Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us (29 page)

Such a social cognitive distortion, in which the image of another’s abundant flesh blurs his or her intellect in our mind while sharpening our focus on his or her naked
feelings
, translates to our actual sexual behaviors toward this other person as well. We’re not usually preoccupied with our partners’ math skills or flair for languages as we’re screwing (or being screwed by) them. But we’re highly attuned to what they’re experiencing at a more sensory and emotional level. Far from objectifying our sex partners as slabs of meat, we’re very much aware of the pleasure or pain that we’re causing them. Even a sexual sadist doesn’t view other people as objects. In fact, it’s the other way around altogether. The sadist is able to derive pleasure only through the lens of his theory of mind, in this case by perceiving a mind capable of experiencing the pain he inflicts. His sadistic arousal is inflamed by the very “redistribution” of mind described by Gray; with his erotic target now stripped of any significant cognitive functions, what he sees before him is a tingling, hypersensitive, wide-eyed figure whose entire axis shifts with every cruel touch he makes. For those of us with slightly less frightening sex lives, the underlying mechanism is the same; it’s just that our arousal is titillated by the perceived pleasure we’re inducing in others and not by their pain.

In fact, for a loving couple to be able to synchronize their sexual movements so expertly that their orgasms can be delayed for an hour or more, with one member releasing his or her own restrained passion so that it erupts in tandem with that of the other, requires very advanced social cognition. This isn’t going to be our experience with
every
erotic encounter we have (really, who has the time), but with some basic practice under our belts, or at least some penis-numbing prophylactics, it’s within erotic reach of most of us. Even our three-minute coital average is impressive when compared with the mad fifteen-second gnashing of genitals in our closest primate relatives. Whether we’ve mastered the
Kama Sutra
or prefer a quick splash in the gutters on Lovers’ Lane, human sex is almost always an elaborate dancing of loins, an intersubjective ballet of lust. Unfortunately, we can still never
really
“become one” through even perfect climactic timing. Don’t forget, after all, our sex partner’s mind is there in theory only, an especially sad solipsistic fact that led the poet William Butler Yeats to write so ruefully of the “perpetual virginity of the soul.”

*   *   *

Theory of mind might not allow us to literally penetrate another person’s subjective existence (maybe it’s for the better anyway—it sounds like something that would take months to clean from the walls), but it does animate that person in a way that shows us such a presence dwells beneath the skin. Once this social cognitive system evolved, it became clear that others were psychological entities like us, with sexual desires of their own. More important, we could see that those desires weren’t always so neatly aligned with ours. The most positive sexual consequence of this psychological innovation is that it enabled us to conceptualize the mental construct of “consent.” It’s a bit nonsensical, for instance, to use terms such as “rape” or “sexual coercion” to refer to behaviors in other species in which a male copulates with a female struggling to free herself, and there are, indeed, many species in which such a pattern is common. The male simply doesn’t have the evolved social cognitive equipment allowing it to think of the psychological harm that it’s causing to the sex “object.” Imagine a monkey in the act of thrusting saying to itself, “You know, actually, wait, I wonder if she’s comfortable with me sticking my penis inside her like this?” By contrast, men who violate females (or other males) this way are indeed rapists. Assuming the other person is giving clear signals (the word “no” is usually a pretty good one), a rapist’s theory of mind allows him to detect the mental state of unwillingness, and yet he continues with the act anyway. This unique ability to ascertain the other individual’s psychological consent was the cognitive key needed for unlocking any coherent form of sexual morality in our species. While human societies are far more different in their attitudes toward sex than they are similar, and the form and degree of punishment for sexual transgressions vary enormously, no known culture on this earth has ever smiled upon rape among its own citizens.

Being able to reason about another person’s thoughts also brought with it a strange, and sometimes disconcerting, mental effect in our species: the feeling of sexual shame. By using our theory of mind to take the mental perspective of someone else, we were able to see ourselves as he or she saw us. That could be a rather unflattering sight when it comes to sex. Just as their attention could turn to someone else’s erotic motives, our ancestors became cognizant of the fact that another person could speculate on their desires. This led to unspoken rituals of sexual deception. It can get quite Machiavellian, but in one of its simplest forms, if you’ve ever had a crush on someone whom you didn’t want to know about it and so you deliberately hid those fire-in-your-pants feelings, you’ve engaged in such theory-of-mind-driven deception.

Related to this is another unpleasant reality: We may desperately
want
to be seen as sexually desirable to someone else, since that’s how we feel about the particular person, but unfortunately we’re just not his or her type. (Trust me, few know unrequited love better than a gay man.) Yet as the trillion-dollar cosmetics industry attests, that definitely doesn’t stop us from trying. On the other hand, being intensely desired by someone toward whom we feel no attraction at all can also be disconcerting. It’s not merely finding out that someone you don’t really fancy has a harmless crush on you. That may be. But there’s also a distinctively unpleasant phenomenology (or the
what-it-feels-like
sense) that comes from knowing that your body is inducing an intense degree of sexual arousal in someone you’d actually prefer it didn’t. This is precisely the state of mind that many feminist writers are referring to when they use the word “objectification,” or when they define porn—aptly so—as the “articulation of the male gaze.” Here’s how the author Angela Carter describes this peculiar feeling of being someone else’s erotic target in her short story “The Bloody Chamber” (which is the one for you if you’re a man who’d like to know what it feels like to be a woman but you’re not so committed as to invest in a whole new wardrobe):

I saw him watching me in the gilded mirrors with the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting horseflesh, or even of a housewife in the market, inspecting cuts on the slab. [The effect] was strangely magnified by the monocle lodged in his left eye. When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me … the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire.

“There are some eyes,” writes Carter, “that can eat you.” Of course, a person’s sexual subjectivity, as we’ve seen throughout, complicates these matters even more. After all, an exhibitionist revels in this very notion of being consumed by others’ eyes. (And in fact Carter’s own empowered female characters often find their loins stirring unexpectedly at the thought of their trembling “horseflesh” being held and rotated in a man’s carnivorous mind.)

Beyond our own private liaisons, our evolved theory of mind system also enables us to morally evaluate (as we’ve been doing all along in this book) those whose sexual natures differ so drastically from our own. And when this system isn’t held in check by scientific facts, our impulsive judgments of these erotic outliers can be heinously harsh. Much of the trouble in this area stems from the fundamentally egocentric nature of our social cognition. I can no more reliably take the perspective of a middle-aged straight man aroused by the sight of a woman’s genitalia, for example, than I can that of a male hamadryas baboon getting worked up over the amorphous, rainbow-colored swelling on the calloused rear of his female lover. (I mean that, for better or worse. If it’s not perfectly apparent to you already, I’m as gay as they come, a “Kinsey 6,” you might say.) Yes, understanding reproductive biology enables me to think logically and mechanically about such heterosexual cues. But metaphorically speaking, having to slip into either of these male primates’ skins isn’t the most pleasant form of virtual reality for my gay human brain. And as we saw earlier, when we’re blue around the gills, our moral reasoning abilities aren’t exactly at their sharpest.

Let’s flip this example around and see what happens when a completely heterosexual man (a “Kinsey 0” on the zero-to-six scale) is told to imagine having sex with another man. In a 1979 study by the psychologists Donald Mosher and Kevin O’Grady, straight college guys were shown clips from gay male porn and instructed to identify with one of the actors in the film: “[Experience] the emotions that you would have if you were, indeed, engaging in the sexual behavior.” The result, as you’d guess, was disgust, anger, shame, contempt, and greater agreement to such eloquent survey items as “I’ve never been able to understand why anyone would fuck a man in the ass when you could have better sex with a woman”; “You can’t walk into a men’s john these days without some guy looking at your cock or showing his hard-on”; “I’d rather be dead than queer”; and “You can tell a pansy by the flowers and butterflies that he wears.”
*

Fortunately for both fashion and gay rights, the 1970s were laid to rest under an orange-and-brown linoleum floor somewhere decades ago. But although their exact contents may be different, the brains of college students today work pretty much the same as the brains of those in 1979, just as
their
brains worked the same way as those of the eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds who lived millennia before them. Natural selection is an incredibly sluggish business and doesn’t move at anywhere near the lightning pace at which human knowledge accumulates. This is a vital point in the context of this discussion, because until our species evolves a totally new kind of brain, any moral progress made toward the subject of sexual diversity hinges solely on the use of our acquired knowledge to defuse our crueler, instinctive biases.

In the modern world, which is a land where entire lives are tidily reduced to a letter on a string of ciphers (“LGBTQ” and whatever else gets thrown onto such messy sandwiches of community acronyms), it has become more imperative than ever for us to resolve this terrible tug-of-war between our innate judgments and our critical-thinking skills. With human beings carved up into so many sexual “types” (and subtypes), negative
stereo
types will spread over them like some invidious algae. If these continue to grow for too long without anyone putting a stop to them, it will become all but impossible for us to make out the actual human being—the individual person—beneath. In fact, that’s exactly how it all evolved to work. Negative stereotypes develop immunity to moral logic because they have an undeniable adaptive currency. Our brains systematically collect and aggregate all the negative information they can about the most salient categories of people in our social environments. Since we can never meet every member of every category, the unpleasant tidbits gathered by our brains come from a very limited sample only. Yet that doesn’t keep these prejudiced organs of ours from automatically and unconsciously—and often against our own better thinking—ascribing these undesirable traits to everyone in that demographic.

Take our heroic homeless man back on the subway, for example. Which of the following was in fact the safer assumption? (And before you answer this, remind yourself how you were traveling at a high rate of speed beneath the surface of the earth in a confined vessel at the time, and so you couldn’t exactly run away to safety as the incident flared up.) Was it that the homeless man had psychiatric problems making him dangerously unpredictable, or that the silver fox in the thirty-five-hundred-dollar tailored suit must have done something nasty to provoke the attack? It’s wonderful, really, that your negative stereotype of homeless people as being mentally unstable was so fantastically wrong in this case, but your negative stereotype was still “right” in the amoral sense of leading you to err on the side of caution for your own selfish genetic interests. (You may be all winks and smiles with the chivalric transient now, but had that mother never screamed about her daughter, you’d still be diligently avoiding any eye contact with him.) As I mentioned briefly in the first chapter, this better-safe-than-sorry function of stereotyping helped our ancestors to make the best split-second decision possible with only limited social information to go on. But it also turned us into ready-made bigots. With our biased attributions made possible by our theory of mind, we simply expect the very worst in strangers.

By stereotyping individuals due to their sexuality—the “lesbian,” the “transvestite,” the “pedophile,” the “fetishist,” the “exhibitionist,” the “masochist,” and so on—we’ve lost the trees for the forest. The reason our knowledge of a person’s hidden sexual desires overshadows everything else we know about him or her becomes clear in the context of evolutionary theory. At their core, of course, adaptive behaviors are those that aid an individual’s reproduction, and so it’s hard to imagine having any more useful, or strategic, information about a person than the nature of his or her sexual desires. Aside from the fact that it tells you I’m not an adventurous person when it comes to Asian cuisine, for instance, I doubt it would interest you to know that I had a humdrum plate of chicken pad thai last night. But if I told you that after dinner I
finally
lost my heterosexual virginity to a stunning, and unusually patient, given the circumstances, Thai waitress in the restaurant lavatory, I suspect your ears would perk up a bit more. (And on that example, remember what your mother told you: “If it sounds too good to be true…” Unless I get a brain transplant, and therefore I cease to be me, I’m afraid this particular penis will never see the inside of a vagina.)