Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us (2 page)

I’ve benefited from this sea change as well. In 2006, after a stint as a psychology professor in Arkansas (of all places), I immigrated with my partner to Northern Ireland (again, of all places) for an academic appointment in Belfast. Soon after we arrived there, Juan and I entered into a “civil partnership”—turns out my father was right about me meeting a nice boy—a legal arrangement that granted us the rights of any straight married couple in the United Kingdom. When one considers how this particular region is synonymous with conservative religious beliefs (think of the Troubles and that interminable clash between Protestants and Catholics), the formal recognition of a gay couple as being legally equivalent to a married man and woman is a remarkable social accomplishment (even if the clerk in Belfast City Hall
did
complete our paperwork through a begrudging series of sighs and warned us of the Leviticus-riddled picket signs in the courtyard). Just like a thrice-divorced man married to the hooker he met at a fish-and-chips shop the night before, I was in a romance sealed with an ironclad decree approved by the British Crown.

Upon our return to America half a decade later, full-fledged marriage equality had already become a legislated reality in multiple U.S. states. In the mail just today, in fact, I received an invitation to my lesbian cousin’s upcoming wedding in Connecticut. I’d like to think that even our squeamish late grandmother would have embraced her queer grandchildren by now. Once the shock wore off, I’m sure she’d find some humor in the fact that my gay Mexican partner makes me matzo ball soup using her favorite recipe (translated from the Yiddish) and that her lesbian granddaughter’s fiancée is currently “knocked up” with a child conceived by artificial insemination.

*   *   *

At thirty-seven, I’ve already seen enormous change in my lifetime. It’s all been for the better. Yet something has made me feel increasingly uncomfortable—or perhaps “guilty” is a better word. In the rush to redress the historical prejudice against gay people, we’re missing a key opportunity as a society to critically examine our uneasy relationship with sexual diversity as a whole. We should certainly celebrate the fact that the lives of those who fit the LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender) label are improving, but we also shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that those who can’t be squeezed so neatly into this box are still being ostracized, mocked, and humiliated for having sexual natures that, if we’re being honest, are just as unalterable. Apologies should be applied only to the things we’ve done wrong, not for who we unalterably are. I have a few scars that never healed properly from those ancient days when I was a terrified kid growing up gay in a climate of such intense scorn. This book, you might say, is my retaliation by reason. But I’ve come to realize that it’s no longer gays and lesbians who need the most help. They could always use more, and I’m certainly here to weigh in on their behalf in the pages ahead and in real life, but today children like I once was have legions of fearless and vocal advocates. By contrast, many of these others—these “erotic outliers”—still live lives in constant fear for no reason other than
being
. And in fact there are many people, of all ages, who fit that bill.

What you’re going to discover along the way is that you have a lot more in common with the average pervert than you may be aware. I’ll be sharing with you a blossoming new science of human sexuality, one that’s revealing how “sexual deviancy” is in fact far less deviant than most of us assume. Yet as we focus in on these glistening new findings of what secretly turns us on and off, it will also become increasingly apparent to you that the full suite of our carnal tastes is as unique to us as our fingerprints. When we combine this new science with forgotten old case studies showcasing some of the most bizarre forms of human sexuality, you’ll catch a glimpse of the nearly infinite range of erotic possibilities. Finally, you’ll come to understand why our best hope of solving some of the most troubling problems of our age hinges entirely on the
amoral
study of sex.

It’s virgin territory indeed, but there’s no time like the present, so let’s dig in and penetrate this fuzzy black hole, shall we? I can’t promise you an orgasm at the end of our adventure. But I
can
promise you a better understanding of why you get the ones you do.

ONE

WE’RE ALL PERVERTS

Gnothi seauton
[Know thyself]

—Inscription outside the Temple of Apollo at Delphi

You are a sexual deviant. A pervert, through and through.

Now, now, don’t get so defensive. Allow me to explain. Imagine if some all-powerful arm of the government existed solely to document every sexual response of every private citizen. From the most tempestuous orgasmic excesses, to the slightest twinges of genitalia, to unseen hormonal cascades and sub-cranial machinations, not a thing is missed. Filed under your name in this fictional scientific universe would be your very own scandalous dossier, intricate and exhaustive in its every embarrassing measurement of your self-lubricating loins. What’s more, the records in this nightmarish society extend all the way back to your adolescence, to the days when your desires first began to simmer and boil. I’d be willing to bet that buried somewhere in this relentless biography of yours is an undeniable fact of your sex life that would hobble you instantaneously with shame should the wrong individual ever find out about it.

To break the ice, I’ll go first. And how I wish one of my first sexual experiences were as charming as inserting my phallus into a warm apple pie. Instead, it involves pleasuring myself to an image from my father’s old anthropology textbook. This isn’t even as admirable as those puerile stories about a teenage boy masturbating to some
National Geographic
–like spread of exotic naked villagers breast-feeding or shooting blow darts in the Amazon. No, it wasn’t anything like that. For me, the briefest of heavens could instead be found in an enormous and hairy representative of the species
Homo neanderthalensis
. I can still see the lifelike rendering now. The Neanderthal was shown crouching down, pink gonads dangling teasingly between muscular apish thighs, while with all his cognitive might this handsome, grunting beast tried desperately to light a fire in a cobbled pit to warm his equally hirsute family (what looked to be a perplexed woman from whose furry breasts a baby feverishly suckled). The Neanderthal was in fact too brutish for my tastes, but in those pre-Internet days he was the only naked man I had at my fingertips. Well, the only naked hominid, anyway. One must work with the material one has.

So there, I said it. In my adolescence, I derived an intense orgasm (or twenty) from fantasizing about a member of another species. (In my defense, it
was
a closely related species.) You may have to rack your brains for some similarly indecent memory, or then again, maybe all you need to do is roll over in bed this morning to remind yourself of the hairy specimen of a creature that
you
brought home last night. Either way, chances are there’s something gossip-worthy in your own sexual past. Maybe it’s not quite as odd as mine. But I’m sure it’s suitably humbling for present purposes. What makes us all the same is our having had certain private moments that could get us blackmailed.

Granted, most of us will never share our own lurid tidbits about our most unusual masturbatory mental aids or the fact that there’s a distinct possibility we had the tongue of a Sasquatch in our nether regions last night (or ours in its). What usually gets out is only what we want others to know. That’s perfectly understandable. We have our reputations to consider. I might never be allowed again into my local museum for fear I’ll debase one of the caveman mannequins, for instance. The problem with zipping up on our dirtiest little secrets, however, is that others are doing exactly the same thing, and this means that the story of human sexuality that we’ve come to believe is true is, in reality, a lie. What’s more, it’s a very dangerous lie, because it convinces us that we’re all alone in the world as “perverts” (and hence immoral monsters) should we ever deviate in some way from this falsely conceived pattern of the normal. A lot of human nature has escaped rational understanding because we’ve been unwilling to be completely honest about what
really
turns us on and off—or at least what’s managed to do the trick for us before. We cling to facades. We know one another only partially. Much of what lies ahead, therefore, concerns what you don’t want the rest of the world to know about your sexuality. But relax, that will be our little secret.

Again, however, I’d urge you to come clean in the confession booth of your own mind. And really, just a small unburdening of your erotic conscience will do for now. Reach far, far into the abyss of your wettest of dreams. Or perhaps it was only a fleeting, long-forgotten secretion, a lingering gaze misplaced, a furtive whiff of an object redolent with someone you once craved, a wayward click of the mouse, a hypothalamic effervescence that made you tingle down below. Nevertheless, even if you settle on one of these relatively minor examples, each embodies a corporeal reality specific to
you
 … a “shocking,” incontrovertible deed of physiology or an outright commission of lust that you’ve never shared with a single person, maybe not even yourself until now.

Whatever it is, once it’s laid bare for all the world to see in your declassified government report, a faultless testimony in inerasable ink, this unique venereal data point will undoubtedly register in the consciousness of someone, somewhere out there as evidence of your sexual deviance, or perhaps even your criminality. Just look around you or think of all the people you know. In the unforgiving lair of another’s critical eyes, you have now been transformed irreversibly into a filthy, loathsome pervert. And
that’s
the feeling, this fetid social emotion of shame, that I want you to keep in the back of your mind as you read this book. We’re going to get to the bottom of where it comes from, and we’re going to do our best to smother it with reason in our efforts to stop it from hurting you and others in the future.

This feeling doesn’t just make you a guilty pervert; more important, it makes you a human being. Blue-haired grandmothers, somnambulant schoolteachers, meticulous bankers, and scowling librarians, they’ve felt it too, just like you. We tend not to think of others as sexual entities unless they’ve aroused us somehow, but with the exception of those people spared by certain chromosomal disorders, we’re all innately lewd organisms. That’s easy to grasp in some abstract sense. But try putting it into practice. The next time you’re at the grocery store and the moribund cashier with the underbite and the debilitating bosom sweeps your bananas across the scanner, think of precisely where those uncommonly large hands have been. How many men or women—
including
her—have those seemingly asexual appendages brought ineffable bliss? This isn’t an exercise in the grotesque; it’s a reminder of your animal humanity. A concupiscent beast has roamed under all skins … even that of the grumpy checkout lady.

Yet the best-kept secret is even bigger than this unspoken universality. It’s this: exploring the outer recesses of desire by using the tools of science is a pinnacle human achievement. It’s not easy, but digging into the darkest corners of our sexual nature (that is to say, our “perversions”) can expose what keeps us from making real moral progress whenever the issues of equality and sexual diversity arise. With each defensive layer we remove, the rats therein will flee at the daylight falling at their feet, and the opportunity to eradicate such a pestilence of fear and ignorance makes the excavation of our species’s lascivious soul worth our getting a little dirty along the way.

*   *   *

We’re not the first to use the grimier realities of human sexuality to grease our way into some deeper truths. They may not have been scientists, but many artists and writers have touched on related psychological processes that were insightful and even foretold future research directions. In his 1956 play,
The Balcony
, for example, the French playwright Jean Genet showed how people who are inebriated by desire experience cognitive distortions motivating them to engage in behaviors that in a less aroused state of mind they’d perceive as obscene. Genet’s story revolves around the daily affairs of a busy brothel in a town on the brink of war. Run by an astute madam named Irma, the whorehouse is a sanctuary in which high-profile local officials are free to drain away their carnal excess. Once they’ve done so, they can get on with the business of being “normal” and respectable public figures defending the town from the enemy. Irma’s house of illusions has come to serve some colorful patrons, including the town judge, who feigns to “punish” a naughty prostitute, a bishop who pretends to “absolve the sins” of a demure penitent, and a general who enjoys riding his favorite (human) horse. “When it’s over, their minds are clear,” Irma reflects after these men visit her establishment. “I can tell from their eyes. Suddenly they understand mathematics. They love their children and their country.” The lustful human brain, Genet understood in a way that contemporary scientists are just now starting to fully grasp by using controlled studies in laboratory settings, is simply not of the same world as that of its sober counterpart.

One point I’d like to make crystal clear at the outset of our journey is that
understanding
is not the same as
condoning
. Our sympathies can take us only so far, and entering other minds isn’t pleasant when it comes to certain categories of sex offenders. Furthermore, it’s one thing to wax theoretical about sexual deviance, but another altogether to be the victim of sex abuse in real life or to know that someone we love, especially a child, has been harmed. Yet while it’s a common refrain to liken the most violent sex offenders to animals, whether we like it or not, even the worst of them are resoundingly human. As unsettling as it can sometimes be to lean in for a closer look, their lives can offer us valuable lessons about what can go wrong in the development of a person’s sexual identity and decision making. “I consider nothing that is human alien to me,” said the Roman philosopher Terence. I feel the same way. And Terence’s credo is one I intend to adhere to closely when it comes to some of the characters we’ll be meeting along the way.