Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us (16 page)

Of the eight specifically named paraphilias in the manual, five are set aside as exempt from the “personal distress” policy: pedophilia, exhibitionism, voyeurism, frotteurism, and sadism. The guiding thought is that whereas most forms of sexual deviance are harmless enough, these are inherently harmful. Yet the dividing line between “harmful” and “not harmful” isn’t always so obvious. We’ll explore this critically important issue in more detail in the next chapter. (And bear in mind that the question of whether someone has a mental illness is altogether different from that of whether he’s broken the law. The issue is his ability to have behaved otherwise.
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)

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Leaving the matter of harm aside for the time being, let’s return to taxonomy. The psychologist James Cantor suggests that we think of paraphilias as being divisible into two broad categories. First, he says, are those in which the sexually interesting object (what’s commonly referred to as the “erotic target”) is something other than reproductively mature, standard-issue human beings. The decadent French poet Charles Baudelaire claimed that he’d acquired a keen taste for female giantesses and dwarves, for instance. (The technical term for an attraction to people of dramatically different heights is “anasteemaphilia.”) Then again, Baudelaire also once claimed to have eaten the brains of a child and that he owned a pair of riding breeches made from his father’s hide, so we should probably take any claims of his love life with a good pinch of salt, too. But other flavorful examples fitting into this first category of unusual erotic targets would include “ornithophilia” (an intense desire for birds), “savantophilia” (arousal to mentally challenged individuals), and “chasmophilia” (the attraction to nooks, crannies, crevices, and chasms, more precisely, those that are
not
found on the surface of the human body).

The second broad category of paraphilias, Cantor goes on to explain, consists of those in which the most arousing sex act is something other than copulatory or precopulatory (or foreplay) behaviors with a consenting partner. Here you’ll find the “stygiophiles” (who work themselves up into a hot lather at the thought of going to hell), the “psychrophiles” (who wouldn’t mind going to hell either, but only once it freezes over, since their biggest turn-on is being cold and watching others shivering), and the “climacophiles” (who are said to have their most intense orgasms while falling down stairs).

These are all extremely rare. More familiar examples of this second category are frotteurism, exhibitionism, and voyeurism. The influential sexologist Kurt Freund, considered by many to be the father of experimental sexology (not to worry, we’ll spend quality time with him later), saw each of these paraphilias as a sign of an underlying “courtship disorder.” Freund argued that most healthy adult sexual encounters include a stage of “preparatory” behaviors that serve to convey the person’s erotic interest. This isn’t so much the foreplay stage as the one where green-lighting efforts are taking place. “This is the phase of eye-talk and finger-talk when the partners give signals or invitations to one another,” the psychologist John Money clarified. “They flirt, coquet, woo, or lure one another. It is sometimes known as the phase of courtship or, in animals, the mating dance of display.” Freund believed that some individuals essentially get “stuck” on a particular element of this courtship stage, and as a consequence they achieve their greatest sexual satisfaction at, say, the pre-intercourse phase of touching (frotteurism), or that of broadcasting their sexual interest in potential partners by showing their arousal (exhibitionism), or by acquiring privileged visual sexual access to another (voyeurism). According to the model, these paraphilias are exaggerated displays of ritualized courtship. As Money explains, each has somehow come to “push its way onto center field, instead of remaining on the sidelines. It displaces the main event, which is genital intercourse, and steals the spotlight.”

Looking at Cantor’s more general bipartite model of the paraphilias, however, we can see that the first category of paraphilias involves an unusual
subject
of desire, whereas the second centers on an unusual
activity
. It’s a useful distinction in thinking about abnormal sexuality, but note that these categories aren’t mutually exclusive. That is to say, someone could be paraphilic in both his erotic target
and
his favorite sex act. I mean, really, any psellismophilic nebulophile (someone whose most passionate moments involve masturbating in the foggy mist while listening to a person stutter) can see that.

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Sexual fetishism is also a case where the division between erotic targets and erotic paraphilic activities can get somewhat blurred. As we’re about to see, the fetish object isn’t exactly the erotic target; instead, it’s more of a symbolic stand-in for the real erotic target’s genitals. Sexual gratification with the fetish object may or may not depend on a particular ritual, so it’s also not a perfect fit for the category of activity-based paraphilias. Now, fetish objects can be anything imaginable. There have been cases of people fetishizing wheelchairs and crutches, hearing aids, rubber swim caps, and anything else that might serve as a sexual surrogate for the person’s ideal partner. Some fetishists, such as the archetypal “panty bandit,” are prone to theft of such objects, a secondary kleptomania that poses additional problems. Also, many paraphiliacs are unhappy to part with their special collections of fetish objects gathered over the years, guarding them like treasures. Stekel referred to such erotic compilations as the “fetishist Bibles.” An elderly man with a pubic hair fetish (“pubephilia,” aptly enough) had an array so ancient that many of the wiry strands glued to the pages in his scrapbook had long since turned gray. (We can only speculate if those earlier principles of disgust management would apply to any unexpected encounters with the fossilized lice eggs hidden in that volume.)

For the fetishist, it’s the object’s physical connection with the erotic target’s body, as though it has absorbed the person’s hidden “essence,” that makes it so arousing. This is an important point. Brand-new, never-before-worn pairs of shoes, for example, aren’t likely to turn on a shoe fetishist; rather, he’s only going to be interested in those shoes that have actually been worn by someone he finds appealing (or someone he can fantasize having worn them—a secondhand store is the fetishist’s brothel). Likewise, if your fetish object is men’s underwear, you’re not going to tear into the plastic wrapping of that crisp new pair of Fruit of the Looms you picked up at Target the next time you’re in the mood; you’re going to pull out the semen-stained briefs worn by your favorite porn star that you won in that online auction the other week.

Even for nonparaphilic fetishists, it’s easy to grasp the appeal of feeling or touching something intimately associated with a person you find attractive. I don’t know about you, but
I’d
certainly be lying if I said that I’ve never been intensely aroused by a Diet Coke can. Back in high school, I once pleasured myself to the empty one discarded by a boy (a straight boy, alas) I had a crush on, since that was about as close as I could get to his lips: something of his essence, to my mind, must have magically been soldered onto it. And in consumer psychology, several studies have found that customers are more likely to purchase clothes that have been physically handled by good-looking salesclerks.
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Casual sexual fetishism like this is quite common. What makes someone a “true fetishist” in the clinical, paraphilic sense is that the fetish object has become even more arousing than the actual erotic target that it represents and is now more or less
required
for sexual gratification.

The “objectophiles,” also known as the “objectum sexuals,” are similar to paraphilic fetishists in some ways, but in other ways they’re altogether different. For these unique individuals, the lust-worthy object isn’t a symbolic stand-in for the real erotic target, nor is their attraction to this item related in any way to its physical contact with a desirable person. Rather, for the objectum sexuals, the object
is
the erotic target. More important, they’re absolutely convinced that the object has reciprocal sexual feelings for them. Chairs, ladders, shawls, bookshelves … you name it. To the objectophiles, any object in the galaxy has the capacity to fall madly, deeply in love (and lust) with particular human beings. (Worth bearing in mind, I suppose, the next time you go to kick your car’s tires after it breaks down on you. If she’s a masochist this might just encourage her.)

The psychotherapist Amy Marsh has suggested that objectum sexuals have a rare underlying neurological condition called “object personification synesthesia,” which causes them to perceive personalities and emotions, including sexual desires, in inanimate objects.
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These individuals are aroused by
individual
objects, not an entire class of fetish objects. In 1979, an objectophilic woman from Sweden named Eija-Riitta Eklöf made headlines when she married the Berlin Wall. Today, she considers herself a widow. More recently, an American named Erika Eiffel (you’ll see why in a moment) was filmed for a documentary consummating her marriage to the Eiffel Tower. It’s hard for newlyweds to be intimate with each other when tourists are constantly snapping photographs and ambling all around them, but there she was, looking up devotedly at her loving 1,063-foot-tall spouse. (She also sees the structure as a female, so it’s a lesbian relationship in that sense. I suppose one could say Erika is bisexual, given that her earlier relationship was with a male … a quiet gentleman that most of us know as the Golden Gate Bridge.) In the documentary, Erika lifted her trench coat demurely, straddled one of the Eiffel Tower’s massive steel foundations, and sealed the coital deal. (There’s more to Mrs. Eiffel than her objectum sexual identity, by the way. She’s also an internationally ranked professional archer.)

More commonly—if “commonly” can be used here—objectum sexuals find themselves swooning over everyday objects, not flashy celebrities like the Berlin Wall and the Eiffel Tower. In a 2010 study, Marsh interviewed dozens of objectophiles. “What does your beloved object or objects find most attractive about you?” she asked them. One woman in a relationship with a flag named “Libby” replied: “Well, Libby is always telling me she thinks I am funny. We make each other laugh so hard!… [It]’s hard to get a serious conversation out of [flags], because they are always silly and joking around!” An objectophilic man, meanwhile, mostly attracted to music soundboards, remarked how his electronic lovers adored his physiognomy. “I’m kind of a heavyset person, and they like that about me,” he told Marsh. “They like my hands. I have swan-neck deformity of my fingers, they like that a lot. They also like the rough texture of my fingers.”

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Speaking of hands and fingers, we shouldn’t forget the partialists we met earlier, their ambassador being that podophile who deflowered my unsightly toes. Partialists aren’t into objects so much as protuberances. You may recall that these are individuals for whom it’s a specific part of the body—a part other than the reproductive organs—that captures their erotic fancy. One individual who most assuredly was
not
a partialist was Voltaire, that witty French philosopher of the Enlightenment, who made it perfectly clear that he was infatuated with every square inch of his mistress (who also happened to be his niece), Mme Denis, in a letter from 1748. “I press a thousand kisses on your round breasts,” he wrote to her announcing his imminent arrival to visit her in Paris, “on your ravishing bottom, on all your person, which has so often given me erections.” But Voltaire’s “monotonous simplicity” in his cherishing the entire female form, Wilhelm Stekel would remind us with his wide-eyed wonderment over natural sexual diversity, is no reason to lose our joie de vivre.

After all, in
Sexual Aberrations
, Stekel introduces us to a twenty-eight-year-old German businessman known only by the abbreviation “P.L.” For P.L., it was all about the hands. “Whenever a lovely female hand touches him, his erection is instantaneous,” writes Stekel of this partialist. After some psychoanalytic sleuthing, he surmised that P.L.’s fixation could be traced back to the man’s first sexual experience at the age of seven, which for uncertain reasons Stekel decides to inform us about in Latin: “He liked especially
cum nonullis commilitonibus mutuam masturbationem tractare
.” This just goes to show how profound a thing can sound when it’s uttered in the language of jurisprudence, since any gravity disappears immediately upon translation: basically, P.L. enjoyed giving while getting hand jobs from other boys his age. Such mutual masturbation persisted into his late teenage years, in fact, with P.L. noticing that he was only attracted to other boys with pale, well-formed hands. Anything else left him limp.

Over time, Stekel explains, P.L. abandoned these gay days and (allegedly) became increasingly aroused by the thought of females, or at least the thought of feminine hands. (“No power in the world could make him touch another man’s organ now,” writes Stekel, “and even the sight of another’s penis is disgusting to him.”) We’re not told, however, if he ever gave up fantasizing about the sight of a boy’s hands touching
his
penis, which I’d bet my bottom dollar he didn’t. In any event, aiming to settle down and start a family, P.L. met an enchanting young woman who he thought would be perfect for playing the role of his wife. She was ideal, “possess[ing] all of the feminine virtues,” adds Stekel. But in a twist of fate worthy of Cupid’s cunning, the girl bore exceedingly large hands and often had dirt caked beneath her nails, an obvious complication for any self-respecting hand fetishist. In the end, he just couldn’t handle her hands. In my mind’s eye, I see the image of a determined P.L. returning home one evening after an insightful session with Dr. Stekel: encircled by a ring of locomotive steam, he’s on the train platform in the drizzling rain, placing one sure finger against the trembling lips of the beautiful woman who has come to greet him and saying, “It’s not you, darling, it’s me. Well, me and those damn meat hooks of yours.”