Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?: And Other Reflections on Being Human

by Jesse Bering

  In any event, Lukianowicz argues that erotic fantasies involve imaginary companions not altogether unlike children’s make-believe friends. But unlike the more long-lived latter, he concedes, the former is conjured up for one very practical purpose: “As soon as the orgasm is achieved the role of the imaginary sexual partner is completed, and he is quite simply and quickly dismissed from his master’s mind.”

  According to most findings in this area, men seem to entertain more visitors in their heads than do women. In a 1990 study published in The Journal of Sex Research, the evolutionary psychologists Bruce Ellis and Donald Symons found that 32 percent of men said that they’d had sexual encounters in their imagination with more than a thousand different people, compared with only 8 percent of women. Men also reported rotating in from their imaginary rosters one imagined partner for another during the course of a single fantasy more often than women did.

  The psychologists Harold Leitenberg and Kris Henning summarized a number of interesting differences between the sexes in this area. In their review of research findings, the authors concluded that in general, a higher percentage of men reported fantasizing during masturbation than did women. It’s important to point out, however, that neither “fantasy” nor “masturbation” was consistently defined across the studies summarized by Leitenberg and Henning, and some participants likely interpreted “masturbation” to mean simply self-stimulation (rather than orgasm inducing) or had a more elaborate conceptualization of “fantasy” than we’ve been using here, as some form of basic mental representation. For uncertain reasons, one dubious study compared “Blacks” and “Whites,” so it’s definitely a mixed bag in terms of empirical quality. They didn’t find much of a difference, by the way.

  A side note: both sexes claimed equally to have used their imaginations during intercourse. Basically, at some point, everyone tends to imagine someone—or something—else when they’re having sex with their partner. There’s nothing like the question “What are you thinking about?” to ruin the mood during passionate sex.

  Here are some other interesting findings. Males report having sexual fantasies earlier in development (average age of onset 11.5 years) than do females (average age of onset 12.9 years). Females are more likely to say that their first sexual fantasies were triggered by a relationship, whereas males report having theirs triggered by a visual stimulus. For both men and women, straight or gay, the most common masturbation fantasies involve reliving an exciting sexual experience, imagining having sex with one’s current partner, and imagining having sex with a new partner.

  It gets more interesting, of course, once you step a little closer to the data. In one study with 141 married women, the most frequently reported fantasies included “being overpowered or forced to surrender” and “pretending I am doing something wicked or forbidden.” Another study with 3,030 women revealed that “sex with a celebrity,” “seducing a younger man or boy,” and “sex with an older man” were some of the more common themes. Men’s fantasies contain more visual and explicit anatomical detail (remember the giant, pulsating penis from Lukianowicz’s study?), whereas women’s involve more story line, emotions, affection, commitment, and romance. Gay men’s sexual fantasies often include, among other things, “idyllic sexual encounters with unknown men,” “observing group sexual activity,” and—here’s a shocker—images of penises and buttocks. According to one study, the top five lesbian fantasies are “forced sexual encounter,” “idyllic encounter with established partner,” “sexual encounters with men,” “past gratifying sexual encounters,” and—ouch!—“sadistic imagery directed toward genitals of both men and women.”

  One of the more intriguing things that Leitenberg and Henning conclude is that contrary to common (and Freudian) belief, sexual fantasies are not simply the result of unsatisfied wishes or erotic deprivation:

  Because people who are deprived of food tend to have more frequent daydreams about food, it might be expected that sexual deprivation would have the same effect on sexual thoughts. The little evidence that exists, however, suggests otherwise. Those with the most active sex lives seem to have the most sexual fantasies, and not vice versa. Several studies have shown that frequency of fantasy is positively correlated with masturbation frequency, intercourse frequency, number of lifetime sexual partners, and self-rated sex drive.

  The authors also provide a fascinating discussion about the relation between sexual fantasy and criminality, including a clinical study in which deviant masturbatory fantasies were paired with the foul odor of valeric acid or rotting tissue. Now, that’s enough to put a crimp in anybody’s libido, I’d say. But Leitenberg and Henning’s piece was written in 1995, summarizing even older research. This is important because it was still long before the mainstreaming of today’s Internet pornography scene, where zero is left to the imagination.

  And so I’m left wondering … in a world where sexual fantasy in the form of mental representation has become obsolete, where hallucinatory images of dancing genitalia, lusty lesbians, and sadomasochistic strangers have been replaced by a veritable online smorgasbord of real people doing things our grandparents couldn’t have dreamed up even in their wettest of dreams, where randy teenagers no longer close their eyes and lose themselves to the oblivion and bliss but instead crack open their thousand-dollar laptops and conjure up a real live porn actress, what, in a general sense, are the consequences of liquidating our erotic mental representational skills for our species’ sexuality? Is the next generation going to be so intellectually lazy in their sexual fantasies that their creativity in other domains is also affected? Will their marriages be more likely to end because they lack the representational experience and masturbatory fantasy training to picture their husbands and wives during intercourse as the person or thing they really desire? I’m not saying porn isn’t progress, but over the long run it could turn out to be a real evolutionary game changer.

  PART IV

  Strange Bedfellows

  Pedophiles, Hebephiles, and Ephebophiles, Oh My: Erotic Age Orientation

  Michael Jackson, the late “King of Pop,” probably wasn’t a pedophile—at least not in the strict, biological sense of the word. It’s a morally loaded term that has become synonymous with the very basest of evils. (In fact, it’s hard to even say it aloud without cringing, isn’t it?) But according to sex researchers, it’s also a grossly misused term.

  If Jackson did fall outside the norm in his “erotic age orientation”—and we may never know if he did—he was almost certainly what’s called a hebephile, a newly proposed diagnostic classification in which mature adults display a sexual preference for children at the cusp of puberty, between the ages of roughly nine and fourteen. Pedophiles, in contrast, show a sexual preference for clearly prepubescent children. There are also ephebophiles (from ephebos, meaning “one arrived at puberty” in Greek), who are mostly attracted to fifteen- to sixteen-year-olds; teleiophiles (from teleios, meaning “full grown” in Greek), who prefer those seventeen years of age or older; and even the very rare gerontophile (from gerontos, meaning “old man” in Greek), someone who has always been primarily aroused by the elderly (usually defined, at least for these purposes, as over sixty-five years of age). So although child sex offenders are often lumped into the single classification of pedophiles, biologically speaking it’s a rather complicated affair. Some have even proposed an additional subcategory of pedophilia, “infantophilia,” to distinguish those individuals most intensely attracted to children below six years of age.

  Based on this classification scheme of erotic age orientations, even the world’s best-known fictitious “pedophile,” Humbert Humbert from Nabokov’s masterpiece, Lolita, would more properly be considered a hebephile. (Likewise the protagonist from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, a work that I’ve always viewed as something of the “gay Lolita.”) Consider Humbert’s telltale description of a “nymphet.” After a brief introduction to those “pale pubescent girls with matted eyelashes,” Humbe
rt explains:

  Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets.”

  Although Michael Jackson might have suffered disgrace from his hebephilic orientation, and his name will forever be entangled with the sinister phrase “little boys,” he wasn’t the first celebrity or famous figure who could be seen as falling into this hebephilic category. In fact, ironically, Michael Jackson’s first wife, Lisa Marie Presley, is the product of a hebephilic attraction. After all, let’s not forget that Priscilla caught Elvis’s very grown-up eye when she was just fourteen, only a year or two older than the boys Michael Jackson was accused of sexually molesting. Then there’s of course the scandalous Jerry Lee Lewis incident in which the twenty-two-year-old “Great Balls of Fire” singer married his thirteen-year-old first cousin.

  In the psychiatric community, there’s recently been much debate surrounding the issue of whether hebephilia, like pedophilia, should be designated as a medical disorder or, instead, seen simply as a normal variant of sexual orientation and not indicative of brain pathology. There are important policy implications of adding hebephilia to the checklist of mental illnesses, since doing so might allow people who sexually abuse pubescent children to invoke a mental illness defense. On the one hand, this defense would give perpetrators a medical excuse for their criminal behaviors. In most Western societies, most people are not entirely comfortable with this happening, because not only do they want the individual to be held accountable for his (or her) criminal actions, but a mental illness defense may also translate to the offender being treated at inpatient facilities rather than incarcerated in less-welcoming prisons. On the other hand, if hebephilia were regarded as a legitimate mental illness, such individuals could more easily be kept away from children indefinitely, since their civil liberties would be, in effect, absorbed by the state and they could therefore be kept institutionalized after serving their initial sentences. So a man who rapes a ten-year-old could more readily avoid prison because he’s seen as having a certifiable, American Psychiatriac Association–backed mental disorder, but in the long run this is more likely to mean that he will never reenter society as a free citizen who “did his time.”

  One researcher arguing vociferously for the classification of hebephilia as a mental disorder is the psychologist Ray Blanchard. In an issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior, Blanchard and his colleagues provide new evidence that many people diagnosed under the traditional label of pedophilia are in fact not as interested in prepubescent children as they are in early adolescents. To tease apart these erotic age orientation differences, Blanchard and his colleagues studied 881 men (straight and gay men recruited from the public) in his laboratory using phallometric testing (also known as penile plethysmography) while showing them visual images of differently aged nude models. Because this technique measures penile blood volume changes, it’s seen as being a fairly objective index of sexual arousal to what’s being shown on the screen—which, for those attracted to children and young adolescents, the participant might verbally deny being attracted to. In other words, the penis isn’t a very good liar. So, for example, the image of a naked twelve-year-old girl (nothing prurient, but rather resembling a subject in a medical textbook) was accompanied by the following audiotaped narrative: “You are watching a late movie on TV with your neighbors’ 12-year-old daughter. You have your arm around her shoulders, and your fingers brush against her chest. You realize that her breasts have begun to develop…”

  Blanchard and his coauthors found that the men in their sample fell into somewhat discrete categories of erotic age orientation: some had the strongest penile response to the prepubescent children (the pedophiles), others to the pubescent children (the hebephiles), and the remainder to the adults shown on-screen (the teleiophiles). These categories weren’t mutually exclusive. For example, some teleiophiles showed some arousal to pubescent children, some hebephiles showed some attraction to prepubescent children, and so on. But the authors did find that it’s possible to distinguish empirically between a true pedophile and a hebephile using this technique, in terms of the age ranges for which men exhibited their strongest arousal.

  They conclude that based on the findings from this study, hebephilia “is relatively common compared with other forms of erotic interest in children.” Blanchard and his colleagues also argue that hebephilia should be added to the next version of the DSM (currently being revised) as a genuine paraphilic mental disorder—differentiating it from pedophilia. But not all of Blanchard’s fellow scientists working in this area agree with this pathologizing approach. Most, in fact, are strongly opposed to conceptualizing hebephilia as a mental disorder. Their recalcitrance stems from the policy grounds mentioned earlier (we’ll explore these in more detail below) but also from very basic, logistical concerns. The psychologist Thomas Zander points out that since chronological age doesn’t always perfectly match physical age, including these subtle shades of erotic age preferences would be problematic from a diagnostic perspective: “Imagine how much more impractical it would be to require forensic evaluators to determine the existence of pedophilia based on the stage of adolescence of the victim. Such determinations could literally devolve into a splitting of pubic hairs.”

  There are also important theoretical reasons to question Blanchard’s recommendation. Men who find themselves primarily attracted to young or “middle-aged” adolescents are social pariahs, since it’s so strongly stigmatized, but historically (and evolutionarily) this wasn’t necessarily the case. In fact, hebephiles—or at least ephebophiles—may have had a significant advantage over their competition. Psychologists have repeatedly found that markers of youth correlate highly, currently and historically, with perceptions of beauty and attractiveness. For straight men, this makes sense, since a woman’s reproductive potential (and hence her “value” from a heartless evolutionary perspective) declines steadily after the age of about twenty. Obviously, having sex with a prepubescent child would be fruitless—literally. But, whether we like it or not, this isn’t so for a teenage girl who has just come of age, who is reproductively viable, and whose brand-new state of fertility can more or less ensure paternity (therefore, being attracted to young girls represents a potentially powerful anti-cuckoldry strategy) for the male. These evolved motives have been portrayed unwittingly in many books and films, including the controversial movie Pretty Baby. In it, a young Brooke Shields played the role of twelve-year-old Violet, a prostitute’s daughter in 1917 New Orleans whose coveted virginity goes up for auction to the highest bidder.

  Understanding adult men’s attraction to boys or adolescent males is more of an evolutionary puzzle; after all, it’s not as though cuckoldry or reproductive years remaining is an issue here. But the psychologist Frank Muscarella’s “alliance formation theory” attempts to unravel this homosexual age orientation. According to him, in the past, homoerotic affairs between older, high-status men and teenage boys served as a way for the latter to move up in ranks, a sort of power-for-sex bargaining chip. The most obvious example of this type of homosexual dynamic was found in ancient Greece, but some New Guinea tribes display these trends too. And of course, that desire which inspired Donatello’s impish David still thrives, to say the least, in the world today. Just type the word twink (a slang term derived from that golden, cream-filled, phallic-shaped Hostess treat that describes a youthful gay male “with a slender, ectomorph build, little or no body hair, and no facial hair”) in your Google image search bar and see what (or rather who) pops up. If you’re bashful about doing that, there are plenty of more safe-for-work articles about these types of scandalous homosexual mentorships happening in Congress.

  In any event, I’m guessing that Oscar Wilde would have signed on to Muscarella’s theoretical perspective. After all, his famous “love that dare not
speak its name” wasn’t homosexuality per se, but rather a “great affection of an elder for a younger man,”

  as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo … It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection.

  There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.

  But, in my opinion, Muscarella’s theory doesn’t pull a lot of weight. It addresses the erotic interests of the adult male in the relationship, sure, but it doesn’t apply very well to the arousal patterns of teenage boys. Money, prestige, and status may make such affairs physically possible, and even symbiotic, as the author suggests. But as a general rule, gay teenage boys are aroused more by other teenage boys than they are by middle-aged men. Just as their male heterosexual counterparts grow up but still desire youthful female partners, gay boys simply turn into gay middle-aged men; their erotic preference for young partners doesn’t change or go away either. And although there are exceptions, such as in ancient Greece, young males in most cultures have never seemed terribly interested in taking this particular route to success. Rather, and I may be wrong about this, since it’s not the type of thing one experiments with these days, but I think most would prefer to scrub toilets for the rest of their lives or sell soft bagels at the mall than become the sexual plaything of an older gentleman.