Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us (15 page)

These questions remain unanswered not for lack of interest or talent. To the contrary, the area has been drawing some of the brightest minds since the earliest days of sexology. Rather, the difficulty in solving these riddles lies in the nature of the questions themselves, one that makes them impossible to address through controlled experiments. I mean, think about it. Let’s say you’re a researcher hoping to crack the case of what makes one child grow up to become—oh, I don’t know—a melissaphile (which sounds like a cute moniker for someone who only wants to be with women named Melissa, but in fact it’s an erotic attraction to bees, with
melissa
being Greek for “honeybee”) while another turns into an adult who
insists
there be no stinging insects around during sex.

Giving them that clichéd old story about the birds and the bees at a fortuitous moment might do the trick, but you can’t exactly randomly assign one group of children to a “bee condition” (the experimental group) and another to the “bee-less condition” (the control group) and twiddle your thumbs while waiting to see if any of them ends up a melissaphile fifteen years later. First of all, it’s unclear what the experimental manipulation should even, ahem,
be
. Perhaps it would involve parents switching on a continuous audio recording of bumblebees buzzing before tucking their little ones into bed each night so that the ambient sound coincides with their first erotic dreams? Or maybe a special honeycomb hive built into a corner ceiling of their bedrooms so that when they’re innocently playing doctor with another child, the presence of the bees comes to be automatically associated with their lifelong sexual arousal. So you see the problem (I hope). The cause of melissaphilia, and of every other paraphilia, indeed exists, but how to establish that cause
ethically
is the bane of every science-minded sexologist.

Given that experiments capable of tapping directly into the root causes of the paraphilias are methodologically verboten, research into the childhood origins of sexual deviance has necessarily been limited to conducting interviews, doing detailed case studies, and administering questionnaires to people who are already openly paraphilic. These are all examples of qualitative studies (rather than quantitative studies, in which experiments generate data that can be converted to objectively crunchable numbers, whereas interviews, case studies, and questionnaires usually produce narrative responses for the researchers’ subjective analysis), and they’re limited in their ability to get to the bottom of things. It may seem straightforward enough to just ask adults about their sexual experiences, but unfortunately such methods are notoriously susceptible to human error and bias.

On the subject’s end, everything from false memories, to bending the truth by telling the researchers whatever it is he or she thinks they want to hear, to issues of outright deception can hugely distort the real picture. Investigators, meanwhile, who ask leading questions, who word their survey choices ambiguously, or who interpret the subject’s vague responses in ways that support their preferred hypothesis also make data useless. Good qualitative scholars anticipate these factors and stem them off with research designs that can minimize such flaws, but even the best qualitative study can’t definitively determine causation. On the positive side, qualitative research provides far richer descriptions and more detailed accounts of the subject’s own experiences and interpretations, giving us glimpses into a person’s private mental life that would be impossible to see with behavioral experiments alone. Such qualitative approaches have produced invaluable information about the paraphilias and have led to plausible, convincing theories (some of which we’ll be examining). So I suppose a reasonable caveat emptor is this: whenever a study depends solely on what people
say
about their erotic desires or their sex lives, rather than on what they actually
think
or
do
, buyer beware.

Now, before we move on to what scientists at least strongly suspect about the paraphilias, there’s one important side note to this issue of using controlled experiments in studying the real-time germination of sexual deviancy. For better or worse, when it comes to creating deviant rodents or farm animals, the ethical barriers are considerably less imposing than they are for turning kids into melissaphiles. And indeed, some researchers have managed to plant and cultivate full-blown “paraphilia-like” traits in members of other species by manipulating specific aspects of their early development.

In one study, for instance, newborn male rat pups that were randomly assigned to nurse from a dam (or mother rat) with teats that had been artificially coated with a lemony scent grew up to be “lemonophilic” adults. They could only get erections and ejaculate with females that smelled like their citrusy mothers. In another experiment, scientists switched newborn sheep and goats at birth: The baby goats were raised by sheep, and the baby sheep were raised by goats. Once these animals were reproductively mature, they were reunited with members of their “birth species.” Such an unusual development had a dramatically different effect on the males and the females. For the now-adult males, neither the sheep nor the goats displayed even the slightest interest in the female members of their own biological kind. Rather, their mating efforts were directed to females of their adoptive species. By contrast, the adult females who’d been switched at birth were far less discriminating in their choice of a male sex partner. Unlike the males’, these females’ potential for arousal went both ways when it came to their sheep-goat options. As long as it was one of the two, it had a penis, and it knew what to do with it, the particular species was just a superficial detail to them.

In other words, the males responded to their unusual development in a fundamentally different way from how the females responded to the
same
aberrant experience. The former underwent a “sexual imprinting” process that wired their arousal pattern in one direction only (toward those they were exposed to while growing up), whereas the latter retained significantly more erotic plasticity. Rats, sheep, and goats are many branches away from us on the phylogenetic tree, so there’s only so much we can make of these findings when it comes to paraphilias in our own species. But keep these animal studies in mind (better yet, earmark this section so you can come back to it), because we’ll soon be encountering examples of what certainly
look
to be sexual imprinting in early human development, and there are also a few differences between men and women that are eerily consistent with the ungulate gender-difference pattern we’ve just seen.

Rest assured, there are no warped
Jungle Book
tales lying in wait for you. As far as I’m aware, for instance, no little girls have ever been raised by a community of bonobos,
let alone
any who eventually grew up to grind their clitorises with female apes. Yet I’d be remiss not to briefly share with you the story of Lucy, a chimp raised much like a human child by the psychologist Maurice Temerlin in the late 1960s. Temerlin reports that once she’d blossomed into a young adult, a favorite hobby of Lucy’s was masturbating to the nude
human
male centerfolds from the latest issue of
Playgirl
magazine by carefully spreading out the pages on the floor and then placing her swollen genitals on the image of the man’s penis. (I’m a bit jealous, to be honest. My mom would only pick up the occasional
Men’s Fitness
for me, and here Lucy was getting Temerlin to purchase a subscription to
Playgirl
.)

*   *   *

We human beings can’t sacrifice a few of our own to be raised by another species just to see if it screws up a person’s sexuality. Most parents, loving and responsible bastards that they are, aren’t willing to donate their babies to such an ambitious project.
*
But we
can
be grouped in accordance with whatever makes us the horniest (or in other words what we’re “into”). Wherever direct causation fails, taxonomy reigns. So before diving headfirst into the elaborate theories and conceptual issues involving the paraphilias, we should get squared away on some basic organizational matters.

Experts have sought to discipline this unruly subfield of psychiatry by classifying, carving up, and cajoling sex deviants into their own neat and tidy corners of the various diagnostic manuals. There are other templates for arranging the paraphilias, and sometimes also major differences between them (such as the inclusion of “excessive sexual desires” in the
ICD-10
but not in the
DSM-5
). For the most part, however, they’re more in agreement with one another than they are in disagreement. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll use the current scheme in the North American diagnostic manual (the
DSM-5
) to get a handle on what would otherwise be an impenetrable, unwieldy mass of outrageous case studies and forensic reports. If nothing else, this will provide us with a nomenclature of sexual deviancy, and when you’re dealing with such a thorny subject matter as this, speaking a common language is essential.

The
DSM-5
includes only eight specific paraphilias: exhibitionism, fetishism, frotteurism (rubbing one’s genitals or touching strangers in public, typically in crowded places such as subway trains or elevators), pedophilia, masochism, sadism, voyeurism, and transvestic fetishism. Rattling that list off out loud makes it sound—and unfortunately so—like a roundup for a “Things Your Mother Would Disown You For” survey on
Family Feud
. As we’ve already seen, there are many other varieties of paraphilias. They can be anything under the sun, “including the sun,” as a psychiatrist once quipped.
*
But the core list is limited to these eight mostly for pragmatic reasons. If every florid fetish or atypical orientation were included in the
DSM-5
, there wouldn’t be any room left for the many psychiatric disorders that
don’t
involve the genitals.

Alas, there’s a place in the
DSM-5
for even the most unusual paraphilias: the residual ninth category under the heading of PNOS, or “paraphilia not otherwise specified.” Just as we saw with “hypersexuality” or “sex addiction” sometimes being diagnosed with the broad swipe of the
DSM-5
’s “sexual disorder not otherwise specified,” most of the paraphilias aren’t found explicitly in the
DSM-5
, either, but instead are tossed into this catchall PNOS bucket. A few of the “philias” that we’ve run into so far (such as zoophilia, necrophilia, podophilia, and acrotomophilia) could be diagnosed under this PNOS heading, and we’ll turn our attention to several additional examples of these more deviant deviances in the pages ahead.

The taxonomy of deviance can get rather complicated. Consider that the same person may have multiple paraphilias, and these can overlap the seemingly snug boundaries laid out in the
DSM-5
in the most curious ways. For example, my first exposure to an erotic outlier was with a hebephilic pygophile who also had a touch of frotteurism. A hebephile (from “Hebe,” the Greek goddess of youth) prefers pubescents between the ages of roughly eleven and fourteen, and as for pygophilia, it’s all about the buttocks. Mix these two together and you get the character I happened to chance upon that afternoon long ago. It’s a blurry reminiscence involving a rabbit-like rodent, a department store, and a man aroused by the scraggy body of the twelve-year-old boy that I inhabited at that time. My older sister had wandered off to another part of the store, leaving me alone in the pet section to pick out a calico-colored guinea pig that I’d already decided to call Trixie (which sounds to me now more like a streetwalker’s nom de plume). I believe it was somewhere around the
fifth
time that the man asked me to bend over to take a closer look at the animals in their ground-level cages while—“Oops,
sorry
,” he kept saying—casually running his hand against my backside that I got the vague sense that this whole business was about something other than our shared fascination with the species
Cavia porcellus
, that brave little emblem of so many bad medical metaphors. Given that he used his hands rather than pressed his penis against me—he did have the decency not to do
that
at least—a pedantic specialist might prefer the term “toucheurism” to “frotteurism.” Both refer to unwelcome, surreptitious contact with strangers in public places for sexual gratification but differ by the appendage being used.

We shouldn’t fault this man for his singular erotic profile any more than we should hold him accountable for the particular whorl of his hair pattern, but he hadn’t kept his deviant desires in his head, where they belonged in this instance. Instead, they reached out and grabbed my ass. Now, the field of psychiatry has learned a few good lessons from its own awkward adolescent history with sex. For example, you don’t call a woman a “nymphomaniac” just because she masturbates and likes to have sex, as Horatio Storer did, and you really shouldn’t try to turn a gay man straight by encouraging one of your female patients to fondle him, as Albert Ellis did. This learning curve has led to the APA’s rather lenient modern stance on the paraphilias, too. The basic rule is this: no matter how deviant your deviant desires, if you’re not hurting anyone (or anything), and if your sexuality isn’t causing you personal distress, then you don’t meet the criteria for a mental illness connected to your paraphilia.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was harmed that day. However, had my sister not reappeared right around this man’s sixth groping attempt, and given that I was so naive I might well have done whatever he told me to do (including follow him to his car, all seventy-five pounds of me), he was walking a precarious line even for my relatively liberal measures of harm. So regardless of whether he was perfectly comfortable with being a hebephilic pygophile whose favorite pastime is touching young boys in public places, and he experienced no personal distress due to his sexual nature, the average psychiatrist examining the store’s security-camera footage from that day long ago would call this man mentally ill. And the average citizen looking over that psychiatrist’s shoulder, of course, would call him a criminal.