Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us (28 page)

A purely scientific approach to sex, however, especially one that trades exclusively in the language of the “natural” and the “normal”—and one in which the word “harm” either never appears or is never properly defined—can send us scampering off to a this-worldly Hell as easily as a religious approach. We’ve seen, for instance, some of the unintended consequences of treating sexual deviance from a purely medical perspective, especially how the practice of pathologizing minorities has in many ways done more damage than good (both to the minorities and to the rest of us). Just look at all those men who went to their graves in Paris with someone else’s family jewels sewn into their scrotums. As we learned in the first chapter, once researchers began to understand erotic orientations to be lifelong patterns of attraction, human beings became distinguishable from one another not just on the basis of, say, skin color, nationality, and social status but also on the basis of their main turn-ons. For most people, this new concept of “orientation” in the latter half of the nineteenth century was an inconsequential development. But it was a change that would strike fear in the hearts of many others forevermore; after all, with experts now separating the “normal” people from the sex deviants, getting exposed as one of
those
people came with all sorts of problems. It wasn’t just a medical diagnosis; it was a social sentence. As a consequence, modern societies became giant breeding grounds for a whole new oeuvre of shame- and anxiety-related psychiatric disorders. From that point on, being a human being with whatever erotic profile (or profiles) your society happened to hate the most would be like living permanently in Middle America as a Communist during the McCarthy era. Only in this situation, you couldn’t just tear up your membership card to your socially inappropriate club if the stress got to be too much; your membership card was your brain.

If you were one of those homosexual specimens trying to avoid notice back in Paris, on your trail would be investigators such as Professor Charles Samson Féré. This no-nonsense heterosexual was a physician who’d been inspired by Havelock Ellis’s
Sexual Inversion
. While his colleagues were busy swapping testicles in labs along the Seine, Féré set out to develop a fail-safe method for detecting gays and lesbians who were concealing their homoerotic tastes. Kurt Freund wasn’t even a twinkle in his mother’s eye and that wacky erection-detection machine of his just some state-of-the-art piece of equipment for the faraway Jetsonian future. So all that Féré could do to find out who was gay and who wasn’t, really, was try to work out the physical, behavioral, and psychological secrets of queers. In his
Scientific and Esoteric Studies in Sexual Degeneration in Mankind and in Animals
, the author shares the wisdom of this new gaydar, circa 1899. “Posture, demeanor, methods of walking,” wrote Féré, “all partake of inversion.” In a subgroup of gay men, he believed that certain bodily traits betrayed the patient’s homosexuality. For instance, “there have been noticed the development of fat in the mammary parts, the large size of the buttocks, and scarcity of [body] hair” (okay, fine, guilty as charged on two of those, but so is my straight brother). And just in case you were wondering, gay men’s penises look the same as straight men’s penises. “A doctor had [dealt with] more than 600 homosexuals,” Féré assures us, “without meeting with a single case of malformation of the genital organs among them.”
*
Burning the midnight oil on many a lonely online night, I have reached my own sample size of more than 600 gay men’s penises—hard to say precisely how many; I stopped counting once I hit a million back in ’02—and I can confirm Féré got this point right. (Well, more or less. I’d be lying if I said I haven’t seen some real doozies.) Don’t fret, though, ladies, because while you may not be able to tell they like other guys by inspecting their packages, Féré lets his readers in on a little secret about homosexual males, at least those of the more obviously inverted countenance: they find it hard to blow. Now I know what you’re thinking (“Obviously, he hasn’t met my friend Mark,” or some such), but it’s the “inability to learn how to whistle,” Féré clarified, “that is the mark of the effeminate man.”
*
Four words, Dr. Féré:
Clay Aiken
,
whistling fiend
.

Lesbians didn’t escape Féré’s investigations, either. Indeed, he was just as motivated to pull his gaydar dragnet over these more slippery sapphic properties. The doctor was convinced—in a rather Freudian sort of way—that lesbianism was caused by a girl’s obsession with her mother’s breasts in early childhood, and she became jealously enraged upon seeing her father paying special attention to, or even daring to touch, what she considered to be hers alone. This animosity toward her boob-poaching father, claimed Féré, was the impetus for a lesbian’s lifelong disgust for the opposite sex. Still, he figured there must be some biological predisposition for a girl reacting this way. “The sight which [shocks] her is such an everyday affair that one might almost say that there is no child who has not seen it … the acquisition of an instinctive perversion on account of it could only take place as a consequence of a special aptitude for such acquisition.” Nonetheless, for the rest of her days, the girl would now view men as mammary thieves, with her most intense passions directed at bosomy females.
†
The best gaydar tool for detecting closeted lesbians, therefore, is to watch carefully where their eyes go in the presence of a shapely female. If she stares at the woman’s voluptuous chest, then you can be certain her jig is up.

Most of his thinking about gay men and lesbians, as you can see, was just plain silly, but Féré also spread some pretty pernicious stereotypes about the moral character of homosexuals. Or rather, their lack of any such character, in his view. “It should be remembered,” he admonished his readers, “that inverts have a tendency to lying, are vain, garrulous, and indiscreet. Some pay no attention to the dress or even the cleanliness of those whom they are on the lookout for. The most squalid creatures do not repel them.” Oh, come on, with that last point. We’re not
all
Lady Gaga fans, for heaven’s sake. In any event, Féré’s words may read to us today like a passage from the Westboro Baptist Church’s monthly newsletter, but bear in mind, this is from one of the most respected physicians and scholars of his day. And in the history of our species, that wasn’t so long ago. Even the gay-friendly Havelock Ellis hailed Féré’s book (which was published only two years after his own
Sexual Inversion
appeared in English-language bookstores) as “the greatest work on the sexual instinct written in French.” (This leads me to believe that Ellis’s French wasn’t very good.)

Féré also waved his finger in disapproval at perverts of other species, regaling his readers with shameless tales of masochistic stallions, a donkey with a passion for zebras, inverted hens, masturbating weasels, and even pederastic insects. There’s no question that other animals sometimes engage in sex practices that are unusual within the context of the standard mating behaviors of their own species. Humans aren’t the only sex deviants in the animal kingdom. But we
are
the only ones to stigmatize each other as disgusting perverts. To understand why we’re so unique as a species in this unfortunate way, why so many intelligent people have fought with each other for so long over the very types of issues we’ve seen during the course of this book, we’ll need to rewind the clock far beyond any recorded history, all the way back, in fact, to the time when we
Homo sapiens
became the insufferably judgmental hominids that we are. In doing so, we may be able to finally comprehend this existential sexual mess that we’ve come to find ourselves in—and why Féré’s penchant for stereotyping sexual minorities is something we still haven’t shaken.

*   *   *

As a species of primate, we are principally set apart from other animals by our highly developed social cognition. Like a bat’s radar system, which enables it to navigate through a dark cave or to find a crunchy insect to snack on, or like an elephant’s trunk that allows it to do everything from snorkeling under water to nudging the “little” ones along on a family outing, our species’s most distinctive adaptation is our ability to empathize—to think about what’s going on in another mind. It’s intuitive, it’s innate, and basically we can’t help it: we’re constantly trying to get into the heads of others.
*

In technical terms, this adaptation is a social cognitive mechanism known as “theory of mind.”
†
The researchers who coined this term in the late 1970s, the psychologists David Premack and Guy Woodruff, did so to refer to the fact that minds are, by definition, purely theoretical. A neurosurgeon in the middle of an operation isn’t actually looking at a
mind
on the table; he’s looking at an organ that produces mental states in its owner. If we were to pore over some batch of fMRI results or recordings from an EEG, the images we’d have before us come from “brain-imaging” devices, not “mind-imaging” devices. That’s to say, regardless of what some eccentric characters out there may try to tell you—or rather to sell you—we can’t literally see, hear, touch, taste, smell, or otherwise directly perceive a thought.
*
Instead, we can only theorize about other people’s mental states (hence, “theory of mind”). So whether you’re a cognitive neuroscientist in a lab deciphering blood-flow changes in an epileptic’s brain or just a guy on a busy sidewalk trying to make sense of a street vendor’s perplexing behavior, you’re still only theorizing about a mind. Other minds
do
exist; it’s just that, as with gravity, we can only infer that they’re present on the basis of what we directly perceive through our own sensory organs.
†

Now, just because we come with this theory of mind system factory installed doesn’t mean that the specific theories it generates concerning what’s going on in someone else’s head are always correct. Since we can never know everything about a person’s private mental life, more often than not we only get it partially right. And a lot of times, we get it flat-out wrong. Imagine, for instance, that you’re riding on a crowded subway. You’re somewhat oblivious to your surroundings given that you’re busy texting and wearing headphones (perhaps you’re even whistling away to your favorite song, assuming you’re not an effeminate gay male). Seemingly out of the blue, the guy across the aisle—a real bedraggled sort, probably headed to the homeless shelter, you told yourself when he got on a few stations ago—suddenly lunges aggressively at that well-dressed businessman with the charming smile and salt-and-pepper hair whom you also noticed before. With all the chaos (people scrambling to get away, disheveled newspapers sailing from laps, shrieks and cries) you’re not going to pull out your pen and legal notepad from your bag and calmly sketch out a theory about what in the hell is going on; instead, your evolved theory of mind system has automatically, effortlessly kicked into gear. So, tell me, why
does
the angry unshaven man with the flies circling around him have his hands around this other gentleman’s neck?

If you’re like most of us, your knee-jerk assessment is that the assailant is clearly mentally unstable. But wait, what’s this? A distraught woman clutching her teenage daughter is shouting obscenities at the handsome assaulted executive (actually, he’s a little less handsome now with that broken nose of his). She’s accusing him of—and you can hardly make it out with all the commotion—touching the girl while her back was turned. Ah, so
that’s
it. The businessman wasn’t so innocent at all, it seems; he’s a practicing frotteurist. With that informative update, watch as your theory of mind transforms the “filthy, disturbed assailant” into a “down-on-his-luck hero” before your very eyes. He may not be a knight in shining armor so much as one in rags of stale urine, but he’s one of the good guys now to you regardless.

The evolution of theory of mind was a huge boon for our ancestors. The more information they had about what was happening on the flip side of another’s skull (his intentions, his desires, his emotions, his knowledge, his beliefs, and so on), the better our ancestors’ “guesses” about why the other person behaved as he had and, even more important, what he was going to do next. (As my graduate adviser liked to say years ago, “The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.”) Being able to explain and anticipate actions like this was a game changer for a highly social species like ours. And when it comes to how this uniquely human adaptation affected our sex lives, the consequences of being able to think about what others think were massive indeed.

*   *   *

Consider what your average sexual encounter would look like in the
absence
of a theory of mind. Here’s the completely “mind-blind” straight male’s perspective, for instance, on entering an everyday domestic bedroom scene: A large object of a uniform pallor, pointy caps at the ends of two compact swellings, is twisting about on the sheets. A pair of thin stalks that balanced the object when it was upright have now drawn apart to reveal the soft pink interior of a woolly black diamond. Something red has poked through a different opening up top; it appears to be a papillate organism moving back and forth through a ragged white gate. Meanwhile, a set of restless blue marbles has settled in place above, and if one looks closely, inside these marbles are black dots exhaling like small resting ravens.

This is nothing at all like what husbands see when they stumble happily upon their ready-to-go wives in bed (at least, I hope it’s not). But without a theory of mind that enables them to perceive the “object” as a conscious human being like them, it’s indeed, horrifyingly enough, something like how a heterosexual man would be processing this sensual scene. Although the most common assumption is that seeing people in the buff or wearing revealing clothing serves to “objectify” them in our minds, the real effect on our social perceptions of seeing a bounty of flesh is quite to the contrary. Or, as it usually is with science, it’s a little more complicated than that. In 2011, the psychologist Kurt Gray investigated what it is, exactly, that we see in other people when they’re not wearing their clothes. In one of several such experiments, Gray and his colleagues had 527 participants, men and women with an average age of thirty-one, take a good long look at photographs of attractive models (also of both sexes). Participants were asked to rate each model on his or her general psychological competencies: “Compared to the average person, how much is this person capable of
feeling joy
? of
planning
? of
self-control
? of
feeling pain
?” and so on. The models were either completely nude or fully clothed, which was the only difference between them—pose, lighting, and facial expressions were otherwise identical.
*
Although the nude models were judged to be less capable of what you might call “intelligent thought” (basically, anything involving executive functioning) than the clothed models, they were judged to have a far greater capacity for experiencing physiological or emotional types of mental states (such as pain, hunger, pleasure, fear, desire, rage, and joy). “The idea that [nudity] can lead to both decreased and increased mind stands in contrast to the term ‘objectification,’” Gray explains. “Focusing on the body does not lead to de-mentalization but to a
redistribution
of mind.” The effect was even more dramatic when the naked models were shown in sexual poses similar to that of the “objectified” wife in our scintillating boudoir episode (you remember her, the one with the “woolly black diamond” for a vagina and the “papillate organism” for a tongue?).