Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us (19 page)

Before the more recent case of the Cannibal Cop (in which the New York City police officer Gilberto Valle was found guilty of planning to kidnap, murder, and eat a woman—or eat and then murder, the correct order of those last two verbs isn’t clear), there was the tale of Armin Meiwes. That name might dimly light up in your frontal lobes as a distant headliner best forgotten, but to remind you—and apologies for doing so—Meiwes, a computer repairman by trade, was the German cannibalistic sexual sadist who, in the spring of 2001, found a willingly edible sexual masochist for himself named Bernd Jürgen Brandes. “Looking for a well-built 18- to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed,” read Meiwes’s personal ad on the Cannibal Café website (which, you’ll probably be glad to know, is a website no more). And Brandes, it seems, was looking to be thoroughly digested. That old psychopath Cupid couldn’t have arranged for a more tragic crossing of these lovers’ paths. (Oh right, where’s my head? After our terminology lesson in chapter 4, you’re probably starving to be told the technical name for this cannibalism paraphilia. It’s “vorarephilia,” from the Latin
vorare
, “to swallow or devour.”)

From the video footage—the whole awful thing was taped from start to finish—it’s apparent that Meiwes (the eat
er
) didn’t coerce Brandes (the eat
ee
) at all. If anything, the coercion was done by the masochist, not the sadist. Brandes even begged a hesitating Meiwes to bite off his penis. There’s no need to hover over all the nasty details, so let’s fast-forward to the kitchen scene, where Meiwes has just sautéed the chomped-off organ in a pan with wine and garlic and the pair is now amicably dining on it
together
. (Meiwes would later describe it as “chewy.”) Forward still, past that unmentionable bit and so on … and then finally to the part when Brandes’s salted carcass is hanging on a butcher’s rack in the purposefully built slaughter room of this house of horrors, where forty-four choice pounds of him would slowly disappear down Meiwes’s esophagus. I’m by no means suggesting that both the
S
and the
M
parts of this equation weren’t disturbed men. You don’t need to be a mental health expert to see that. Yet when we try to apply the
DSM-5
’s criteria of pain and non-consent, there’s some tension here, since Meiwes had explicitly sought out a consenting adult partner. And when you combine consent with a masochist’s apparent death wish, well, you can see how a forensic psychiatrist’s job can be daunting. Diagnosing the only remaining member of this carnal coupling becomes, shall we say, “philosophically problematic,” given the victim’s extraordinarily unique subjectivity.
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Attempts to objectify pain and consent for a diagnosis of sadism also run into trouble at the other end of the ouch scale. In this case, it’s not consent that’s the issue (the other person clearly doesn’t want to be doing what the sadist is enjoying); rather, there are some sex acts that don’t appear to our own eyes to be “painful,” at least as we usually understand that term. In fact, they can very well escape our notice altogether as being sexually motivated, but from the actor’s point of view, they’re maliciously so. Take tickling, for instance. Despite peals of laughter and the ear-to-ear smiles associated with tickling, it can be a very unpleasant experience for those on the receiving end of a well-placed feather or incessant forefinger. Consensual tickling isn’t unusual for those into S&M, and usually it’s quite harmless. But when it’s done mercilessly against someone’s will, tickling is no less than torture.

When you combine a sadistic personality with the paraphilia of “titillagnia” (erotic arousal from tickling), the result isn’t anything to laugh about at all. I submit for your consideration a patient described in 1947 by the psychiatrist Emil Gutheil. The man was a married, prominent thirty-nine-year-old lawyer living in New York City (funny how so many of these deviant sex cases are based in the Big Apple) who just happened to have an ineradicable sexual urge to tickle people. This wasn’t some innocuous velvet dragon, however. Instead, his most frequent masturbation fantasies involved tickling a person to
death
, or at least to the point that the person would foam at the mouth and lose consciousness. (This man’s sexual sadism may have given the case a unique spin, but he certainly wasn’t the first to tickle for malevolent reasons. In ancient China, the courts of the Han dynasty brutalized the nobility by tickling them, since it left no marks on these high-profile figures when they’d be seen in public. Centuries later, a woman in Vienna filed for divorce against her husband, who for years had been tickling her as a form of spousal abuse for precisely the same reason.
*
)

Consistent with the theory of male sexual imprinting, Gutheil believed that the patient’s desires stemmed from him growing incidentally aroused as a seven-year-old boy while being overpowered and tickled by his older brother. Now an adult, the man found intercourse repulsive, and he’d been forcing his poor wife to indulge his vicious tickles. The psychiatrist notes how the sadistic patient was sometimes able to find prostitutes who’d allow him to tie them up and tickle them. “But this type of prostitute was so expensive that he could not afford them for any length of time,” writes the psychiatrist. The man also had a history of paying young boys to tickle each other unremittingly, masturbating on the sidelines while watching them doing so and thereby re-creating the childhood scene with his brother but this time in the role of voyeur.

It’s kind of a pity that this man lived when he did. Today he’d surely have found a more suitable “knismolagniac” (the tickling masochist to the titillagniac’s sadist) or perhaps even the more rarefied “pteronophiliac” (those who obtain their most intense gratification from being tickled with feathers) somewhere online. (If a computer repairman can find a person happy to be swallowed alive these days, an attorney can certainly find someone willing to be tickle-tortured.) Had the patient enjoyed his sexuality with one of those complementary paraphiliacs, the harmfulness of his actions would have been less than they probably were for his wife, prostitutes, and children.

Sadism isn’t the only paraphilic category for which the question of harm can get murky for psychiatrists as well as for anyone who has ever contemplated another person’s unusual sex life. As the lovely Kate Upton reminded us earlier, a universally objective reality simply doesn’t exist in the present domain; what’s harmful to me isn’t necessarily harmful to you, and vice versa. It will change as soon as I put this comma right
here
, but as of this very moment there are exactly 7,088,343,858 people on the planet. If all but one of these individuals were to experience harm in exactly the same way from a certain sex act, that solitary person is nevertheless just as right (or just as wrong) as all the others combined. This is because there’s no “correct” way to experience a sex act, only individual differences in subjective realities. It may be a moot point, since it’s not logic that guides culture but instead sheer social mass shouldering into it with brute force, but nonetheless 7,088,343,85
7
shared subjective realities do not add up to a single objective fact. What was harmful to
them
was not harmful to
him
, and that, as they say, is that. Or to rephrase: one person’s horror story is another’s erotica. And I’m quite sure our vorarephile Bernd Jürgen Brandes would tell you so too, if only he were still around.

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That’s all well and good, you might point out, but there are issues here far more serious than two people disagreeing over whether, say, getting tickled by feathers is sexy or cruel. Take pedophilia, for instance. Is harmfulness “subjective” with that, too? Well,
yes
and
no
. This is a dark and treacherous path that we’re about to embark on, so it’s all the more important for us to be guided by the light of clear thinking. There’s no doubt whatsoever that children who are sexually abused are often irreparably damaged—and not only psychologically but, sadly, physically as well. Denying that children can face grievous, debilitating, and permanent harm from being violated by adults in this way is just asinine. It flies in the face of scientific data showing such trauma is all too real.

Yet research has also revealed that not every child who has a sexual encounter with an adult is traumatized. In the next chapter, we’ll get all of our terms straight regarding the “erotic age orientations”—there are at least five of them—but one important thing to highlight here is that when it comes to sex, there’s a world of difference between a six-year-old and a sixteen-year-old. (The term “pedophilia” has become so misused that it’s now difficult to reclaim its proper scientific meaning from the vernacular, but this area of what John Money called the “chronophilias” gets fairly complex.) A six-year-old child may subjectively experience little, if any, harm at the time of being molested by an adult, but that doesn’t mean significant damage hasn’t been done. As the child grows older, his or her interpretation of the experience on coming to understand what really happened may become increasingly traumatizing. One way to think about it is that the sexually abused child has essentially been implanted with a psychological time bomb that may or may not go off down the road. There’s a marginal chance that it won’t detonate at all, but if it does, it’s often catastrophic. This can also be the case with teens (many of us have regrets about being taken advantage of when we were young and naive, sexually or otherwise), but for a sixteen-year-old who has hormonally fueled desires that are just as intense as those of the adult he’s having an encounter with, it’s a very different can of emotional worms.

The more controversial “yes” part of my response to the question of harm in such sexual encounters with adults being subjective, therefore, refers to the fact that for some individuals looking back on their childhood or adolescent experiences, the event was not harmful
to them
. For whatever reason, their bombs never went off. Whether or not we have a hard time understanding their perspective, there are indeed people out there who feel this way. (And some who, believe it or not, even view their sexual experience with an adult as a positive moment in their lives.) The “no” part of my response, by contrast, relates to the fact that the child’s sexual subjectivity inevitably changes as he or she grows older. To say that a six-year-old who doesn’t understand what’s happening to her isn’t being harmed because she appears to be just fine otherwise, or even that she “likes it” (as child molesters sometimes claim), is to miss the point entirely of these delayed, and potentially devastating, emotional injuries that may affect her later. If we were to follow up with this little girl in twenty years, we might find a woman damaged beyond repair by the memories of the very events that were inconsequential to her at the age of six. In other words, the bomb has gone off.

So although harm may not be inevitable in every case, what
is
inevitable is the very high risk of shattering a child’s life for the sake of one’s own immediate sexual gratification. (And note that this is true regardless of cultural differences in symbolic disgust: if the pain is real to the individual, then it’s real in terms of its harmful effects on them.) When it comes to adolescents’ sexual experiences with adults, where the distance between the subjective present of the child and his or her subjective future has grown narrower, some researchers believe that the damage isn’t as significant as it’s often assumed to be. Bruce Rind, for example, an expert on the study of “intergenerational sexuality,” set off some explosions of his own in the late 1990s when he published a set of highly contentious (to put it mildly) findings to this effect. The best predictor of subjective harm—past, present, and future—he found, is the minor’s lack of
consent
. Obviously, there’s consent in the legal, underage sense of the term, but there’s also consent as a mental state (basically, the feeling of wanting to do something) that occurs regardless of age. Rind was more interested in this latter, psychological meaning.

In 1998, he and his coauthors, Philip Tromovitch and Robert Bauserman, managed to put the American Psychological Association (or “the other APA,” which comprises not psychiatrists but academic, research-oriented clinical psychologists) in the rather awkward position of having to publicly acknowledge that not every incident of an adult having sex with a juvenile is harmful. Actually, “awkward” may not be entirely the right way to describe it: it was more that the APA locked horns with every wrathful, powerful politician in the country for defending this very politically incorrect view. It all started when Rind and his colleagues published a study in the association’s flagship journal,
Psychological Bulletin
. The authors argued that it makes little sense to refer to something as “child sex abuse” if, as an adult, the individual doesn’t personally feel harmed and if his or her harm can’t be detected by any known empirical measures.

The most delicate issue for the APA was that this wasn’t just the authors’ personal and controversial opinion, but a statement based on scientific findings. Rind’s study was a meta-analysis of previously published data on the sexual histories of a whopping 35,303 college students from around the world. One thing that set his project apart from most others in the field of child sex abuse was that the data being evaluated weren’t from clinical samples of adults who’d sought help for ongoing problems stemming from their being raped, molested, or otherwise sexually exploited as children or teenagers, but from random samples of college students. And what Rind and his coauthors found by using a large
nonclinical
sample was that the majority of those people who reported having had consensual encounters with adults as minors were, at the time of testing, no more likely to have pervasive psychological problems than those who hadn’t.

Now, it’s extremely important to bear in mind that for the most part, these mentally healthy individuals weren’t those who’d been subjected to terrible abuses as children. More often they were those who, as adolescents, had consensually (again, in the psychological sense of that term) “fooled around” in various ways with someone on the other side of the legal line (wherever that line had been drawn at the time, since, remember, it was an international sample and, as we’ll be examining in detail shortly, the legal age of consent varies by country). Beyond that weird and unwanted guinea-pig incident with the hebephilic pygophile (which wasn’t consensual even after the fourth groping of my skeletal backside), I never had any such experience with an adult while growing up, so it’s hard for me to know for certain. But speaking only for myself, I suspect that had a very adult Mr. April 1991 stepped out of the calendar that hung in my sister’s dorm room that year, ripped, hairless legs beaded with river water, his unkempt hair plastered against his forehead and glistening clavicles, wearing nothing but wild green eyes and a tapioca-colored fishnet loincloth (my
vague
recollection), and proceeded to gently guide me on the ways of man-on-man love, the last thing that my fifteen-year-old self would have felt was harmed. I only wish I had such a memory to look back on now.
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