Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us

by Bering, Jesse

  When the romantic relationships of gay men are repeatedly linked with excrement this way, the disgust response makes it much easier to sell them as immoral. And in the battle against the “homosexual agenda,” this has quickly become a core strategy in the tireless and patriotic efforts against, ahem, “evil.” Really, I’m not kidding: anything even remotely related to gay men—Anderson Cooper chuckling uncontrollably during a newscast, Barney Frank bending over to tie his shoelaces, a scandalous plot twist on the sitcom Modern Family—will faithfully serve to induce a reverie of maledictions for their anuses.

  We can also induce disgust to sway a person’s political views. It’s one of the oldest tricks around. “Just look at these guys!” the Nazi author of an illustrated children’s book wrote for his young German readers in 1938. “The louse-infested beards! The filthy, protruding ears, those stained, fatty clothes … Jews have an unpleasant sweetish odor. If you have a good nose, you can smell the Jews.” (The book’s publisher was later executed as a war criminal for his central role in peddling anti-Semitic propaganda.) For those who don’t know how the trick works, it can get them every time. A study by the psychologists Yoel Inbar, David Pizarro, and Paul Bloom illustrates how the experience of disgust can make even those who aren’t normally intolerant express strikingly bigoted views. In the study, a group of straight male and female undergrads from Cornell University were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. For the sake of clarity, we’ll call these the “stink” and “no-stink” conditions. All of the students sat alone in a private room and completed a survey about their attitudes on a range of social and political issues. For those in the stink condition, a research assistant had sneaked in beforehand and applied a novelty spray to a trashcan in the corner. (This smell—I got the sense from speaking to one of the authors—was vaguely akin to that of a hospital emergency-room toilet.) The no-stink participants were tested in the same room and answered the very same survey, but, luckily for their brains’ olfactory bulbs, they weren’t exposed to the bad odor while doing so.

  The findings are revealing. Irrespective of the gender of the participants and their self-reported political orientation (they ranged from “extremely liberal” to “extremely conservative” in their worldviews), those who were randomly assigned to the stink condition expressed significantly more disapproval toward gay men than did those in the no-stink condition. It wasn’t that the bad smell simply made these participants crankier in general while pondering their feelings on social issues. In fact, their opinions of other minority groups (such as blacks and the elderly) weren’t any different from those of the cohort in the no-stink condition. The disgusting smell just made these very bright and perfectly polite students from an Ivy League university less sympathetic to gay men. (The data trended in this direction for their judgments about lesbians, too, but the effect wasn’t as strong.)

  Now, we needn’t dwell on the obvious (anal sex isn’t limited to gay men, not all gay men have anal sex, straight people can get HIV through intravaginal sex, and—it’s really not a myth—condoms do exist). But just for the record, the average gay man is no less repulsed by a sexual experience involving feces than are most other human beings. I’m careful here to say “most” because there are indeed a handful of people who walk among us who could be considered truly “coprophilic,” which means they have a strong erotic attraction to feces. It’s not my sort of thing, and I’d imagine there’s a lot more scrubbing involved than there is with your average postcoital cleanup job, but assuming one takes certain precautions, it seems harmless enough to me, really. Kind of a funny thing about coprophilia, too: the only documented cases are heterosexual men.

  * * *

  Feces ranks among the most rare aphrodisiacs, but we shouldn’t forget that rather than seeing it as a turnoff, some people actually get turned on by the human body in its more natural aromatic form. Upon finishing a military campaign, Napoleon Bonaparte, who despised the saccharine fragrance of perfumes, sent that notorious memo to his wife, Joséphine. It read simply: “Coming home soon; don’t wash.” The existence of human pheromones (or scent-based hormones that stimulate strong desire in the opposite sex) is still hotly debated, but whatever their role in our sexuality, it’s no longer as major as it was in the days of the murid rodent ancestor. Male hamsters, for example, will hump anything dabbed with the vaginal secretions of a female in heat. By contrast, human males told to inhale a woman’s bottled-up vaginal odors without knowing what it is that’s under their noses generally find it off-putting. According to the psychologist Roy Levin, most heterosexual men express an “affectionate distaste” for the smell (tolerating it but not exactly enjoying it). Yet he also notes that plenty of other men, and lesbians too for that matter, have come to fetishize it. Certainly there are brazen admirers, especially when the smell is indicative of youth. Levin describes stumbling upon a product called Girl Scent on the Internet (now be nice, it was during his very important research obviously) with this colorful marketing description:

  Girl Scent is a new erotic scent scientifically designed to smell like a young woman’s sexy vagina aroma. It was created by studying the sex pheromones and other aroma chemicals in samples of vaginal secretions gathered from dozens of healthy girls. Many men risk disease by purchasing worn panties on the Net. Girl Scent gives you a whole bottle without risk of infection!

  “There does not appear to be a similar scent of male genital odor synthesized for women,” observed Levin.

  That may be. But perhaps it’s only so because we don’t yet have data on women smelling semen or men’s crotches. Rest assured, however, that we do have findings on them inhaling their male partner’s armpit secretions. And some women report an intense olfactory appreciation of this distinctive scent. This is particularly the case when men have different major histocompatibility complex (MHC) alleles (or genes that code for proteins involved in the recognition of biological relatedness) from the woman. When these MHC alleles differ, women judge male scents to be more pleasant (or at least less heinous) than when the alleles match. Evolutionary biologists believe that this is an adaptation—an unconscious one, needless to say—meant to steer women away from incest. Any prospective genetic recombination involving these different alleles helps to insulate offspring against disease and recessive mutations. If you’re a straight woman of reproductive age and dare to put the theory to the test, have your dad and your current male sex partner (husband, fiancé, boyfriend, the cute-but-not-very-bright barista who’s been giving you those courtesy espressos lately, any of them will do, really) wear the same undershirt for a full, unbathed week. Once the two men peel these items off their ripe torsos, code whose is whose somehow and then mix them up so you can’t tell by appearance alone. Dab the armpit portions of both malodorous garments generously on your philtrum (that little odor-catching trap between your nasal septum and your upper lip) and see which makes you amorous. And if neither of these mephitic fabrics gets you worked up, don’t worry: note that sometimes it isn’t so much a pleasure response as the lesser of two evils that reveals the general effect.

  Even for those of us who are prone to gagging at basic human emissions, however, our locally anesthetized disgust usually helps us to get the sexual job done.* Still, in the heat of the moment, our potential for disgust has only been dulled, not put into a coma where absolutely nothing about our partners’ bodies can shake us out of our erotic trance. In fact, the system evolved with its own sensible limits. Surely you’d be excited to finally tear off the clothes of that attractive coworker you’ve long had your eyes on, for example, but removing his underwear and observing what appears and smells to be a raft of expired, sizzling bacon strips would put a damper on things. Or here’s a homework assignment. The next time you’re online and find yourself—funny how that happens—in a lascivious state while masturbating to your favorite porn, abruptly switch gears to do a Google image search for sexually transmitted infections. If you’re an ovulating female, be forewarned: com
ing so suddenly like that upon the monstrously deformed and scab-covered penises of the afflicted may well make your ovum frantically double back into your fallopian tubes in a reversed race to the mother ship. And straight males blinking their eyes at all those multicolored vulvae with eruptions of syphilis, genital warts, crabs, gonorrhea, scabies, pelvic inflammatory disease, herpes, or any other weeping, oozing, bursting incarnations of a true libidinal nightmare can expect to undergo penile detumescence at warp speed. (I think I’m finally starting to get what that foot fetishist saw in me. Against the backdrop of festering genitalia, my feet are quite handsome, really.)

  What this sojourn into such a vivid venereal hell tells us is that if the disgust gets really potent, our brains have an emergency “kill switch” that can shut down the whole lustful operation no matter how far things have already gotten under way. Seeing such clear signs—blinking, throbbing marquees, effectively—of a communicable sexual disease and going forward with the sex act anyway wouldn’t have been a very adaptive evolutionary decision for our ancestors. And as a safety precaution, our sex drive is also likely to remain out of service for a while in the aftermath of such a traumatic sensory affair. After all, the brain has now received vital information about venomous genitalia being out there in the social environment, and some (the asymptomatic cases) might not be so painfully obvious.

  The overall effect is similar to what happens with a food-related conditioned taste aversion. Whether it’s an accident of timing and menu choice (such as a chance coupling of the flu and potato salad), or a bad bout of nausea or hurling our guts out after we’ve incorporated some actual contaminants that have made us sick (perhaps a disgruntled cafeteria worker laced that all-American picnic staple with arsenic), our bodies are exquisitely designed for one-shot learning in avoiding hazardous foods. Once you ingest that particular food and soon after get violently ill, you don’t have to convince yourself to avoid it tomorrow. In the present case, one day down the road your body may let you revisit potato salad as a possibility, but for the foreseeable future your stomach rejects it as a viable option.

  Likewise, the feeling of overwhelming disgust while we’re sexually aroused can cause us to avoid for a while whatever erotic situation it was that put such an instant crimp in our libido. We might call this the “conditioned carnal aversion” effect. In the past, this mechanism was, sadly, exploited by psychiatrists attempting to “cure” gays and lesbians. In a behavioral modification technique known as “covert sensitization” (a form of classical conditioning), patients are told to visualize a highly unpleasant scenario occurring in tandem with their unwanted behaviors or desires. If you were an unhappily gay male patient of the psychiatrist Barry Maletzky in 1973, for instance, you might have been given the following story to help rid you of your cravings for other men’s privates.* “You’re at the beach with a special person, John,” the vignette began:

  Imagine the ocean, the smell of salt air. You lie down behind a sand dune and start to embrace and undress each other. You can see his penis hard and stiff. He starts rubbing it back and forth. But as you get closer you notice a strange odor and you see small white worms, like lice, crawling in the hair around his penis! You’re touching them with your mouth! It’s disgusting and it’s making you sick. Some of them have gotten onto you. They’re crawling into your mouth. Your stomach starts to churn and food particles catch in your throat. Big chunks of vomit come into your mouth. Vomit dribbles down your chin. You can see the worms still, crawling in your puke, and you get sicker than before.

  Such an intervention didn’t exactly turn gay men straight, but it did occasionally turn them off from having sex with other men for a while. (After reading an equally disgusting story featuring a worm-eaten vagina, after all, I’m guessing a lot of straight men would probably avoid those for a time too.) Since the effect would wear off before long and the man’s lustful gay desires eventually return, some clinicians recommended that the patient keep a handy flask in his pocket containing a foul-smelling liquid or chemical. Armed like this with his very own portable emetic, the patient could then quickly pull out the bottle and hold it under his nose to invoke a vicious bout of nausea (better yet, vomiting) whenever he became “inappropriately” aroused by the same sex. It’s kind of like those poor copulating rats being given a shot of lithium chloride to turn them asexual, only here some gay people had learned to hate themselves as “perverts” so much that they could even be taught to self-administer their own poison.

  * * *

  In the politically less dramatic world of heterosexual desire, there are interesting mechanisms in their own right when it comes to lust and disgust. For example, there’s reason to believe that the precise hydraulics involved in these counterbalancing forces evolved to work in slightly different ways in the brains of men and women. The best way to interpret the sex differences we’re about to examine is through the adaptive lens of “parental investment theory.” There are many complex layers of caveat and detail to the biologist Robert Trivers’s classic evolutionary theory, but its basic ideas (and those now accepted by experts as truisms) have to do with the costs of casual sex being unequal for males and females. (And note that the theory clarifies that our sexual brains work the way they do today as the result of conditions faced by our ancestors tens of thousands of years ago when they first evolved—a time when birth control and prophylactics weren’t anywhere to be had.)

  Women are born with a finite number of eggs (one to two million on average) and can bear only a finite number of offspring before reaching menopause. Pregnancy, childbirth, and breast-feeding all place tremendous demands on the female body. Furthermore, nine long months of gestation, several of which can make women largely dependent on others for their survival, are followed by a period of infertility while lactating that puts them even further out of reproductive commission. For a woman in the ancestral past to have sex (thereby placing herself at the risk of conceiving) was therefore to have assumed a significant “cost,” one that even included the possibility of her own death through pregnancy- or birth-related complications. Under these conditions, natural selection favored a conservative investment strategy for her ovarian assets, which meant women were generally wary of casual sex and relatively choosy about their sexual partners. (These are gender trends, needless to say, not hard-and-fast rules. We’ll also be encountering plenty of folks whose sexualities stray far from these normative patterns.)

  Men’s bodies, on the other hand, produce around eighty-five million sperm cells per day, per testicle. Over the course of an average life span, that adds up to more than a quadrillion gametes. With virtually unlimited holdings like these—and being virile on any given day of the month, too—a bit of seminal splurging here or there wasn’t “costly” at all for our male ancestors. Rather, evolutionarily speaking, sex is cheap for men. This is especially true, of course, since it’s not the male who could end up with an adorable but demanding little incubus inside his body cavity growing exponentially for the better part of a year only to be, at long last, expelled painfully out of his urethra. Instead, if his female partner got pregnant as the result of his three-minute time sink (the average latency for a man to ejaculate into a vagina), then all the better for his genetic replication. Given these factors of having gametes galore and being immune to pregnancy, the most adaptive investment strategy for human males, so the Trivers theory goes, involved a general penchant for casual sex and not being too picky about one’s sexual partners.

  With these differential costs in parental investment between the sexes, then, the key for each would have been to experience sexual disgust to the right degree and by the right stimuli. Let’s start with the bells and whistles of the lust-and-disgust hydraulic system at work in the evolved male brain. Bearing those earlier investment strategies in mind, note that any man who was too choosy, too often, and too easily grossed out would have frequently missed opportunities to spread his genes. With spermatozoa by the mega-millions chomping at the bit in
his gonads and trillions more to take their place, easily overcoming sexual disgust, especially when it came to having sex with “receptive” females, would have been a pressing adaptive problem for the ancestral human male.

  And by the overpopulated state of things today, he seems to have solved this problem like a rock star. You’ll recall what Freud said about the human libido and how it “thrives on obstacles.” Once a strong degree of male arousal occurs, only the most blatant of maladaptive emergencies can trigger the erotic kill switch. Otherwise, the male gene-reproducing operation is lustfully motivated to go forward at all costs. This even applies to instances for which, in a less aroused frame of mind, the male would clearly see the massive long-term risks he’s taking on by proceeding with such a reckless romantic mission.

  When it comes to sexually transmitted infections, for example, more than a few dangerous viruses (both those of today and those of the past) could again be asymptomatic. Signs of overt disease will loyally deflate an erection into a protective state of flaccidity, and this aversion may even be temporarily generalized to other women for the reasons we’ve gone over. But assuming that no such conditioned carnal aversion has occurred, any unprotected sex (which, remember, was the only form of sex our ancestors were having) has always come with a health risk for men. From an unconscious evolutionary perspective, it was a risk worth taking. That’s according to Richard Stevenson, anyway, the researcher who had those male students fondle lubricated condoms and cold pea-and-ham soup. He reasons that “[men’s] need to ‘lower the guard’ can be seen as one of a large number of balancing acts that organisms must engage in to optimize breeding success.”