The Other Side of Desire (14 page)

Throughout those years, her stepfather had licked her vagina, the sensations pleasurable beneath her fear and revulsion. And the legacy of her childhood had led to adult lovemaking during which she imagined having vaginal intercourse with him. She would picture herself with him, but as she was now: “an older woman, experienced, like I was giving him something.” It was the only way she could reach orgasm.

DOWN
the hall from Meredith Chivers, the psychologist at the edge of the forest of female sexuality, Ray Blanchard and James Cantor believed that the pictures of the brain they had recently taken and studied all but proved nature’s dominance over nurture, biology’s primacy over experience, in setting the direction of desire. The research appeared almost unprecedented. (One precursor was a controversial study published by the sexologist Simon LeVay in 1991: autopsies of gay and straight men detected a difference, corresponding to sexual orientation, in the size of a minuscule cluster of cells in the hypothalamus.) Blanchard and Cantor radiated triumph. Blanchard was a compact man with a disciplined gray beard; there was efficiency in the way he looked, and, in the way he spoke, dismissiveness when he mentioned those who opposed him.

“In graduate school I started in clinical psych,” he said, “and it was a hardcore behavioral therapy department. You were taught to apply methods, learned in the laboratory with rats and pigeons, to humans.” Behavioral conditioning was the prevailing theory of his professors, and he had rebelled. “The emperor has no clothes,” he recalled sensing. He couldn’t pinpoint the reasons for his early skepticism. He seemed almost to ascribe his judgment to his own superior instinct, to biology.

He switched, in school, from the clinical department to the experimental, from a focus on humans to lab work with animals. “And what I discovered was that the animal experts weren’t talking so much about learned behavior anymore. Instinctive behavior, prepared behavior—these were becoming the things. So you had clinicians teaching that you can just apply these learning principles established beyond doubt in the animal laboratory, while the people doing animal research were saying, ‘Well, it’s not really like that.’” Ever since, Blanchard’s career had followed—and, in a small way, forged—the path of scientific culture toward medical, physiological explanations for human behavior. And now, in the infinitely complex realm of eros, he felt that he and Cantor held confirmation.

In the lab at one end of their floor, a technician had hooked a plethysmograph to the one hundred and twenty-seven men who were Blanchard and Cantor’s current subjects, and he had tested for arousal to the young. “I’ve studied mind, body, and soul,” the technician told me; he had earned master’s degrees in psychology, medical science, and religion. “And here I am measuring dicks.” He had seen, he guessed, thirty-two hundred, and he often conducted an informal interview before strapping on the glass tube and securing the wires and leaving the subject alone, pants around ankles, with the slide show. For his own curiosity, he liked to ask, “If I had a video clip of your mind in the last ten seconds before you climax during sex, what would I see?” He marveled at how few men, including those who were excited most by adult women, said that the ten-second video would be filled with the women they were with.

The current subjects were split nearly equally between pedophiles and what Blanchard called “teleophiles”—“the normal guys,” he translated, though with a hint of irony: a recent study of his own jibed with those Richard Green had cited. Normal didn’t mean uninterested in the young. Measured by plethysmograph, teleophilic heterosexuals were aroused most by pictures of female adults, but significantly, too, by female pubescents and, less so but still markedly, by female children. There was no mistaking ordinary men’s erotic response to very young girls when their reaction to female children was compared to their negligible responses to slides of males of any age, or when it was compared to their indifference to a neutral picture: a photograph of a pond surrounded by the bare limbs of trees in winter. Teleophilic homosexuals adhered to their own analogous continuum. And the pattern held in reverse for the pedophilic.

After their sessions with the plethysmograph, the hundred and twenty-seven men had slid into the cylinder of an MRI machine, and images had been taken of their brains.

A
magenta cat floated on the computer screen, body tilted upright, belly exposed, eyes bulging. Its limbs were grotesquely short, except for one long foreleg that swiped at the air. An amorphous teal creature sat behind the cat, tending like a servant to the floating animal’s back, stroking. Below the cat stood a pair of slender beings: twins, one magenta and one teal, as though the cat and its servant were lovers and these were their children. Little teal amoebas were suspended all around them.

The colored shapes were superimposed on a white-and-gray side view of the human brain. The cat and the servant, the twins and the amoebas were areas where a difference existed between pedophilic and teleophilic brains, with the magenta forms signifying differences in the right hemisphere and the teal indicating distinctions in the left. The MRI pictures of the two groups of brains had been analyzed and compared, minuscule point by minuscule point, for quantity of white matter. Within the magenta and teal areas, Cantor, an elfin man in a black sweater vest, explained, “the more pedophilic a person is, the more the amount of white matter goes down.”

Specialized technicians—“my two imaging geeks,” Cantor adoringly called the young man and woman who spent their days rotating, slicing, and tinting images as they rendered representations of the brain on their computers—had transformed the quantitative analysis into graphics that made visual sense of the comparisons. And it seemed right that the outcome would look like a surrealist’s vision. The surrealists had given shape to the subconscious, to anarchic and bewildering desires that could be buried but never killed off. Here, on the screen, was the science of lust turned into art.

And here was proof, it seemed, that a divergence of desire was rooted in the anatomy of the brain, proof that pointed to the prenatal in molding sexuality. Blanchard and Cantor acknowledged that the physiological differences could somehow be caused by pedophilic experience; they foresaw that those who refused to accept the determinative power of biology would insist on making this argument as soon as the study was published. But the argument, they felt, would be strained, especially given an earlier discovery they’d made—that pedophilic men are about three times more likely than teleophiles to be left-handed. The statistical link was glaring, and handedness is set prenatally. Now, with their current results, it seemed logically undeniable that pedophilia, or at least a strong predisposition toward pedophilia, was determined prenatally, too.

Even about the evidence that perhaps one-third of sexual abusers had, as children, been abused themselves, Blanchard and Cantor were dismissive. The data were overly reliant on self-reported, unverified histories, Cantor argued. And Chivers’s husband, the researcher Michael Seto, who supported Blanchard and Cantor’s conclusions, said that while he did credit the link between being abused and abusing, this didn’t contradict the idea of pedophilia’s prenatal origin. The abused might have a related inborn trait that made them psychologically vulnerable to, or more likely to receive, adult advances, he suggested. Or being abused might be “a trigger” that, later, set off the prenatally loaded tendency.

“Terror,” Cantor said, remembering his feelings as the early results of the brain imaging had come in, and had seemed, for a short while, inconclusive. “My heart was beating fast. I thought, I’ll never find anything. There’s nothing here.”

“Thank God!” Blanchard recalled his reaction as the patterns of difference in the temporal and parietal lobes had become more and more clear with the help of the imaging geeks.

And now, showing me and Michael Seto the latest computer-generated graphics of differentiation, Cantor was thrilled. His snug sweater vest seemed unable to contain the exuberance within him. “Isn’t that the hottest thing in the world?” he asked. He directed one of the technicians to click slowly through a series: the differences viewed from dozens of vantage points and highlighted in red and yellow and green. “It doesn’t get any cooler than that!” he exclaimed. Then he told the man to rotate one of the graphics; he wanted us to admire it from all angles. With the technician manipulating the computer’s mouse, a large, three-dimensional, liver-shaped glob flew toward us, paused, spun slowly, paused again, and seemed to pose in front of us like a runway model, challenging anyone to gaze her way and doubt the supremacy of what she had to offer. “The proof is staring us in the face!” Cantor declared.

Posters of three Michelangelo sibyls, the Delphic, Libyan, and Eritrean seers, hung above Cantor’s desk. “I just want to know how the sexual brain works,” he said. “What makes the human brain tick when it comes to sexuality. That’s our thing. Etiology.” He made it clear that he was less driven by the wish to have some practical effect in the field of child sexual abuse than by the wish to know how we become who we are in the world of eros.

With the aid of magnetic resonance imaging, with the assistance of his geeks, with the power of equipment and techniques that hadn’t yet been invented, Cantor wanted to become a kind of seer. But, exultant though he was over the revelations in magenta and teal, he knew he hadn’t yet seen with enough precision, not at all. The vast differences between the pedophilic and teleophilic brains, as detected by the MRI machine, were almost certainly too generalized, too vague. The magenta and teal reflected not only the divergent directions of lust but also the fact that pedophilic brains held any number of associated conditions, “a constellation of symptoms” having little or nothing to do with sex, Cantor suspected. As his and Blanchard’s thinking went, something had happened in the womb, a “perturbation,” as they called it, probably a chemical event, a toxin introduced by anything from maternal drug use to infection to some agent in the environment, the introduction coinciding with a particular developmental period for the fetus. The result was an array of abnormalities in the white matter. Somewhere within the magenta and teal was the exact area of distinction that led to pedophilia, but so far Cantor and Blanchard had no method to eliminate the irrelevant regions. “We haven’t hit
it
yet,” Cantor said, and he guessed that the precise point of relevance might be too tiny for present technology to pick up. “A three-dimensional pixel is called a voxel. A voxel is about one millimeter cubed. But of course a fiber in the brain is much smaller than that. So if there are fine differences they may be too thin for an MRI ever to be able to see.”

Our conversation drifted to the men whose brains he studied. About those who preferred children, he said, “I don’t think any of them are quite happy. I don’t think I would be quite happy if I realized that I would never be permitted the sexual partners I find most attractive: that’s it; there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s easy to understand why a lot of them ask for sex drive–reducing medications. They don’t want a sex drive they have to spend the rest of their lives resisting, that they’re never allowed to express. It’s easier to try to live without the sex drive altogether.”

He spoke about the near-absence of sexual aberration among animals. In humans, “higher parts of the brain have taken over things done by lower parts in other species. And it appears that one of those things is sexual behavior.” The result, he said, was not a complexity worth celebrating. “More things can go wrong. It’s like with each new version of Windows we just end up with more problems.”

And the problems are compounded by constancy. Most animals have their mating seasons; humans are prepared for sex year-round, and so continually prone to torment.

Was there, I asked, any chance that someone with a dominant desire for children could move to a different point on the continuum, any hope that he could subordinate that lust to another; was there any possibility for real change?

Beneath the three sibyls Cantor’s voice flattened. It lost the buoyancy that came with his talk about the science of eros; he was no longer peering into unknowns nor thrilled by his discoveries.

“Not that I’m aware of,” he said. Biology was the beginning, and biology was the end.

“MASTURBATORY
reconditioning,” Blanchard wrote later in an e-mail, answering a question I’d sent about the brain’s capacity for reconfiguration, a capacity known as neuroplasticity. If stroke victims could, through relentless and painstaking practice, stir their brains to sprout new neural wiring that allowed them to walk, to speak, might the physiology of the brain, I wondered, be similarly plastic when it came to desire? “I don’t recall exactly when the notion of masturbatory reconditioning was introduced,” he wrote. “Probably back in the 1960s, when a number of behavior therapy procedures, based on conditioning experiments with rats, dogs, and pigeons, were first applied to human patients. The basic procedure was that a patient with pedophilia, fetishism, or (in those days) homosexuality would be instructed to masturbate, with a
Playboy
magazine within easy reach. When the patient started to approach orgasm, he was supposed to grab the magazine and focus intently on the nude adult female just before and during ejaculation. This was supposed to establish erotic interest in adult females.

“One would expect that such a procedure, if effective, would have swept the world. I think that would have been true even if it turned masturbation into a tiresome obligation. In fact, the treatment has been quietly abandoned, like many of the animal lab–based therapy inventions of the 1960s (although one can, of course, find pockets here and there where these procedures are still recommended).”

CANTOR
talked about the course his career had taken the way Blanchard did, as beyond his control. To ask why he’d become a sexologist, or why, as a sexologist, he’d been drawn to prove physiological explanations for attraction, was “like asking a twig how did it float down the river,” he said. “I’m a twig, I’m in the water, and this is where I ended up.”