Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us
Page 9
Then there was Ellis’s case of “Gail,” or more precisely the case of “Gail and Burt.” “Several homosexual-nymphomaniacal matings have come to my attention in recent years,” Ellis begins his account of the “Neurotic Type” of the oversexed female. Such “matings” referred to those mismatched domestic partnerships, apparently quite common in the 1950s and ’60s, in which a loose woman sets up a home with a gay man. The psychologist speculated that more often than not in such cases, the homosexual male represents a sort of masculine safe haven that an insecure nymphomaniac can depend on without having to fear that she’ll be traded in for a more attractive woman.
Gail was a single mother, and Burt was helping to raise her young son. The pair was endowed with perfectly compatible personalities and reproductive anatomies, but given that both had an eye for men, never the twain shall their genitalia meet. “Now, let’s not be so cynical,” Ellis would surely have interjected in reaction to our pessimism. Nymphomaniacal Gail, you see, was also deeply in love with the flamboyant Burt. Not only was he attractive, he was also intelligent, a good conversationalist, and a caring father figure to her child, whose biological father was apparently not in the picture. Gail would happily give up her wild ways if only her gay BFF would cultivate a passion for vulvae. Namely hers. Wasn’t there anything, anything at all, she could do to get Burt to burn with desire for her rather than for other men? “I told Gail that this was theoretically possible,” Ellis explains:
since homosexuals are not born the way they are and can, and in some instances do, change remarkably, so that they can enjoy heterosexual activities. But I told her that Burt was not likely to change, because he did not consider himself disturbed. He insisted he thoroughly enjoyed his homosexual activities and showed no inclination whatever to come for therapy.*
This psychologist wasn’t one to allow a little thing like patient consent stop him from trying to cure an inconveniently stubborn man of his homosexual ways, however. “If she wanted to try,” Ellis tells us of his conversations with Gail, “there was nothing to be lost in attempting to seduce Burt into heterosexuality … [so] the two of us devised a plan of attack on Burt’s heterosexual virginity.” Basically, Ellis instructed his client to weasel her hands into Burt’s pajama pants while he slept at night. Since the two lived together anyway, and since the house was so small that they had to share a bed (probably not the brightest idea, really), there was plenty of opportunity for such stealth maneuvers. Being in a dream-induced stupor would presumably minimize Burt’s resistance to Gail’s unbidden affections. Technically, Ellis prescribed a sexual assault, but let’s not get lost in the semantics.
Ellis reports to us that Burt showed some “irritation” upon waking to discover the woman fondling him and rudely mouthing his thoroughly unimpressed organ. Eventually, however, with Gail hinting that she couldn’t go on with a sexless relationship for much longer, the gay man began to shrug his shoulders and let the straight woman have her hopeless way. Then, one magical night a few months later, and to both of their surprise, Burt experienced an orgasm during one of Gail’s persistent manipulations. Slowly working their way up to some clumsily deliberate intercourse, similar transactions of viscous pleasure hesitantly followed. And soon the trio—Gail, Burt, and Albert Ellis—were cautiously celebrating Burt’s newfound heterosexuality.
As it turns out, caution was warranted. It soon became apparent that Burt was only going along with this gay conversion plan because he was petrified of losing his otherwise pleasant home life, his close friendship with Gail, and his relationship with her young son, to whom he was very attached. After all, if a closeted zoophile can ejaculate into his wife by pretending that she’s a horse, then an admirably motivated gay man can, at least on those occasions when his hormonal stars are perfectly aligned, also make out a subcutaneous Adonis in a woman’s labial folds. Nonetheless, this admitted lack of sincere change in Burt made Ellis grow impatient with the unwitting gay client’s failure to acknowledge his “disturbance.” I can just picture the exasperated therapist snapping his pencil in two, taking a deep breath, and finally summarizing the trying case when he concludes: “He was doing the right thing for the wrong reason.” The “right” reason to be straight, in Ellis’s 1964 view, was self-evident: straight was simply what every person should be. The psychologist gives us no closure on the case of the “homosexual-nymphomaniacal” mating pair. But I’d like to think they’re happily married senior citizens now, both with their very own husbands.
* * *
Compared with nymphomania, the medicalization of “excessive” male lust—at least when it comes to the heterosexual variety—is historically less noteworthy. But male genitals didn’t go entirely unscathed during the moralistic heights of the Victorian era either. The next time you pour yourself a bowl of Special K cereal, think of the very special advice given to young wankers by the inventor of cornflakes, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg: “Boys, are you guilty of this terrible sin? Have you even once in this way yielded to the tempter’s voice? Stop, consider, think of the awful results, repent, confess to God, reform. Another step in that direction and you may be lost, soul and body. You cannot dally with the tempter. You must escape now or never.” And for parents at their wit’s end with their masturbating sons, Kellogg offered this sage recommendation:
[Circumcision] should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment, as it may well be in some cases. The soreness which continues for several weeks interrupts the practice [of masturbation], and if it had not previously become too firmly fixed, it may be forgotten and not resumed.
If you were iffy about having your son’s foreskin lopped off, Kellogg recommended it be stretched as tightly as possible over the glans (head) of his penis and sutured shut with a needle and wire to keep him from getting an erection. And if that didn’t work, well, you could always lock up the boy’s organ in one of the doctor’s patented genital cages. For the young offenders themselves, Kellogg and other physicians of the period had plenty of stern warnings about the dire health consequences of masturbation. Tragic stories of boys going insane or blind, or of having deformed or mentally impaired offspring, were made readily available to prevent the horny male adolescent from engaging in this vice. “Such a victim literally dies by his own hand,” wrote Kellogg in his wildly popular Plain Facts for Old and Young of 1888. Around the same time, G. Stanley Hall, the father of the field of adolescent psychology and the first president of the American Psychological Association, called masturbation “the scourge of the human race.” Unlike Kellogg, at least he was willing to grant them the hallucinatory pleasure of their wet dreams—he wasn’t happy about it, mind you, but he regarded nocturnal emissions as being beyond the boy’s control.
Such bizarre ideas about the harmless act of masturbation were tossed long ago into the waste bin of history. Fast-forward to modern Europe, for instance, where several nations—including the former capital of Victorian prudishness itself, the United Kingdom—now have official diktats stating that the experience of sexual orgasm is a basic human right. Adolescents of both sexes are encouraged to masturbate routinely to curb the transmission of STIs and to reduce teen pregnancies.
With the exception of onanism in adolescent boys, a subject for which physicians and scholars like Kellogg and Hall clearly had a thorn stuck in their paws, clinical descriptions of men whose animalistic desires couldn’t be satisfied are conspicuously scant in the deep historical records. Women who demonstrated some arbitrary level of lust were usually victims of misguided, arrogant doctors (most of whom, of course, were men), whereas men who exhibited licentiousness were far more likely to be shuffled off to the penal system—perceived not as medical or academic curiosities but as criminals. Unlike Rivière’s account of poisonous gases disrupting female sensibilities, there are no convoluted theories about the migratory patterns of frus
trated testicles making old widowers woozy. (Ironically enough, we now know that lust does affect male cognition dramatically.) Neither will you find medieval prescriptions for treating an aroused man by rubbing his tummy while giving him a gentle hand job in a warm bath so that the water may lap against his prostate gland and relieve his seminal tensions. Lust has always been regarded as status quo for men—as a controllable vice, not a sickness. Unlike “nymphomania,” in which female desire was perceived as anomalous, men who expressed their default lecher were rarely seen as mentally ill. Perverts, maybe, but not crazy.
There’s one notable exception to this sexist historical divide between women who were sick and men who did sick things. This is the work of the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and more specifically his influential study of sexual deviance that resulted in the 1886 publication of Psychopathia Sexualis. Krafft-Ebing believed that some men suffered from a mental condition called “satyriasis”—basically, nymphomania’s male counterpart. Whereas mere masturbation was often enough to get a woman diagnosed with nymphomania, a man had to exhibit an extraordinary degree of carnality to receive the diagnosis of satyriasis. Satyrs weren’t just your average players. These were men on the order of that depraved French nobleman Count Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, better known as the Marquis de Sade. And just like that eponymous father of sadism and its most infamous practitioner, Krafft-Ebing’s male patients had come erotically undone (the marquis’s favorite sex act was sodomizing a young girl while getting violently lashed by another man). The psychiatrist felt that these men couldn’t control themselves due to their medical condition of satyriasis, a neurological disorder of an overwhelming sex drive that he strongly suspected was inherited.*
In Psychopathia Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing provides a few examples of men presumably battling this dreadful disease. One such person was “Clemence,” a successful forty-five-year-old engineer with a familial history of psychiatric disturbances. One oppressively hot summer afternoon in 1874, Krafft-Ebing explains, Clemence was riding on a train bound for his home in Vienna, where his wife and child were eagerly awaiting his return after a long business trip. Suddenly he found himself getting so worked up by the seat vibrations, the incessant prattle of the other passengers, and the roiling temperature that “he could no longer hold out against his sexual excitement and the pressure of blood in his abdomen.” Frothing with lust, Clemence exited the train at the nearest stop, which was the small town of Brück on the German-Austrian border, about ninety-three miles southwest of Vienna. Under the scorching sun, this monstrously aroused engineer dragged himself all over town in hope of finding a stray dog (as in an actual canine; that’s not a euphemism) to relieve his agony discreetly in an alleyway. Failing to do this, and luckily so for the other panting inhabitants of Brück that day, he stumbled with fiery crotch in hand into the neighboring village of St. Ruprecht. Here, in a polluted haze, the befuddled Clemence crossed paths with an elderly woman who he thought might like to see his erect penis. It turns out he was wrong about that. The old lady screamed; he panicked and tried to embrace her and got promptly pounced on by her neighbors, who held him to the ground until the police arrived to arrest him on attempted rape charges. “He said that he often suffered with such sexual excitement,” notes Krafft-Ebing. “He did not deny his act, but excused it as the result of disease.” And, astonishingly, so did the judge when Krafft-Ebing explained his medical theory of satyriasis to him. All charges against Clemence were dismissed.
Psychopathia Sexualis also includes the curious case of “Mr. X.,” a man who’d come to the psychiatrist’s attention in the aftermath of a rather eventful wedding ceremony. Mr. X., Krafft-Ebing tells us, was a rakish bachelor who’d finally decided to settle down in matrimony after years of playing the field. Allow me to set the scene for you. Picture, if you will, the affluent Mr. X. attired in a fine suit and being escorted proudly down the church aisle on the arm of his grinning brother. It’s an idyllic image. Dust mites swirl in the sun-drenched rafters like a flock of miniature angels. Family and friends stir eagerly in the pews; the priest clears his throat in preparation for the vows he’s delivered a hundred times before; the organist hunkers down in melodious devotion; and the groom takes his place at the altar to await his bride, prim and coquettish in her spidery veil. But then the mood abruptly changes. Before his future wife is halfway down the aisle herself, Mr. X. turns to face the audience, unzips, and unleashes his priapic demon for all to see. It’s unclear what happened next, but I’m sure you can fill in those gaps easily enough. Stranger things have happened, but I’m guessing the service didn’t end with a kiss.
Krafft-Ebing collected dozens of stories like these of sex-crazed men. To him, satyriasis was a real disease that caused certain males to act out in inappropriate, and potentially harmful, ways. Yet unlike nymphomania, a hypothetical condition that captured the attention of nearly everyone, Krafft-Ebing’s concept of satyriasis languished in both medical and academic obscurity for more than half a century. It’s only in 1966, in fact, that the subject of excessive male lust as a mental illness makes its next earnest appearance, with the American psychotherapist Franklin Klaf’s book Satyriasis: A Study of Male Nymphomania helping to give the long-forgotten issue a fresh elbow in the ribs.
Klaf had been troubled by the number of male patients appearing in his office who seemed predisposed to engage in self-defeating bouts of sexual gorging. Taking the old theoretical baton from Krafft-Ebing, he added a number of interesting claims of his own about satyriasis. For example, like other forms of psychotic breaks, he argued, the disease is characterized by a temporary disconnect from reality rather than a continuous mental state, and it’s usually precipitated by a stressful event in the man’s life. Klaf also concluded that “satyrs” were disproportionately attracted to underage teenage girls and as a consequence frequently faced legal problems, which is exactly how those featured in his book had ended up on his couch chatting with him about their problematic sex lives.
Many of Klaf’s observations were quite insightful. His claim that upsetting life events can trigger bouts of satyriasis has found support in recent studies showing that a minority of men responds to feeling depressed by becoming more sexually active, not less. For a very long time, it was widely assumed that anhedonia (or depressed mood) goes hand in hand with a reduction in sex drive for both sexes, but it turns out that “hypersexual” men tend to respond to depression very differently, getting more easily aroused when they’re depressed and seeking lust as a transitory escape from their negative feelings.
Nobody’s perfect, though, and some of Klaf’s other claims are indeed a bit suspect today. Take his theory about male-pattern baldness: “Satyrs display more than the ‘normal’ concern about baldness,” he argued. “All men are somewhat self-conscious when it comes to receding hairlines, both front and rear. Most accept this hormonally determined phenomenon as part of the natural course. Not so with satyrs. They look for miraculous cures to wipe away the attrition of time, and they often fall prey to unscrupulous hucksters.” I’m sure my mother would have agreed with Klaf on his baldness theory, since I vaguely recall my dad getting a perm during the Garfunkel era to plump up what hairs remained on his mutinous scalp, and this happened to be a period in my parents’ relationship marked by some extramarital strains. Yet there’s still no evidence that high anxiety over follicular fallout betrays a man’s proclivity to go over the erotic edge.
Klaf was by no means the last scholar to try to confirm the existence of satyriasis. In 1995, for example, the psychologist Wayne Myers wrote a curious little case study about a man named “Alex.” By this point in history, most psychologists had given up on trying to turn homosexuals into heterosexuals and were instead more interested in helping their gay patients adopt healthy sexual behaviors consistent with their own orientation. Alex was a gay case in point. In his early thirties at the time, he had cultivated a distinctive modus operandi in his tireless pursuit of sex on the mean streets of
New York City. This involved carrying around a Polaroid image of his erect penis (these were the days before iPhones made penis-photo transport so much easier), an organ that he considered exceptionally large. There’s no reason for us to doubt this, really. I guess he figured that his appendage was a work of art that ought to be shared with other men, not kept hidden away where nobody could appreciate it. So he’d wander about in public places flashing this photograph to attractive male strangers, especially those he suspected of having their own extra-large penises and who’d reward his generosity with a complementary erection.