good hard shove out of the closet.

  *A close cousin to the acrotomophile is the apotemnophile, whose erotic fantasies involve having his own arm or leg removed. In 2005, the psychiatrist Michael First interviewed fifty-two middle-aged subjects (all males) who reported a lifelong desire to have a limb amputated. Fourteen had already had one removed. Nearly all of the subjects were gainfully employed and college educated. Much as transsexuals say they feel as if they were born into the wrong body, apotemnophiles just can’t shake the feeling that their “true self” is an amputee. (The most envied alteration by far was an above-the-knee leg job.) Many were so desperate that they’d gone to extraordinary lengths to rid themselves of the misfit body part. The psychiatrist uncovered people who’d crushed their legs under gym weights or used shotguns, chain saws, a wood chipper, and even dry ice to liberate a rudely extraneous appendage. If they caused enough damage, many reasoned, a surgeon would be forced to finish what they started. The biggest regret for those who’d managed to escape their burdensome appendage was that they hadn’t done it sooner. “I am absolutely ecstatic; I’m in possession of myself and my sexuality,” said one. “It finally put me at peace,” said another. “I no longer have that constant, gnawing frustration.” See Michael B. First, “Desire for Amputation of a Limb: Paraphilia, Psychosis, or a New Type of Identity Disorder,” Psychological Medicine 35, no. 6 (2005): 926.

  †Yet paraphilias do change with the times. A once relatively common type of paraphilia known as agalmatophilia (from the Greek agalma, statue) has all but gone extinct today. Frequent references to some men’s exclusive sexual interest in stone statues can be found throughout antiquity, especially in the records of ancient Rome and Greece. Pliny the Elder wrote of a man who fell in love with a statue of the goddess Aphrodite and “hiding by night embraced it [so] that a stain betrays his lustful act.” See A. Scobie and A. J. W. Taylor, “Perversions Ancient and Modern: I. Agalmatophilia, the Statue Syndrome,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 11, no. 1 (1975): 51. The agalmatophiles’ modern descendants lust after realistic life-size dolls (pediophilia, from the Greek pedio, doll; not to be confused with pedophilia). A virtual explosion in the ranks of the robotophiles is right around the corner. We may have lost agalmatophilia, but advances in technology mean that we’ve since gained everything from latex fetishism to mechanophilic arousal by automobiles to the electrophile’s sexual dependence on electric currents. It’s not just an ever-accelerating technology that broadens the paraphilic range, but changes to social conditions can modify, distort, or alter the human form in ways that similarly introduce new possibilities for sexual imprinting. During times of war, for example, amputees are more common a sight than during extended times of peace.

  *At last count there were more than five hundred identified paraphilias. See Anil Aggrawal, Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices (Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press, 2009).

  †The one exception to this drought of scientific knowledge is with our present understanding of pedophilia, a subject that has, for obvious and important social reasons, dominated empirical research in recent decades and has led to something of a renaissance of data-driven studies. Given the importance of that topic, pedophilia and some of the other “erotic age orientations” will receive their own extended treatment in chapter 6.

  *Not that Lucy’s parents were either, by the way. She was born wild in Africa. Poachers killed her mother when she was an infant, and Temerlin had adopted her as an orphan.

  *And it’s true, by the way. The term “actirasty” applies to those who become sexually aroused by the sun’s rays.

  *One paraphilia for which this distinction between mental illness and criminal accountability has generated heated discussion is that of biastophilia. This is a subtype of sexual sadism where the erotic focus is centered on the coercive act itself, whether it’s a particularly brutal act of rape or one that occurs by blackmail or threat. Arousal is triggered not by overt signs of injury, suffering, or humiliation per se but more narrow
ly by forcing intercourse upon an unwilling other. Only a handful of convicted rapists are believed to be “true biastophiles” (particularly repeat offenders and those with a history of violent crimes). In controlled studies, these men become more sexually aroused by video scenes and audio clips depicting rape than they do by those involving consensual sex. The exact opposite pattern is seen in the vast majority of men, including most rapists. See David Thornton, “Evidence Regarding the Need for a Diagnostic Category for a Coercive Paraphilia,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 39, no. 2 (2010): 411–18.

  *The effect can also be seen in a person’s unwillingness to touch objects belonging to an undesirable person. For example, consider your comfort level in slipping on Jerry Sandusky’s favorite sweater or wearing Jimmy Savile’s glasses. Whether or not this disgust reaction is logical (it isn’t, of course, since a person’s spoiled reputation isn’t literally a contagious pathogen that we can “catch”), it steers us away from “social contaminants” that are clearly signaling a perceived “health risk” to our own reputations. Expressions of symbolic disgust toward such individuals, especially when we’re in the presence of others (wearing Sandusky’s sweater or Savile’s glasses in public is probably even less appealing to you than briefly donning them in the privacy of a lab), broadcast that you’re “not like” the offending person. In the case of these two, for instance, their “child molester” essence is the most toxic symbolic substance in our society. See Paul Rozin and Edward B. Royzman, “Negativity Bias, Negativity Dominance, and Contagion,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 5, no. 4 (2001): 296–320.

  *They also commonly have Asperger’s syndrome or fall somewhere along the autistic spectrum, neurocognitive conditions associated with impaired social functioning.

  *There are no data on it at the moment, but it would be interesting to see how this split between a woman’s subconscious and conscious arousal would apply to ovulating women, given those earlier disgust findings on “biologically suboptimal” sexual unions.

  †Those men who attempt to hide their deviant desires for defensive social reasons, such as pedophiles desperately trying to conceal their attraction to children or homophobic men trying to mask their own same-sex desires, have been found to exhibit the same circumscribed penile response pattern as those who are open about their sexuality. The only difference is that closeted men show the exact opposite pattern of arousal (the stigmatized) from whatever it is they claim to be attracted to (the socially acceptable).

  *Compared with plentiful retrospective accounts of paraphilic men, women’s remembered accounts of some definitive childhood experience they believe to be linked to their adult sexual arousal are scarce. Yet a handful of such cases do exist. In 1960, for instance, a woman recounted for a sex researcher what she considered to be the seeds of her masochism: “When I was four, my father once caught me masturbating. He put me over his knee and smacked my buttocks. He was in pajamas, and the slit in front of his trousers opened widely, so that I could see his big penis and dark scrotum moving quite near my mouth each time he raised his hand … Ever since, I subconsciously connected the smacking of my buttocks with the view of his penis and my first sexual excitement.” See Narcyz Lukianowicz, “Imaginary Sexual Partner: Visual Masturbatory Fantasies,” Archives of General Psychiatry 3, no. 4 (1960): 432.

  *This psychoanalytic approach to the paraphilias traces back to Stekel’s initial allegiance to Freud. Stekel’s Sexual Aberrations served largely to pave the way for future sexologists who dissected individual cases of deviant desire using established methods.

  *In 1976, John Money reported on a case strikingly similar to this. Money’s acrotomophilic patient recalled being around five or six years old when he’d accidentally spilled a bowl of scalding hot soup on his foot. “Get it off! Get it off!” his panicked father had shouted. Thinking that his dad meant his foot and not the sock that he was wearing at the time, this was enough, according to Money, to put the amputee fetish in motion, with the image of a removed foot allaying the boy’s castration anxiety. See John Money, “Amputee Fetishism,” Maryland State Medical Journal 25 (1976): 35–39.

  *Stekel might have been the first to describe them in detail, but it was Money who coined the term “acrotomophilia” after seeing several of these amputation-obsessed patients in his Johns Hopkins clinic. He “discovered” and coined many unusual paraphilias, including “symphorophilia,” which is erotic arousal from staging accidents or catastrophes.

  *Money overemphasized the role of society in shaping sexuality and gender. His name will forever be ignominiously associated with the “John/Joan” case from 1965. Believing gender identity to be a product of “nurture” rather than “nature” (we now know this is a false dichotomy), Money had advised the distraught parents of an infant boy who’d lost his penis during a botched circumcision to raise their son as a girl without ever telling him the truth. This recommendation led to a major gender-identity crisis in the patient (later identified as a Canadian man from Winnipeg named David Reimer) and, ultimately, contributed to the man’s suicide in 2004 at the age of thirty-eight. See Claudia Winkler, “Boy, Interrupted: A Tale of Sex, Lies, and Dr. Money,” Weekly Standard, June 19, 2000, www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/011/136eioki.asp.

  †It’s important to note, however, that the occurrence of sexual deviance in small-scale, traditional societies has not yet been the subject of proper scientific investigation—at least of the objective, unbiased variety. So this absence of paraphilias among hunter-gatherers may in fact be more apparent than real.

  *The example used here is of a female paraphilic sadist. But as we learned in the previous chapter, males are more likely to be “true” sexual sadists, especially of the criminal variety.

  †For example, in the nineteenth century, Apinajé women in Brazil were known to bite off their male lovers’ eyebrows and spit them out while having sex. The husbands of Trukese women in the Caroline Islands could anticipate a finger being poked sharply into their ear canals by their highly aroused wives. And prior to the invasion of the more conservative Muslim rulers, sex among the early Hindus of India was a refined form of combat. As the psychiatrist Dinesh Bhugra describes it: “The male attacks, the woman resists and, amid the subtle interplay of advance, retreat, assault and defence, the desires are built up.” Bhugra explains that Hindu consciousness was enhanced during sex by first dulling the physical sensations through sadistic acts. See Dinesh Bhugra, “Disturbances in Objects of Desire: Cross-Cultural Issues,” Sexual and Relationship Therapy 15, no. 1 (2000): 69.

  *In the end, Meiwes was charged with murder and sentenced to life in prison. The judgment was rendered with considerable controversy since both parties were consenting adults. The case is liable to inspire drunken debates for at least another century.

  *There’s also the old story warped by time and of questionable veracity about a tailor from Salzburg who’d allegedly murdered seven of his wives by tickling them to death.

  *On the other hand, had he forced himself on me, I could be a quivering pile of jelly right now. But the point is that even when it comes to illegal sex with a minor, the likelihood of psychological harm is reduced by the minor’s consenting mental state.

  *One of the few politicians to abstain from voting on the study was Representative Brian Baird, a Democrat from the state of Washington who boasted a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. Baird wanted to go on record as saying that out of the 535 members of the House and Senate, only 10 had actually bothered to read Rind’s article. See Brian N. Baird, “Politics, Operant Conditioning, Galileo, and the American Psychological Association’s Response to Rind et al.,” American Psychologist 57, no. 3 (2002): 189–92.

  *Today, each state has its own numerous and complex series of clauses dealing with factors such as age differences between parties and the nature of specific sexual acts, but general ages of consent presently range from fifteen (in Colorado only) to eighteen.

  *This is the same chicken
-and-egg problem that we saw in chapter 3 involving the notion of personal distress for ego-dystonic homosexuality and hypersexual disorder. Is it the person’s sexuality that’s responsible for his or her personal distress in these cases, or is his or her personal distress the result of living in a society that refuses to accept even harmless expressions of sexual diversity? With the exception perhaps of the creepy crawlies getting accidentally smashed by a vigorous hand, formicophilia certainly isn’t harmful to others. When society rejects the self, the self rejects the self.

  *A pair of sociologists once examined the discussion threads of pedophile chat rooms and noted how many topics involved tactics of “passing” in society. “Look at the boys with their mothers next to them,” advised one when asked how not to draw suspicion. “If a friend notices that your attention is elsewhere, just comment on the mother.” See Thomas J. Holt, Kristie R. Blevins, and Natasha Burkert, “Considering the Pedophile Subculture Online,” Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment 22, no. 1 (2010): 18.

  *As with the paraphilias more generally, there are virtually no female transvestites, or women whose most intense sexual desire centers on wearing men’s undergarments.