Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us (25 page)

The first part of the test, of course, involves the most essential part of all: your own telltale penis. Begrudging or not, under court order, it will be expertly hooked up to the device by a knowledgeable technician. The lights will then be dimmed as you settle into a cozy reclining armchair. “Make yourself comfortable,” you might be told sympathetically. You’re even kindly given a blanket for your modesty. The more tranquil your surroundings, after all, the less anxiety there will be to interfere with your arousal to whatever it is you’re about to see. (In the pioneer days of plethysmography, it was even fairly common to give the man some alcohol beforehand, just to loosen him up. “A certain degree of relaxation can possibly be achieved this way,” explained the hospitable Freund.) If you’re the extra-nervous sort and normally can’t get it up under these types of conditions, or if you have some trouble experiencing erections due to your health or age (impotent old men can be child molesters too, don’t forget), well I’m sure you’ll do just fine, since it’s become increasingly routine these days for technicians to give their male subjects a hefty dose of Viagra before getting started.

If you’re worried about your penis’s poor behavior—you’ve learned over the years that it’s not always so obedient to what it
should
be doing—you might feel like closing your eyes and refusing to look. To pull your emergency erotic kill switch, maybe you can whip up some disgusting images in your head featuring genitals with STIs. Perhaps the right incestuous scene will do it, like performing oral sex on your orgasmically groaning grandmother … and toss in a nasty case of genital warts for her too while you’re at it (it’s not a pleasant thing to imagine nor, sadly, the thought of a loving grandson, but you know, it’s a good last resort when you’re in a locker room filled with hot naked straight guys). This metacognitive technique works the other way around also; in this case, if you’re not attracted to grown-ups, you could picture in your mind’s eye a child whenever a nude adult pops up on the screen. In Nabokov’s
Lolita
, for instance, the hebephilic protagonist Humbert Humbert was able to consummate his marriage to Lolita’s clingy thirty-year-old mother, Charlotte Haze, only by imagining that it was her twelve-year-old daughter (“light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta”) that he was really having sex with. “Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve,” Nabokov wrote, “but it was Lilith he longed for.”
*
But if
this
is your big strategy, it’s not going to work in the Walking Nudes Test, since, oh yes, I forgot to mention there’s a retinal camera trained on your pupils to make sure you’re watching intently.
†

And what you’re going to be watching so intently on the three separate projector screens before you are films of three smiling models of the same approximate age and wearing only their birthday suits. Each will be advancing slowly, tantalizingly, directly toward you. That’s to say, these visual stimulus sets comprise nude children and adults serving as erotic ambassadors, or perhaps “martyrs” is a better word here, for the pedophile, hebephile, and teleiophile categories.
‡
As the models approach, the camera will zoom in on their genitals. All the while, just as it was in the days of Freund’s original test, the forensic technician will be monitoring
your
genitals.

These aren’t prurient images; the erotic triptychs are more anatomy-lesson film clips than porn. But not only does the Walking Nudes Test add movement and the illusion of the models’ personal attention, it pads the image bank with multiple models from each age group rather than just a single representative. So, for example, if you’re a hebephile, the odds of your seeing at least one of the pubescent nudes as a genuine “nymphet” or “faunlet” (Nabokov’s term for the male version of a nymphet) are increased. Consider, then, that for the youngest ages, parents have volunteered their five- to ten-year-olds’ gooseflesh to serve the purpose of weeding out the pedophiles from among the thousands of sex offenders (like you) taking part in this forensic study. Likewise, on any given trial you’ll see the three sacrificial nude adolescents heading your way whose parents have agreed for their bodies to be used to detect men who grow tumescent for pubescents. Finally, of course, there are the naked adults perambulating for your viewing pleasure (we’ll see about that, you sex offender, you), each of whom is a shining example of a fit, reproductively mature human being with a full suite of secondary sexual characteristics. You’ll be exposed not only to models of your preferred gender, by the way, but both girls and boys, women and men, to sort out exactly what’s behind that first slot machine window of yours, too. (There’s some evidence that pedophiles are more likely to be bisexual, for instance, than are men of other erotic age orientations.)
*

All of this is to say that your penis is about to pigeonhole you into a crucial category: Are you a pedophile, a hebephile, or a teleiophile? Bear in mind (and this may help some of you men breathe easier) that the Walking Nudes Test, and every other version of the phallometric method, is meant to determine your
primary
age of attraction, not necessarily your
exclusive
age of attraction. That’s to say, it’s not uncommon for a teleiophile to exhibit some tumescence in response to the images of pubescents, or even, occasionally, to those of the prepubescent children. This is why an adult teleiophile may recall being attracted to a fellow seventh grader at the time, though he wouldn’t dare think of a twelve-year-old girl now in that way; even back then, he was still more attracted to his busty twenty-three-year-old science teacher than he was to the girl his own age, but he also wasn’t entirely erotically immune to that cute twelve-year-old female, then
or
now. Nor is every pedophile or hebephile entirely phallically unresponsive to adults. The question is which age category is going to induce your strongest arousal response when your erectile averages are compared across the board. (This is generally the case with all the paraphilias; paraphilic men are often capable of some degree of arousal to erotic stimuli outside their particular kink, but the kink is undeniably their most trusty trigger.)

*   *   *

Most men, it’s safe to say, know perfectly well what their erotic age orientation is before ever setting foot in the lab scenario I’ve just described. Yet that know-thyself reality can get a little confusing, given that children develop physically at such different rates. Some teenagers come with all the trappings of an adult—trappings colloquially known as “jailbait.” It’s been declining for years, but today the average age of menarche (a girl’s first period) in the industrialized world is around twelve. But there’s tremendous variance. Genes, socioeconomic status, stress, parental relations, diet, and a host of other complex factors are behind huge individual differences in female maturation, not only within the same society but in the very same suburb. Somewhere, a precocious fifth grader is shifting nervously in her chair after having to use a tampon in the school restroom while adjusting her bra; a more flat-chested girl, meanwhile, is pulling into the parking lot of the high school up the road, having recently gotten her driver’s license but still waiting patiently for her first period.
*
Male development varies dramatically as well. I distinctly recall bragging to a friend in eighth grade about how I’d started sprouting a few odd hairs in my armpits, to which he replied in a voice deeper than my father’s what a chore it had become to have to shave his beard every day.

Chronological age is of course
all
that matters in the legal sense. As we learned in the last chapter, it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference whether some chain-smoking, heavily tattooed fifteen-year-old with two kids looks more like a twenty-four-year-old escort; she’s still clearly a minor in the eyes of the law. By contrast, for researchers studying the erotic age orientations, chronological age is almost entirely irrelevant. What’s far more important to them is “biological age.” These two constructs—how old one
is
(chronological age) versus how old one
looks
(biological age)—generally go hand in hand, but, again, it’s not a perfect fit. A month of hormones working overtime can mean big physical changes to an adolescent’s appearance. It could also mean that the man growing aroused by that particular adolescent isn’t a hebephile but a teleiophile responding to the very adult physical cues being broadcast on the body of a child. In this area of forensic psychiatry, then, researchers want to know the age-related physical “type” that a man is most attracted to, not simply the specific chronological age of a person who happens to arouse him.
†

To address this potential gap between chronological age and biological age, the models selected for use in today’s plethysmograph studies are matched in terms of where they fall on the so-called Tanner scale. In his 1978 book,
Foetus into Man: Physical Growth from Conception to Maturity
, the eponymous British pediatrician James Tanner charted, in blushingly intimate detail that includes everything from the width of the areolae to the girth of the penis to the hue and texture of the vulva and scrotum, the precise physical changes that go along with each of six distinct stages of sexual development (from birth to full reproductive maturity) in both males and females. I can only imagine the auditioning process for becoming a Tanner stage model must be incredibly awkward for children and teens given such specificity of gonadal detail. And I say this having once had a Turkish pediatric endocrinologist who smelled of cigarettes and gauze pads thumbing my testicles with one hand while using the other hand to demonstrate to my parents how their thirteen-year-old son’s dangling parts should be more walnut- than grape-size, so perhaps they ought to consider growth hormone injections (which I in fact received for several years). But the main point is that each of the Tanner stages is defined by a unique constellation of maturation-graded physical cues; whichever constellation of bodily traits best ignites your passions reveals your erotic age orientation.

At the time of that embarrassing doctor’s visit, I’d probably have been in “Tanner Stage III,” which on average is seen in boys around eleven to twelve and a half years of age. “Testicular volume between 6 and 20 ml,” goes this clinical description, “scrotum enlarges further, penis begins to lengthen to about 6 cm, thicker pubic hair spreads to mons pubis, voice breaks, increase in muscle mass, may have some breast swelling (gynecomastia), sperm production may begin, growth accelerates to 7–8 cm per year.” If the plethysmograph shows that particular type of organism to be the perfect one for you, then you’re a homosexual hebephile … and quite possibly a priest.

Oh, I’m only joking about that last bit, of course. But as we’ve indeed seen from the Catholic Church sex-abuse scandals, in which 90 percent of the victims have been boys, homosexual hebephilia is one of today’s most poisonous slot machine outcomes. You’d have hit the jackpot with this particular alignment back in ancient Greece, though; Plato famously claimed that pederasty was the one true feature distinguishing Hellenistic society from all the other “barbarians.”
*
In fact, consider yourself lucky if you’re a gay man who prefers men instead of boys. Throughout most of human history, you would have been rejected by society, or at least even more than you are today. (John Money, ever the rogue sexologist among his forensically minded peers, believed that some young boys are “androphilic,” or aroused by adult men. “If I were to see the case of a boy aged 10 or 11 who’s intensely erotically attracted toward a man in his twenties or thirties,” Money said in a 1991 interview with
Paidika
, which was arguably less of a science journal than a pedophilia support group newsletter, “if the relationship is totally mutual, and the bonding is genuinely totally mutual … then I would not call it pathological in any way.”
†
)

In fact, two adult men of equivalent age and status being in a “versatile” romantic relationship (which is to say, they take turns being the insertive partner and the insertee) is a contemporary gay ideal. Basically—how do I put this delicately—in the past a man was often permitted his homosexual affairs as long as he wasn’t the “bottom”; if he were the one doing the penetrating, his masculinity was unimpeachable. And this implied, needless to say, that a man could only have sex with males of lower social standing, which typically meant boys. This wasn’t just the case in ancient Greece, either. Throughout ancient Asia, Australia, Melanesia, China, Japan, and most of the Islamic world, men are also frequently depicted in the historical literature as having intercourse with boys. A few centuries ago in traveling warrior societies such as the Japanese samurai and the Berbers of the Siwa oasis, pubescent boy “brides” accompanied jealous soldiers on their tours of duty while girls and women tended to things back at home. Today’s ultraconservative Saudis might be interested to know that an eighteenth-century Englishman once observed how, on strolling by the Great Mosque at Mecca one day, he spied in its sacred halls men fornicating with adolescent boys while nonchalant passersby merely shook their heads and grinned. (Lesbians aren’t without their share of hebephilic traditions either. For example, in the mid-1980s, a type of institutionalized lesbianism was discovered in Lesotho, in southern Africa. Prior to marriage, some young women in Lesotho courted pubescent girls, the two then forming an intense romantic bond. These “mummy-baby” relationships, as they’re called, provided not just opportunities for sexual experimentation but also emotional support for girls with unstable family lives.)

The homosexual factor aside, one of the most heated debates in this subarea centers on how hebephiles should be conceptualized and, more to the point, whether they should be treated as having a disorder. Most psychiatrists believe that pedophiles are mentally ill.
*
But there’s a sharper division in the field over whether hebephiles are psychologically sick. That’s to say, should those who are attracted primarily to pubescent children be added to the
DSM
as having a mental pathology, as pedophiles are conceived, or is a man’s primary attraction to pubescents, although not as common (nor, certainly, as socially acceptable) as attraction to adults, still “natural” and “normal” enough to make such a diagnosis illogical? There are policy implications for whatever answer goes here. With the formal backing of the APA confirming that the individual is mentally ill due to his erotic age orientation, in some states a hebephile in prison for a sex offense (hands-on
or
hands-off) can be held indefinitely in a U.S. psychiatric hospital after he’s served his sentence in full, if he’s found to be at high risk of committing another offense in the future.