Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us (11 page)

Storer was quite a piece of work, but he wasn’t alone in his dyspeptic views of female sexuality. Alarmed by the specter of loose women on the prowl, other Victorian-era gynecologists warned their colleagues to be on the lookout for “seductresses” fabricating symptoms of urine retention only to get unsuspecting male doctors to palpate their pudenda. Medical misogyny even found its way into popular culture. British journalists explained how a nymphomaniac could be detected hiding among “normal” females (a snake in the grass, in other words) by her penchant for wearing perfume and flashy jewelry. Even speaking openly of marriage, it was thought, betrayed a woman’s lewd inclinations.

To complicate matters, physicians weren’t on the same page about what, exactly, nymphomania
was
. The diagnosis variably meant that the woman was having too much sex, that her desires were “clinically significant,” or that she was a frequent masturbator. Also, given the social stigma that came with receiving such a diagnosis, gynecologists couldn’t always count on their patients being honest about their sex lives. In some recalcitrant cases, doctors relied on “physical symptoms” of nymphomania to diagnose women with the condition. Genital hypertrophy was thought to be one such obvious clue to a woman’s sickness. According to popular folk wisdom at the time, Mother Nature helpfully ratted out Messalinas by branding them with large clitorises, a trait noted as frequently occurring alongside these sickened, improper needs. (The misogyny behind such a “warning sign” is indefensible, but in fact there may be something to this clue. When testosterone treatment is prescribed for women today, side effects often include an enlargement and sensitivity of the clitoris—coincident with a rise in sex drive.)

*   *   *

These were dark days for women. Surgical clitoridectomies were even being recommended as a last line of defense against the great ill of female masturbation. One of the most infamous advocates of this barbaric procedure was an English gynecologist and obstetric surgeon named Isaac Baker Brown, who believed that everything from epilepsy to mania to catalepsy in women stemmed from their self-pleasuring habits. His professional undoing came when he performed the surgery on several patients without their consent while they were under general anesthesia for more routine procedures. Ironically, when Baker Brown died, the dissected brain of this practitioner who, under the cloak of Hippocrates, was so eager to dispose of these body parts of female pleasure was found riddled with syphilis courtesy of his own “excessive” needs.

It wasn’t just the British who were such prudes during the Victorian era. As we saw with Storer’s handling of his patient, the concept of nymphomania had crossed the oceans. Here’s another American woman of the period describing her battle with masturbation: “While I was praying my body was so contorted with the disease that I could not get away from it even while seeking God’s help.” A tad melodramatic to us today, but that was the mind-set. And it was indeed a warped way of seeing female sexuality. In 1894, an overwrought mother brought her nine-year-old daughter to the New Orleans physician A. J. Block after discovering the little girl masturbating. Block propped up the child on his examining-room table and began inspecting her genitals with his fingers. There was no reaction upon touching her labia. But “as soon as I reached the clitoris,” the doctor later recounted without any emotion, “the legs were thrown widely open, the face became pale, the breathing short and rapid, the body twitched from excitement, slight groans came from the patient.” In Block’s imagination, these responses clearly meant that the child had a very bad case of nymphomania indeed. So, with the approval of the girl’s mother, he performed an emergency clitoridectomy on her.

When we hear the phrase “female genital mutilation,” our thoughts usually sail over to Africa, but the practice of eliminating a woman’s capacity for sexual pleasure by removing critical parts of her anatomy has a distinctively Western history, too. The gynecologist John Studd (an improbable name given his profession, but true nonetheless) believes that more clitoridectomies were performed in England and the United States over the past two centuries than we’d care to recognize. One of the first uses of radiotherapy was the obliteration of teenage girls’ clitorises to discourage them from masturbating. These X-ray clitoridectomies weren’t happening in backwater clinics, either, but in some of the most fashionable cities in the world, including London and Manhattan. And this was just in the twentieth century. Fortunately, radiotherapy quickly moved on to its more benevolent purposes (such as the therapeutic treatment of cancer patients, a
slightly
more humane practice). But the fact that this shiny new technology got its start with such a cruel and unnecessary procedure should give us all pause. Most of these “patients,” after all, were just healthy teenage girls whose parents couldn’t bear the thought of their daughters doing
that
.

*   *   *

The clinical concept of nymphomania was still floating around as recently as 1964, when the book
Nymphomania: A Study of the Oversexed Woman
hit the shelves. It’s tempting to dismiss a book with such a sexist title as hogwash—and much of it really
is
hogwash. But it was taken perfectly seriously at the time, mainly because the well-known psychotherapist Albert Ellis, the founder of cognitive behavioral therapy, was its author. In the book, Ellis (who was no relation to Havelock, by the way) introduces us to several different “types” of nymphomaniacs. Take the twenty-seven-year-old career woman “Dolores,” the “Conquering Woman Type.” To understand Dolores’s nymphomania, the psychologist reasoned, one had to appreciate the self-consciousness she’d long been dealing with over her heavily scarred face, the result of a freak childhood accident. She “found herself,” wrote Ellis, “with an extremely feminine body to go with her disfigured face.” It seems that Dolores had gotten herself into the habit of making conquests of men and then promptly discarding them, with no interest in dawdling in relationships with those who fell in love with her along the way. From one to the next—virgin office boys, married businessmen, clerks long in the tooth and overdue for retirement—she delighted only in the numbers accumulated. Dolores wasn’t a fan of foreplay either. “She wanted the whole thing or nothing,” Ellis shares with his readers. It’s hard to imagine the part in their interview where the woman explained to him her talents in inducing multiple orgasms in men, which the author also tells us about. But in any event, in Ellis’s view, promiscuous sex pacified Dolores’s self-consciousness, making her feel desirable despite her disfigurement. (With that psychoanalytic critique in mind, I can’t help but feel it’s probably for the best that Dolores didn’t know
then
what we know
now
about the evolution of male arousal and disgust.)

Then there was Ellis’s case of “Gail,” or more precisely the case of “Gail and Burt.” “Several homosexual-nymphomaniacal matings have come to my attention in recent years,” Ellis begins his account of the “Neurotic Type” of the oversexed female. Such “matings” referred to those mismatched domestic partnerships, apparently quite common in the 1950s and ’60s, in which a loose woman sets up a home with a gay man. The psychologist speculated that more often than not in such cases, the homosexual male represents a sort of masculine safe haven that an insecure nymphomaniac can depend on without having to fear that she’ll be traded in for a more attractive woman.

Gail was a single mother, and Burt was helping to raise her young son. The pair was endowed with perfectly compatible personalities and reproductive anatomies, but given that both had an eye for men, never the twain shall their genitalia meet. “Now, let’s not be so
cynical
,” Ellis would surely have interjected in reaction to our pessimism. Nymphomaniacal Gail, you see, was also deeply in love with the flamboyant Burt. Not only was he attractive, he was also intelligent, a good conversationalist, and a caring father figure to her child, whose biological father was apparently not in the picture. Gail would happily give up her wild ways if only her gay BFF would cultivate a passion for vulvae. Namely
hers
. Wasn’t there anything, anything at all, she could do to get Burt to burn with desire for her rather than for other men? “I told Gail that this was theoretically possible,” Ellis explains:

since homosexuals are not born the way they are and can, and in some instances do, change remarkably, so that they can enjoy heterosexual activities. But I told her that Burt was not likely to change, because he did not consider himself disturbed. He insisted he thoroughly enjoyed his homosexual activities and showed no inclination whatever to come for therapy.
*

This psychologist wasn’t one to allow a little thing like patient consent stop him from trying to cure an inconveniently stubborn man of his homosexual ways, however. “If she wanted to try,” Ellis tells us of his conversations with Gail, “there was nothing to be lost in attempting to seduce Burt into heterosexuality … [so] the two of us devised a plan of attack on Burt’s heterosexual virginity.” Basically, Ellis instructed his client to weasel her hands into Burt’s pajama pants while he slept at night. Since the two lived together anyway, and since the house was so small that they had to share a bed (probably not the brightest idea, really), there was plenty of opportunity for such stealth maneuvers. Being in a dream-induced stupor would presumably minimize Burt’s resistance to Gail’s unbidden affections.
Technically
, Ellis prescribed a sexual assault, but let’s not get lost in the semantics.

Ellis reports to us that Burt showed some “irritation” upon waking to discover the woman fondling him and rudely mouthing his thoroughly unimpressed organ. Eventually, however, with Gail hinting that she couldn’t go on with a sexless relationship for much longer, the gay man began to shrug his shoulders and let the straight woman have her hopeless way. Then, one magical night a few months later, and to both of their surprise, Burt experienced an orgasm during one of Gail’s persistent manipulations. Slowly working their way up to some clumsily deliberate intercourse, similar transactions of viscous pleasure hesitantly followed. And soon the trio—Gail, Burt, and Albert Ellis—were cautiously celebrating Burt’s newfound heterosexuality.

As it turns out, caution was warranted. It soon became apparent that Burt was only going along with this gay conversion plan because he was petrified of losing his otherwise pleasant home life, his close friendship with Gail, and his relationship with her young son, to whom he was very attached. After all, if a closeted zoophile can ejaculate into his wife by pretending that she’s a horse, then an admirably motivated gay man can, at least on those occasions when his hormonal stars are perfectly aligned, also make out a subcutaneous Adonis in a woman’s labial folds. Nonetheless, this admitted lack of sincere change in Burt made Ellis grow impatient with the unwitting gay client’s failure to acknowledge his “disturbance.” I can just picture the exasperated therapist snapping his pencil in two, taking a deep breath, and finally summarizing the trying case when he concludes: “He was doing the right thing for the wrong reason.” The “right” reason to be straight, in Ellis’s 1964 view, was self-evident: straight was simply what every person should be. The psychologist gives us no closure on the case of the “homosexual-nymphomaniacal” mating pair. But I’d like to think they’re happily married senior citizens now, both with their very own husbands.

*   *   *

Compared with nymphomania, the medicalization of “excessive” male lust—at least when it comes to the heterosexual variety—is historically less noteworthy. But male genitals didn’t go entirely unscathed during the moralistic heights of the Victorian era either. The next time you pour yourself a bowl of Special K cereal, think of the very special advice given to young wankers by the inventor of cornflakes, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg: “Boys, are you guilty of this terrible sin? Have you even once in this way yielded to the tempter’s voice? Stop, consider, think of the awful results, repent, confess to God, reform. Another step in that direction and you may be lost, soul and body. You cannot dally with the tempter. You must escape now or never.” And for parents at their wit’s end with their masturbating sons, Kellogg offered this sage recommendation:

[Circumcision] should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment, as it may well be in some cases. The soreness which continues for several weeks interrupts the practice [of masturbation], and if it had not previously become too firmly fixed, it may be forgotten and not resumed.

If you were iffy about having your son’s foreskin lopped off, Kellogg recommended it be stretched as tightly as possible over the glans (head) of his penis and sutured shut with a needle and wire to keep him from getting an erection. And if
that
didn’t work, well, you could always lock up the boy’s organ in one of the doctor’s patented genital cages. For the young offenders themselves, Kellogg and other physicians of the period had plenty of stern warnings about the dire health consequences of masturbation. Tragic stories of boys going insane or blind, or of having deformed or mentally impaired offspring, were made readily available to prevent the horny male adolescent from engaging in this vice. “Such a victim literally dies by his own hand,” wrote Kellogg in his wildly popular
Plain Facts for Old and Young
of 1888. Around the same time, G. Stanley Hall, the father of the field of adolescent psychology and the first president of the American Psychological Association, called masturbation “the scourge of the human race.” Unlike Kellogg, at least he was willing to grant them the hallucinatory pleasure of their wet dreams—he wasn’t happy about it, mind you, but he regarded nocturnal emissions as being beyond the boy’s control.

Such bizarre ideas about the harmless act of masturbation were tossed long ago into the waste bin of history. Fast-forward to modern Europe, for instance, where several nations—including the former capital of Victorian prudishness itself, the United Kingdom—now have official diktats stating that the experience of sexual orgasm is a basic human right. Adolescents of both sexes are encouraged to masturbate routinely to curb the transmission of STIs and to reduce teen pregnancies.