Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us (36 page)

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This was right around the time that the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality as a mental illness from its official diagnostic manual (the Bible-like
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
). Various methods of conversion therapy, however, remained common for years to come in private clinical practices.

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Note also that the odds fall decidedly against the lustful male “gambler” if he has a sexual fetish or paraphilia deemed criminal or socially inappropriate. The underlying psychology of lust serving to lower moral standards is the same for all men, but such disinhibition places the deviant at a distinct disadvantage in this sense over other males.

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Fessler and Navarrete’s data deal with disgust and not value judgments per se, but the findings hint that women’s moral dumbfounding (“It’s wrong
because
it’s gross”) may also peak when they’re ovulating.

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It works the other way around too, whereby people try to symbolically decontaminate themselves from the stain of their own lust. One of the most disturbing examples of this “moral cleansing” effect is the phenomenon of baby rape in post-apartheid South Africa. A widespread “virgin myth” among some men in that society held that the only way to cure an infected man of HIV was to have sex with a virgin. This led to some men seeking out the most “virginal” and morally pure sex partners possible (meaning, sadly, infants and toddlers). “Not only was the child violated … [by] the unmitigated and undiluted brutality of the perpetrator,” writes the sociologist Deborah Posel, “but the risk of transmission of the HIV virus doomed the child to the prospect of death.” Deborah Posel, “The Scandal of Manhood: ‘Baby Rape’ and the Politicization of Sexual Violence in Post-Apartheid South Africa,”
Culture, Health, and Sexuality
7, no. 3 (2005): 246.

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Although the Victorian age is when the term “nymphomania” (“female disease characterized by morbid and uncontrollable desire”) gained in popularity, coinage of the word is credited to the French physician D. T. Bienville in his 1775 thesis
Nymphomania; or, A Dissertation Concerning the Furor Uterinus
. In Greek mythology, nymphs were minor female deities who were usually depicted as nubile young maidens guided by their amorous passions and mating indiscreetly with mortals of both sexes.

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Whoever “Burt” was (or is), it’s worth commenting on just how extraordinary was his refusal to defer to Ellis’s psychiatric opinion for those times. To assert that one is not mentally ill, when practically all the world informs one otherwise, requires either an uncommon degree of self-delusion or an inhumanly defiant moral clarity. The ironic thing is that almost all experts today would unhesitatingly credit Burt with the latter.

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There’s still no clear evidence that individual differences in sex drive are genetically determined, but it remains a viable hypothesis. A cluster of “hypersexuality” (the modern term for excessive sexual desire and equally problematic as a scientific construct, as we’ll see shortly) was found among interrelated Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn in the late 1980s. See Nancy J. Needell and John C. Markowitz, “Hypersexual Behavior in Hasidic Jewish Inpatients,”
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
192, no. 3 (2004): 243–46.

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The term “sex addiction” is contentious, and much of the debate over its use stems from sheer linguistics. Critics of this wording argue that the construct of addiction should apply only to a brain-based chemical dependency on endogenous physical substances—namely, alcohol and other drugs—and they point out that it’s illogical to speak of “addiction” for evolved drives like sex. Saying that porn is “like a drug” works as a metaphor, in other words, but natural sensory experiences are not pharmaceuticals.

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Note that just a few short decades ago, “culturally tolerated … homosexual behaviors” would definitely not have been part of that sentence.

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People with deviant sexualities (such as zoophiles, pedophiles, fetishists, exhibitionists, and voyeurs) can also be at the “hypersexual” end of the spectrum (in fact, individuals with such dispositions typically have unusually high sex drives), but Kafka’s proposed “hypersexual disorder” applied only to “normophiles.”

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Precise figures on Internet porn are notoriously contentious, largely varying by the methodology used to ascertain such data. In their book,
A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire
(New York: Dutton, 2011), for example, the neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam give a more conservative estimate of around 4 percent of all websites being pornographic.

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The accuracy of these figures can always be doubted, of course, since it’s not as if there were hidden cameras in men’s bedrooms. Still, ensuring participants’ anonymity and confidentiality, combined with similar rates across multiple studies, tells us that these TSO figures are reasonable approximations of what’s happening behind closed doors.

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The Aka’s belief in seminal nurture can be contrasted with that of the Gikuyu people of Africa—and of many Westerners too, for that matter. The Gikuyu believe that penile-vaginal intercourse during pregnancy can harm the fetus (it can’t, by the way), and so Gikuyu men with expectant wives are required to tie up their foreskins into a special tassel called a “bush,” allowing no more than two inches of penetration.

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The “Human Male” and “Human Female” parts of Kinsey’s titles should really be placed in scare quotes today, given what we’ve since learned about the range of cultural variation in the sexual practices of other human societies such as the Aka.

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Religious upbringing and related beliefs about sex also play a moderating role. One study found that male hypersexuals who sought treatment were likely to be members of organized religions and to report that religion was important to them. See Rory C. Reid, Bruce N. Carpenter, and Thad Q. Lloyd, “Assessing Psychological Symptom Patterns of Patients Seeking Help for Hypersexual Behavior,”
Sexual and Relationship Therapy
24, no. 1 (2009): 47–63.

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Some sexologists have since pointed out that “paraphilia” is in fact a misnomer when applied to deviant desires. They prefer to use the more arcane term “paralagnia,” since
lagnia
is Greek for “lust.” This is indeed a better fit given that the main issue is what stirs people’s genitals, not love per se. Both love and lust are basic ingredients that must be mixed together in order for any decent romance to occur, and they can affect each other in fascinating ways. But neither is dependent on the other, and it’s only lust that we’re focusing on here. In any event, with these minor points cleared up, we’ll be sticking with the more common “paraphilia” and its typical use in describing unusual sexual desires.

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At seventeen, I distinctly recall promising to myself how I’d “go to my grave” without telling another living soul that I was gay. (Except, perhaps, for the closeted lesbian that I’d marry and with whom I’d swear a blood oath to never, ever, under any circumstances, reveal our dark secret. Preferably, she’d be on the tomboyish side just to make it doable.) Two things changed me. First, I almost died myself in an Atlanta hotel room of an accidental insulin overdose, and this spurred me to live a more open life. Second, science: the power of reason over shame and fear gave me a good hard shove out of the closet.

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A close cousin to the acrotomophile is the apotemnophile, whose erotic fantasies involve having his
own
arm or leg removed. In 2005, the psychiatrist Michael First interviewed fifty-two middle-aged subjects (all males) who reported a lifelong desire to have a limb amputated. Fourteen had already had one removed. Nearly all of the subjects were gainfully employed and college educated. Much as transsexuals say they feel as if they were born into the wrong body, apotemnophiles just can’t shake the feeling that their “true self” is an amputee. (The most envied alteration by far was an above-the-knee leg job.) Many were so desperate that they’d gone to extraordinary lengths to rid themselves of the misfit body part. The psychiatrist uncovered people who’d crushed their legs under gym weights or used shotguns, chain saws, a wood chipper, and even dry ice to liberate a rudely extraneous appendage. If they caused enough damage, many reasoned, a surgeon would be forced to finish what they started. The biggest regret for those who’d managed to escape their burdensome appendage was that they hadn’t done it sooner. “I am absolutely ecstatic; I’m in possession of myself and my sexuality,” said one. “It finally put me at peace,” said another. “I no longer have that constant, gnawing frustration.” See Michael B. First, “Desire for Amputation of a Limb: Paraphilia, Psychosis, or a New Type of Identity Disorder,”
Psychological Medicine
35, no. 6 (2005): 926.

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Yet paraphilias do change with the times. A once relatively common type of paraphilia known as agalmatophilia (from the Greek
agalma
, statue) has all but gone extinct today. Frequent references to some men’s exclusive sexual interest in stone statues can be found throughout antiquity, especially in the records of ancient Rome and Greece. Pliny the Elder wrote of a man who fell in love with a statue of the goddess Aphrodite and “hiding by night embraced it [so] that a stain betrays his lustful act.” See A. Scobie and A. J. W. Taylor, “Perversions Ancient and Modern: I. Agalmatophilia, the Statue Syndrome,”
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
11, no. 1 (1975): 51. The agalmatophiles’ modern descendants lust after realistic life-size dolls (pediophilia, from the Greek
pedio
, doll; not to be confused with pedophilia). A virtual explosion in the ranks of the robotophiles is right around the corner. We may have lost agalmatophilia, but advances in technology mean that we’ve since gained everything from latex fetishism to mechanophilic arousal by automobiles to the electrophile’s sexual dependence on electric currents. It’s not just an ever-accelerating technology that broadens the paraphilic range, but changes to social conditions can modify, distort, or alter the human form in ways that similarly introduce new possibilities for sexual imprinting. During times of war, for example, amputees are more common a sight than during extended times of peace.

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At last count there were more than five hundred identified paraphilias. See Anil Aggrawal,
Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices
(Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press, 2009).

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The one exception to this drought of scientific knowledge is with our present understanding of pedophilia, a subject that has, for obvious and important social reasons, dominated empirical research in recent decades and has led to something of a renaissance of data-driven studies. Given the importance of that topic, pedophilia and some of the other “erotic age orientations” will receive their own extended treatment in chapter 6.

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Not that Lucy’s parents were either, by the way. She was born wild in Africa. Poachers killed her mother when she was an infant, and Temerlin had adopted her as an orphan.

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And it’s true, by the way. The term “actirasty” applies to those who become sexually aroused by the sun’s rays.

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One paraphilia for which this distinction between mental illness and criminal accountability has generated heated discussion is that of biastophilia. This is a subtype of sexual sadism where the erotic focus is centered on the coercive act itself, whether it’s a particularly brutal act of rape or one that occurs by blackmail or threat. Arousal is triggered not by overt signs of injury, suffering, or humiliation per se but more narrowly by forcing intercourse upon an unwilling other. Only a handful of convicted rapists are believed to be “true biastophiles” (particularly repeat offenders and those with a history of violent crimes). In controlled studies, these men become more sexually aroused by video scenes and audio clips depicting rape than they do by those involving consensual sex. The exact opposite pattern is seen in the vast majority of men,
including
most rapists. See David Thornton, “Evidence Regarding the Need for a Diagnostic Category for a Coercive Paraphilia,”
Archives of Sexual Behavior
39, no. 2 (2010): 411–18.

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The effect can also be seen in a person’s unwillingness to touch objects belonging to an undesirable person. For example, consider your comfort level in slipping on Jerry Sandusky’s favorite sweater or wearing Jimmy Savile’s glasses. Whether or not this disgust reaction is logical (it isn’t, of course, since a person’s spoiled reputation isn’t literally a contagious pathogen that we can “catch”), it steers us away from “social contaminants” that are clearly signaling a perceived “health risk” to our own reputations. Expressions of symbolic disgust toward such individuals, especially when we’re in the presence of others (wearing Sandusky’s sweater or Savile’s glasses in public is probably even less appealing to you than briefly donning them in the privacy of a lab), broadcast that you’re “not like” the offending person. In the case of these two, for instance, their “child molester” essence is
the
most toxic symbolic substance in our society. See Paul Rozin and Edward B. Royzman, “Negativity Bias, Negativity Dominance, and Contagion,”
Personality and Social Psychology Review
5, no. 4 (2001): 296–320.

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They also commonly have Asperger’s syndrome or fall somewhere along the autistic spectrum, neurocognitive conditions associated with impaired social functioning.

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There are no data on it at the moment, but it would be interesting to see how this split between a woman’s subconscious and conscious arousal would apply to ovulating women, given those earlier disgust findings on “biologically suboptimal” sexual unions.

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Those men who attempt to hide their deviant desires for defensive social reasons, such as pedophiles desperately trying to conceal their attraction to children or homophobic men trying to mask their own same-sex desires, have been found to exhibit the same circumscribed penile response pattern as those who are open about their sexuality. The only difference is that closeted men show the exact opposite pattern of arousal (the stigmatized) from whatever it is they claim to be attracted to (the socially acceptable).