How Sexual Desire Works- The Enigmatic Urge

by Frederick Toates

  When fetish turns to tragedy

  A tragic case of fetishism was that of Jerry Brudos, who in Oregon went on to become a serial killer (Rule, 1983). He was also a cross-dresser, a feature often associated with fetishism (Epstein, 1975). His fetish appears to have arisen from a chance pairing of a female-related object and a powerful (negative) emotion. When 5 years old, Jerry found a pair of women’s shiny high-heeled shoes on a dump and took them home. He used the shoes as his initiation into cross-dressing, whereupon he was severely scolded and punished by his mother, whom he detested. At this time, a neighbour, a girl of 5 with whom Jerry had developed a strong attachment, died. To make matters worse, a neighbouring lady who had befriended him was taken ill and was no longer accessible for friendly contact. It appears that memories of the shoes, the girl and the lady became linked in his mind. Shortly after this, Jerry stole the shoes of a female teacher and, corresponding to his emerging sexuality, shoes become an erotic fixation for him. Pointing to the arousal value of the forbidden, Rule (1983) suggests (p. 180): ‘his very need for subterfuge and secrecy made his obsession all the more thrilling’.

  Females were either detested, as in the case of Jerry’s mother, or had been lost from his life, but the eroticism of their shoes remained intact. The fetish targets now expanded to include women’s silky underwear, which he stole from neighbours’ houses and clothes lines. The act of intrusion doubtless created excitement and strengthened the future tendency to repeat this behaviour. Each item was added to a growing collection and, in the privacy of his room, Jerry would take out and fondle them while masturbating and would sleep with them. His fantasy evolved into dwelling on the prospect of creating a prison in which he would house chosen women who were to be at his command.

  Jerry then escalated his activities to stalking women and seizing their shoes, which he took home and to bed with him. After he married, Jerry insisted that his wife wear high-heeled shoes, even for doing housework. When he felt depressed, he would resume night-time foraging to steal clothes and thereby ease his mood. Putting them on and feeling the sensation against his skin, he would enjoy a kind of token of its original owner. After killing one woman, he even cut off her foot and kept it with the shoe on. After receiving a life sentence for murder, the tedium was relieved by receiving an endless stream of catalogues of women’s shoes through the post.

  Another example of the tragic consequences of an escalating activity starting with fetishes is the Canadian, Colonel Russell Williams, the highly respected commander of the largest military base in Canada (Gibb, 2011). As far as is known, Williams’ path towards fatal addiction and escalation started with entering the homes of unsuspecting women to steal their underwear, even trying it on while still in their homes. His biographer suggests that the adrenalin rush of the illegal entry served to add to the attraction of the activity. When this escalated to rape he would take such items as a souvenir of the event.

  There has been speculation (and one can put it no stronger than that) concerning what triggered Williams’ intense fetishist attraction, one suggestion being that he caught glimpses of his highly attractive mother wearing just underwear in the home (Gibb, 2011). Sexual advance towards the mother would have been inhibited with a possible accentuated focus upon her underwear. There is also speculation that he felt a parallel animosity towards the mother, for her role in their dysfunctional family.

  Why the particular content of fetishes?

  McConaghy (1987) recalls the phenomenon of ‘preparedness’ (p. 295): ‘Sexual arousal in male fetishists occurs mainly to objects that are shiny, smooth, silky, and pink or black. Is this a “prepared” association to stimuli similar to the vulva?’ Binet (1887) documented fetishes for women’s hair and also for their body odours, the latter sometimes overriding all other stimuli.

  Pointing to the combination of basic processes of association and more complex uniquely human meaning-related processes, Epstein notes that fetishes (1975, p. 307):

  frequently bear a relationship to body parts or to the person as a whole (shoes, boots, gloves, underclothes, aprons, handkerchiefs) and have the capacity to be applied easily to the body of the self (putting on a shoe). Such an object becomes the equivalent of a body part or person and is endowed with meaning beyond its mere intrinsic qualities.

  By wearing the item of clothing, something that has acquired qualities of desire, the fetishist in some symbolic sense achieves a kind of union with the woman.

  One can speculate on why, ahead of hands and gloves, it is feet and shoes that top the list of fetishes. Let us suppose that the attraction develops by a process of association between things in the real world and also between their representations in memory. Feet are attached to legs and legs are sexually charged by association with genitalia, more so than arms and, by association, hands. At least in industrial societies, feet are normally covered and the process of uncovering them triggers a change in the stimulation reaching the senses. Ramachandran and Blakeslee (1999) suggests that foot fetishes arise because of the proximity in the brain of sensory regions devoted to processing information from the feet and the genitals.2 As a general principle, the process that forms associations tends to be insensitive to constant features of the environment, such as the regularly exposed hands, but would register the sudden appearance of naked feet or feet covered by a stocking. This is presumably one reason why door handles and light fittings rarely if ever feature as fetishes. There is a report that in cultures where breasts are normally exposed men do not tend to eroticize them (Symons, 1995), which could point in a similar direction.

  An animal model of fetishes?

  Investigators have observed fetish-like behaviour in some non-human species and this gives pointers to the kind of process that could underlie a part of the human equivalents. Evidence suggests the attribution of incentive salience by means of classical conditioning. Breland and Breland (1961), two students of B. F. Skinner, carried out an experiment, which involved presenting tokens to various species such as pigs and racoons by means of which they could earn food rewards. The behaviour started off well but then degenerated, in that the token seemed to acquire an inordinate degree of attraction. It was hard for the animal to let go of the token. In a bird species, the Japanese quail, an inanimate object paired with copulation can acquire such a value that the bird tries to mate with the inanimate object (Köksal et al., 2004).

  Lomanowska et al., (2011) presented hungry rats with food pellets at unpredictable intervals. Just prior to the food pellet arriving, a lever would slide into the cage. The rat did not have to contact the lever in any way to get the food. So, the optimal thing to do would be to approach the food cup without delay and take each pellet of food, while ignoring the lever. That is to say, the goal of the food cup would dominate the control of behaviour. Nonetheless, a significant proportion of the rats made energetic contact with the lever, pointing to its strong attraction to them. It appeared that in such rats the low-level dopamine-based control underlying approach behaviour was strongly activated in this situation. Those rats which had experienced maternal deprivation were particularly prone to contact the lever (Lomanowska et al., 2011), suggesting that maternal deprivation sensitized the low-level incentive-based system. The life-histories of sex-related serial killers reveal a tendency to have experienced maternal deprivation and fetishes sometimes assume a great importance (Chapter 21).

  Could arson be a form of fetish?

  At first glance it might seem that there is little link between arson and sexual fetishes. Yet a number of sex offenders have a history of arson and sometimes the act of setting fire is said to take a sexual dimension. For example, the most notorious arsonist in US history, Thomas Sweatt, fits this description.3 He set hundreds of houses and cars alight in the Washington DC area between 1985 and 2005. Driving away from the fires and later, Sweatt masturbated over the imagery. Sweatt, always an oddball, was socially inadequate and regarded himself as a failure. He had a fetish over uniforms, feet and shoe
s and would also use shoes as an object of masturbation.

  Masochism and being dominated

  What is it?

  A classical account of masochism was given by the eighteenth-century Swiss philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Confessions, as he recalled his experiences at age 8 years at the hands of his governess Mlle Lambercier (Rousseau, 1781/1953, pp. 25–6):4

  But when in the end I was beaten I found the experience less dreadful in fact than in anticipation; and the very strange thing was that this punishment increased my affection for the inflictor. It required all the strength of my devotion and all my natural gentleness to prevent my deliberate earning another beating; I had discovered in the shame and pain of the punishment an admixture of sensuality which left me rather eager than otherwise for a repetition by the same hand. No doubt, there being some degree of precocious sexuality in all this, the same punishment at the hands of her brother would not have seemed pleasant at all…

  Who could have supposed that this childish punishment, received at the age of eight at the hands of a woman of thirty, would determine my tastes and desires, my passions, my very self for the rest of my life, and that in a sense diametrically opposed to the one in which they should normally have developed?…Tormented for a long while by I knew not what, I feasted feverish eyes on lovely women, recalling them ceaselessly to my imagination, but only to make use of them in my own fashion as so many Mlle Lamberciers.

  And describing events somewhat later, he continued (pp .27–8)

  Not only, therefore, did I, though ardent, lascivious, and precocious by nature, pass the age of puberty without desiring or knowing any other sensual pleasures than those which Mlle Lambercier had, in all innocence, acquainted me with; but when finally, in the course of years, I became a man I was preserved by that very perversity which might have been my undoing. My old childish tastes did not vanish, but became so intimately associated with those of maturity that I could never, when sensually aroused, keep the two apart.…I never dared to reveal my strange taste, but at least I got some pleasure from situations which pandered to the thought of it.

  To fall on my knees before a masterful mistress, to obey her commands, to have to beg her for forgiveness, have been to me the most delicate of pleasures; and the more my vivid imagination heated my blood the more like a spellbound lover I looked.

  Rousseau reported that he desired to repeat the earlier experience of punishment but dared not ask any woman to perform it, and so had to be content with the imagination.

  There is a high sympathetic nervous system arousal associated with pain, which, provided it is not excessive, might get attached to sexual desire (Zillmann, 1986). Krafft-Ebing (1978) observed (p. 22): ‘It sometimes happens that in boys the first excitation of the sexual instinct is caused by spanking, and they are thus incited to masturbation.’ He noted that, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, passive flagellation was at first welcomed by the church as a form of moral purification. However, it was later opposed after it was observed that sensuality was excited by the process. Amongst some of his patients, masochism was (p. 138) ‘directed exclusively to purely symbolic acts expressing subjection without any actual infliction of pain’.

  In keeping with this interpretation, Baumeister (1988) develops an interesting, albeit speculative, argument on masochism. According to this, masochism is a means for an individual to escape from the self; that is, to get away from meaningful thoughts and painful self-consciousness. In this regard, it is an activity that has the feature of ‘mental narrowing’ in common with extreme exercise, certain spiritual and meditative techniques, alcoholism and binge eating. Masochism moves the focus of attention to the body itself and thereby increases sexual pleasure. Baumeister suggests that painful self-awareness gets in the way of sexual pleasure and masochism is often accompanied by, or is a prelude to, more conventional sexual activity. The masochist switches off from personal and professional roles in life, and the goals and opinions of others. In masochistic sex, people are not acting as observers of their own performance. Performance failure can hardly feature large in masochistic activities; surely most could be confident of their powers of total submission!

  The stereotype of extreme pain is probably a considerable exaggeration if applied universally. Light pain or token pain can suffice for some, as can merely the threat of pain. Madonna (1992, p. 28) observed: ‘I talked to a dominatrix once and she said that the definition of S and M was that you let someone hurt you who you knew would never hurt you.’ A study of masochists revealed the tendency for pain to be within acceptable limits (Gosselin and Wilson, 1980, p. 50): ‘a masochist has little wish to put his head on the block, figuratively or literally, and will only play that role with someone who understands the “rules of the game”’. However, in some cases, ‘the rules of the game’ appeared to be such that injuries were incurred, as in cigarette burns. Such activities might well hold high arousal value, which can be labelled as sexual arousal (Zillmann, 1984). There are various forms that the loss of control can take, most obviously and usually those of bondage and blindfolding.

  In Gosselin and Wilson (1980, p. 56), a neurologist in England gives the following self-report:

  When a person such as myself visits a sympathetic lady so that he might obtain pleasure by her inflicting what most people regard as pain on him, a curious thing happens. With me at any rate, the stimulus must be applied at a very modest intensity at first. As my ritual is carried out, the intensity may be increased without my finding it distressing. By the time climax occurs, the woman is beating me with an intensity that, were it done outside the situation we have arranged, would probably give me a heart attack, whilst my cries would be heard far away. It is by no means easy to explain how such high levels of pain can be not only tolerated but enjoyed.

  This escalation in tolerated intensity suggests that, over the time that this occurs, particular changes are gradually happening in the brain. Doidge (2007) suggests that, under these circumstances the brain rewires itself, so that neurons that were previously triggering its pain regions now come to trigger its pleasure regions. It would be expected that any such wiring manifests its influence only in the specific context of the masochistic experience. There would not be a general loss of the sensation of pain.

  Who are masochists?

  Both males and females are represented amongst masochists, with a slight excess of males. According to Baumeister and contrary to the stereotype of extreme deviation, masochists are generally healthy individuals, ‘normal’ in every other feature of their lives (Gosselin and Wilson, 1980). Masochists tend to be successful individuals of high socioeconomic status, which Baumeister interprets as reflecting the need to escape from the self. Thus, sex workers who cater for this taste tend to derive most of their clients from the rich and powerful. In Washington DC, judges and politicians are the typical clients. A feature in some cases of masochism is full identity change by taking on female characteristics, specifically dressing in women’s clothes.

  Baumeister (1991) argues that the greatly increased frequency of masochism seen in recent centuries reflects the move to greater individualism (p. 121):

  Just when our culture started to increase the stressful burden of the self by insisting that each person cultivate a unique, autonomous, individually responsible and authentic identity, the appetite for sexual masochism emerged historically as a response to the spread of individuality – exactly what one would expect if masochism is an escape from the self.

  A study of those who engage in hardcore sadomasochism, that is where real physical damage is inflicted, revealed that a large percentage had suffered painful surgical interventions in childhood (Stoller, cited by Doidge, 2007). In some way, their development had been such as to eroticize their suffering.

  The nature of pain

  Baumeister suggests that pain causes a fundamental shift in the state of awareness with what is termed a ‘deconstruction of the self’ and a low capacity for abstrac
t thought. The focus shifts to the ‘here and now’ and away from issues of meaning and of long-term concern. Taking a biological perspective, he suggests that in the masochistic experience just sufficient pain can be triggered to act as a narcotic.

  The consequences

  Apparently, masochists experience intense orgasms as a culmination of their activity, which according to Baumeister powerfully reinforce the activity, increasing the future tendency to repeat. As he notes, if masochism has a disinhibiting effect, then new aspects of sexuality might appear – those which were previously desired but suppressed. This would follow logically if control moves to a lower level. Some people reported that they engaged in new experiences for the first time in the course of masochistic sex. It was as if responsibility for performing a previously forbidden act was lifted from the participant and put into the hands of the dominant partner.

  It’s simply enjoyable to submit, when one has to be in control of one’s life all the time. When I have to spend all day every day fulfilling responsibilities and obligations and taking care of business, it’s nice to just let go and give someone else complete and utter control.