Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us (17 page)

Even the most comprehensive taxonomy of sexual deviance can’t always foresee all the bizarre ways in which the paraphilias can possibly materialize, and sometimes it’s unclear how a particular expression of sexual deviance should be labeled. Take the following case of an “oral partialism,” for instance. Whether this was the most accurate diagnosis is debatable, I’d say. Yet oral partialism was how the Australian psychiatrists assigned to the patient chose to describe it. And as you’re about to see, one can certainly forgive them any confusion over what, exactly, they should have called it.

Our hard-to-believe-it’s-true-but-unfortunately-it-is story takes place this time in 1998 and involves a socially awkward, morbidly obese nineteen-year-old male. Clinically depressed and weighing in at more than three hundred pounds, the unkempt teen first came to the medical attention of doctors in a clinic in rural Australia due to his poor personal hygiene. The young man had developed ulcerated sores under his arms, above his pubis, and in his groin. His father, who should have dragged his son to the doctor’s office long before he’d gotten to this point, finally brought him in and explained to the attending physicians how these purulent wounds had been festering for the better part of
five years
.

At first, rather surprisingly given the long duration of infection, the prognosis was good. A standard course of antibiotics was prescribed, and assuming his hygiene improved, the doctors were optimistic that the adolescent’s sores would fully heal. It turns out, however, that the patient wasn’t especially keen to get rid of them. Odd as this may sound, he had fallen in love with these bubbling cankers. At a follow-up appointment, he showed poor compliance with taking his medicine, claiming that he’d lost the pills. When the hospital staff pressed him on the matter, he confessed to his sexual motivations for retaining his wounds. “The patient’s primary fantasy stimulus was that of a woman’s mouth,” explain the psychiatrists eventually assigned to the case:

The fantasy consisted of an image of the woman licking her fingers or gently biting her own lips. Behaviorally, the patient would simultaneously put his own fingers into the ulcers in the groin or under the arms and then lick the pus from [them] … He ingested the pus and found both the smell and taste exciting, although he was unable to pinpoint exactly the sexually stimulating aspect of this act.

This large, lonely soul demonstrates how the human imagination can make even the most grotesque of elements subjectively worthy of the most passionate longings. You’ve probably also noticed by now the distinctively male tenor of our examples. I do wish I had more female paraphiliacs to tell you about, but remember that the most conservative estimate suggests a male-to-female paraphilia ratio of 99 to 1. This enormous gender gap appears across the almost infinite range of sexual deviance, too. There are two exceptions. First are the objectum sexuals, given that women appear to be just as likely as men to have the rare object personification synesthesia that may be behind that paraphilia. The other is sadomasochism, where males outnumber females by only 20 to 1. (Yet within this latter subgroup, there are far more female masochists than there are sadists. We’ll discuss S&M in painstaking detail in the following chapter.)

This is also where those animal experiments come back into play. Just like the sex differences in the cross-reared sheep and goats, the robust sex ratio in the paraphilias betrays a similar difference in men’s and women’s sexuality. Human males whose erotic brains are wired in their early childhoods to respond only to
specific
cues in the environment resemble those male ungulates that couldn’t become aroused by their own biological kind, but instead only by their adoptive species. Whether it involves livestock or people, this sexual-imprinting process (in which a highly circumscribed set of erotic targets is stamped early into the individual’s brain) appears to be a decidedly male characteristic. By contrast, the female sheep and goats that were able to “go both ways” after their intensive cross-rearing experiences, equally aroused by both their own biological kind and members of their adoptive species, were exhibiting “erotic plasticity” (in which one can be sexually excited by a wide range of stimuli). Interestingly enough, erotic plasticity is also strikingly more apparent in human females than it is in human males. Another way to say this is that a girl’s developing sexuality is more fluid or labile (and for once that’s not a pun) than a boy’s; it’s less prone to getting locked onto a specific category of erotic target during childhood.

The social psychologist Roy Baumeister once rounded up a half century’s worth of data on the sexual differences between men and women, deriving from his analysis a sort of paraphilic axiom. “Once a man’s sexual tastes emerge,” he wrote, “they are less susceptible to change or adaptation than a woman’s.” The mountains of data he surveyed to arrive at that conclusion are indeed revealing of female sexual fluidity and the more confined range of desire in men. Self-described heterosexual women who are polyamorous, for instance, report that they almost always engage in cunnilingus (female oral sex) with the other women during group sex, whereas self-identified straight men from the same community almost never perform oral sex on each other. (In other words, while the “poly” in “polyamory” stands for “many” sexual partners, for male polyamorists, that
usually
doesn’t mean having many sex partners with penises.) In fact, women in general are far more likely than men to report being bisexual. Tellingly, they’re also more likely to change their self-identification as straight or gay during their adult lives. Furthermore, lesbians are more likely than gay men to say that their sexual orientation is a “choice,” a term that really only makes sense, of course, if the individual is in fact bisexual and decides to commit to one label or another. (Incidentally, if an antigay bigot genuinely believes homosexuality is an intentional choice or a “lifestyle,” then it stands to reason that person’s frequent use of such words could very well be a linguistic reflection of his or her own bisexual desires.)

Work by the psychologist Meredith Chivers also illustrates a greater female erotic plasticity. In several studies, Chivers has found that both straight women and lesbians exhibit vaginal vasocongestion (or increased blood flow to the genitals, a response specific to female sexual arousal) to a surprising assortment of sexual stimuli. For example, a woman’s genitals will respond this way not only to her
preferred
gender (which is to say, men for self-identified straight women and women for self-identified lesbians) but also to naked pictures of her
nonpreferred
gender. They’ll even become demonstrably aroused at this physiological level to video footage of other species having sex, notably graphic scenes of bonobo intercourse. That last finding has been replicated, so it wasn’t just some quirky, happenstance overrepresentation of female zoophiles in the study. Chivers clarifies that women aren’t always consciously aware of their arousal to such stimuli. At least they report not feeling as turned on as the objective state of their genitalia would otherwise suggest. The vagina has a mind of its own, in other words; I suppose anything’s possible, but farther north in the female brain, a pair of frenetic bonobos getting it on probably doesn’t top most women’s list of sexy and hot.
*

When Chivers ran the same kinds of studies with (non-paraphilic) men using the erection-measurement device of a “penile plethysmograph” (which we’ll have a closer look at in chapter 6), she uncovered an entirely different pattern of genital responding. Basically, compared with women’s, men’s “southern brains” were more of the same mind as their “northern brains,” in that their genitals lined up pretty much with how they’d describe their own sexual orientations. Penises of men who’d checked off the heterosexual box grew erect for salacious images of women and went limp at the sight of naked men, whereas those attached to the self-described gay men stood to attention for the photographs of nude men and withered in response to naked women. Yet even the raunchiest depictions of bonobo sex left the men of both persuasions entirely flaccid. In summary, these data told Chivers that unlike with women, there’s not much of a rift between the subconscious and the conscious when it comes to men’s sexual arousal.
†

The evolutionary interpretation of these sex differences in arousal—and I’m aware of no other explanation that has been proposed—is that female genital hyper-responsiveness was biologically adaptive in the ancestral past. Back on the savannah tens of thousands of years ago, even the most unappealing sex cues would have often been followed by actual intercourse, so whether the woman wanted intercourse (it was consensual) or not (basically, rape), the capacity to become so easily physiologically aroused offered a sort of insurance policy against possible damage. Specifically, Chivers’s “preparation hypothesis” posits that a woman’s ready-for-anything genital arousal reduced physical injury to her reproductive organs by vaginal lubrication. “The costs of non-responding [genitally] to sexual cues, including nonpreferred cues,” clarifies the psychologist Samantha Dawson, “would be expected to be much higher for women (e.g., tears and ecchymosis leading to infertility) than for men (e.g., the loss of a single reproductive opportunity).” In further support of this hypothesis, researchers have also found genital arousal to depictions of violent sexual coercion in women who consciously find the thought of rape revolting and terrifying, hardly erotic and arousing.

*   *   *

Needless to say, what we’ve reviewed so far are again relative findings concerning male and female sexuality, not inviolate statements of absolute differences between the sexes. There are exceptions to every generality, and Darwin got famous on this very premise of individual differences in biology. Still, as the work of Roy Baumeister, Meredith Chivers, and many others clearly suggests, if there
is
any degree of sexual imprinting in human females during development, for the vast majority of them it’s much more easily overwritten than it is for human males.
*
The paraphilic classifications in the
DSM-5
are gender neutral, it’s worth noting. So without a theory of innate sex differences to account for the fact that this section of the diagnostic manual is almost the exclusive province of male psychiatric patients, it’s rather hard to explain this overrepresentation on traditional feminist grounds of a sexist society. I’ve never heard complaints of paraphilias being a male privilege and in fact I’m quite sure most paraphilic men would be happy to share this wealth of shame and stigma with the fairer sex.

Paraphilic males show a telltale range of erections just like their nonparaphilic brethren; it’s just that the focus of their attraction has somehow constricted around more unusual erotic targets, which is something other than the norm. Many sexologists, and a lot of paraphiliacs themselves, believe that such atypical arousal patterns link back to a specific event, or perhaps a series of events, in the man’s early boyhood. That’s to say, sexual imprinting, just like what happened to those male rats that suckled as pups from a set of lemony teats. The defining “imprint” in our own species seems to occur surprisingly early, usually being reported as sometime between the boy’s fourth and ninth birthdays, although it’s best to think of this five-year time frame as a “sensitive period” (with plus or minus several years on either end) rather than as a “critical period” of male development. At puberty, the eroticized imprint is jogged awake by a flood of hormones (namely, testosterone), which quickly turns the male’s reproductive system into one of those 24/7 sperm microbreweries that we encountered in chapter 3.

Since the days of Stekel, most of the causal theories about the paraphilias have been grounded in neo-Freudian psychodynamics (which emphasize the sleepless battles being waged between the conscious and the subconscious parts of our personalities).
*
But regardless of your take on Freud’s ideas, there’s no shortage of compelling case studies to support a paraphilic model of male imprinting. You’ll recall, for instance, those lovers of lost limbs, the acrotomophiles. It turns out that one of the most detailed investigations of a deviant desire seeding in a fertile young mind involves a friendly amputee fetishist. It would be impossible to document every little thing that happens during a male’s development to determine the event’s role in crafting his lifelong attraction to, using our example here, truncated limbs, yet the study that follows comes as close as possible to doing just that.

In 1963, a team of developmental psychologists (non-Freudian ones at first) from the City University of New York began a long-term study with a group of 131 children, observing them from birth until the age of six. Funded by the National Institutes of Health, this study aimed to examine how the mother-child relationship affects the latter’s emotional development and coping in a complex social world. To get at this, the investigators would unobtrusively film the pair interacting—during a feeding session when the subjects were babies, for instance, or later, while the mother and child played together—and then they’d analyze the footage to see if the child’s adjustment to the outside world correlated with the quality of these caregiving exchanges. And indeed it did: children with the most secure attachments to their mothers (also to their fathers, the researchers learned along the way) fared better in school and beyond.

That was the end of
that
study. But then decades later, in 1994, an entirely different team of scholars (here’s where the neo-Freudians enter the picture) managed to track down most of the original child participants from the 1960s. Now in their early thirties, these people were quizzed by the psychoanalysts Henry Massie and Nathan Szajnberg on pretty much everything they’d been up to since the initial study ended. A tall order for a study, given that a quarter of a century had come and gone in the interim. Yet the results from this ambitious follow-up were fascinating in their own right. For example, the kids from those old 1960s-era home movies who’d shown the most secure attachments with their moms were now the adults in the sample that had the healthiest social relationships. For those who’d tied the knot, this included their marriages as well. But the most intriguing line of questioning for our purposes involved what was
not
recorded in the lab, namely those very personal events from these people’s early childhoods that might relate to their now-adult sexuality. Most of the subjects were remarkably bland in this regard, or at least they weren’t willing to divulge any particularly juicy secrets. The one exception to this was a handsome, articulate, and happily married advertising executive who reluctantly confided while sitting across from the interviewer: “The only quirk in my sexual life is that I find it very exciting to fantasize sex with a woman missing a limb.” He hadn’t managed to find an amputee wife, but he did find an intact one who was happy enough to simulate an amputated leg (method unknown) whenever they made love.