Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us (38 page)

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At least one scholar, Brandon Centerwall, has argued convincingly that Vladimir Nabokov himself, not just the fictional belletrist Humbert Humbert that the author famously created, was a closet hebephile (or “pedophile,” as Centerwall calls him), with the book being Nabokov’s attempt to exorcise a wanton demon haunting him all his life. See Brandon S. Centerwall, “Hiding in Plain Sight: Nabokov and Pedophilia,”
Texas Studies in Literature and Language
32, no. 3 (1990): 468–84.

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This ensures that you’re not closing your eyes or looking offscreen as the nude models appear before you, but pupil dilation also correlates with sexual arousal.

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Men’s attraction to older adolescents is considered “normal” by most forensic psychiatrists—“barely legal” or “teen porn” isn’t exactly a rare niche in the adult entertainment industry—so the ephebophile category usually isn’t included. Instead, the teleiophile category may include young adult models in their late teens or early twenties. “True gerontophiles,” on the other hand, are so rare that elderly models would only be included if the sex-offender subject has shown a history of targeting such-aged victims.

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Incidentally, if you’re a blind sex offender and can’t see the nude models, don’t feel excluded, because some early research has shown that an
audio
version of the standard plethysmograph may be just as effective. In Blanchard’s “Narratives Slides Test,” the images are paired with provocative audio narrations to amp up the male subject’s arousal. For instance, you might hear through a set of headphones: “You are with your neighbors’ 12-year-old daughter … you have your arm around her shoulders and your fingers brush against her chest. You realize that her breasts have begun to develop.” See Ray Blanchard et al., “Pedophilia, Hebephilia, and the DSM-V,”
Archives of Sexual Behavior
38, no. 3 (2009): 339.

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Racial differences in age of menarche have also been used to discriminate against immigrant families, with lawmakers arguing that African American, Mexican, and Italian girls should have lower ages of consent than their white peers since they develop faster. See Stephen Robertson, “Age of Consent Laws,”
http://chnm.gmu.edu/cyh/teaching-modules/230
.

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In parts of the Pacific, the average age of menarche is as high as eighteen. So technically, in some areas of New Guinea, a heterosexual hebephile could be defined as anyone aroused by seventeen- to twenty-one-year-old indigenous women.

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The aristocrats of Athens, most of whom were men in their twenties and thirties, romantically courted boys of eleven or twelve as their special “pupils.” A free boy was expected to allow an influential suitor to have exclusive intercourse with him (or at least “intercrural intercourse,” sex between the thighs) in exchange for an elite education and sociopolitical benefits that would extend to the boy’s family. In Xenophon’s
Symposium
, the wealthy Callias bargains with the father of a boy named Autolycus for such an arranged relationship as the boy leans against his dad. What strikes the reader is the businesslike nature of the trade. There’s no evidence that these boys were thrilled about this grown-up affair happening between their thighs, and some modern scholars believe that it was child abuse then just as it is now. See Enid Bloch, “Sex Between Men and Boys in Classical Greece: Was It Education for Citizenship or Child Abuse?,”
Journal of Men’s Studies
9, no. 2 (2001): 183–204. (Actually, in
Phaedrus
, Socrates warns these young boys of the real motives of at least some of their idolized mentors: “Consider this, fair youth, and know that in the friendship of the lover there is no real kindness; he has an appetite and wants to feed upon you.” See David West,
Reason and Sexuality in Western Thought
[New York: Polity, 2005], 23.) Others point out, however, that such institutionalized pederasty was widespread throughout ancient Greek civilization, and there are no obvious records of any mental or physical trauma suffered by these boys.

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Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia
ran from 1987 to 1995. Published by the Stichting Paidika Foundation, the mission statement of the journal read as follows:

The starting point of
Paidika
is necessarily our consciousness of ourselves as pedophiles. To speak today of pedophilia, which we understand to be consensual intergenerational sexual relationships, is to speak of the politics of oppression. This is the milieu in which we are enmeshed, the fabric of our daily life and struggle. Through publication of scholarly studies, thoroughly documented and carefully reasoned, we intend to demonstrate that pedophilia has been, and remains, a legitimate and productive part of the totality of the human experience. (Stephanie J. Dallam, “Science or Propaganda? An Examination of Rind, Tromovitch, and Bauserman,”
Journal of Child Sexual Abuse
9, nos. 3–4 [2001]: 109–34.)

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Interestingly enough, not all psychiatrists consider even pedophilia a mental illness (Richard D. Green, “Is Pedophilia a Mental Disorder?”
Archives of Sexual Behavior
31 no. 6 [2002]: 467–471.)

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Such evolved motives have been portrayed unwittingly in many books and films, including the controversial movie
Pretty Baby
, in which a young Brooke Shields played the role of twelve-year-old Violet, a prostitute’s daughter in New Orleans in 1917 whose coveted virginity goes up for auction to the highest bidder.

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It bears asking whether there are meaningful cultural differences when it comes to the sexual appeal of the elderly, particularly of elderly women. Writing of the Wogeo tribe of New Guinea, the anthropologist Ian Hogbin came upon a woman advanced in years who still actively seduced and had intercourse with many of the youths on the island. “Desire doesn’t disappear with the teeth,” she told Hogbin. “And so long as a woman can still dig she wants to do a little something now and then.” Similarly, Bronisław Malinowski, an anthropologist in the early twentieth century known for his frank and unapologetic accounts of explicit sexual behavior among the natives of the Trobriand Islands of Melanesia, traced an outbreak of venereal disease to a woman who was, according to him, “so old, decrepit, and ugly” that nobody suspected her of being the source of the epidemic. Such ethnographic data may imply a greater willingness to have sex with the elderly in some cultures. But in support of the evolutionary account, at least one survey has revealed that the most common cross-cultural reaction to the elderly as prospective sexual partners is, by far, one of pronounced erotic distaste. See Rhonda L. Winn and Niles Newton, “Sexuality in Aging: A Study of 106 Cultures,”
Archives of Sexual Behavior
11, no. 4 (1982): 292.

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John Money defined gerontophilia as “the condition in which a young adult is dependent on the actuality or fantasy of erotosexual activity with a much older partner in order to initiate and maintain arousal and facilitate or achieve orgasm.” See John Money, “Paraphilias: Phyletic Origins of Erotosexual Dysfunction,”
International Journal of Mental Health
(1981): 75–109. But neither Money nor Krafft-Ebing, who first described this condition, said how old
old
really was in the case of gerontophilia. In 2005, the psychiatrist Hadrian Ball suggested the clinical cutoff should be an erotic target aged sixty or more. Regardless of chronological age, it’s the physical signs of advanced age that do it for the true gerontophile.

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In the U.K., for example, somewhere between 2 and 7 percent of all rapes involve victims over the age of sixty, and at least a subset of these cases are believed to involve a specific targeting of elderly victims. See Hadrian N. Ball, “Sexual Offending on Elderly Women: A Review,”
Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology
16, no. 1 (2005): 127–38.

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In a creative effort to address child sexual abuse, the German government launched a massive media campaign in 2004 to encourage self-identified pedophiles to reach out and get help from supportive professionals. Using a blitz of public service announcements—highway billboards, prime-time television commercials, full-page newspaper ads, spots before movie previews in cinemas—in the hopes of coaxing police-wary pedophiles out of the closet, the ad campaign read, “Do you like children more than you/they like?” (And notice the two meanings.) This was accompanied by images of coquettish children. “You are not guilty because of your sexual desire,” it went on to say, “but you are responsible for your sexual behavior. There is help! Don’t become an offender!” Over the next three years, 808 men responded to the ads. Of these, however, only 358 followed through with a face-to-face consultation with the psychologists in Berlin, so that’s quite a lot of skittish pedophiles who slipped through the cracks after an ambivalent attempt to seek help. The ones who
did
follow through were committed to the project. Some had traveled all the way from Austria, Switzerland, and even England to volunteer. See Klaus M. Beier et al., “Encouraging Self-Identified Pedophiles and Hebephiles to Seek Professional Help: First Results of the Prevention Project Dunkelfeld (PPD),”
Child Abuse and Neglect: The International Journal
33, no. 8 (2009): 545–49.

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Thomas Mann penned
Death in Venice
(something of the gay
Lolita
, or in Mann’s words, “a case of pederasty in an aging artist”) only after becoming entranced in real life by what Nabokov would call a “faunlet” while vacationing with his wife in Vienna. In the true story, the Polish boy whom Mann had become infatuated with wasn’t fourteen but only eleven, and the child was later identified as the Baron Władysław Moes. See Gilbert Adair,
The Real Tadzio: Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice” and the Boy Who Inspired It
(New York: Carroll & Graf, 2003).

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Leading the charge for this monkey-testicle cure for male homosexuality was a medical professor from the University of Madrid named Gregorio Marañón. In his
Evolution of Sex and Intersexual Conditions
, published in 1930, Marañón writes: “Several [physicians] have endeavored to combat homosexuality by replacing the testicles of the invert by those of a healthy man; or by grafting upon him the testicle of a monkey … with results that are favorable, though still subject to criticism.” He confesses, however, that he’s had a hard go of finding these “favorable” results in his own experimentation: “[In] one of my own cases of homosexuality, the grafting of the testicle of a monkey augmented the libido, but in a homosexual direction” (168–69).

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Féré believed that although the genital organs of gay men looked normal in appearance, they
acted
differently: “In most cases there is irritable weakness. Orgasm often occurs with them as the result of a mere touch, of the sight or odor of the one they love” (146).

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Gay men “practice gymnastics,” the doctor added to his list. “They do not give way to tears. As a rule, they like dancing, but with persons of their own sex … the effeminized man especially likes coachmen, butchers, circus-riders, etc., or persons who have large sexual organs” (154).

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Féré describes one of his own lesbian patients with this background, coming of age in France: “She was attracted by girls and felt an urge to caress them … she noticed the rubbing of her breast against theirs caused specially pleasing sensations. When she was 16, she felt for the first time her genitals sharing in the excitement, becoming wet. From that time she began to have voluptuous dreams in which girls always played the most important part” (222). Even after she was introduced by another lesbian to what Féré calls “the mysteries of vulvar rubbings,” it was always breasts that did it for her.

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Scientific opinions are mixed as to whether we’re
entirely
unique in having a theory of mind or whether we just can’t detect it as readily in nonverbal animals (a few other social species, such as great apes, dogs, dolphins, and crows, may have some ability to reason about other minds also). But there is a general consensus among researchers in this area that humans are the planet’s “natural psychologists.” This doesn’t make us “smarter” or “better” than other species—you wouldn’t say that a bat’s radar abilities make it smarter or better than an elephant with a trunk, after all—just different. See Mark Nielsen et al., “Social Learning in Humans and Nonhuman Animals: Theoretical and Empirical Dissections,”
Journal of Comparative Psychology
126, no. 2 (2012): 109–13.

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The word “theory” here refers not to a formal academic theory but to the default human way of perceiving other minds in the world. It’s not fully functional at birth, but it develops rapidly over the first few years of life, with studies consistently revealing that a theory of mind is up and running by a child’s fourth birthday.

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Which is why sexually deviant thoughts are, in and of themselves, inherently harmless.

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Unless you want to adopt the extremist philosophy of solipsism, which posits that since we can’t directly perceive them, there’s no reason to assume that other minds exist at all.

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Each participant judged each model only once, but for every model there was a nude image and a clothed image that was identical aside from the amount of flesh shown. (In other words, all of the participants got a mixed batch of nudes and nonnudes, but no participant ever saw the same model both naked and clothed. It was one or the other.)

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Male participants who saw scenes of gay anal sex not only experienced more negative emotions than did those who watched a video of a solitary man masturbating but also reported more “genital sensations.” The authors interpreted this to mean that straight men’s anger and disgust toward gay men are reactions to their own suppressed desires. More recent work by the psychologist Henry Adams traded in self-reports for data from a penile plethysmograph. Adams found that, basically, the more hostile a man is toward gay men, the stronger his erectile response is to gay male porn. See Henry E. Adams, Lester W. Wright, and Bethany A. Lohr, “Is Homophobia Associated with Homosexual Arousal?,”
Journal of Abnormal Psychology
105, no. 3 (1996): 440–45. An alternative interpretation does exist (essentially, that anger toward gay men induces a more general physiological arousal causing an erection). I’ll let you judge for yourself on this one.