Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us (24 page)

By contrast, those recurrently seeking out porn that features prepubescent children (or pubescent children in the case of hebephiles), when there’s a bottomless well of more-than-available grown-up porn, are obviously exhibiting an orientation to minors. In any event, while these two subtypes of criminal pedophiles—hands-on and hands-off—aren’t always distinguished from each other in studies, we do know a few of the traits that are associated especially with the hands-on variety. Before I share these with you, just be aware that these are statistical correlations only, which means that the co-occurring relationship between pedophilia and these traits is greater than would be expected by chance alone. Even if someone you know has all of these attributes (such as, ahem, that new boyfriend of yours), it’s still exceedingly unlikely that he’s attracted to prepubescent children. (Likewise, just because someone doesn’t have any of these traits doesn’t mean he’s
not
a pedophile.)

The psychologist James Cantor, whom we met earlier while distinguishing the erotic-target paraphilias (who or what you’re attracted to) from the erotic-activity paraphilias (what you like doing), has uncovered a number of these patterns. For reasons presently unknown, for example, pedophiles are more likely than other men to be short in stature. Another finding is that there is a disproportionate number of left-handed pedophiles. Being a southpaw is usually just a genetic quirk that means nothing in particular, but it can also emerge as the result of damage to the cerebrum during prenatal development. So the overrepresentation of left-handedness in pedophiles hints at a neurological “born that way” basis of having a sexual interest in children (or perhaps, born with a predisposition for getting sexually imprinted that way). Cantor uncovered another revealing neurological trend among pedophiles who sexually abuse children: the younger their victims, the lower the offender’s IQ. It’s by no means a perfect correlation between IQ and erotic age orientation (if it were, all gerontophiles would be geniuses and all pedophiles would be drooling idiots, neither of which is true), but it does say
something
is different in the actual brains of pedophilic child molesters.

Cantor’s big scoop, however, came when he discovered anomalies in the density of white matter in pedophile neuroanatomy. “The ‘white matter’ is the shorthand term for groupings of myelinated axons and glial cells that transmit signals throughout the gray matter that composes the cerebrum,” he explained to a reporter in 2012. “Think of the gray matter like the houses on a specific electricity grid and the white matter like the cabling connecting those houses to the grid … There’s either not enough of this cabling [in pedophiles], not the correct kind of cabling, or it’s wiring the wrong areas together, so instead of the brain evoking protective or parental instincts when these people see children, it’s instead evoking sexual instincts. There’s almost literally a crossed wiring.”

Yet even if it’s all a matter of white matter, this still tells us little about how the matter came to be. That’s to say, we know next to nothing about how to prevent mothers from giving birth to pre-pedophilic babies in whose soft heads the bungled white matter cabling process is already well under way. We run into the same problem as we did when trying to come up with (ethical) experiments using children that can isolate the specific cause of any paraphilia. In fact, it’s unthinkable in the present case. The ethical problems of turning kids into bee-loving melissaphiles for the sake of science pale in comparison to the atrocity of randomly assigning newborns to be in the “pedophile” or “nonpedophile” condition of a controlled experimental study. Imagine being the parent of a child in the pedophile condition and waiting patiently to see if the experimenter’s hypothesis pans out, with your bouncing baby boy (or girl) growing up to be an adult sexually aroused by six- and seven-year-olds.

As an example of how difficult it is to infer the causal origins of pedophilia when you’re dealing only with correlations, consider the findings from a questionnaire given to thirteen hundred anonymous men in Finland. Men who reported having childhood sexual interactions (such as “playing doctor”) with other children were now more likely, as adults, to express a sexual interest in children under fifteen. On the surface, this might
look
like evidence of male sexual imprinting. And it may well be. But there’s another way to interpret this correlation that’s just as plausible. It could be that these men weren’t imprinted by these early experiences; instead, they were pre-pedophilic boys who’d been more motivated to engage in sex play with other children.

There’s also no clear evidence to support the common assumption that being molested by a pedophile causes victims to become pedophiles themselves. There
are
data showing that being molested leads to a greater likelihood of sexually abusing a child oneself (the disturbing “abused abuser” cycle effect, which is usually explained by some neo-Freudian power-and-control theory or model of social imitation), but this doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the victim turned perpetrator’s own erotic age orientation. If anything, if the abuse occurs at a sensitive period of male development and leads to the child’s incidental arousal, he’d be more likely to develop a paraphilic attraction to harmful adults like the offender or to erotic cues that resemble the abusive event—an unsettling imprint in its own right.

*   *   *

Similar to the huge gap in the sex ratio for all the other paraphilias, there are very few certifiable female pedophiles. Some sexologists aren’t convinced they exist at all. You’re probably shaking your head in disbelief on hearing that, given the abundance of stories in the media about predatory “pedophile” female teachers. But remember that a pedophile is someone whose primary attraction is to prepubescent children. Although the word is often used to loathingly describe any adult who has sex with someone under the age of eighteen, a female teacher caught in a sex scandal with her hairy-chested high school student is no more a pedophile than a twenty-year-old having sex with a forty-year-old is a gerontophile. That’s to say, unless they’re, respectively, very late bloomers or have been smoking a whole lot of meth, most older teens aren’t prepubescent and most forty-year-olds don’t look anything like an elderly person.

Yet although they may be incredibly rare, case studies indicate that a handful of “true pedophiles” do exist among women. There are very upsetting incidents in which women have sexually abused shockingly young children. And although the act of child molestation itself isn’t a direct indicator of pedophilia, targeting young children, combined with recurring fantasies limited to sex with prepubescents, is indeed so. In his book
Pedophilia and Sexual Offending Against Children
, Michael Seto describes several such women. In one case, a young mother reported herself to child protective services after she performed fellatio on her one- and three-year-old sons and found herself masturbating to the memory of the incident.
*
Another woman performed oral sex on a pair of four-year-old girls in her care and became aroused while bathing them; her sexual fantasies were similarly confined to young children. By and large, however, the data on this mercifully slim demographic indicate that the majority of female child molesters aren’t pedophiles but usually are timid women who’ve been coerced by pedophilic men into joining them in committing their crimes. More often than not, these women are also the victims of abuse (in all its various forms) and have a mortal fear of adult males. Consider also that women represent less than 1 percent of all child porn offenders, an astonishingly (and tellingly) low percentage given that women are thought to consume around a third of all porn generally.

To scientifically confirm that a particular woman is a pedophile, researchers
could
use vaginal vasocongestion to measure her arousal to images of nude models of different ages, just as they do for men using the penile plethysmograph (as we’ll see shortly). But this is a subject area driven by forensic investigations, and in case you haven’t noticed, sex offenders are vastly, overwhelmingly male. Nevertheless, a speculative hypothesis that’s been floating around for a while, and one stemming from those female genital hyper-responsiveness data we reviewed earlier, is that women should be more likely than men overall to display sexual arousal to children and the elderly. It’s an empirical question, and I’m guessing it’s also one that won’t get answered anytime soon, since ladies won’t exactly be lining up to help researchers answer it. Yet even if it were found to be true, the crime data clearly show that females are still about as likely to act on their subconscious and unwitting genital arousal by eight- and eighty-year-olds as they are to date a bonobo. Remember, Meredith Chivers’s ready-for-anything “protection hypothesis” assumes that vaginal responses to any and all sex cues—even highly unappealing ones (ape sex, rape scenes, naked men if you’re lesbian, naked women if you’re not, and
possibly
kids and octogenarians too)—would have evolved to reduce physical injury.

Again, a woman’s genitals can be in stark disagreement with her desires.

*   *   *

The erect penis, by contrast, is a direct window into a man’s erotic soul, or even more to the point it’s a divining rod to his reservoir of specific desires. We’ve already come across a few studies during our journey in which the penile plethysmograph has been put to use in evaluating various scholarly questions about human sexuality. Its more common use is a forensic one, with the courts ordering sex offenders to undergo testing to distinguish the “true pedophiles” from the opportunistic offenders.
*
But this erection-detection machine was originally invented for another reason altogether. In fact, the scientific measurement of tumescence to ascertain a man’s erotic tastes (a penis lie detector, of sorts) got its start in the most unlikely of places: the Czechoslovakian army.

In the 1950s, the Czech military approached the psychiatrist Kurt Freund, a practicing physician with a clinic in Prague, for help with a problem. It seems that a growing number of army recruits had been fibbing about being homosexual to avoid compulsory service, since openly gay men didn’t have to enlist. So the top brass hired Freund to develop a reliable method of separating the gay wheat from the camouflaged straight chaff. They had come to the right man for the job. Like the army officials, Freund distrusted self-reports of people’s sex lives. He was also more interested in the palpable biology of desire than he was in those fuzzy psychodynamics devised by a similarly named theorist from Vienna. Instead, what Freund needed here was a concrete measure of sexual orientation. And he quickly realized that a single dumb erection in a man would be more useful for the army’s specific needs than an hour of prevaricating conversations with him in the clinic. The penis, Freund observed, could forever render impotent the art of the verbal lie when it comes to secret desires. (Freund also knew a thing or two about creating ruses in order to survive, or at least how to keep a low profile. Not only had he lived through the Holocaust as a Jew caught in the thick of the Nazi occupation of his native country in the early 1940s, but he somehow managed to avoid being deported to the concentration camps altogether. His parents and younger brother weren’t so fortunate, however. All three perished at Auschwitz.)

The specifics have gotten more complicated in the decades since Freund first hand-delivered his sparkling new penile plethysmograph machine to the homophobic generals, but the basics of the procedure have remained largely the same: A man sits down in a chair, his penis is connected to an erection gauge that can pick up very subtle changes in tumescence (the device is so sensitive that it can detect a blood-volume increase of less than one cubic centimeter, which most men wouldn’t even experience consciously), and he’s then shown randomized images of nude models representing distinct erotic categories.
*
The scientist, meanwhile, measures what’s happening with the man’s own equipment as these photographs appear. In the first instance, the nudes were chosen to expose the fake gays in the army’s recruiting pool, so they were simply static images of attractive men or women. But once the device had effectively ensured that any soldiers whose organs saluted vaginas were in place guarding his nation’s borders, Freund began to see other applications for his new invention, including using plethysmography to identify closeted pedophiles. After all, if a straight man were asked outright if he finds some pretty seventh grader sexually arousing, he might say something on the order of “Oh, her? Well, she looks like a nice girl, but I wouldn’t say she’s ‘attractive.’ I mean, she’s a bit young, isn’t she?” What Freund wanted to know was the extent to which his penis concurred with that socially appropriate verbal sentiment.

Nowadays you can get similar results from looking at a man’s computer hard drive, which police often do in the case of child porn investigations. But Freund’s device is still routinely used to confirm (or rather to “diagnose”) the defendant’s erotic age orientation. Today, your plethysmography experience in a lab in Toronto, for example (where Freund relocated in 1968 after being targeted by his country’s Communist Party as an intellectual dissident), would probably look something like the “Walking Nudes” version of the test originally devised by Freund but perfected by Ray Blanchard. That name may ring a bell, since it was Blanchard who came up with the controversial autogynephilia theory of MTF transsexuals. As a young psychologist then working in the Canadian prison system, Blanchard also became one of Freund’s most trusted North American collaborators. It was a relationship that would last until 1996, when, crippled by excruciating pain from an incurable lung cancer that had spread to the lymph nodes in his neck and was now threatening his brain, the inventor of the plethysmograph swallowed a fistful of muscle relaxants and pain pills with a bottle of wine and fell dead to the floor at the age of eighty-two. Yet despite the device’s controversial use, it has lived on. And by the time Blanchard’s Walking Nudes Test (which I’m about to strap you into) appeared in 2002, forensic investigators had anticipated almost every trick in the book that a pedophile with his penis caught in a Freundian trap might use to throw them off.
*