Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us (6 page)

It’s far easier to assume that all sex deviants, including even some of those who’ve committed crimes, are immoral than it is to show, case by case, how they’ve caused measurable harm. “In all the criminal law,” Alfred Kinsey once pointed out, “there is practically no other behavior which is forbidden on the ground that nature may be offended, and that nature must be protected from such offense. This is the unique aspect of our sex codes.” Once the Bible and the legal system aren’t there to tell us how to think about sex (neither of which, you may have gathered, I’ll be using as a source of moral authority for our consideration in the chapters ahead), establishing harm can require strenuous mental effort. In fact, you might think you’re pretty good at knowing sexual right from wrong. But even our most fervent intuitions aren’t always as logical as we’d like to believe.

Back in 2001, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt coined the term “moral dumbfounding” to refer to the phenomenon in which we struggle to elaborate on the precise reasons why we believe certain acts are immoral. Emotionally fueled tautologies (or expressions of redundancy that fail to offer any actual clarification, such as “It’s wrong because it’s just nasty,” “You shouldn’t do it, because it’s creepy,” “It’s immoral because it’s plain evil,” and of course “It’s not right, because God says so”) only echo intense social disapproval for certain crimes that shouldn’t be crimes at all when we prioritize the question of harmfulness. Consider a vignette from a study in this area:

A man belongs to a necrophilia club that has devised a way to satisfy the desire to have sex with dead people. Each member donates his or her body to the club after death so that the other members can have sex with the corpse. The man has sex with a dead woman who gave her body to the club.

When asked whether it was wrong for this man to do what he did and, more important, to articulate and to justify their belief if they said it was, most participants in this study defaulted to a
presumption of harm
in their moral reasoning. Even when they were told explicitly that the woman didn’t have any family members who might get upset if they found out what happened to her corpse, that the club isn’t interested in recruiting or harming living people, that neither the man nor any of the other club members suffer any regrets or anguish about their sexuality, that the group’s activities are kept private and consensual, that the man used protection to prevent disease, and, per her instructions, that the club cremated the woman’s body after the man was done having sex with it, people
still
insisted that somehow or another, someone, somewhere, must be getting harmed.

For social conservatives, the damage might even be seen as inflicted on symbolic bodies—“America,” for example, “the Church,” “society,” or “the sanctity of marriage.” Saying that a behavior is “harmful to America” or that it’s “destructive to society” is a bit like giving corporations the legal status of personhood. That is, it only makes sense to those with an agenda. The scientific definition of a “person” as a carbon-based life-form resembles nothing of the circuitous legal definition that enables a profit-driven corporation to claim that same status. Likewise, pain and distress can occur only at the level of a subjectively experiencing organism (human or animal) in possession of pain receptors and a nervous system able to register emotional trauma,
not
at the level of an abstract entity without a brain. The problem of sexual harm concerns living, breathing creatures, not political parties, nations, or worldviews.

The case of the responsible necrophile is just one example of deviant sex in which researchers have uncovered presumption-of-harm reasoning. When offered similarly clear information about eliminating
all possible
forms of measurable harm, participants trying to justify their feelings of the wrongfulness of sex with animals, teenagers, and family members (incest) likewise default to a presumption of harm. Such scenarios aren’t confined to artificial lab studies, either. They happen in the real world as well. Indeed, that’s the whole point: that not every “obvious” case is in fact so obvious.

Take the brothers Elijah and Milo Peters, for example, a pair of twentysomething identical male twins from Prague who appear together in gay porn films featuring full anal penetration—
with each other
. The Peters twins not only have been having sex together since they were fifteen but also consider themselves romantic partners, just like other young couples with genes that don’t match so perfectly. Outside the porn studio, they claim to be monogamous. “My brother is my boyfriend, and I am his boyfriend,” says one of the other. “He is my lifeblood, and he is my only love.” With the procreation factor removed (and therefore the possibility of genetic harm to any resulting offspring able to be completely ruled out), along with the Peters twins giving mutually enthusiastic consent to sex, their surprising absence of shame about it, and their clear happiness with each other, their steamy incestuous pairing isn’t so obviously “wrong.”

One reason it’s so difficult for us to exercise our mental faculties in a proper way when it comes to the subject of deviant sex, instead being ruled by emotional reactions that fail to give accurate weight to the question of harm, is what we might call “the disgust factor.” Feelings of disgust have a way of undermining our social intelligence and indeed of compromising our very humanity. In fact, as we’re about to see, if there’s anything that researchers have learned about moral reasoning and sex in the past decade, it’s that disgust is the visceral engine of hate. The good news is that once you understand how the whole thing works, you can kill that engine. Our best hope of addressing this deep-seated problem of sexual disgust is to do some reverse engineering on its adaptive functions. Because let’s face it, when you’re not in the mood or you’re not attracted to the person whose sex life it is that you’re contemplating, sex can be gross. And deviant sex, almost by definition, is bound to gross out more people than normal sex. But disgust doesn’t justify the ravages of inequity and oppression on the lives of sexual deviants themselves.

TWO

DAMN DIRTY APES

The butting of his haunches seemed ridiculous to her, and the sort of anxiety of his penis to come to its little evacuating crisis seemed farcical. Yes, this was love, this ridiculous bouncing of the buttocks, and the wilting of the poor insignificant, moist little penis.

—D. H. Lawrence,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
(1928)

The entire ordeal is something of a blur to me now, but the one thing that I remember clearly about my first experience with another man (a real
Homo sapiens
this time) is that he was far more interested in fellating my toes than he was in doing anything with some other body part of mine. Well, different strokes for different folks, you’ll say. Really, that’s quite kind and understanding of you. But if you ever have the misfortune of actually seeing my feet, which are vaguely reminiscent in both color and shape (I hesitate to say smell, but if truth be told, sometimes that too) of the sparsely haired underbelly of a dead possum, you’d realize just how extraordinary this man’s bedroom behaviors really were. That a person could become so sexually excited—in the full curtain-drawn light of day, no less—by something that I perceived to be so
disgusting
mystified me.

To this day, I avoid making direct eye contact with my feet when taking a shower, so it’s still hard for me to completely understand his actions. I do, however, have a better sense of the mechanics behind this man’s lustful psychology. First of all, it’s clear he was a podophile. The words look and sound very similar, but note that’s an
o
and not an
e
as in “pedophile.” (I was young but not that young, after all.) Podophilia, or “foot fetishism,” is by far the most common manifestation of what sexologists refer to as a sexual “partialism,” which is an erotic preoccupation with a nonreproductive body part. Feet, belly buttons, teeth, noses, eyeballs, earlobes, pinkie toes, calves, nipples—there are partialists for any type of localized real estate you can imagine, and their desire for this part exceeds (and sometimes even excludes) their interest in the genitalia. In any event, my awkward first experience with a disgust-challenged podophile who was willing to be intimate even with
my
feet encouraged me to read up on the curious history of foot fetishism.

It was none other than Havelock Ellis who first unraveled the mind-set of the podophile.
*
Unlike the subject of
Sexual Inversion
, Ellis’s sharp-eyed analytical focus on foot fetishists zeroed in on the heterosexuals among them. “In a small but not inconsiderable minority of persons,” he wrote in 1927, “the foot or boot becomes the most attractive part of a woman, and in some morbid cases the woman herself is regarded as a comparatively unimportant appendage.”
†
I know how she feels. Ever since Ellis dug his heels into the matter, case studies of foot fetishism have continued to find an attentive audience. Homosexual, heterosexual, and even bisexual podophiles have all made sporadic appearances in psychological write-ups. But as far as I know, there has only been one attempt in all of podophilic history to explain foot fetishism using evolutionary theory. And believe it or not, it’s not an altogether ridiculous Darwinian hypothesis, either.

The psychologist James Giannini put the idea forward in 1998. Giannini had discovered a revealing sociosexual trend concerning podophilia. Throughout the course of human history, the cultural eroticization of the female foot predictably peaked whenever there was an outbreak of venereal disease, and then just as predictably it leveled out again as the epidemics ran their courses. Foot love blossomed during the gonorrhea epidemic in the thirteenth century, for example, syphilis in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, and even AIDS in the late twentieth century. (As if the oppressive Inquisition weren’t bad enough, Spain was also suffering from a large syphilitic population just as the heresy trials were heating up. With all that was going on, it seems like an odd time for Spanish painters to begin specializing in portraits of women’s feet, but this is precisely when that artistic oeuvre really took off. New shoe styles showing a teasing bit of “toe cleavage” were also all the rage.) Even if you’re straight and into a lady’s lower extremities, you can’t very well impregnate her foot to spread your genes. Giannini’s claim was simply that if one’s arousal were
primarily
but not
exclusively
confined to nonreproductive parts, then less frequent contacts (or maybe less exuberant ones) with infectious genitalia could meaningfully reduce the risk of infertility or even death. If such outbreaks were common enough in our deep past, suggested Giannini, then people who were able to become sexual partialists would have an advantage over those concentrating all their attention on the body’s more dangerous hot spots.

*   *   *

There’s still that puzzling question of how the podophile could suckle toes from hooves as hideous as mine. I do try to keep them clean, but they are feet, after all, and one can’t always know exactly what’s going on down there with the fungus scene. In fact, never mind feet, it’s astonishing that we’re so willing during sex acts to put
any
body part in our mouths that doesn’t belong to us. Penises don’t always come out smelling of roses either, and consider the flourishing bacterial substrate that is the human vagina. This region can play host to more than four hundred different species of organisms, and healthy female anatomies contain numerous acids that combat yeast and pathogens and give vulvae their odoriferous punch.
*
Not only that, but in both sexes, there are distinct glandular secretions that you’d rather not know about gathering unseen around the anus, face, groin, scalp, and umbilicus. There’s also, of course, prodigiously generated sweat, tears, urine, dental plaque, sebum, earwax, smegma, and that most formidable foe to our sexual arousal that is feces. More specific culinary hurdles depend on the sex of your partner. If employing your mouth on a man’s body, for instance, your palate can anticipate being greeted unexpectedly by pre-ejaculate or semen. Women’s equally aqueous bodies, by contrast, are often plentiful reservoirs of vaginal fluids, breast milk, and menstrual blood. Considering what walking factories of ick we human beings are, it’s amazing that we’ve managed not only to
survive
as a sexual species by wanting to copulate with each other but to do it often enough over our 150,000-year eyeblink of an existence that we’re now straining the planet’s natural resources beyond all capacity.

The secret to our “success” lies in how our lustful mammalian minds evolved to handle each other’s sometimes-repellent bodies. It’s quite an exquisite operating system, too. Lust and disgust are antagonistic forces in an emotional balancing act that serves to push us toward orgasm (through lust) or to turn us away from it (through disgust). It’s a dynamic relationship with ancient origins. For example, DNA sequencing reveals that the “murid rodent ancestor” (a term that signifies the last common ancestor of human beings, mice, and rats—so a slightly different take on Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men
) last scurried upon this earth around eighty-seven million years ago. Yet the subjective experience of disgust is every bit as much the modern rat’s carnal kryptonite as it is ours. If you take a healthy, virile adult male rat and allow him to have unbridled sex with a female in heat and then immediately inject him with a nausea-inducing drug such as lithium chloride, he’ll acquire a total aversion to sex. Nothing else has this effect. Even if you shock him while he’s doing it, or inflict any other type of cruel punishment, this won’t diminish his sexual appetite—only disgust does that. It’s just his mating behaviors that are affected, too; the lithium chloride has no effect on his social behavior in general. He’ll be as affable with his rat friends as ever, in other words, but he won’t be doing that horrible pelvic-thrusting stuff for a while, since that’s what made him so miserable the last time around.