Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us

by Bering, Jesse

  Anthropologists have long known just how easy it is to make Western moral compasses spin out of control by describing other “exotic” cultural traditions, especially those involving sex. Consider the elaborate semen-ingestion ritual of the Sambia of Papua New Guinea, in which around their eighth or ninth birthday all of the boys in the community are banished to a bachelor’s hut filled with older males, and for several years thereafter they fellate these more senior figures on a daily basis. The Sambia believe that semen is a magical substance that transforms their youths into mighty soldiers, and the more seminal fluid that boys swallow, the more powerful they become. “By the age of 11 to 12,” explains the anthropologist Gilbert Herdt, “boys have become aggressive fellators who actively pursue semen to masculinize their bodies.” In our society, this “semen-ingestion ritual” would be unspeakable, causing irreparable harm and condemning these boys to lifelong issues with their sexuality. By contrast, Sambia adults and older teenagers who “donate” their semen to young boys are seen as altruistic. And within that society, the boys grow up to be well-adjusted adults who, in turn, give their own magical semen to the next generation. The Sambia perceive harm in denying boys participation in the semen-ingestion ritual, since this is to permanently brand these children as weaklings who were judged unworthy of defending the community as adult warriors.

  Or consider, while we’re on the subject of semen, the case of a Pennsylvania man accused of using syringes to inject what I once heard referred to as “baby batter” through the tinfoil lids of his coworkers’ yogurt containers. Rather disgusting, you’ll certainly say (and to which, I hasten to add, I completely agree). The judge hearing the case called it the “most despicable act” he’d ever seen—this with a long bench history overseeing rape, child abuse, and murder trials—and promptly sentenced the man to two years in federal prison. This man’s actions might strike us as obviously antisocial, raising public health concerns as well as being a rather grotesque form of sexual harassment in the workplace. But there is a cultural context to every crime, even when it comes to tampering with a person’s food by covertly lacing it with seminal fluid. If this troubled man had been a bachelor living in the Egyptian oasis of Siwa in the fairly recent past, a local sage there (the equivalent of our judge here) might have actually instructed him that the surest way to a girl’s heart was concealing his seed in her favorite food. She, in turn, wouldn’t be disgusted on discovering her suitor had done this, but more likely flattered.

  The notion of abnormal sexuality is as much a matter of straying from our culture’s sexual scripts as it is one of violating the laws of reproductive biology. For men, at least, being in a lustful state makes us more likely to wander over both of these lines, and sometimes dangerously so, hurting both ourselves and others in the process. But the concept of the “perversions” (or “going against what is right”) is entirely a phantom of the moralizing human mind. When unburdened of its massive emotional weight, sexual deviance is no more and no less than a statistical concept that signifies being off course from our societal norms. Very little is universal when it comes to human sexuality. And once we acknowledge this lack of universality, the illusion that there’s anything like an objective right and wrong in the vast domain of our species’s libidinal relations shatters beyond repair. The best that psychiatrists can hope to do is to describe and treat sexual deviance in their own idiosyncratic cultures.

  Oddly enough, a healthy dose of moral nihilism is the antidote for so many of the social ills connected to human sexuality. To adopt the most clear-sighted stance on these increasingly slippery subjects, we’ve got to remember to take “deviance” within its given context, and “harm” must be understood as harm experienced by the parties involved, not by us as “disgusted” onlookers. Morality isn’t “out there” in the world; it’s a way of seeing, and it’s constantly evolving. In fact, as we’re about to learn, we don’t even need to look to exotic others to put our critical-thinking abilities to the test in this way. The emotional atmosphere of our own culture has undergone such radical social climate changes that to assume we’re now finally glimpsing a clear moral reality that previous generations simply didn’t notice because of their ignorance and cloudy biases would be stupendously foolish of us.

  THREE

  SISTER NYMPH AND BROTHER SATYR

  People in general let loose the tiger of sexual desire they have kept under leash and occasionally ride on its back until they tumble into the Valley of Ruin.

  —Ogai Mori, Vita Sexualis (1946)

  In the days when there were still kings in France, there was King Louis XIII, or Louis the Chaste. On the throne from 1610 to 1643, the least erotically minded monarch in French history was, it turns out, a pretty active homosexual. I’m referring not to the curious detail of his setting an international fashion craze for men’s wigs that lasted centuries but to the fact that he spent much of his reign in bed with a crimson-headed marquis who’d been gifted to him as a sexual companion by his sensible first minister. Although his own “chaste” glands were actually getting sufficient venting all the while, the sexual desires of Louis XIII’s female subjects were severely stifled. In fact, even an expression as innocent as that—“sexual desires”—if used in reference to female arousal would be something heard only in the somber context of a serious medical consultation. Back then, diagnosing a woman with a libido transpired in the way that doctors today stare down nervously at the floor while breaking the news to family members that their loved one has, indeed, tragically lost both arms to the explosion at the factory.

  One such seventeenth-century Frenchman was Lazare Rivière, the eminent physician-scholar of Montpellier during the reign of Louis XIII. Rivière was a specialist, a pioneer you might even say, in the clinical treatment of female lust. It seemed this disease really was an epidemic throughout France. Why, in Montpellier alone there was a rash of lonely old widows stalking the picturesque meadows in pursuit of penises to sate their venereal appetites, and young girls said to be doing unthinkable things to themselves with (brace yourself) their own hands. That’s not even to mention all the aging lady virgins still without suitors, nor the many women who had married but found themselves now with impotent old husbands. Just like their single contemporaries whom the heavens had so cruelly burdened with ravenous internal genitalia, these women’s needful loins couldn’t be satisfied by an amorous spouse’s purposeful appendage, either. Rivière saw all such creatures as equally dangerous (after all, their desires might lead them to seduce a married man, and that sort of thing was especially frowned upon by His Majesty, King Louis the Chaste). But Rivière also felt that these women should be pitied and cared for. He insisted that many of them were chronic sufferers of a terrible mental illness, one that he liked to refer to as the “madness from the womb.” That’s to say, they were sick.

  According to Dr. Rivière, the central problem was that noxious gases emanate from a piling up of the female’s unspent “seed.” Like fuliginous tentacles with the worst of intentions, these fumes would then creep up from her midsection and into her nervous system, where they’d interfere with her ability to think clearly. Even a normally pious and reserved woman could go insane with passion this way. “It’s the abundance of seed … the parts made for generation, are vehemently stirred up, and inflamed with lustful desires,” wrote Rivière. One can almost picture him patiently explaining this to a local farmer fretting over his growing daughter and the girl’s unmentionable deeds with the carpenter’s son. Flipping through the vellum pages of a hefty book that was his Praxis medica, he’d land with a sure finger—Ah, oui, je l’ai trouvé!—on that all-important line that spelled it out for the man so clearly: “From the same seminal matters so affected, vapors ascend unto the brain which disturb the rational faculty, and depose it from its throne.” Over time, Rivière decried, this process “turns into a true and proper madness.”

  So there you have it: the modern woman’s guide to madness from the womb. But it wasn’
t all bad news, according to this French physician. There were a number of proven techniques for easing the suffering of women whose overheated uteruses caused them to “openly before all the world ask men to lie with them expressing the action of generation in the broadest language their mother tongue affords.” Among these salves were a diet of bland meats (spices would only whip up the woman’s lust), leeches applied to the labia, baths filled with cold lettuce heads, and abstaining from dancing and romance stories. No resting their heads on comfortable pillows, either. Such materials were far too sensuous. Eventually, marriage to a lusty young man would do the trick for those girls with enviable prospects. Such a conjugal stud would be the best solution of all for the devout Christians of Montpellier. In the meantime, or for women who were more likely to go permanently unpartnered, Rivière scribbled out the following prescription:

  The genital parts should be by a cunning midwife so handled and rubbed, as to cause an evacuation of the over-abounding [seed]. But that being a thing not so allowable, it may suffice whilst the patient is in the bath, to rub gently her belly on the region of the womb, not coming near the privy parts, that the lukewarm temper of the water may moderate the hotness of the womb, and that it may by the moisture be so relaxed, as of its own accord to expel the seminal excrement, and that nothing else be done with the hand, save a little to open the womb, so as the water may pass into its more inward parts.

  Peculiar as Rivière’s ideas sound today, the medicalization of female arousal has historically been more the norm than the exception. Such an approach to women’s lust certainly didn’t end with the Enlightenment. The feminist sociologist Carol Groneman has traced the long and depressingly misogynistic history of reproductive medicine, focusing most of her attention on those infamously rigid Victorian attitudes of the nineteenth century. During this period, women continued to be seen as either passive receptacles for men’s pleasures or chattel for the purposes of men’s breeding. (Either way, pathological modesty dictated their flesh be drowned in heavy garments.) Just as in Rivière’s day, expressions of female lust were taken to be signs of illness. The Victorian age is when this viewpoint went global, with doctors around the world now using the diagnosis of “nymphomania” for women with excessive desires (what constituted “excessive” was anyone’s guess, but it usually meant any woman with a pulse).* Nymphomania was just a fancy new way of saying “madness from the womb,” really, with just as much going for it as a scientific concept. Indeed, some gynecologists were recommending anti-nymphomania treatments strikingly reminiscent of Rivière’s quick fixes.

  For example, in 1856, a twenty-six-year-old doctor named Horatio Storer counseled a woman two years his junior who’d made an appointment to see him on account of her very naughty dreams. She also had a much older husband whose flagging erections, she confessed to Storer, couldn’t satisfy her own insatiable sex drive. The young doctor’s advice to this patient makes one wonder if he had an ancient dog-eared copy of Praxis medica tucked away in his desk: stay away from meat, he admonished her, no brandy, and replace the duvet feathers at once with something less sumptuous, like horsehair. He did progress beyond cold-lettuce baths. None of that old-fashioned stuff for the forward-thinking Storer; instead, he calmly instructed the young woman to dab her vagina with borax solution to cool her inflamed passions. (At least it was better than the carbolic acid that other doctors were recommending at the time.) But hers was quite a serious case of nymphomania; it had reached such an advanced stage that the poor thing had even taken to masturbating, of all things. “If she continued in her present habits of indulgence,” Storer notes with colorless authority, “it would probably become necessary to send her to an asylum.” Years later, Storer became president of the American Medical Association and one of this country’s first antiabortion crusaders.

  Storer was quite a piece of work, but he wasn’t alone in his dyspeptic views of female sexuality. Alarmed by the specter of loose women on the prowl, other Victorian-era gynecologists warned their colleagues to be on the lookout for “seductresses” fabricating symptoms of urine retention only to get unsuspecting male doctors to palpate their pudenda. Medical misogyny even found its way into popular culture. British journalists explained how a nymphomaniac could be detected hiding among “normal” females (a snake in the grass, in other words) by her penchant for wearing perfume and flashy jewelry. Even speaking openly of marriage, it was thought, betrayed a woman’s lewd inclinations.

  To complicate matters, physicians weren’t on the same page about what, exactly, nymphomania was. The diagnosis variably meant that the woman was having too much sex, that her desires were “clinically significant,” or that she was a frequent masturbator. Also, given the social stigma that came with receiving such a diagnosis, gynecologists couldn’t always count on their patients being honest about their sex lives. In some recalcitrant cases, doctors relied on “physical symptoms” of nymphomania to diagnose women with the condition. Genital hypertrophy was thought to be one such obvious clue to a woman’s sickness. According to popular folk wisdom at the time, Mother Nature helpfully ratted out Messalinas by branding them with large clitorises, a trait noted as frequently occurring alongside these sickened, improper needs. (The misogyny behind such a “warning sign” is indefensible, but in fact there may be something to this clue. When testosterone treatment is prescribed for women today, side effects often include an enlargement and sensitivity of the clitoris—coincident with a rise in sex drive.)

  * * *

  These were dark days for women. Surgical clitoridectomies were even being recommended as a last line of defense against the great ill of female masturbation. One of the most infamous advocates of this barbaric procedure was an English gynecologist and obstetric surgeon named Isaac Baker Brown, who believed that everything from epilepsy to mania to catalepsy in women stemmed from their self-pleasuring habits. His professional undoing came when he performed the surgery on several patients without their consent while they were under general anesthesia for more routine procedures. Ironically, when Baker Brown died, the dissected brain of this practitioner who, under the cloak of Hippocrates, was so eager to dispose of these body parts of female pleasure was found riddled with syphilis courtesy of his own “excessive” needs.

  It wasn’t just the British who were such prudes during the Victorian era. As we saw with Storer’s handling of his patient, the concept of nymphomania had crossed the oceans. Here’s another American woman of the period describing her battle with masturbation: “While I was praying my body was so contorted with the disease that I could not get away from it even while seeking God’s help.” A tad melodramatic to us today, but that was the mind-set. And it was indeed a warped way of seeing female sexuality. In 1894, an overwrought mother brought her nine-year-old daughter to the New Orleans physician A. J. Block after discovering the little girl masturbating. Block propped up the child on his examining-room table and began inspecting her genitals with his fingers. There was no reaction upon touching her labia. But “as soon as I reached the clitoris,” the doctor later recounted without any emotion, “the legs were thrown widely open, the face became pale, the breathing short and rapid, the body twitched from excitement, slight groans came from the patient.” In Block’s imagination, these responses clearly meant that the child had a very bad case of nymphomania indeed. So, with the approval of the girl’s mother, he performed an emergency clitoridectomy on her.

  When we hear the phrase “female genital mutilation,” our thoughts usually sail over to Africa, but the practice of eliminating a woman’s capacity for sexual pleasure by removing critical parts of her anatomy has a distinctively Western history, too. The gynecologist John Studd (an improbable name given his profession, but true nonetheless) believes that more clitoridectomies were performed in England and the United States over the past two centuries than we’d care to recognize. One of the first uses of radiotherapy was the obliteration of teenage girls’ clitorises to discourage them from masturbating. These
X-ray clitoridectomies weren’t happening in backwater clinics, either, but in some of the most fashionable cities in the world, including London and Manhattan. And this was just in the twentieth century. Fortunately, radiotherapy quickly moved on to its more benevolent purposes (such as the therapeutic treatment of cancer patients, a slightly more humane practice). But the fact that this shiny new technology got its start with such a cruel and unnecessary procedure should give us all pause. Most of these “patients,” after all, were just healthy teenage girls whose parents couldn’t bear the thought of their daughters doing that.

  * * *

  The clinical concept of nymphomania was still floating around as recently as 1964, when the book Nymphomania: A Study of the Oversexed Woman hit the shelves. It’s tempting to dismiss a book with such a sexist title as hogwash—and much of it really is hogwash. But it was taken perfectly seriously at the time, mainly because the well-known psychotherapist Albert Ellis, the founder of cognitive behavioral therapy, was its author. In the book, Ellis (who was no relation to Havelock, by the way) introduces us to several different “types” of nymphomaniacs. Take the twenty-seven-year-old career woman “Dolores,” the “Conquering Woman Type.” To understand Dolores’s nymphomania, the psychologist reasoned, one had to appreciate the self-consciousness she’d long been dealing with over her heavily scarred face, the result of a freak childhood accident. She “found herself,” wrote Ellis, “with an extremely feminine body to go with her disfigured face.” It seems that Dolores had gotten herself into the habit of making conquests of men and then promptly discarding them, with no interest in dawdling in relationships with those who fell in love with her along the way. From one to the next—virgin office boys, married businessmen, clerks long in the tooth and overdue for retirement—she delighted only in the numbers accumulated. Dolores wasn’t a fan of foreplay either. “She wanted the whole thing or nothing,” Ellis shares with his readers. It’s hard to imagine the part in their interview where the woman explained to him her talents in inducing multiple orgasms in men, which the author also tells us about. But in any event, in Ellis’s view, promiscuous sex pacified Dolores’s self-consciousness, making her feel desirable despite her disfigurement. (With that psychoanalytic critique in mind, I can’t help but feel it’s probably for the best that Dolores didn’t know then what we know now about the evolution of male arousal and disgust.)