Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us (37 page)

*
Compared with plentiful retrospective accounts of paraphilic men, women’s remembered accounts of some definitive childhood experience they believe to be linked to their adult sexual arousal are scarce. Yet a handful of such cases do exist. In 1960, for instance, a woman recounted for a sex researcher what she considered to be the seeds of her masochism: “When I was four, my father once caught me masturbating. He put me over his knee and smacked my buttocks. He was in pajamas, and the slit in front of his trousers opened widely, so that I could see his big penis and dark scrotum moving quite near my mouth each time he raised his hand … Ever since, I subconsciously connected the smacking of my buttocks with the view of his penis and my first sexual excitement.” See Narcyz Lukianowicz, “Imaginary Sexual Partner: Visual Masturbatory Fantasies,”
Archives of General Psychiatry
3, no. 4 (1960): 432.

*
This psychoanalytic approach to the paraphilias traces back to Stekel’s initial allegiance to Freud. Stekel’s
Sexual Aberrations
served largely to pave the way for future sexologists who dissected individual cases of deviant desire using established methods.

*
In 1976, John Money reported on a case strikingly similar to this. Money’s acrotomophilic patient recalled being around five or six years old when he’d accidentally spilled a bowl of scalding hot soup on his foot. “Get it off! Get it off!” his panicked father had shouted. Thinking that his dad meant his
foot
and not the
sock
that he was wearing at the time, this was enough, according to Money, to put the amputee fetish in motion, with the image of a removed foot allaying the boy’s castration anxiety. See John Money, “Amputee Fetishism,”
Maryland State Medical Journal
25 (1976): 35–39.

*
Stekel might have been the first to describe them in detail, but it was Money who coined the term “acrotomophilia” after seeing several of these amputation-obsessed patients in his Johns Hopkins clinic. He “discovered” and coined many unusual paraphilias, including “symphorophilia,” which is erotic arousal from staging accidents or catastrophes.

*
Money overemphasized the role of society in shaping sexuality and gender. His name will forever be ignominiously associated with the “John/Joan” case from 1965. Believing gender identity to be a product of “nurture” rather than “nature” (we now know this is a false dichotomy), Money had advised the distraught parents of an infant boy who’d lost his penis during a botched circumcision to raise their son as a girl without ever telling him the truth. This recommendation led to a major gender-identity crisis in the patient (later identified as a Canadian man from Winnipeg named David Reimer) and, ultimately, contributed to the man’s suicide in 2004 at the age of thirty-eight. See Claudia Winkler, “Boy, Interrupted: A Tale of Sex, Lies, and Dr. Money,”
Weekly Standard
, June 19, 2000,
www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/011/136eioki.asp
.

†
It’s important to note, however, that the occurrence of sexual deviance in small-scale, traditional societies has not yet been the subject of proper scientific investigation—at least of the objective, unbiased variety. So this absence of paraphilias among hunter-gatherers may in fact be more apparent than real.

*
The example used here is of a female paraphilic sadist. But as we learned in the previous chapter, males are more likely to be “true” sexual sadists, especially of the criminal variety.

†
For example, in the nineteenth century, Apinajé women in Brazil were known to bite off their male lovers’ eyebrows and spit them out while having sex. The husbands of Trukese women in the Caroline Islands could anticipate a finger being poked sharply into their ear canals by their highly aroused wives. And prior to the invasion of the more conservative Muslim rulers, sex among the early Hindus of India was a refined form of combat. As the psychiatrist Dinesh Bhugra describes it: “The male attacks, the woman resists and, amid the subtle interplay of advance, retreat, assault and defence, the desires are built up.” Bhugra explains that Hindu consciousness was enhanced during sex by first dulling the physical sensations through sadistic acts. See Dinesh Bhugra, “Disturbances in Objects of Desire: Cross-Cultural Issues,”
Sexual and Relationship Therapy
15, no. 1 (2000): 69.

*
In the end, Meiwes was charged with murder and sentenced to life in prison. The judgment was rendered with considerable controversy since both parties were consenting adults. The case is liable to inspire drunken debates for at least another century.

*
There’s also the old story warped by time and of questionable veracity about a tailor from Salzburg who’d allegedly murdered seven of his wives by tickling them to death.

*
On the other hand, had he forced himself on me, I could be a quivering pile of jelly right now. But the point is that even when it comes to illegal sex with a minor, the likelihood of psychological harm is reduced by the minor’s consenting mental state.

*
One of the few politicians to abstain from voting on the study was Representative Brian Baird, a Democrat from the state of Washington who boasted a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. Baird wanted to go on record as saying that out of the 535 members of the House and Senate, only 10 had actually bothered to read Rind’s article. See Brian N. Baird, “Politics, Operant Conditioning, Galileo, and the American Psychological Association’s Response to Rind et al.,”
American Psychologist
57, no. 3 (2002): 189–92.

*
Today, each state has its own numerous and complex series of clauses dealing with factors such as age differences between parties and the nature of specific sexual acts, but general ages of consent presently range from fifteen (in Colorado only) to eighteen.

*
This is the same chicken-and-egg problem that we saw in chapter 3 involving the notion of personal distress for ego-dystonic homosexuality and hypersexual disorder. Is it the person’s sexuality that’s responsible for his or her personal distress in these cases, or is his or her personal distress the result of living in a society that refuses to accept even harmless expressions of sexual diversity? With the exception perhaps of the creepy crawlies getting accidentally smashed by a vigorous hand, formicophilia certainly isn’t harmful to others. When society rejects the self, the self rejects the self.

*
A pair of sociologists once examined the discussion threads of pedophile chat rooms and noted how many topics involved tactics of “passing” in society. “Look at the boys with their mothers next to them,” advised one when asked how not to draw suspicion. “If a friend notices that your attention is elsewhere, just comment on the mother.” See Thomas J. Holt, Kristie R. Blevins, and Natasha Burkert, “Considering the Pedophile Subculture Online,”
Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment
22, no. 1 (2010): 18.

*
As with the paraphilias more generally, there are virtually no female transvestites, or women whose most intense sexual desire centers on wearing men’s undergarments.

†
A Swedish study found that transvestic fetishists are more likely to be sadomasochists than the general male population. See Niklas Långström and J. Kenneth Zucker, “Transvestic Fetishism in the General Population,”
Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy
31, no. 2 (2005): 87–95. When the “Voice of Basketball,” the legendary sports broadcaster Marv Albert, was arrested in 1997 on charges of rape and sodomy (he was alleged also to have violently bitten a woman on her back), one of his accusers added that he was wearing women’s panties and a garter belt when the assault occurred. See Brooke A. Masters, “Albert Apology May Clear Record,”
Washington Post
, October 25, 1997,
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/longterm/albert/albert.htm
.

‡
There are also several chromosomal perturbations of biological hermaphroditism, which can complicate both the subjective sense of gender and the individual’s expression of gender identity. But since our focus here is on the psychology of sexual deviance rather than gender and biological sex per se, we won’t be exploring these in any detail.

*
In Far Eastern countries such as Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand that have considerably less tolerance for effeminate men leading openly gay lives as males, it’s the polar opposite pattern. More than 95 percent of the MTF transsexual population in those regions consists of biological males who are attracted exclusively to men. In their early development as boys, these
kathoeys
, or “lady-boys,” of Southeast Asia tend to be extremely feminine in their mannerisms and appearance. They’re not accepted as gay men, but they do have an easier time than more masculine sorts in making “convincing” (in other words, socially acceptable) women after their physical transition to female. See Anne A. Lawrence, “Becoming What We Love: Autogynephilic Transsexualism Conceptualized as an Expression of Romantic Love,”
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine
50, no. 4 (2007): 506–20.

*
This escalated to peak intensity upon the 2003 publication of the psychologist J. Michael Bailey’s book,
The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism
(Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press). In the book, Bailey embraced the controversial autogynephilia theory to explain heterosexual MTF transsexuality, with many people in the trans community being exposed to these ideas for the first time.

*
In her memoir,
Mirror Image: The Odyssey of a Male-to-Female Transsexual
(New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1978), the now-adult MTF Nancy Hunt describes her adolescent feelings as a boy this way: “I was feverishly interested in girls. I studied their hair, their clothes, their figures … brood[ing] about the differences between us. I seethed with envy while at the same time becoming sexually aroused—I wanted to possess them as I wanted to become them. In my night-time fantasies, as I masturbated or floated towards sleep, I combined the compulsions, dreaming of sex but with myself as the girl” (60). And in her rather deliberately titled book,
Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism
(New York: Springer, 2013), the self-described autogynephilic transsexual therapist Anne Lawrence provides many similar anonymous accounts of an underlying erotic motivation as shared by her heterosexual MTF patients.

*
“A man crosses his legs by resting an ankle on his knee; a sissy drapes one leg over the other,” wrote the novelist Edmund White in
A Boy’s Own Story
(1982; New York: Penguin Books, 2009). “A man never gushes; men are either silent or loud. I didn’t know how to swear: I always said the final
g
in
fucking
and I didn’t know where in the sentence to place the
damn
or
hell
” (8).

*
There are massive cultural differences in parents’ attitudes to their children’s private parts; what would be seen as sexual abuse by most of us is normal in other parts of the world. In the 1940s, an anthropologist studying the Sirionó Indians of Bolivia noted, “Parents are very proud of a display of sexual desire on the part of their infants. One afternoon,” he recalled of an incident with a Sirionó father, “Eantándu was fingering the penis of his young son who was sleeping. The boy got an erection. Eantándu called my attention to it and proudly said: ‘Very hard penis; when grown, he will have a lot of intercourse.’” Like the Sirionó, the Hopi of North America were also known to stimulate the genitals of their young children as a means of soothing them. Grandmothers would mouth the genitals of their grandchildren because they believed it pacified colicky babies. Alorese mothers of Indonesia also fondled their infants’ genitals while nursing.

*
It’s not a perfect predictor, but knowing the erotic age orientation of a sex offender is useful to law enforcement because pedophiles who
do
abuse children are more likely to re-offend than are the opportunistic offenders. After all, the former have an erotic age orientation that isn’t going to go away, and by offending, they’ve already demonstrated their difficulty in controlling their sexual urges. The latter, by contrast, can attribute their crimes to a more transient problem, or something other than having an exclusive sexual interest in children, anyway. (The perfect-storm equivalent of a child molester is a pedophile who clinical tests reveal is also a certifiable sociopath. Very few pedophiles actually fit this bill, but such a person is an enormous threat to children.) See Seto,
Pedophilia and Sexual Offending Against Children
.

*
A small inflatable cuff is placed around the base of the phallus. The cylinder is then tightly secured over the cuffed organ so that the air inside is isolated from the atmosphere outside. A rubber tube attached to the cylinder connects to a pressure transducer. This, in turn, converts air pressure changes affected by increases in penile volume to some measurable voltage output for the scientist to read. See Kurt Freund, “A Laboratory Method for Diagnosing Predominance of Homo- or Hetero-Erotic Interest in the Male,”
Behaviour Research and Therapy
1, no. 1 (1963): 85–93.

*
In 1976, the psychologists Vernon Quinsey and Sidney Bergersen discovered that some pedophiles had been deceiving forensic technicians by the act of “pumping” on the task, which is the voluntary contraction of the abdominal and perineal muscles to momentarily “inflate” the flaccid penis and thus have it register as an erectile response to the images of adults. (In the nonforensic world of bladder control and prenatal exercise classes, this is usually referred to as Kegel exercises.) Pedophilic or not, my male readers can tend to this exercise easily enough in order to grasp how it would work; I’m afraid there’s no clear way to convey the exact process to my female readers except to suggest that you ask some helpful male, preferably one you know, to demonstrate with his limp organ. In addition to pumping, some pedophiles took to sneaking into the lab a pin to surreptitiously prick themselves when images of children appeared, with the pain killing their arousal. See Vernon L. Quinsey and Sidney G. Bergersen, “Instructional Control of Penile Circumference in Assessments of Sexual Preference,”
Behavior Therapy
7, no. 4 (1976): 489–93.