Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us (26 page)

Making the determination of whether a sexual orientation is a genuine mental disorder has gotten increasingly challenging over the years. In 1992, the psychiatrist Jerome Wakefield suggested that for a trait to be considered diseased in this way, it must be biologically
dysfunctional
; that is, the trait must be at odds with an evolutionarily adaptive response. That sounds logical enough. But then if such a criterion were to be adopted by the APA or some other mental health organization as the defining factor, one could reasonably conclude that homosexuality should never have been removed from the
DSM
, nor should other deviant psychosexual traits (such as “gender identity disorder,” which could be used until 2013 to diagnose well-adjusted transsexuals with a mental illness) should ever have been plucked out.

When it comes to homosexuality, there are plenty of unconfirmed and circuitous theories about the possible evolutionary “reasons” for it (such as helping to raise your nieces or nephews, who share a quarter of your genes—and I’m afraid I’m a very bad uncle in this sense, living hundreds of miles away). But whether there’s any truth to these Darwinian hypotheses or not, it’s rather silly to argue over the blatantly obvious fact that being attracted only to the opposite sex is a much more effective gene-reproducing strategy than is being attracted only to the same sex. The APA’s reclassifying homosexuality as a “normal form of human sexuality” in 1973 set an important precedent, because thereafter the psychiatric use of the word “normal” as applied to sexuality could never again be perfectly synonymous with “biologically adaptive.”

Now, I realize how such a concession might encourage more than a few social conservatives out there to celebrate. “You
see
!” I can picture them saying. “I told you it was all just politics. The APA just caved to threats by the queers back in the 1970s, but gay people really
are
mentally ill!” Before such individuals break out the free champagne bottles that came with their membership in the Family Research Council, they might want to reconsider using “normal” and “abnormal” for the basis of their moral reasoning. After all, under the guidelines of reproduction and biological dysfunction suggested by Wakefield, the people that most conservatives would erroneously refer to as “pedophiles” are, in fact, far more “normal” than homosexuals.

A girl who has just started menstruating isn’t nearly as fertile as she’ll be a few years later, and her reproductive anatomy is still very delicate. Furthermore, there’s some anthropological evidence that women who have their first child before the age of fourteen bear fewer offspring overall than those who become mothers in their late teens or early twenties. So although young females are high in “reproductive value” (in terms of the total number of their fertile years remaining), this evolutionary logic may not extend all the way down to gangly pubescent girls. Furthermore, the female’s reproductive value is rather moot in this sense for a hebephile, given that, to use the modern example, he’d lose his attraction for the girl around the time she gets her braces off and grows out of her Justin Bieber fan T-shirts. Still, in the ancestral past, hebephilia may have represented an adaptive strategy under conditions where the risk of cuckoldry (unknowingly raising, and therefore investing one’s resources in, another man’s child) was especially high. After all, assuming she was at least reproductively able, the younger a girl was, the more likely she was to be a virgin, thus virtually guaranteeing the man’s paternity if she became pregnant.
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Depending on the most pressing adaptive problem for a man living in the ancestral past, different reproductive strategies varied in their effectiveness. And under such conditions of high paternity uncertainty (perhaps combined with high rates of STIs, as well, since youthfulness would also correspond with less prior exposure to sexually communicable diseases), impregnating, say, a dozen pubescent girls over the life span may have been a more adaptive strategy—at the heartless level of the man’s gene replication motives only—than a monogamous man raising two children together with an adult woman. (Incidentally, if such an adaptive trait were heritable, it could help to explain recent genetic findings showing that identical twins raised
apart
are far more likely to share a hebephilic orientation than are fraternal twins raised
together
.)

Yet even if hebephilia weren’t evolutionarily adaptive under
any
conditions, in the history of our species, there have been far more babies born to ovulating thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls than there have to men who have sex with men. So for social conservatives to draw from that insipid old argument that homosexuality is “biologically unnatural” and therefore “morally wrong” is essentially for them to say that sex with pubescent girls is “biologically natural” and therefore “morally right.” And that’s rather ironic, isn’t it, given that so much of the fuel for today’s pedophilia panic and antigay mentality lies at the fiery heart of the right-wing community.

It was due in no small part to these reproductive realities (well, that and the challenges of doing a Tanner scale classification for every child involved in a sex-abuse investigation) that the APA ultimately rejected a proposal to add hebephilia to the
DSM-5
, voting instead to keep only pedophilia as a mental illness. But it was an intense debate while it lasted. Ray Blanchard, who spearheaded the campaign to enter hebephilia into the diagnostic manual, used plethysmography to prove that many sex offenders incarcerated for crimes against children are in fact hebephiles (attracted mostly to pubescents) and not pedophiles (attracted mostly to prepubescents) and therefore presumably constitute a separate threat. Yet many of his fellow colleagues failed to see how simply being able to distinguish between pedophiles and hebephiles in prisons meant that the latter should also be diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder. One of Blanchard’s most vocal adversaries was the forensic psychologist Karen Franklin, who accused him of confusing morals and science (much as the Victorian-era doctors had confused morals and science in the case of nymphomania, which similarly gave the courts license to confine individuals in mental hospitals against their will). Blanchard’s bid to add hebephilia to the
DSM-5
was also met with resistance from the sexologist Richard Green, founder of the International Academy of Sex Research. Green titled one of his critiques of Blanchard’s arguments with just a
hint
of transparency: “Sexual Preference for 14-Year-Olds as a Mental Disorder: You Can’t Be Serious!!”

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A sole attraction to pubescent girls is another thing altogether, perhaps, but in keeping with this amoral, mechanistic reasoning, and given that most of a woman’s eggs are gone by the time she reaches the ripe old age of thirty, the
inability
to be attracted to young females who display visible signs of reproductive capacity (such as breasts and widening hips) would be decidedly abnormal (and I hope you’re able to see clearly by now, by the way, why the issue of “normality” is so morally vacuous and why the question of harm must instead prevail before we can ever hope to make any real ethical progress in these debates). In the ancestral past, a man aroused more by women in their thirties or forties than he was by those in their teens or twenties would have been at a distinct reproductive disadvantage. Regardless of monumental changes since the Pleistocene days in our understanding of teenage emotions, our appreciation of older women, and the extension of the average life span, it’s these youth-detecting ancestral men’s brains that modern men still come standard equipped with. Age is just a number, yes, but as that number rises, the amount of a woman’s eggs declines. That’s not a sexist or ageist statement; it’s simply a plain biological fact. (Note also that lust and love are wholly different; what inspires a man’s lust will never change, but his love will adapt to whatever nature can throw at it, which certainly includes something as insignificant to an otherwise happy and successful marriage as his wife’s menopause.)

None of this is to say that men who find women of more “suitable” ages attractive aren’t exhibiting a biologically adaptive response. So long as the woman is still showing signs of being fruitful (whether by a genuine ripeness or false advertising by Botox), the capacity to become aroused by, say, those forty-something women popularly known as MILFs (get thee to
urbandictionary.com
if you don’t know) is clearly biologically adaptive. It’s just not
as
adaptive as being attracted primarily to younger women. As we saw in our discussion of parental investment theory, men have more than enough (and then some) spermatozoa to spare, so even if there’s only the remotest chance of impregnating an older female, the inability to be aroused by her could work against a man’s genetic interests. (It’s basically the same principle at work behind most men’s capacity to be aroused by pubescent girls, only it’s applied to the other far end of the female reproductive age spectrum.)

This evolutionary logic is also why gerontophilia is so uncommon. An attraction to the elderly is apparently so rare, in fact, that even Alfred Kinsey doesn’t mention it in his otherwise exhaustive
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
.
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(He included plenty of other deviant sexual behaviors, such as pedophilia and bestiality, so it’s a revealing omission.) Any man whose erections are reserved for women over sixty, no matter how lovely, active, and intelligent those ladies may be, isn’t much of a threat to other males in the genetic arms race (he’ll have a great sex life, though, with not only less competition but the appreciation, experience, and accumulated wisdom of his erotic targets).
*

Wakefield’s criterion of biological dysfunction aside, if it doesn’t bother the gerontophile or his elderly partner (and by the way, many older women near and dear to me would wring my neck for calling them “elderly,” but I mean no harm, I speak only of your absent ova), there’s no reason for gerontophilia to be seen as a mental disorder. And indeed, you won’t find it in the
DSM-5
. Its only dark manifestation would involve (as it does on some occasions) elder abuse.
†
But otherwise, it’s kind of a win-win. Remember, the erotic age orientations are lifelong arousal patterns, and so a true gerontophile is a gerontophile at the age of twenty just as he is at the age of eighty. If such a man finds himself with a woman younger than he prefers, she’s literally becoming more beautiful to him as she ages. From his subjective perspective, she’s still merely larva slogging through the ravages of her youth throughout her thirties and forties, but by the time she’s in her fifties, she’s entered the dreamy chrysalis stage and will emerge as the most spectacular butterfly—entirely white and ever so fragile—at age eighty-five. That’s the gerontophile’s erotic ideal. You may see it as peculiar, but I suspect you’ll find it less disturbing than the lamentations of a pedophile. “Little girls are hopeless causes because they grow into big girls in short order and then are unattractive,” a team of sociologists quoted one such dreary figure. “That is why it is rare I know a girl for more than a few months or years. Once they grow into puberty, we slide apart and go our separate ways.”

Pedophilia is a mental illness in the
DSM-5
, whereas gerontophilia is not. Both are quite clearly biologically dysfunctional, the former by having an erotic target (a prepubescent girl) who is much too young to conceive, the latter by having an erotic target (a postmenopausal woman) who is far too old to conceive. In both cases the individual’s erotic age orientation is out of joint with the most basic mechanics of reproductive biology. Both, arguably, also involve erotic targets who are vulnerable physically and often mentally as well. That one is included in the
DSM-5
as a mental illness and the other is not tells us that it’s not adaptation-based logic about “normal” and “natural” alone that guides psychiatric opinions on which erotic age orientations to pathologize, and perhaps it’s not even
only
about harm. Maybe there’s something else at work, too. And given that society takes the psychiatric community’s nod over what’s “normal” and what’s not and applies that to its treatment of minority sexual orientations, it’s worthwhile for us to try to get to the bottom of what that “something else” is, exactly. (If you doubt this, ask an older lesbian what it was like being gay when the APA still considered her mentally ill, then compare her response with what a young lesbian couple has to say about being gay in the United States today—but don’t rush them, for crying out loud, wait until they’re back from their honeymoon at least.)

If male gerontophiles are indeed about as common as female pedophiles, then perhaps they’re simply not worth the effort of pathologizing. Establishing baseline rates in the population is a critical part of any psychiatric research given that one can only make claims about “abnormal” psychology by contrasting it with the known normal. But the challenge with getting accurate percentages of the human population that could be characterized as pedophiles, hebephiles, ephebophiles, teleiophiles, and gerontophiles is obvious. If there were no shame today associated with being anything other than a teleiophile, scientists would have had these phallometric stats in the bank long ago. But outside of forensic samples, the only men likely to participate voluntarily in your study are confident teleiophiles who have nothing to conceal and therefore, save a touch of indignity, no reason
not
to participate. How many wary pedophiles, hebephiles, ephebophiles, and gerontophiles will escape your attention, by contrast, is impossible to say, but rest assured, lines of eager men won’t be snaking around the corners for your study.

There are also ethical challenges faced by the researchers themselves. Let’s assume, for instance, that you somehow manage to get a completely random sample, not sex offenders doing their mandatory plethysmograph testing, but men without any criminal history from the general population. Nonetheless, some of your subjects will inevitably score as pedophiles and show zero arousal to adults. If there are young children living in any of these men’s homes, or perhaps there are even pediatricians or grade-school teachers among them, what would you do? All they’ve done, really, is respond physiologically on this artificial task, and erections aren’t against the law. Don’t forget also that you assured your subjects, as is standard practice for psychological research, that you’d keep their results confidential and anonymous. That’s probably the only way you could get anything like this random sample in the first place. On the other hand, children may be at risk if you fail to disclose these men’s erotic age orientation to the authorities. Given your knowledge of their desires, many people would blame you if any of them ever harmed a child. If you’re an ethical scientist committed to protecting both the rights of your subjects and the safety of the public, it’s a catch-22.
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