Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us (35 page)

Réage, Pauline,
The Story of O

religion; bestiality; medieval

Rétif de la Bretonne

Rind, Bruce

Rivière, Lazare

Robertson, Stephen

romance

Rome, ancient

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques

rubber boot fetish

Ryan, Christopher,
Sex at Dawn

Sade, Marquis de

sadism

sadomasochism

Salem, Massachusetts; witch hunts

Sambia people

Sandusky, Jerry

Santorum, Rick

Sartre, Jean-Paul

Satan

satyriasis

Savage, Dan

Savile, Jimmy

scabies

schizophrenia

Schlessinger, Dr. Laura

science

secretions; disgust;
see also specific secretions

semen; in food; -ingestion ritual

seminal nature

Seto, Michael;
Pedophilia and Sexual Offending Against Children

sexually transmitted diseases

Shakespeare, William;
Othello

shame

shoe fetish

sight

Sirionó Indians

skellum

sleep

slippery slope effect

smegma

smell; disgust; gay sex; incest; pheromones

sneeze fetishists

social media

Socrates,
Phaedrus

Sodom and Gomorrah

sodomy

solipsism

sound

South Africa, baby rape in

Southeast Asia

Spain

Spencer, George

sperm

Stekel, Wilhelm;
Sexual Aberrations

Stevenson, Richard

Storer, Horatio

Studd, John

stygiophilia

subjectivity; children; harm; orientation; pedophilia

substance abuse

suicide; gay teen

sweat

Sweden

symbolic disgust

Symonds, John Addington;
Sexual Inversion

syphilis

Szajnberg, Nathan

Tanner, James,
Foetus into Man

Tanner scale

taste; aversion

taxonomy

tears

teenagers; age-of-consent laws; disgust; homosexual; masturbation; pregnancy; sex with

teleiophilia

television

Temerlin, Maurice

Terence

terror management theory

testicles; monkey

testosterone

Thailand

theory of mind

tickling

titillagnia

touch

transsexuality; autogynephilia theory; FTM; MTF; terminology

transvestic fetishism

tribal societies

Trivers, Robert

Tromovitch, Philip

TSO (total sexual outlet)

Ulrich, Heather

unusual erotic targets

urine; retention

urophilia

vagina; odors and fluids; preparation hypothesis

vaginismus

Valle, Gilberto

Vanity Fair

Viagra

Victorian era; hypersexuality

virginity

Voltaire

vomiting

vorarephilia

voyeurism

Wakefield, Jerome

Walking Nudes Test

Wegner, Daniel

Weinberg, Martin

Westphal, Carl

White, Edmund,
A Boy’s Own Story

White, Ryan

white bear effect

Wilde, Oscar; ephebophilia of; indecency trials

Wise, Thomas

Wogeo tribe

women; age of menarche; average number of orgasms; casual sex; disgust; Féré stereotypes about lesbians; hypersexual; imprinting; madness from the womb; masturbation; medicalization of female lust; nymphomania; odors and fluids; paraphiliacs; pedophiles; postmenopausal; sadists; sex differences in arousal; transsexual

Woodruff, Guy

Xenophon,
Symposium

Yeats, William Butler

Zeigarnik effect

Zgoba, Kristen

zoophilia

Zucker, Kenneth

ALSO BY JESSE BERING

Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?

The Belief Instinct

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jesse Bering, Ph.D.,
is a frequent contributor to
Slate
and
Scientific American
. His writing and research have appeared in
New York
magazine,
Cosmopolitan
,
The Guardian
, and
The New Republic
, among other publications, and have been featured by NPR, Playboy Radio, and more. The author of
The Belief Instinct
and
Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?
, Bering is the former director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University, Belfast, and began his career as a professor at the University of Arkansas. He lives in Ithaca, New York.

Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 2013 by Jesse Bering

All rights reserved

First edition, 2013

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bering, Jesse.

    Perv: the sexual deviant in all of us / Jesse Bering. — 1st Edition.

        pages   cm

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-374-23089-0 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-374-71063-7 (ebook)

    1.  Paraphilias.   2.  Sex.   I.  Title.

HQ71 .B3567 2013

306.7—dc23

2013021856

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Scientific American is a trademark of Scientific American, Inc. Used with permission.

eISBN 9780374710637

*
Boethius’s
Consolations
went largely unnoticed until Chaucer translated the mystic’s treatise in the fourteenth century. Thomas Blount’s seventeenth-century definition of “pervert” likely originates in turn from Chaucer’s earlier translation of that 524 text.

*
Ellis was also a vehement supporter of eugenics and even held court for a while as the president of the Galton Institute, an organization that sought to improve the fitness (or reproductive quality) of our species’s genetic stock through carefully regimented human breeding. The heritability of kinkiness didn’t seem to be of any special concern to him.

*
Believing that sexual fetishes get their start in childhood experiences, Ellis recalled his mother playfully thrusting a younger sibling’s wet diaper in his face when he was nine years old. Several years later, while strolling with the pubescent Havelock through the grounds of the zoo gardens, Mrs. Ellis lifted her skirt and squatted to relieve herself behind some bushes. Havelock remembered how the sound of her urine stream meeting the composted earth had titillated him as a twelve-year-old boy. Before long, he’d be scientifically measuring the distance and trajectory of his schoolfellows’ pee—“my own vesical energy being below the average,” he noted with a characteristically morbid self-analysis. His curiosity culminated in an empirical study: “The Bladder as a Dynamometer,”
American Journal of Dermatology
6 (May 1902).

*
See, for example, the French novelist André Gide’s firsthand account of his traveling to Algiers with Wilde to procure adolescent boys for sex not long before the trial:
If It Die: An Autobiography
, trans. Dorothy Bussy (New York: Modern Library, 1935).

*
Getting wind of Ellis and Symonds’s soon-to-be-published book, the Manhattan psychiatrist Allan McLane Hamilton put out his “Civil Responsibility of Sexual Perverts,”
American Journal of Psychiatry
52 (1896). Whereas Ellis had mostly a shoulder-shrugging philosophy about homosexuality, Hamilton felt that it was so corrupting a disease that anyone found in a committed gay or lesbian relationship should be separated by force. “I hold that under such circumstances not only may the aid of habeas corpus be implored for the purpose of effecting a separation, but that in aggravated instances the physician should, in manner specified, bring the matter before the attention of a committing judge” (511).

*
In
The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1
(New York: Random House, 1978), the philosopher Michel Foucault traces the origins of homosexuality as biological essence rather than action to a rather obscure 1870 paper by the German neurologist Carl Westphal. Westphal had described several patients with “contrary sexual feelings” that today we’d recognize clearly as being gay men and lesbians. It’s splitting hairs really, but in my reading of the historical literature, it was only with the extensive treatments of the subject by later sexologists such as Krafft-Ebing and Ellis (combined with the further reach of their popular books) that homosexuality as a psychosexual condition became widely accepted among Western clinicians.

*
The new medicalization of homosexuality did offer some gays and lesbians a certain degree of legal protection against overzealous prosecutors who sought to jail anyone caught in a same-sex erotic tryst, especially since consensual adult homosexual acts would remain against the law for some time to come. In many places, a psychiatrist testifying on behalf of the defendant that the latter suffered from the mental illness of “inversion” could mitigate the legal punishment for such unlawful homoerotic dalliances.

*
It’s a pity to me that a person’s critical thinking would be ceded so completely to the Bible, but religious individuals point to Matthew 5:28: “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

*
For a rare glimpse into the “average” person’s private sexual fantasies, see the psychologist Brett Kahr’s book
Who’s Been Sleeping in Your Head? The Secret World of Sexual Fantasies
(New York: Basic Books, 2008).

*
Or what Ellis called “retifism,” after the eighteenth-century French novelist Rétif de la Bretonne, who wrote that as a boy he would “tremble with pleasure” and blushingly lower his eyes before a pretty girl’s boots “as if in the presence of the girls themselves.”

†
I’ll go into more detail about the developmental origins of fetishes in a later chapter, but in a study with gay male podophiles who were members of the “Foot Fraternity,” the sociologist Martin Weinberg found that most of the men could trace their passion for feet back to a specific childhood event. Quite often, these were innocent experiences of playing with their parents’ lower extremities. “Sleeping upside down with my parents,” reflected one man, “and finding my dad’s feet in my face.” “I used to tickle my dad’s feet,” recalled another. “I enjoyed his laughter very much … he would feign enjoyment as part of the game.” Another reminisces: “At about five or six years old, removing my father’s shoes and massaging his hot feet … the soft, warm feet and the pleasure he seemed to experience—usually going to sleep—and I could kiss and lick his feet.” See Martin S. Weinberg, Colin J. Williams, and Cassandra Calhan, “‘If the Shoe Fits…’: Exploring Male Homosexual Foot Fetishism,”
Journal of Sex Research
32, no. 1 (1995): 17–27. These men just happened to be gay, but it works the same way for straight podophiles. In a detailed psychoanalysis of a “child foot fetishist,” a team of neo-Freudian sleuths tried to unravel the case of a sixteen-year-old boy who’d been enamored with his mom’s feet since he was a toddler. She originally thought it was cute, but by the time he was six, his fascination with his mom’s extremities had become sexualized. “While licking the feet,” write the psychiatrists, “he regularly had an erection and played with his penis.” See Jules R. Bemporad, H. Donald Dunton, and Frieda H. Spady, “The Treatment of a Child Foot Fetishist,”
American Journal of Psychotherapy
30, no. 2 (1976): 303–16.

*
One group of enterprising scholars isolated the “vaginal vapors” of ten different women to see if all vaginas smelled alike. There were some strict rules that the open-minded women who volunteered for the study had to follow: no douching for a full week before the scent sampling, no intercourse for forty-eight hours prior, and absolutely no garlic or heavy seasoning in their foods, since these substances leak into genital fluids. The sniffers’ ability to differentiate the vaginal odors by female donor led the authors to conclude that, indeed, depending on the particular mélange of inhabitants occupying an unwashed groin, every woman on the planet has her own signature smell. See Louis Keith, Paul Stromberg, B. K. Krotoszynski, Joan Shah, and Andrew Dravnieks, “The Odors of the Human Vagina,”
Archives of Gynecology and Obstetrics
220, no. 1 (1975): 1–10.

*
There are notable individual differences in disgust sensitivity. Consider some examples from an assessment scale developed by the psychologist Peter de Jong. How willing would you be to “lie beneath bedclothes below which you have masturbated the day before and which show obvious smudges” or to “touch a soiled, unwashed towel that is possibly used to wipe off sperm/vaginal fluid of an unknown person after sexual intercourse (e.g., a towel in a hotel)”? (I know you’d prefer some additional information. If we’re talking about a towel used by a male supermodel at a Four Seasons, rather than one wiping off a drug-addled, unhygienic pimp at a hovel at a Motel 6, that could make a big difference.
But
we’re playing the all-else-being-equal game here.) Interestingly, women with a history of vaginismus (the difficulty in allowing vaginal entry to a penis, a finger, or other object despite wanting to be able to do so with their partners) are significantly more disgusted at the prospect of touching these soiled objects than are control subjects. “From this perspective,” says Jong, “the difficulty in penetration in women [with] vaginismus may at least partly be due to a disgust-induced defensive response.” Another way to think about this is that such women are resistant to the local anesthetic. See Peter J. de Jong et al., “Disgust and Contamination Sensitivity in Vaginismus and Dyspareunia,”
Archives of Sexual Behavior
38, no. 2 (2009): 244–52.