Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us (21 page)

As we saw in the previous chapter concerning gender differences in sexual imprinting and erotic plasticity, once a male’s desires calcify into such a discrete pattern of arousal, it’s a permanent affair. Somehow or another, the paraphiliac must come to accept that, to live with the reality of his “socially inappropriate” psychological existence. A good therapist might be able to correct any obvious bad habits and decision making, or the patient’s overall sex drive can be watered down with libido-crushing medication (such as Depo-Provera), but the unique design of his erotic taste buds remains as deeply etched in his neurons as are the fingerprints on his hands. Quibbling over whether paraphilias should be seen as “sexual orientations” and be recognized as such for political or social reasons is entirely irrelevant in this sense. Of
course
they’re sexual orientations; a paraphiliac’s brain orients him to an atypical erotic target (or activity), just as other people’s brains orient them to the normal suspects.

And pedophiles aren’t the only ones likely to lead morbidly troubled inner lives. When you’re oriented to erotic targets that can fit in the palm of your hand, for example, and that most people would sooner step on than screw, that’s also a pretty tough row to hoe. These are the so-called formicophiles (from
formīca
, Greek for “ant”), and the difficulty they face with their unusual paraphilia is exemplified in a 1987 case study by the Sri Lankan psychiatrist Ratnin Dewaraja. The psychiatrist explains how an introverted young man entered his clinic seeking treatment for what the patient had called “my disgusting habit.” I think we crossed that line long ago and you aren’t likely to be shocked by anything at this stage, but a formicophile’s most intense sexual urges involve placing small creatures like snails, frogs, ants, or roaches around his erotic zones (genitals, anus, and nipples, usually), then pleasuring himself to the tiny nibbling mandibles, or perhaps the cold slime trail forming behind a slug as it makes its arduous hike across the twin peaks of his testes. “He was depressed, unemployed, had no friends, and most of the time,” Dewaraja tells us of this bleary-eyed man torn straight from the pages of a Tim Burton film script (if Tim Burton produced niche porn, that is), was “preoccupied with collecting [such specimens].” After a year of counseling, the patient had managed to reduce his formicophilic masturbation sessions to just once a week, down noticeably from the three to four weekly bouts at the start of his visits. “He was [now] engaging in social interactions with women on a regular basis,” Dewaraja writes optimistically, but then adds tellingly “[he] had not yet experienced coitus.”

It’s clear enough that the formicophile in this story had a paraphilia that he didn’t want, given that it was interfering with his life in negative ways. It was subjectively harmful to him because it was associated with his own personal distress. But note that his formicophilia isn’t the sole cause of this distress. If he’d grown up in a culture that revered formicophiles as reincarnated deities, for instance, his experience would likely be entirely different.
*
In other words, a paraphiliac’s level of distress is usually correlated with the extent to which his society demonizes, ridicules, or shames his form of deviance. Given the objects of their affection, necrophiles are more likely to be demonized than are transvestic fetishists, who in turn are more likely to be ridiculed (mostly in bad British comedy skits). The most shamed (and feared) paraphiliacs today are the pedophiles. A lifetime of having to continually defend, rationalize, or hide for dear life any such unwelcome paraphilia in a society that not only doesn’t understand it but doesn’t
want
to understand it is obviously going to serve as a petri dish for sprouting personal distress symptoms. These people aren’t living their lives in the closet; they’re eternally hunkered down in a panic room and chewing away nervously at their nails.

Homosexuality is no longer regarded as a paraphilia, but as a gay man who tried to pass as straight for the first twenty or so years of his life, I can assure you that hiding one’s “true nature” from the world is absolutely exhausting. Here’s an exercise in the hypothetical that may be helpful for those of you who fall more along the far vanilla side of the Neapolitan ice cream erotic equation. Let’s say you’ve been placed in a witness protection program and you suddenly have to create a new identity of being
gay
, which is the most vital part of your cover. You must move all alone to a place where nobody knows you, and you must convince everyone you meet, for your own safety and for the safety of those you care most about, that you’re 100 percent homosexual. Now, don’t try
too
hard to appear gay, because you’ll give yourself away, so be stereotypical but not
too
stereotypical, yet don’t ever let your guard down either, since some people will try to trick you into revealing the truth by being “understanding,” and it’s hard to know if they actually do know, too, so err on the side of caution and assume they don’t. Watch what you say, where your eyes go, what you do in your spare time, whom you’re seen with, and careful, now, no matter how close you get to someone in this new life of yours, no one must ever discover that you’re really a heterosexual. All that you know and hold dear—and I can’t emphasize this part enough—hangs in the balance. Whatever you do, and in fact you better make this your mantra,
don’t be yourself
.

If living under such intense social conditions for the next twenty, forty, sixty, or even eighty years wouldn’t do a number on your nerves (and by that I mean cause “personal distress”), then you’re simply not human. Yet this is exactly how many people today live their entire lives.
*
It’s also true, however, that many deviants aren’t bothered at all over their minority sexual orientation. This is because the vast majority of the paraphilias are either so rare (such as “lithophilia,” an attraction to stones and gravel), so common (such as foot fetishism), or so trivial (such as “katoptronophilia,” a need for sex in front of mirrors) that passing as normal isn’t so much a hide-for-dear-life sort of problem for these people as it is a “nobody-would-believe-me-anyway” problem, a “you-and-everyone-else-I-know” problem, or a “so-
that’s
-your-big-secret-after-all-this?” problem.

*   *   *

Still other sexual orientations are altogether impossible to hide from society’s prying eyes, and this constant scrutiny can be incredibly painful for an individual who doesn’t particularly want any attention. Some people, that is, have no choice but to wear their deviancy on their sleeves, quite literally when it comes to “cross-dressers” in all their varied forms. There are many subcategories of people who wear the clothes of the opposite sex, with each group having a different motivation for doing so. Some of these individuals clearly have sexual motivations, whereas others have motivations that are anything but erotic. And some, well, it’s not entirely clear to scientists
what
their motivations are, and for reasons we’ll see shortly, that uncertainty continues to be the source of considerable conflict. But whatever reasons one has for needing to transform into the opposite sex, hiding for dear life to minimize feelings of personal distress clearly isn’t an option. Instead, without the right bone structure and a good surgeon, his or her difference is exposed for all the world to see.

That’s not necessarily always such a bad thing, mind you, especially for those who want to do everything
but
hide for dear life. Let’s first examine a subcategory of cross-dresser that isn’t sexually motivated, or at least for whom lust isn’t the primary inspiration. There are male “drag queens” who impersonate women for their livelihood, for instance, but they don’t necessarily dress this way for any sexual reason. (This is also true for the less frequently seen “drag kings,” female entertainers whose acts are male impersonations.) It’s usually money, a love of their craft, or the thrill of performing (often all three factors, to different degrees) that drives these people to gender bend, not their libidos. Then there are the male “transvestites,” whose cross-dressing habits are most definitely libidinal.
*
For transvestites, the primary turn-on is the feel of female garments (usually undergarments, such as a pair of matching panties and bra from Victoria’s Secret worn discreetly under a Brooks Brothers suit) as they rub against their skin; lustful thoughts of women are elicited by the texture, tactility, and other sensual attributes of the clothing. It’s not as common as sadomasochism, but neither is transvestism rare: around 3 percent of straight men report having become sexually aroused at least once in their lives by cross-dressing.
†
The “straight” part is a central point here, too; there’s no such thing as a homosexual transvestite since, rather obviously, gay men certainly aren’t going to get turned on by wearing sexy lingerie that makes them think of fornicating with a woman.

Yet another subcategory of people who wear the clothes of the opposite sex are those in the transgender community. These are individuals who describe having gender dysphoria, which is the unpleasant sense of their biological sex (or chromosomal sex, as in XX or XY) being out of sync with the subjective feeling of their gender, a potentially very painful psychological experience.
‡
The clichéd expression for gender dysphoria is “a woman trapped in a man’s body,” but—as in the case of Cher’s son, formerly her daughter, Chaz Bono—transsexuality can also take the form of a “man trapped in a woman’s body.” There’s one big difference between male-to-female (MTF) transsexuals and female-to-male (FTM) transsexuals, however, and this is the fact that whereas the vast majority (around 75 percent in the West) of the former are “heterosexual,” nearly all of the latter are “homosexual.”
*

The language here gets dicey, to say the least. But it’s not quite as complicated as it sounds. Think of each of us as being comprised of three basic parts. First, we each have a biological sex, which (except in rare cases of chromosomal disorders) is either “male” or “female.” This is what gets written down on our birth certificates. Second, we each have a gender. Again, gender is our subjective feeling of being male or female. Our gender usually matches our biological sex but, as we’ve already seen, this isn’t always the case. Finally, each of us has a sexual orientation, which means that we’re erotically attracted to males, females, or—in the case of bisexuals—both males and females. (There are also asexuals, who have a lifelong pattern of being attracted to neither males
nor
females.) The important thing to understand about these three elements (biological sex, gender, and sexual orientation) is that for any given person they can combine in any number of ways. Most people get the standard concoction, whereby whatever is jotted down on our birth certificates matches the feelings in our heads of who we are, and we grow up to be most erotically attracted to those of the opposite biological sex. But speaking as a case of “male-male-male” on all three of these dimensions, which is to say, I was born a biological male, I’ve always felt like I was a male, and I’ve only ever been attracted to other males—deviations from the norm are not uncommon.

With transgender individuals, the labels we like to adopt for social identity reasons can look hazier, but beneath the terminological fog is the same basic three-factor combination logic. For example, because many MTF individuals are still attracted to women, they often adopt new identities as lesbians after undergoing surgical or hormonal changes to their physical appearance. Likewise, biological females who once identified as lesbians may come to see themselves as straight men after they’ve transitioned. But whereas the physical appearance of one’s sex can change dramatically, for biological males at least, erotic tastes are pretty much a done deal once they’re fixed in place. In other words, regardless of gender, if a biological male has a heterosexual orientation (that is, is “straight”) for the thirty or forty years prior to transitioning to a female identity, after she becomes a woman physically, she’s still going to have that same sexual orientation. (Just ask any wife—or ex-wife—who married a man who then became a woman. At no point was her spouse ever a “gay man.”) The individual may identify as a lesbian now, but her sexual orientation is the same as before.

Here’s where that considerable conflict I spoke of earlier rears its ugly head (and really, it’s all gotten quite brutal, complete with harassment and social-media wars between the two opposing theoretical camps).
*
Whereas it’s clear enough to most researchers that
homosexual
transsexuals aren’t erotically motivated to permanently transform themselves into women (or men, in the case of FTM individuals) but simply want to rid themselves of the horrible gender dysphoria that has gnawed at them their entire lives (more often than not, these are individuals who’ve lived as very effeminate males or as very masculine females since their early childhoods), some prominent sexologists believe that it’s a different story altogether for
heterosexual
MTF transsexuals (who tend not to have as many stereotypically “effeminate” characteristics as their homosexual MTF cohorts). Thus, although it’s often misunderstood, the controversial theory that I’m about to describe applies only to one specific subcategory of transgender individuals: those born as biological males, who have a female gender, and who’ve only ever been attracted to females.

The controversy over the “real” motivations of these biological males who are attracted to women dates back to 1989, when the psychologist Ray Blanchard postulated the existence of a paraphilia involving “a male’s propensity to be aroused by the thought of himself as a female.” He called this “autogynephilia.” To Blanchard and others, heterosexual MTF transsexuals want to become women not so much to relieve their gender dysphoria as to actually incarnate their erotic target. And
that
, as you might imagine, hasn’t sat well at all with the transsexual community, many of whom feel they’re being falsely accused of lying when proclaiming it really
is
about gender dysphoria for them, not about lusting after themselves like some weird “pervert.”