Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us (33 page)

“
If I were to see
”: John Money, interview,
Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia
2, no. 3 (1991): 5.

traveling warrior societies
: Randolph Trumbach, “Homosexual Behavior and Western Culture in the 18th Century,”
Journal of Social History
11, no. 1 (1977): 1–33.

Today’s ultraconservative
: Ibid.

Lesbians aren’t without
: Judith Gay, “‘Mummies and Babies’ and Friends and Lovers in Lesotho,”
Journal of Homosexuality
11, nos. 3–4 (1986): 97–116.

held indefinitely
: Karen Franklin, “The Public Policy Implications of ‘Hebephilia’: A Response to Blanchard et al. (2008),”
Archives of Sexual Behavior
38, no. 3 (2009): 319–20.

the psychiatrist
: Jerome C. Wakefield, “Evolutionary Versus Prototype Analyses of the Concept of Disorder,”
Journal of Abnormal Psychology
108, no. 3 (1999): 374–99.

such as “gender identity disorder”
: Eric Cameron, “APA to Remove ‘Gender Identity Disorder’ from DSM-V,”
Human Rights Campaign Blog
, December 4, 2012,
www.hrc.org/blog/entry/apa-to-remove-gender-identity-disorder-from-dsm-5
.

“
normal form of human
”: Barry S. Anton, “Proceedings of the American Psychological Association for the Legislative Year 2009: Minutes of the Annual Meeting of the Council of Representatives and Minutes of the Meetings of the Board of Directors,”
American Psychologist
65, no. 5 (2010): 385–475.

bear fewer offspring
: Raymond Hayes and Ray Blanchard, “Anthropological Data Regarding the Adaptiveness of Hebephilia,”
Archives of Sexual Behavior
41, no. 4 (2012): 745–47.

the risk of cuckoldry
: Todd K. Shackelford and Aaron T. Goetz, “Adaptation to Sperm Competition in Humans,”
Current Directions in Psychological Science
16, no. 1 (2007): 47–50.

it
could help to explain
: Katarina Alanko et al., “Evidence for Heritability of Adult Men’s Sexual Interest in Youth Under Age 16 from a Population-Based Extended Twin Design,”
Journal of Sexual Medicine
(In Press).

forensic psychologist Karen Franklin
: Karen Franklin, “Why the Rush to Create Dubious New Sexual Disorders?,”
Archives of Sexual Behavior
38, no. 4 (2010): 819–20.

Green titled one
: Richard Green, “Sexual Preference for 14-Year-Olds as a Mental Disorder: You Can’t Be Serious!!,”
Archives of Sexual Behavior
39, no. 3 (2010): 585–86.

“
Little girls are hopeless
”: Thomas J. Holt, Kristie R. Blevins, and Natasha Burkert, “Considering the Pedophile Subculture Online,”
Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment
22, no. 1 (2010): 11.

“
deliberately manipulat[ing]
”: Brook Barnes, “A Topless Photo Threatens a Major Disney Franchise,”
New York Times
, April 28, 2008,
www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/business/media/28hannah.html?_r=0
.

“
I’m sorry that my portrait
”: “Annie Leibovitz: ‘Miley Cyrus Photos Were Misinterpreted,’”
Hollywood.com
, April 28, 2008,
www.hollywood.com/news/celebrities/5226536/annie-leibovitz-miley-cyrus-photos-were-misinterpreted
.

Her famous book
: Germaine Greer,
The Female Eunuch
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971).

visual meandering
: Germaine Greer,
The Beautiful Boy
(New York: Rizzoli, 2003).

“
full of pictures
”: Emma Young, “Sticks and Stones May Break Bones but Not Stereotypes,”
Sydney Morning Herald
, October 27, 2003,
www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/10/26/1067103267287.html?from=storyrhs
.

“
I know that the only
”: Germaine Greer, “Country Notebook: Beautiful Boys Cause Bedlam,”
Telegraph
, December 7, 2002.
www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/3307166/Country-notebook-beautiful-boys-cause-bedlam.html
.

“
absolutely revolting
”: Brian Simpson, “Sexualizing the Child: The Strange Case of Bill Henson, His ‘Absolutely Revolting’ Images, and the Law of Childhood Innocence,”
Sexualities
14, no. 3 (2011): 290–311.

a philistine
: Ibid.

“
at best inconvenient
”: Rachel Olding, “Henson: Photo Furore Was ‘Inconvenient at Best,’”
Sydney Morning Herald
, March 8, 2011,
www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/henson-photo-furore-was-inconvenient-at-best-20110307-1blbh.html
.

7. LIFE LESSONS FOR THE LEWD AND LASCIVIOUS

“
Indeed, of all
”: Yukio Mishima,
Confessions of a Mask
, trans. Meredith Weatherby (1949; New York: New Directions, 1958), 72.

which set sail: Thomas W. Higginson,
Life of Francis Higginson, First Minister in the Massachusetts Bay Colony
(New York: Dodd, Mead, 1891).

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

testicles would be replaced
: Gregorio Marañón,
The Evolution of Sex and Intersexual Conditions
(London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1932).

busy grafting monkey
: Ibid.

“
Posture, demeanor
”: Charles Samson Féré,
Scientific and Esoteric Studies in Sexual Degeneration in Mankind and in Animals
, trans. Ulrich van der Horst (1899; New York: Falstaff Press, 1932), 145.

“
there have been noticed
”: Ibid.

“
A doctor had [dealt with]
”: Ibid.

“
inability to learn
”: Ibid.

“
The sight which [shocks]
”: Ibid., 225.

“
It should be remembered
”: Ibid., 146.

species of primate
: Daniel J. Povinelli, Jesse M. Bering, and Steve Giambrone, “Toward a Science of Other Minds: Escaping the Argument by Analogy,”
Cognitive Science
24, no. 3 (2000): 509–41.

researchers who coined
: David Premack and Guy Woodruff, “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?,”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
1, no. 4 (1978): 515–26.

it usually is with science
: Kurt Gray et al., “More Than a Body: Mind Perception and the Nature of Objectification,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
101, no. 6 (2011): 1207–20.

“
The idea that [nudity]
”: Ibid., 1209.

“
perpetual virginity of the soul
”: Christopher Cahill, “Second Puberty: The Later Years of W. B. Yeats Brought His Best Poetry, Along with Personal Melodrama on an Epic Scale,”
Atlantic Monthly
, December 2003.

“
I saw him watching
”: Angela Carter,
The Bloody Chamber, and Other Stories
(1979; New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 11.

“
There are some eyes
”: Ibid., 86.

In a 1979 study
: Donald L. Mosher and Kevin E. O’Grady, “Homosexual Threat, Negative Attitudes Toward Masturbation, Sex Guilt, and Males’ Sexual and Affective Reactions to Explicit Sexual Films,”
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology
47, no. 5 (1979): 860.

Our brains systematically collect
: Francis T. McAndrew and Megan A. Milenkovic, “Of Tabloids and Family Secrets: The Evolutionary Psychology of Gossip,”
Journal of Applied Social Psychology
32, no. 5 (2006): 1064–82.

“
devil of a torment
”: Boots [pseud.], “The Feelings of a Fetishist,”
Psychiatric Quarterly
10 (1957): 742–58.

“
It is possible
”: Ibid., 744.

“
Normal men cannot
”: Ibid., 748.

“
This friend is one
”: Ibid.

“
Knowing that these
”: Ibid., 752.

“
It was the best of times
”: Charles Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities
(1859; Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1999), 1.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When I first set out to write “a lighthearted book about sexual deviance,” most people thought I was crazy. And many, I’m sure, still do after reading it. But for seeing the good in this project from its very inception, I’d like to thank my agent, Peter Tallack. I’d been writing a lot about human sexuality for
Scientific American
, and I’d been mulling over the odder social realities of being gay for most of my life, but the idea for
Perv
only crystallized while I was playing tourist in Europe one sweaty summer a few years ago. Juan and I were on a public bus that had quickly become standing room only (and all the more aromatic for it). As the bus bounded down a bumpy road to Cinque Terre, I noticed a local man around sixty or so in a cream-colored nylon suit. He was leaking from every pore (wearing such an outfit on a crowded bus in the Italian Riviera in July would have that effect), and I watched him stealing cautious glances at the chest of a voluble, and quite oblivious, teenage girl in a bikini. She looked to be about fourteen, fifteen … it was hard to tell, but certainly not the age of female he
should
be eyeing like that. There was nothing else to it: just a perspiring Italian pensioner staring at a pretty young girl with lust in his eyes. But it got me thinking about what scientists might be missing about our species’s hidden sexual minds. So that night I hammered out a quick e-mail to Peter about the possibility of writing a book on the psychology of people’s unspoken (or rather, unspeakable) desires. He liked the idea, and presto … here’s
Perv
.

Not quite “presto” of course. In fact, the distance separating an author’s hazy ideas for a book and getting that book into a shape that people would want to read is incredibly vast. It’s so vast, in fact, that anyone who’d take on such a project as an editor would have to be crazier than the author. Luckily, I found such a mental state in Amanda Moon at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, who has served with grace, patience, and good humor as my editor on this and other projects over the years. Sometimes I can get a bit lost in my writing, and in the spirit of the flow I’ll make a few insensitive missteps here and there—okay, “missteps” is putting it too mildly, more like the type of stumbling over sentences that can break a reader’s bone. Amanda understands me well enough by now to know what it is I really
meant
to say, not that dreadfulness of a line I’ve just vomited onto the page without considering how people could misinterpret it. In other words, it’s because of Amanda that this book isn’t as offensive as it would otherwise have been, and whatever you did find offensive in it would have been inordinately more so if not for her.

I was all the more fortunate to have benefited from the talent and knowledge of Amanda’s editorial assistant at FSG, Christopher Richards, who took on the role—and courageously so—of a second editor on this project. Chris had a major part in the making of
Perv
, pushing me to try harder at my weaker moments and consistently offering the level of feedback and quality of insight of an editor far beyond his years. Closer to the production end, the editorial assistant Daniel Gerstle was also instrumental in briging this project to fruition, patiently handling my many questions and emails with remarkable aplomb. For their diligence, keen eyes, and attention to detail, I would like to thank my copy editor, Ingrid Sterner, as well as my production editor, Lenni Wolff. Kathy Daneman, my publicist at FSG, is a force to be reckoned with who has worked tirelessly behind the scenes for me on all my deviant projects. I’m grateful to have her.

I’m also grateful to the very kind Robert Allen and his staff at Macmillan Audio for their work on the audiobook version of
Perv
, as well as Doug Young and Madeline Toy at Transworld Publishers in the United Kingdom. The hardworking folks at
Scientific American
, particularly Mariette DiChristina and Bora Zivkovic, have been hugely supportive and encouraging of my writing on human sexuality from the get-go. And I’d like to extend my appreciation to the helpful staff at the Kinsey Institute Library & Special Collections at Indiana University for permitting me access to their archived material.

For those in my life who for so long have had to endure my tales of sexual deviance—at dinner parties, at family reunions, and during transatlantic flights—I sincerely apologize. But I really did appreciate your generous listening. I’d like to thank my dad and stepmother; also, my sister and brother and their respective mates, and along with them my nieces and nephews, who one day will come across this book and realize why their parents always seemed to avoid their questions about what Uncle Jesse did for a living.

To Juan, my accommodating partner whose ears have sighed for so long from hearing me read aloud to him bedtime stories he’d rather not go to bed knowing and into whose loving arms I’ve crawled each night, wounded by the sex lives of strangers, I swear I’ll never write another word about sex. Well, I promise a breather, anyway.

Finally, I am grateful to the many supportive friends and colleagues who’ve read and commented on early versions of this material, who answered my clueless questions about their fascinating research, or who simply offered patience and an encouraging word or two when I needed it along the way. These include (in no particular order): Synnove Heggoy, Ira Berliner, Jayne Roth, Laurie Santos, Ray Blanchard, Mike Seto, James Cantor, Todd Shackelford, Christopher Ryan, Karen Franklin, Sean Massey, Roy Baumeister, Meredith Chivers, Dave Bjorklund, Derren Brown, Anne Lawrence, David Buss, Ben Hale, Michael Bailey, David Pizzaro, Becky Fortgang, Dan Savage, Patti Virgadamo, Erin O’Donnell, Rita Marker, Martin Kafka, Steve and Sonni Roth, Cyndi and Jesper Sjögren, Symone and Maxx Carroll, Daniel Engber, Laura Helmuth, Ginger and Brent Geiger, Alex Lakeman, Eileen Curtayne and Srini Dixit, Caroline Clark Rivera, Michèle Roten Baumgartner, Ericka L’Abbe, Alondra and Yeri Quiles, and Justin Nolan.
Thank you
.