One reason it’s so difficult for us to exercise our mental faculties in a proper way when it comes to the subject of deviant sex, instead being ruled by emotional reactions that fail to give accurate weight to the question of harm, is what we might call “the disgust factor.” Feelings of disgust have a way of undermining our social intelligence and indeed of compromising our very humanity. In fact, as we’re about to see, if there’s anything that researchers have learned about moral reasoning and sex in the past decade, it’s that disgust is the visceral engine of hate. The good news is that once you understand how the whole thing works, you can kill that engine. Our best hope of addressing this deep-seated problem of sexual disgust is to do some reverse engineering on its adaptive functions. Because let’s face it, when you’re not in the mood or you’re not attracted to the person whose sex life it is that you’re contemplating, sex can be gross. And deviant sex, almost by definition, is bound to gross out more people than normal sex. But disgust doesn’t justify the ravages of inequity and oppression on the lives of sexual deviants themselves.
TWO
DAMN DIRTY APES
The butting of his haunches seemed ridiculous to her, and the sort of anxiety of his penis to come to its little evacuating crisis seemed farcical. Yes, this was love, this ridiculous bouncing of the buttocks, and the wilting of the poor insignificant, moist little penis.
—D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)
The entire ordeal is something of a blur to me now, but the one thing that I remember clearly about my first experience with another man (a real Homo sapiens this time) is that he was far more interested in fellating my toes than he was in doing anything with some other body part of mine. Well, different strokes for different folks, you’ll say. Really, that’s quite kind and understanding of you. But if you ever have the misfortune of actually seeing my feet, which are vaguely reminiscent in both color and shape (I hesitate to say smell, but if truth be told, sometimes that too) of the sparsely haired underbelly of a dead possum, you’d realize just how extraordinary this man’s bedroom behaviors really were. That a person could become so sexually excited—in the full curtain-drawn light of day, no less—by something that I perceived to be so disgusting mystified me.
To this day, I avoid making direct eye contact with my feet when taking a shower, so it’s still hard for me to completely understand his actions. I do, however, have a better sense of the mechanics behind this man’s lustful psychology. First of all, it’s clear he was a podophile. The words look and sound very similar, but note that’s an o and not an e as in “pedophile.” (I was young but not that young, after all.) Podophilia, or “foot fetishism,” is by far the most common manifestation of what sexologists refer to as a sexual “partialism,” which is an erotic preoccupation with a nonreproductive body part. Feet, belly buttons, teeth, noses, eyeballs, earlobes, pinkie toes, calves, nipples—there are partialists for any type of localized real estate you can imagine, and their desire for this part exceeds (and sometimes even excludes) their interest in the genitalia. In any event, my awkward first experience with a disgust-challenged podophile who was willing to be intimate even with my feet encouraged me to read up on the curious history of foot fetishism.
It was none other than Havelock Ellis who first unraveled the mind-set of the podophile.* Unlike the subject of Sexual Inversion, Ellis’s sharp-eyed analytical focus on foot fetishists zeroed in on the heterosexuals among them. “In a small but not inconsiderable minority of persons,” he wrote in 1927, “the foot or boot becomes the most attractive part of a woman, and in some morbid cases the woman herself is regarded as a comparatively unimportant appendage.”† I know how she feels. Ever since Ellis dug his heels into the matter, case studies of foot fetishism have continued to find an attentive audience. Homosexual, heterosexual, and even bisexual podophiles have all made sporadic appearances in psychological write-ups. But as far as I know, there has only been one attempt in all of podophilic history to explain foot fetishism using evolutionary theory. And believe it or not, it’s not an altogether ridiculous Darwinian hypothesis, either.
The psychologist James Giannini put the idea forward in 1998. Giannini had discovered a revealing sociosexual trend concerning podophilia. Throughout the course of human history, the cultural eroticization of the female foot predictably peaked whenever there was an outbreak of venereal disease, and then just as predictably it leveled out again as the epidemics ran their courses. Foot love blossomed during the gonorrhea epidemic in the thirteenth century, for example, syphilis in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, and even AIDS in the late twentieth century. (As if the oppressive Inquisition weren’t bad enough, Spain was also suffering from a large syphilitic population just as the heresy trials were heating up. With all that was going on, it seems like an odd time for Spanish painters to begin specializing in portraits of women’s feet, but this is precisely when that artistic oeuvre really took off. New shoe styles showing a teasing bit of “toe cleavage” were also all the rage.) Even if you’re straight and into a lady’s lower extremities, you can’t very well impregnate her foot to spread your genes. Giannini’s claim was simply that if one’s arousal were primarily but not exclusively confined to nonreproductive parts, then less frequent contacts (or maybe less exuberant ones) with infectious genitalia could meaningfully reduce the risk of infertility or even death. If such outbreaks were common enough in our deep past, suggested Giannini, then people who were able to become sexual partialists would have an advantage over those concentrating all their attention on the body’s more dangerous hot spots.
* * *
There’s still that puzzling question of how the podophile could suckle toes from hooves as hideous as mine. I do try to keep them clean, but they are feet, after all, and one can’t always know exactly what’s going on down there with the fungus scene. In fact, never mind feet, it’s astonishing that we’re so willing during sex acts to put any body part in our mouths that doesn’t belong to us. Penises don’t always come out smelling of roses either, and consider the flourishing bacterial substrate that is the human vagina. This region can play host to more than four hundred different species of organisms, and healthy female anatomies contain numerous acids that combat yeast and pathogens and give vulvae their odoriferous punch.* Not only that, but in both sexes, there are distinct glandular secretions that you’d rather not know about gathering unseen around the anus, face, groin, scalp, and umbilicus. There’s also, of course, prodigiously generated sweat, tears, urine, dental plaque, sebum, earwax, smegma, and that most formidable foe to our sexual arousal that is feces. More specific culinary hurdles depend on the sex of your partner. If employing your mouth on a man’s body, for instance, your palate can anticipate being greeted unexpectedly by pre-ejaculate or semen. Women’s equally aqueous bodies, by contrast, are often plentiful reservoirs of vaginal fluids, breast milk, and menstrual blood. Considering what walking factories of ick we human beings are, it’s amazing that we’ve managed not only to survive as a sexual species by wanting to copulate with each other but to do it often enough over our 150,000-year eyeblink of an existence that we’re now straining the planet’s natural resources beyond all capacity.
The secret to our “success” lies in how our lustful mammalian minds evolved to handle each other’s sometimes-repellent bodies. It’s quite an exquisite operating system, too. Lust and disgust are antagonistic forces in an emotional balancing act that serves to push us toward orgasm (through lust) or to turn us away from it (through disgust). It’s a dynamic relationship with ancient origins. For example, DNA sequencing reveals that the “murid rodent ancestor” (a term that signifies the last common ancestor of human beings, mice, and rats—so a slightly different take on Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men) last scurried upon this earth around eighty-seven million years ago. Yet the subjective experience of disgust is every bit as much the modern rat’s carnal kryptonite as it is ours. If you take a healthy, virile adult male rat and allow him to have unbr
idled sex with a female in heat and then immediately inject him with a nausea-inducing drug such as lithium chloride, he’ll acquire a total aversion to sex. Nothing else has this effect. Even if you shock him while he’s doing it, or inflict any other type of cruel punishment, this won’t diminish his sexual appetite—only disgust does that. It’s just his mating behaviors that are affected, too; the lithium chloride has no effect on his social behavior in general. He’ll be as affable with his rat friends as ever, in other words, but he won’t be doing that horrible pelvic-thrusting stuff for a while, since that’s what made him so miserable the last time around.
While we’re on the general subject of our animal ancestry, one of the more creative accounts of the relationship between sex and disgust in human beings comes from the field of “terror management theory,” which postulates that any disgust reactions we have to sex actually stem from the fear of our own mortality. Sex is so corporeal, or bodily, the argument goes, that it’s a uniquely powerful reminder of our animal nature. And just like other animals we’ve got one-way tickets to Decomposition Central, which is a very scary place to us. It’s so scary, terror-management theorists claim, that if our brains were to dwell on this reality for too long, we’d become so paralyzed with fear that we’d no longer be able to function adaptively. Human beings coped with their awareness of death, these scholars believe, by inventing various cultural expressions of immortality to quell their existential fright. (All of this is presumably happening subconsciously, mind you.) And by the looks of it, the idea of sex presents some big challenges to our species in this uncomfortably mortal regard.
In one study, for instance, having people contemplate their own deaths caused them to favor a definition of sex in its more lofty, abstract forms (such as “making love” rather than “copulating”). Concepts like love and romance are said to be “symbolically immortal,” helping to return the individual to a more manageable state of death anxiety. Presumably, this is why we’re so enamored of slogans such as “A diamond is forever” and why poetic lines like Emily Dickinson’s “Unable are the Loved to die / For Love is Immortality” strike a true and universal chord. Compare those maudlin sentiments with Shakespeare’s lurid metaphor for sex in Othello as “making the beast with two backs” or his describing a couple as “prime as goats” and “hot as monkeys.” You’d find Shakespeare’s language here especially gross, the argument goes, right after being told you’ve got an inoperable brain tumor and have only a few months to live. Like another famous theory that’s based on subconscious anxieties, it has its limits, but I think there’s probably something to terror management theory. It could explain Rick Santorum believing gay marriage is a stone’s throw away from interspecies marriage, anyway. That poor man—the mere act of ejaculating, reminding him that he’s an animal, must be so existentially terrifying to him.
Yet we don’t need complex psychodynamics to understand how it all really works. We lost our rodent tails and whiskers long ago, but even for us postmodern animals it’s still best not to think too much about all those bodily secretions and worrisome odors of ours while having sex. Even the best relationships can be strained by having to explain to your loving partner why you look as if you’ve just gotten a nose full of rancid vinegar while performing oral sex on him. Fortunately, most of us can overcome these seemingly insurmountable sensory barriers thanks to a brain that’s able to subjectively sanitize such sticky situations. One that evolved to be overly sensitive to disgust during sex wouldn’t have been very adaptive after all; so prudish a creature would perish in its own purity as a genetic dead end. Rather, as Sigmund Freud wrote, “our libido thrives on obstacles” and “in its strength enjoys overriding disgust.” Indeed, more recent scholars have found that our willingness (and sometimes our eagerness) to let others’ body products make contact with our lips and tongues or even to slip down our throats entirely is a product of our fluctuating arousal levels. When we’re horny, we’re happy to dip into someone else’s organic buffet. Really. There are even data on it.
In a study with straight undergraduate students in Denmark, for example, most of the males said they’d be willing to taste a woman’s breast milk if they were aroused, but far fewer said they’d ever do so if they weren’t turned on. Similarly, most women could see themselves ingesting semen if they were hot and bothered, but the thought of swallowing fresh seminal fluid when not in the mood was enough to send shivers up many spines. Imagining having to taste someone else’s sweat, tears, and saliva, meanwhile, wasn’t especially sickening to the students either way. By contrast, very few men or women—no matter how concupiscent they might be—ever wanted to taste menstrual blood. And wouldn’t you know it, while most of the female students said they’d be willing to give it a go if they felt sufficiently lustful, only 3 percent of the males in the study warmed up to the idea of ever tasting another man’s smegma.
This overall pattern of findings makes some sense in evolutionary terms. When the system works smoothly, sexual arousal can serve to anesthetize the otherwise adaptive disgust response long enough for people to get on with the Darwinian business of reproduction. (Well, heterosexual people, anyway. It just allows us homosexuals to have decent sex.) But questionnaire studies aren’t the greatest when it comes to tapping into behaviors fueled by strong emotions. Even if a straight man were willing to taste another man’s smegma when drunk with desire, he might not know it himself, or he might not share that fact on a survey. More creative approaches induce actual sexual arousal in participants to see how the state of lust alters their real-time perception of disgusting objects or affects their behaviors. In one study, researchers first exposed straight male subjects to porn. Only then did the real testing begin. The psychologists behind the scenes, led by Richard Stevenson, were curious to know if sexual arousal lessens disgust for sexual cues only or for nasty things altogether. We can therefore think of their experiment as pitting a “local anesthetic” hypothesis of disgust management against a “general anesthetic” one. To get at this, the scientists invaded the sensory systems of these now very aroused men with terribly yucky things, comparing their perceived grossness of gross sex cues with their reactions to cues that were just generally gross.
For the sensation of touch, for instance, the lustful men were told to dip their hands into a bucket filled with either lubricated condoms (for sexual disgust) or cold pea-and-ham soup (for general disgust). For hearing, they listened to a brief sound bite of someone either performing oral sex or vomiting. (These do sometimes go together, but let’s not complicate matters.) Smell, meanwhile, was a whiff of rotting fish (for sexual disgust) or of feces (for general disgust). Seeing involved being exposed to the image of a horribly disfiguring scar on a naked woman or a pile of decomposing garbage. Fortunately for the participants, the researchers chose not to include the sense of taste in this particularly interactive study of disgust. That would have probably been “a little much,” as my dad likes to say.
The findings support our local anesthetic hypothesis. Sexual arousal, or at least male sexual arousal, numbed the participants’ gut-level aversion to sexual unpleasantries only, not to the whole disgusting lineup. Even when we’re in the middle of doing disgusting things with each other under the sheets, in other words, we’re just as sensitive to the revolting features of the noncarnal world above. Think of it this way: When you’re in the throes of orgasm, the fact that the hot guy or gal you met at the club last night hasn’t showered since yesterday and smells a little funky probably isn’t too much of a hindrance to your ultimate pleasure. But if you move your passionate lovemaking to the other room, where in your mad dash to tear each other’s clothes off, your nostrils suddenly detect the unmistakable smell of decomposing human flesh coming from beneath the bed, that would probably be a sensory deal breaker for your bliss. (Not to mention you’d have a different type of “happy ending” to worry about now—in the form of getting out alive.) In fact, the olfactory category in Stevenson’s study, which, if you rec
all, compared the rotting fish smell with the feces smell, was the only one for which the lustful male raters found the stimuli to be equally pleasant (or unpleasant, depending on how you look at it). But that’s actually not very surprising if we understand lust as dampening sex-related disgust for all bodily effluvia, not just those emanating from one particular orifice. Necrophiles aside, the smell of a moldering corpse tends to be sexually off-putting. Yet there are plenty of smells from living bodies that most of us don’t find too pleasant, either. And it’s not just “fishy” smells that can be an orgasmic barrier for straight men, after all. Women, from what I understand, have anuses too, and an odeur de colon can be a psychological impediment to sex for both men and women, gay or straight.
By virtue of certain “anatomical affordances,” however, and the limiting nature of homosexual male intercourse (that is, anal sex), gay men are frequently the targets of a cheap rhetorical strategy designed to evoke a moralizing disgust response. “It’s wrong because it’s gross” is, of course, a rather transparent case of moral dumbfounding. Yet painting gay men as depraved creatures rife with infectious disease whose idea of a relaxing Sunday afternoon involves wallowing in feces and smelly assholes can be alarmingly effective at keeping heterosexuals from seeing them as fellow human beings. For example, whenever the subject of gay men crops up at the various websites, news feeds, and online forums that cater primarily to social conservatives (they do really love to talk about us queer folk), post after scatological post is a display of this antifecal-therefore-antigay mentality. “If your personal identity revolves around your lust for other men’s stinking anuses,” wrote one man at the Free Republic website in response to a news story about gay pride, “a particularly disgusting form of depravity that spreads horrific diseases, the chest swells with self-satisfaction.” Another weighs in: “Homosexuals should never have got their special rights like civil unions let alone marriage or Don’t-Ask[-Don’t-Tell] in the first place. The ignorant and stupid on our side wanted to appease them and usually say: ‘I know a couple and they are nice’ … friggin idiots … when did we base special rights based on fecal diseased sex in the constitution?”
Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us Page 5