A Natural History of Love (41 page)

Shot entirely in black-and-white, the photographs reveal a world of vice and shadows, a film-noir landscape held at a safe distance from the Ektachrome reality of everyday life. Their sex is as separate from love as it can be. The advertising sex is angry, mean, and sad. Everyone looks bitter, as if recoiling from something too horrible to name. Heavy, stylized, vulgar, the ads are perversely attractive in a slick way. But instead of the buoyant, life-affirming free-for-all sex of the sixties, one finds in this “erotica” a deadness.

Even subtle sexuality sells completely unrelated products. So, why these extremes? One answer is that, as subtle sex has become more prevalent, and even unsubtle sex appears regularly in respectable magazines, the sexual sell has had to become less subtle, too—or so advertisers assume. Hence the sex on display has become tougher and more perverse. As with real sex, a surfeit leads to a search for fresh stimulation, more exotic kicks. It used to be that gas stations offered drinking glasses or ice scrapers and snow brushes as lagniappe, a small gift to lure customers. The gas station may have been across town, but we couldn’t resist getting “something for nothing,” even if it really wasn’t for nothing, since it cost more to drive farther and the cost of the “free” premium was factored into the price of the gas. Makeup companies do that today, and it works nicely. If you buy some products, you receive sample sizes of others. Self-esteem is now being used in the same way. If you purchase a “green” product, you can think of yourself as morally responsible. If you buy certain athletic shoes, you can think of yourself as self-confident and strong. If you Guess right or Request the right jeans, you can think of yourself as sexually desirable. The bonus is a small infusion of worth, a homeopathic remedy for self-doubt, which may indeed make one feel good—or may simply disappear into the bottomless drawer of the psyche, along with other elixirs. The question is why we find sadomasochism, exhibitionism, voyeurism, and other so-called perversions so attractive right now.

Perhaps, in part, this comes from our meandering return to Victorian morals. In that era, society was so repressive and filled with mother-worship that men felt guilty about defiling the “angel” at home, and were driven to subterranean avenues of pleasure and perversion. When societies try to stifle sexuality, they often produce a yen for acting out. In our own turn-of-the-next-century culture, as magazines remind us, soft-core pornography has gone mainstream. Fashion is filled with naked sex and bondage images. Tattoos, once associated with rednecks and underworld characters, are worn by models. (Women sported them in the twenties also, but mainly as permanent makeup—tattooed lipstick, eyebrows, and rouge—although tattoos of scarabs and other Egyptiana became popular when they were discovered on a mummy in one of the tombs.) Calvin Klein ads offer dream-scene sex at the level of slow-motion libido. Remember, these are magazines read in waiting rooms and libraries, subscribed to by teetotalers and wine tasters, delivered to one’s doorstep, devoured in the agreed-upon sanctity of one’s home, read in bathtubs and over coffee, left lying around the house for guests to riffle through and children to scissor up for school projects.

We are a fin-de-siècle culture, confused about our morals, with one foot planted squarely in our puritanical past and the other feeling its way into the future. We lust for extremes, a perfectly human trait. People always want some scandal beyond the scandal they’re allowed. Rock stars perform fellatio on the microphone and, by extension, on the crowd, which responds in waves of screams. Porn stars show up at charity events and model clothes on haute-couture runways. Now that sex has risen to the surface of society, what does this suggest about our private habits? I suspect they may seem mild, even boring, by comparison. Private has become public; but public has not become private.

Why? In these plague years, when we cannot be promiscuous without worry, voyeurism has hit an all-time high. The ultimate safe sex is abstinence, we’re warned. “Ecstasy,” the current drug of choice at discos, is a sexual depressant. “The nice thing about masturbation,” a cynical female friend once confided, “is that you meet a nicer class of men … and you don’t need to dress up.” Sex shows may make one think of the tenderloin area of a city, frequented by moral vermin. But, to some extent, we’ve taken sex shows on the road, polished them up, and made them fashionable. It’s as if we were all watching the same peep show on television, in the separate cubicles of our lives, unobserved. This version of safe sex caresses the optic nerve, giving everyone a small taste of soft-core pornography. Sometimes it crosses boundaries into sadomasochism and exhibitionism. Sometimes it toys with the definition of gender. Sometimes it challenges the notions of taboo and scandal. Some of the most blatant sexual acts have nothing to do with sex per se, but rather with power, anger, and domination. Rape is an extreme example. A milder one is rock stars grabbing their genitals onstage. Look at the way we use sexual defilement as a socially acceptable threat. I’ve heard many heterosexual men and women say they fear prison not because of its isolation but because of rape. In their minds, prisons exist to punish heterosexuals in a homosexual way—by forcing them to change their sexuality and endure the horror of countless rapes. But public perversion always aims to shock. If you want to sell someone a CD or an idea, first you have to get their attention.

Habit is a great deadener. Nudity is so familiar that it takes wilder and wilder ways to excite us. Still, it is possible to shock us, to push the edge of the envelope, as test pilots say. And then to lick the envelope and savor the piquancy of the glue. Consider Madonna’s much-publicized masturbation scene in
Truth or Dare
, performed in front of multitudes, and, perhaps more important, as her father watched. After seeing the film, I thought of the bad-girl syndrome, of the need to do outrageous things, and, when those are condoned, to find ones even more outrageous, questing for some absolute acceptance, asking in effect:
Will you love me now? Even if I’m a holy terror? Oh, yeah? How about now?
Madonna’s follow-up book,
Erotica
, includes sexually explicit stills.

For perversion to be erotically exciting, the person has to feel like he or she is committing a sin. Some moral code has to be transgressed, someone has to be hurt or humiliated, physically abused or degraded, or reduced to an inanimate object. A shoe. A breast. A knife. Most perversion is heterosexual, and practiced by or for men, using women as sex objects. Some women are fetishists, exhibitionists, or voyeurs, but they seem to be rarer. Psychoanalyst Robert Stoller, who spent his clinical life studying perversion, interviewing and observing the habits of a great many people, including a New Guinea tribe obsessed with semen, learned that the crucial ingredient that “makes excitement out of boredom for most people is the introducing of hostility into the fantasy.” A tincture of hostility works very nicely during sex—a little slap on the bottom, a pretend rape, perhaps even a pair of easily removable scarves binding the wrists. The merest pretense suffices.

Why human beings require taboos—which almost always involve eating; eliminating; death; covering the sex organs; whom to associate with; and where, when, how, and with whom to have sex—is a subject for endless contemplation. Presumably, taboos are intended to guide us (especially the young) to act in ways that are healthy or socially expedient. Once, priests were the taboo-police. Guilt, shame, and blame for supernatural revenge was the punishment that kept people in line.

Everyone has seen two-year-olds happily eating sand. Yet “Dirty!” is a negative term that can be applied equally to persons, words, ideas, or even jokes. Why don’t we like dirt? We are far from biologically pure. Quite the contrary—our bodies crawl with mites, bacteria, and other organisms. Why do we worry about polluting, soiling, dirtying ourselves? And, given that fanaticism, what inspires some people—whom we recoil from and call “perverts”—to be coprophiles? In various cultures, mothers used to clean their babies by licking away the urine and feces, as other animals do. Balinese mothers carry their babies in cloth slings and frequently have a pet dog whose job is to provide “diaper service” by licking the baby and mother clean after the baby soils. The Masai drink cow urine as part of their diet, and several cultures dress their hair with dung. According to sex researcher John Money, somewhere in our primitive wiring lies the memory of drinking urine and eating feces as a natural part of behavior; and in a few people—the ones we call coprophiliacs—the wiring gets crossed with sexuality’s.

Sex may seem spontaneous, raw, true, and of the moment, because the sensations are so hotly felt that the body screams out its own version of
Eureka!
But every sex act, no matter how casual, is a tangled drama, a piece of pure “theater,” says Stoller, “the result of years of working over the scripts in order to make them function efficiently—that is, to ensure that they produce excitement… rather than anxiety, depression, guilt, or boredom.” One grows more excited the more one is at risk, or pretends to be at risk. Stoller speculates that excitement happens only when we perceive two opposite possibilities—alive/dead, love/hate, strong/weak, control/out of control, succeed/fail, and so on—and manage to navigate between them:

The poles … are markers limiting a territory within which the energy vibrates. Beyond the poles are experiences not of anticipation but consummation, either present or guaranteed. Excitement is uncertainty; certainty brings pleasure, pain, or no response, but not excitement.

This echoes Oscar Wilde’s observation that “the essence of romance is uncertainty.” Ultimately, the two poles one steers between “are risk and safety.” In fantasies, pornography, or perversions, Stroller says,

the whole business is a fraud, an act, a performance, a masquerade, a disguise—no matter how much the author … proclaims about truth…. What shall we do with daydreaming, where we know that one is quite consciously deceiving oneself, inventing a story known to be untrue, embellishing it…. Yet for all that falsity, tissues swell. Fantasy converts to physiology…. Excitement, then, is a continuum of anxiety/fear into which has been poured the possibility of pleasure, especially mastery…. True excitement … occurs when we are weighing the odds between danger (trauma) and safety.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with exciting daydreams; they serve us in countless therapeutic ways, and sometimes inspire romance, love, works of art. “For most of us,” Stoller continues, “unadorned reality would boil our eyeballs…. Who, of those who buy tickets to war movies, would also buy a ticket to the war?” It’s when sexual fantasies of hostility, debasement, and harm enter the picture that the emotional lighting changes. Why is it hostile to need perversion to become sexually excited? Because perversion is the “erotic form of hatred.”

Let’s consider exhibitionism. One version of it, the one that most often springs to mind, is of a flasher. Most flashers are male, and repeat offenders, because being caught is essential to their satisfaction. Typically, a man goes to a park or some other public place, approaches a woman sitting on a bench, and yanks open his coat to reveal his penis. The woman shrieks and runs for a policeman. What happens next sheds some light on the man’s motives. The flasher rarely runs away. Flashing the woman fills the smallest part of his need. His real goal has many aspects, including the woman’s upset and disapproval; the police coming; the bystanders gasping in a fit of shock and anger; the humiliating arrest; the appearance in court; the embarrassment to his family; the risk of losing his job. These are the critical elements of exposure for the flasher. A flasher is nearly always someone with low self-esteem, a bankrupted vision of his sexual worth, and a deep sense of failure as an individual. In his own eyes he is the unmanliest of men, a limp member of society, a worthless male. By hauling out his penis in public and causing consternation, shock, and chaos, he proves to himself how important his penis is after all, important enough to stop traffic, to make a woman faint, to get him arrested, to ruin his career. That’s a mighty powerful penis; so he must be quite a man after all.

Love is an act of union or merging with a beloved, which is sought greedily by most, but there are some for whom that is a frightening thought. What if they get suffocated, swallowed up, dismantled? Intimacy takes high-wire courage; it’s dangerous. One could be humiliated, lose face, be forced to relive old traumas. Perversion is a defense against that intimacy. Instead of facing the vulnerability and complexity of a real relationship, where everything is at stake, one invents a fantasy that is violent and taboo enough to be erotically exciting, but where people are dehumanized. People can’t be trusted, only parts of them, or fetishes like knives and whips, or people offering themselves as fetishes. The sexual theater is exciting, not the partners. Once they’re dehumanized, the would-be partners pose no threat. But there is still the sexual excitement. Most often, unknown to the players, this is a revenge drama. The exhibitionist is typically someone who was humiliated as a child and feels driven to humiliate or dominate others, usually strangers, in public. Perversion is what people resort to when intimacy fails.

Why should intimacy be so frightening? When you tell the truth about your life or feelings you give someone kryptonitelike information about you that can be translated into any language, converted into any currency; you never know when it may be used against you, or how far it may travel, or in whose unfriendly hands it may end up. Compared to that, donating an organ is impersonal. Family members risk being more intimate with one another, but they still keep a simmering portion of their lives private. Children discover that they have little privacy about their bodies and sexuality, both of which are open to view and discussion, whereas their parents’ bodies and sexuality are mainly hidden. Their parents—who happily teach them how to eat and act, how to pee and reason—do not teach them how to be erotic. That equally natural activity is just too shameful and embarrassing to discuss. They learn it haphazardly from friends, books, movies, spying on elders, television, magazines, advertisements.