Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us (30 page)

People have no control over their sexual orientation, but likewise we have no control over the fact that our brains evolved to pay special attention to and systematically accrue information about other people’s sexuality. Again, from an evolutionary perspective, those details are high-dollar knowledge. So let me come clean. The truth is that the “Thai waitress” from last night was in fact a married man sitting with his wife at the next table over. After he made eyes at me for the better part of an hour, we met in the restroom and exchanged a brief but passionate moment in one of the toilet stalls. Oh, I’m still pulling your leg. But you see how sex stirs the social brain. Flitting quickly through your head a moment ago were probably incoherent thoughts such as “Hold on, did the man’s wife know what he was doing?” and “Where was Juan during all this?” The critical takeaway here is that while we can’t undo natural selection and reengineer human social cognition so that we’ve no interest in other people’s sexual desires and behaviors, we have considerably more control over what we do with that information once it’s been revealed to us and how we treat a vulnerably “exposed” person as the result of our knowing. Like fighting alcoholism, the first step in overcoming our sexual bigotry is recognizing that we’re sexual bigots.

*   *   *

In all of the many case studies I’ve read while working on this book, one that stands out as especially moving is an autobiographical account from a 1957 issue of
Psychiatric Quarterly
. Written under the pseudonym “Boots” (fitting, given that the man was a rubber boot fetishist, men’s and boys’ were his thing), this letter to the editor of that journal is an eloquent description of a man’s erotic fascination with rubber boots and the perils of having to hide this “devil of a torment” from others throughout his life.
*
But Boots’s tale is also a celebratory ode to the transformative power of human friendship. The fetishistic author realized that if he were ever to bring his beloved boots out of the closet, as it were, from that point on society would see him as no more than a “weird” pervert. The prospect of forever losing his more nuanced, more positive social identity by letting others know of his unusual sexual desires had long been a source of great unease to him. Boots was quite bright, and whether or not anyone else could see it, he knew there was a lot more to him than the fact that his lovers were born on a production line in Boise. “It is possible for fetishists to be ‘raving mad’ about their fetishes,” he writes, “but outside of an irresistible, compelling obsession for them, be in all other respects as intelligent and sane as the president of the United States” (this was of course
years
before George W. Bush came around to muddy that claim, but you get Boots’s point). In any event, it seems that while Boots was out searching for used boots one day (he did so under the guise of a hobbyist or scrap-rubber trader), he happened to make a new friend—a “
true
friend,” he stresses repeatedly. “Normal men cannot comprehend, or fully understand, any odd, unusual feelings of this sort that are entirely foreign to their own natures … However, some persons do exist who possess the rare gift of profound understanding when it comes to sensing the secret sorrows that shroud the lives of many folks.” Boots then proceeds to dedicate page after page to the virtues of this sympathetic new compadre of his, an unnamed figure whom he describes as a “normal, married heterosexual person with an independent business of his own”:

This friend is one who fully fits the best description of a true friend that I have ever come across: “A true friend is one who knows ALL ABOUT US, but still remains our friend.” With a sense of humility, knowing that each man has a weakness of some kind, he accepted the truth of my strange and haunting obsession … he knew I was in many other ways not too greatly different from many other men. My friend did not add to the weight of “my secret cross” by shunning me. He provides my ailment with palliatives to ease my “fetishistic hunger” whenever necessary.

And by this, Boots means that not only was his “true friend” a nice guy and a good listener but he even went out of his way to supply him with the objects he desired most:

Knowing that these cast-off articles of footwear are a peculiar treasure of mine, he collects all he can obtain to give to me as sentimental keepsakes that symbolize my tragic and unreturned love of man for man … [He] does not condemn, ridicule or scorn. My friend is not a psychiatrist, but he has done more to contribute to my happiness and peace of mind than any psychiatrist trying to chase elusive bats out of the belfry possibly could. It is a “peaceful co-existence” between two persons whose sexual emotions are as different as night is from day.

Charles Dickens wasn’t a homosexual boot fetishist (at least as far as we know), but he did pen that immemorial line, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” I think the same can be said for where we are today as a society when it comes to sex and sexuality. In fact, we’re not altogether unlike the primmer characters in
A Tale of Two Cities
, many of whom discover that their ethical sensibilities and cherished traditions are being strained or upended altogether by the French Revolution. Our own “Enlightenment” is the unprecedented pace at which the science of human sexuality is now advancing, and with it that gathering storm of data showing that deviance is more status quo than any of us imagined. Like the French monarchy, our sexual morality was built on the unsteady grounds of myths and customs, which can clearly no longer sustain it under the deluge of facts now raining down. There’s no question that we’re presently standing at a moral crossroads and getting soaking wet from anger and confusion in the process; the question, rather, is where to go from here. And we could use a nice solid pair of boots of our own these days to keep from slipping as we step forward. (By the way, if you want to spend some private time with them out in the woods first, have at it, I say.)

Now, if we go in the direction of those still mourning the loss of the “good old days,” which, as we’ve seen, weren’t so good at all for the erotic outliers among us, then we’d be continuing to harm others with our closed minds, fostering their “personal distress,” while heading knowingly into the terminal sunset of an outdated worldview. Going in the other direction may seem obvious enough, but it’s a far rockier road than it appears at first glance, which is precisely why we’ve been idling before it for so long. It’s not just the road less traveled; it’s the road never traveled. Since no society has ever ventured this way before, doing so requires us to lay brand-new tracks for a sturdier framework of sexual ethics and morality, one that those following in our footsteps can trust never to give way beneath them or fall crashing down upon their fragile heads.

To avoid the type of decay that’s rotted away the entirety of that other man-made path, our new value system would need to be constructed of the brick and mortar of established scientific facts, its bedrock being the incontrovertible truth that sexual orientations are never chosen. It must also have walls of iron to protect us from the howling winds sure to arrive as we move along, walls forged by the knowledge that there is no evil but that which comes from thinking there is so. To guide us forward, we must emblazon every star in the sky with the reminder that a lustful thought is not an immoral act. And our handrails would have to be painstakingly carved from the logic that in the absence of demonstrable harm the inherent subjectivity of sex makes it a matter of private governance. Finally, and most imposing of all, we’d each have to promise to walk this brave new path completely naked from here to eternity, removing this weighty plumage of sexual normalcy and strutting, proudly, our more deviant sexual selves.

You go first.

NOTES

“
Rarely has man
”: Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, and Paul H. Gebhard,
Concepts of Normality and Abnormality in Sexual Behavior
(New York: Grune and Stratton, 1949), 16.

1. WE’RE ALL PERVERTS

In his 1956 play
: Jean Genet,
The Balcony
(1956; New York: Grove Press, 1994).

“
When it’s over
”: Ibid., 35.

“
I consider nothing
”: Publius Terentius Afer [Terence], “Heauton Timorumenos” [The Self-Tormentor], in
Comoediae: Andria, Heauton Timorumenos, Eunuchus, Phormio, Hecyra, Adelphoe
, ed. Robert Kauer and Wallace M. Lindsay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), 25.

the British lexicographer
: Thomas Blount,
Glossographia; or, A Dictionary Interpreting the Hard Words of Whatsoever Language Now in Our Refined English Tongue with Etymologies, Definitions, and Historical Observations on the Same
(1656; Ann Arbor, Mich.: EEBO Editions, ProQuest, 2010).

an earlier form
: Boethius,
The Consolation of Philosophy
, rev. ed., trans. Victor Watts (524; London: Penguin Classics, 2000).

Dawkins encourages his fellow
: Richard Dawkins,
The God Delusion
(London: Great Bantam Press, 2008).

I’ve penned my own
: Jesse Bering,
The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).

But of all these
: Jon Jureidini, “Perversion: Erotic Form of Hatred or Exciting Avoidance of Reality?,”
Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry
29 (2001): 195–211.

in the work of the Victorian-era scholar
: Havelock Ellis and John A. Symonds,
Sexual Inversion
(London: Wilson Macmillan, 1897).

chided the woman
: Phyllis Grosskurth,
Havelock Ellis: A Biography
(New York: Knopf, 1980).

“
It was never to me vulgar
”: Havelock Ellis,
My Life: The Autobiography of Havelock Ellis
(Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 84.

“
[It’s] not extremely uncommon
”: Ibid.

“
As there was between David
”: Richard Ellmann,
Oscar Wilde
(New York: First Vintage Books, 1988), 463.

In a scathing review
: William Noyes, “Das Konträre Geschlechtsgefühl,”
Psychological Review
4, no. 4 (1897): 447.

“
In this way, which
”: Mervin Glasser, “Identification and Its Vicissitudes as Observed in the Perversions,”
International Journal of Psychoanalysis
67 (1986): 14.

citing other nonmonogamous species
: Christopher Ryan and Cecilda Jethá,
Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality
(New York: Harper, 2010).

As the primatologist
: Frans de Waal, “Sociosexual Behavior Used for Tension Regulation in All Age and Sex Combinations Among Bonobos,”
Pedophilia: Biosocial Dimensions
(1990): 378–93.

“
mere breath on the air
”: Jean-Paul Sartre,
No Exit, and Three Other Plays
(1948; New York: Random House, 1989), 43.

“
white bear effect
”: Daniel Wegner,
White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts: Suppression, Obsession, and the Psychology of Mental Control
(New York: Viking, 1989).

negative stereotypes can
: Robert Kurzban and Mark Leary, “Evolutionary Origins of Stigmatization: The Functions of Social Exclusion,”
Psychological Bulletin
127, no. 2 (2001): 187–208.

half of all “farm-bred”
: Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
(Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948).

Just as it’s impossible
: Christopher M. Earls and Martin L. Lalumière, “A Case Study of Preferential Bestiality,”
Archives of Sexual Behavior
38, no. 4 (2009).

But the hysteria over
: Robert F. Oaks, “‘Things Fearful to Name’: Sodomy and Buggery in Seventeenth-Century New England,”
Journal of Social History
12, no. 2 (1978).

“
butt one eye for use
”: Ibid., 275.

“
a faire & white skinne & head
”: Ibid., 276.

“
Immedyatly there appeared a working of lust
”: Ibid.

highlighted by the case
: Edward Payson Evans,
The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals
(1906; Clark, N.J.: Lawbook Exchange, 2009).

many people of European
: Fernando L. Mendez, Joseph C. Watkins, and Michael F. Hammer, “Neandertal Origin of Genetic Variation at the Cluster of OAS Immunity Genes,”
Molecular Biology and Evolution
, published online January 12, 2013.

“
In all the criminal law
”: Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin, and Gebhard,
Concepts of Normality and Abnormality in Sexual Behavior
, 12.

Back in 2001
: Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,”
Psychological Review
108, no. 4 (2001): 814–34.

“
A man belongs to
”: Roberto Gutierrez and Roger Giner-Sorolla, “Anger, Disgust, and Presumption of Harm as Reactions to Taboo-Breaking Behaviors,”
Emotion
7, no. 4 (2007): 868.

“
My brother is my boyfriend
”: Thomas Rodgers, “Gay Porn’s Most Shocking Taboo,”
Salon
,
www.salon.com/2010/05/21/twincest/
.

2. DAMN DIRTY APES

“
The butting of his haunches
”: D. H. Lawrence,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
(1928; New York: Penguin, 2006), 171.

“
In a small but not
”: Havelock Ellis,
Studies in the Psychology of Sex
(online-ebooks.info, 2004), 5:12.