Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us

by Bering, Jesse

  “Successful encounters led to transient feelings of relief,” writes Myers, “but unsuccessful ones where he could not produce an erection or the man would not examine his photograph led to tortures of the damned.” Alex, we’re told, typically had at least one sexual encounter a day over a ten-year period while cruising the bars and bathhouses of Manhattan. But his not-so-subtle method of seduction wasn’t limited to gay-friendly establishments, and when you’re displaying your penis to random strangers, this can cause problems with ambiguously oriented passersby (which is to say, straight men who didn’t take too kindly to a photograph of his rigid member being shoved under their noses).

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  When Myers was writing about Alex in 1995, most North American and British psychiatrists had already stopped using old-fashioned terms like “nymphomania” and “satyriasis” to describe those with an unusually active sex life. The more gender-neutral “hypersexual” is favored today, but the evolution of this terminology for excessive sex over the latter half of the twentieth century belies the messiness of the central construct. Some terms remained just as sexist as “madness from the womb” (for example, the “Messalina complex” or “Don Juanitaism”), whereas others conveyed a patently moralistic view or tone of judgment about the appropriate levels and forms of sexuality (such as “libertinism,” “erotomania,” “urethromania,” “oversexuality,” “compulsive promiscuity,” and “pathologic multipartnerism”). There were even subtypes, such as “the frigid nymph,” “the Casanova type,” and “the sexual compensator.” (Incidentally, being compared to Casanova may sound like a compliment, since history has a way of sanitizing its heroes, but this icon of chivalry had a decidedly less glowing reputation in his own day. Over his long and prolific career charting miles of untrammeled female flesh, Casanova also liked having sex with boys, cost several nuns their hallowed positions in the Church, was rumored to have nearly wedded a young woman who turned out to be his own estranged daughter, was robbed of a small fortune by a light-fingered prostitute, and is believed to have been infected with gonorrhea more often than not.)

  When it comes to ascertaining sexual excess, modern clinicians have two main diagnostic guides at their disposal: the International Classification of Diseases (presently in its tenth version as the ICD-10), which is a publication of the World Health Organization and the primary reference for practitioners in Europe, Australia, and some Asian regions; and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (currently in its fifth incarnation, the DSM-5), which is the go-to source in the United States and Canada and the flagship book of the American Psychiatric Association. The ICD-10 includes the diagnosis of “excessive sexual drive,” and believe it or not, it’s still subdivided by the antiquated gender terms of “satyriasis” (for males with excessive sex drives) and “nymphomania” (for females with excessive sex drives). By contrast, despite some recent attempts to add “hypersexual disorder” to the DSM-5 as a genuine psychiatric illness, North American “hypersexuals” or “sex addicts” are today diagnosed under the umbrella label of “sexual disorder not otherwise specified.”*

  It was the psychiatrist Martin Kafka, a physician at Harvard’s McLean Hospital, who led the charge in 2012 to get “hypersexual disorder” formally recognized by his peers as a real phenomenon with well-defined diagnostic criteria. Kafka’s definition of hypersexuality was “excessive expressions of culturally tolerated heterosexual or homosexual behaviors”—for example, porn, random hookups, cybersex, strip clubs, erotic massage parlors, or masturbating so often that your exhausted genitals have recently started recoiling in fear at the sight of your hand.* In other words, Kafka’s diagnosis was reserved for people engaging in “too much” socially permitted sex or having “excessive desire” for other consenting adults.† These he called “normophiles.”

  Yet Kafka narrowed down the criteria for his proposed diagnosis even further, so that it wasn’t simply the fact that you partook in such behaviors—or even that you did so frequently—but that your urges were interfering with other important (nonsexual) activities and obligations, such as, you know, eating meals, bathing, remembering to pick up the kids from school, that sort of thing. Kafka knew from many years of experience with treating so-called sex addicts that patients’ unsuccessful efforts to curb their problematic habits could cause tremendous difficulties in their lives. And it was this distress over what the patient perceived to be his or her own erotic overindulgences that motivated Kafka to push for “hypersexual disorder” to be added to the DSM-5. In fact, I think his position on these grounds—that is to say, basing the diagnosis on the subjective negative experience of the patient, not on some attempt by psychiatrists to objectively define sexual excess—is both reasonable and based on admirable intentions.

  Unfortunately, it’s also conceptually problematic. The trouble is that much of the patient’s malcontent (or in clinical terms his “personal distress”) comes from being a member of a sexual minority, in this case one that’s characterized by having a much higher sex drive than the statistical average. There were once countless gay men and lesbians with similar feelings of personal distress about their uncontrollable desires, after all. They were even diagnosed for a while with an APA-certified mental disorder called “ego-dystonic homosexuality” (those who were gay, in other words, but really, really didn’t want to be). In reality, it’s more often the society in which gay people have lived that is disordered, not them. Kafka’s “hypersexual disorder” invites similar concerns. The only difference is that hypersexuals are led to see themselves as sick not for whom or what they want to have sex with but for how often and how much they want it.

  In understanding that the patient’s inner reality (especially the experience of personal distress) is a reflection of the society in which he or she lives, you can see how, deep down, Kafka’s criteria aren’t entirely absent a moral bias regarding the sexually “appropriate.” In the days when nymphomaniacs ran amok, doctors and the public alike were convinced of what was appropriate. Most of us are now willing to say that Victorian physicians were sorely mistaken, with doctors confusing morality with medicine, but there’s certainly no guarantee that hundreds of years from now people won’t similarly be looking back at our present consensus on the sexually “appropriate” while shaking their heads over our own backwardness. You can pretty much count on that, in fact.

  Kafka’s unsuccessful bid to add “hypersexual disorder” to the DSM-5 was due in no small part to the history of nymphomania and satyriasis being mired in moralism. When it came time for committee members to evaluate his proposed addition, many of his colleagues had become unwilling to take a medical stand on the issue. The psychologist Charles Moser, for example, pointed out that those inclined to divide the “sane” from the “insane” in terms of frequency of sex and intensity of desires overlook the possibility that sex itself may be the most meaningful part of a person’s life, “which appropriately can take precedence over other activities” (italics added). Casanova may not have been entirely the virtuous womanizer many like to think he was, for instance, but it was indeed the pursuit of sex above all else that enriched his life and inspired his legend. “Cultivating whatever gave pleasure to my senses was always the chief business of my life,” he wrote in his memoirs. “I have never found any occupation more important.”

  One person’s sexual exorbitance is another’s slow Monday morning. In my opinion, the only important point to weigh when trying to decide what is or isn’t sexually appropriate is, again, that of harm. Deviations from population-level averages are useful in helping us to understand the full range of erotic diversity, but as we’ve seen, the issue of what is “normal” or “natural” is as shallow as a thimble when it comes to guiding us about how to behave. Unless we want to invoke the idea of a God who wound up the clockwork settings of an evolved human nature (and there’s certainly no reason to do that), normal is just a number. And it’s one without any inherent moral value at all.

 
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  Normal is still an interesting number, however. So for the sake of comparing a “normal” sex drive with a “hypersexual” one, we should start with the average number of orgasms that the average human being has over the course of a given week. Let’s have a look at men first. Some of the best estimates of male ejaculatory frequencies can still be found in Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male from 1948. Kinsey’s book, coauthored by Wardell Pomeroy and Clyde Martin, set the gold standard for the objective study of human sexuality. Among other things, their carefully collected data with thousands of randomly sampled participants showed that 75 percent of adult American males were technically “sex deviants” according to the mental health criteria at the time. One of the many topics explored by Kinsey and his associates involved something they called TSO (or “total sexual outlet”). TSO was a man’s cumulative total number of orgasms achieved per week by any single sex act or by some combination of sex acts. Whether he relied on old-fashioned means for ejaculation like masturbation or marital sex, or included something a bit more risqué, like inserting his penis into one of those newfangled vacuum cleaners, was inconsequential to the calculation of a man’s TSO. It was simply how many times a given man living in the United States in the year 1948 expelled seminal fluid over the course of an average week. In a sample of fifty-three hundred males of reproductive age, the average TSO was 2.5. (Not that such a thing doesn’t occur, but note that’s an aggregate mean— the “.5” doesn’t represent a half orgasm.) But some men in the study were more Casanovian in their physiologies, reporting ejaculation frequencies that were well above this average. In fact, about 8 percent of those sampled had a mean TSO of 7 or more for five consecutive years. That translates to at least one orgasm a day, every day, for the past half decade.

  Much has changed since Kinsey collected his data, such as relaxing attitudes about masturbation, not to mention the ability to summon up nude strangers on our laptops whenever we want to. “In my day” (as old-timers like me in their late thirties can now say), the best I could do as a horny teenager was to waste an entire afternoon glued to an exercise-equipment infomercial showing an overly tanned, equine-toothed spokesman doing sit-ups while wearing tight red shorts that promised a big reveal at any moment but, alas, never delivered. It’s not that I didn’t fantasize about more explicit scenes. Oh, the things I dreamed up. But like most emerging adults in the early 1990s, I wasn’t about to go on a public scavenger hunt for hard-core porn. When I turned eighteen, I slid shamefully into an independent bookstore and blushingly purchased an expensive Robert Mapplethorpe volume (whose images of anal fisting and pierced frenulums were slightly more extreme than what I was used to), but that was about as far as I was willing to go to attach my face and reputation to my self-consciously sordid desires. Then the Internet happened, and, well, let’s just say I haven’t needed to watch any of those lame infomercials since.

  The advent of the Internet created the perfect set of conditions for the consumption of porn, what scholars refer to as the “Triple-A Engine” effect: affordability, access, and anonymity. According to a set of statistics from 2010, 40 million Americans are regular consumers of porn. One in every three of these people is a woman. Thirty-five percent of all Internet downloads is porn related. Each day, 2.5 billion e-mails containing porn are sent and received, and 68 million search engine requests (25 percent of all terms entered) are for porn. Around 12 percent of all websites are pornographic.* Ninety percent of children aged 8 to 16 have viewed porn for “adults only” online, most while “doing their homework.” The average age of their first exposure to this content is 11. Whether you’re a fan of porn or see it as a plague, these are simply the naked facts.

  Yet even in the face of tectonic shifts in culture and technology, Kinsey’s old TSO figures have proven remarkably stable over the many decades since he first sat down to interview men about their hidden sex lives. (If anything, evidence shows that TSO counts have fallen a bit since then.) In 1987, for example, a study revealed that only 5 percent of high school boys and 3 percent of male college students masturbated on a daily basis. A 1994 survey of American men aged 18 to 59 reported that 1.2 percent routinely masturbated more than once a day. In 2002 (well into the Internet era), another study showed that the average male undergraduate masturbates about three times a week.* When it comes to sex that involves parties other than one’s own palm, findings from the 1994 survey indicated 7.6 percent of American males were then engaging in partnered sex (married or unmarried, gay or straight) four or more times a week.

  There are biological limits to the number of orgasms men can possibly have within a period of time, but even so, means and averages are linked to the cultural contexts in which they occur. Consider how Kinsey’s concept of TSO would apply to the Aka people of central Africa, a peaceful group of foragers. In 2010, the anthropologists Barry and Bonnie Hewlett were startled to discover that married Aka couples have sex four or five times in a single night. It’s not that they don’t enjoy it also, but the Aka view sex primarily as a form of labor, quite literally a “search for children.” “The work of the penis is the work to find a child,” said one informant. “I am now doing it five times a night to search for a child,” said another. “If I do not do it five times my wife will not be happy because she wants children quickly.” Even after the woman is pregnant, this astounding hypersexuality continues due to the Aka’s belief in “seminal nurture,” which is the idea (similar to the semen-ingestion ritual of the Sambia in Papua New Guinea thought to transform boys into warriors) that semen is an essential “milk” or nutritive substance that all fetuses need in order to develop normally. Repeatedly inseminating their pregnant wives is a culturally mandated sex practice for Aka men.* They do take a few nights off during the week, and the husbands use a kind of natural Viagra in the form of a mysterious tree bark called bolumba, said to go down best with palm wine. Furthermore, once the baby is born, there’s a moratorium on sex altogether for a while. Still, the TSO counts for married Aka males make the rest of us men look like monks.

  It’s unclear if the Aka wives’ orgasms are matched in frequency with those of their husbands (they don’t need to climax to conceive, after all), but we do have some sense of how often American women are having orgasms—or at least how often they were doing so in 1953. That’s when Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female came out.† Kinsey and his colleagues found that unlike for male ejaculation, the female TSO was a function of marital status. Unmarried women had a mean of 0.5 orgasms a week, whereas the average for married women was 2.2.

  Aside from those old sexist books written by Ellis and others, there are still virtually no studies on female “sex addicts,” a reflection of the fact that women represent only a small fraction of cases presenting to clinicians. (Kafka points out that there are five male hypersexuals for every one female, a statistic also in keeping with the parental investment theory basics we saw in the previous chapter.) In a 2006 survey of 1,171 Swedish women, 80 of them (around 7 percent) were labeled “hypersexual.” Why the researchers settled on thirteen orgasms per month as the critical dividing line between “normal sexuality” and “hypersexuality” in women is something of a puzzle (there’s nothing special or catastrophic about that figure so far as I can tell), but nonetheless any kvinna finding herself on the wrong side of that line was considered “hypersexual.” The bar for the Swedish male respondents in the same survey was set somewhat higher. Men needed a minimum of seventeen orgasms a month (another dubious figure) to be classified by the researchers as “hypersexual.” And 151 of the 1,244 men responding to the survey (around 12 percent) could indeed claim that title.

  In addition to simply climaxing more frequently than their peers, these hypersexual Swedes—male and female, gay, bisexual, and straight—had other things in common with one another as well. Compared with the nonhypersexuals, for example, they reported becoming sexually active at an earlier age, expressed a wider range of sexual preferen
ces, paid more often for sex, and were more likely to identify as exhibitionists, voyeurs, and sadomasochists (I’ll forever dream of IKEAs stocked floor to ceiling with nipple clamps and bondage hoods). But it’s not all fun and games for Swedish hypersexuals. The women in this category were more likely to report having been sexually abused, too. Overall, both the men and the women were also less satisfied with their sex lives than the nonhypersexuals and reported more relationship problems and STIs. They were also more likely to have sought professional help for sex-related issues.

  But this is where that personal distress problem from before comes into the picture, because these negative effects were true only for those hypersexuals having a lot of “impersonal sex,” a term used by the authors to describe sex with anyone other than a committed partner. By contrast, those hypersexuals having loads of “personal sex” were the happiest respondents of all.* What this tells us is that hypersexuality isn’t the cause of a person’s problems per se; rather, it’s the way that people express their high sex drives that determines whether they’ll run into difficulties. Like other sexual minorities, most hypersexuals find themselves in societies that fail to tolerate harmless, biologically based erotic differences. For those who aren’t in relationships (or for those who are, just not with a fellow hypersexual), having the urge or need to orgasm several times a day can lend itself to pursuits of casual (or “impersonal”) sex. Having frequent no-strings-attached sex (or being “promiscuous”) is still frowned upon even in societies as relatively progressive as Sweden’s. So for hypersexuals to report being “less satisfied” with their “impersonal” sex lives and having “relationship problems” and “sex-related issues” under such social conditions really isn’t all that surprising.