* * *
There are situations, however, where hypersexuality is a genuine medical crisis. In some cases, an unusually febrile and chronic state of desire can appear almost overnight in an individual who doesn’t normally have a particularly high sex drive. When that happens, it can indeed be a worrisome symptom of a serious underlying health problem. After all, localized brain regions govern all thought and behavior, including those related to our erotic responses. Our personalities and our sex drives can be dramatically altered by physical injury to certain brain regions or by drugs that modify our neurochemicals, as well as by infections and viruses that seep into our cerebrums. So when an average Joe (or Jane) suddenly morphs into the Marquis de Sade, this could be a sign of serious engine troubles under the hood.
Consider the case of a twenty-eight-year-old housewife from India, for example, who noticed a sudden change in her own libido. Her sex drive was off the charts, she found herself persistently aroused, and she’d been having multiple orgasms for the past two days. Since it was so unlike her (and since this unyielding state of yearning had begun to cause the type of marital friction that she definitely didn’t desire), she sought the help of her gynecologist. Her physician couldn’t explain the woman’s hypersexuality, either. But after a few days of scratching his head, the gynecologist’s colleague, an epidemiologist from a nearby hospital, eventually solved the mystery. It turned out that a rabid puppy had bitten the woman a few months earlier while she played with the dog at a neighbor’s house. She didn’t know it was rabid, and so she’d brushed off the incident as a minor event, as most people would. (It was just a small puppy, after all, not exactly Cujo.) Unfortunately, by the time anyone managed to figure out that the abrupt spike in her passions was actually a warning sign of the rabies rampaging through her brain, it was too late. “She expired on the fourth day,” the doctors close their sad case report.
Rabies is just one of many distinct neurological conditions for which hypersexuality may appear as a rather jarring symptom. It’s not inevitable, and by and large most people with these conditions don’t become hypersexual, but extreme libidos have also been found in patients with Tourette’s syndrome, multiple sclerosis, Huntington’s disease, and, most notably, Klüver-Bucy syndrome. Klüver-Bucy is a rare disorder that can be brought on by a variety of factors, including herpes encephalitis and oxygen deprivation. The condition has likely been around ever since there were brains to go haywire, but it was first discovered in 1939 when the epilepsy researchers Heinrich Klüver and Paul Bucy were tinkering inside the skulls of live rhesus monkeys to better understand seizures. When the scientists removed chunks of these poor animals’ medial temporal lobes, where we now know the central problem behind this condition lies, the monkeys became so sexually agitated that they’d start gyrating against the operating table. Since then, Klüver-Bucy syndrome has been the subject of several high-profile legal cases in which a person with the condition commits a sex crime and the judge must then decide if the accused is to be held responsible (that is, punished) for his or her acts. This is exactly what that other judge did so long ago with Krafft-Ebing’s “Clemence” on his attempted rape charges. And it’s disconcerting, actually, that even with psychiatrists’ expert testimonies about hypersexuality being a known indicator of a malfunctioning brain, most judges presiding over such cases today have been considerably less lenient toward defendants with Klüver-Bucy syndrome than a judge in 1886 was with a man suffering from “satyriasis.”
Incidentally, Krafft-Ebing was probably on the right track about our old pal Clemence in the late nineteenth century. When the out-of-control middle-aged engineer who’d stepped off that train in Brück and assaulted the elderly woman was five years old, he’d been accidentally struck in the head by a hoe (of the farm tool variety, just to avoid any confusion). In Krafft-Ebing’s notes from his physical exam, he mentions Clemence’s right parietal and frontal bones being still noticeably dented some forty years later—“the overlying skin was united to the [skull]”—and when the author of Psychopathia Sexualis applied pressure to this spot on the patient’s head, sparks of pain irradiated the lower branch of Clemence’s trigeminal nerve. Neuroscience was in its infancy then, and so Krafft-Ebing didn’t see anything especially relevant about the head injury at the time. But it’s revealing to us now, because this cortical area has since been implicated in brain-damaged patients’ difficulties with behavioral inhibition.
* * *
Sudden changes in a person’s normal sex drive can clearly signal a major underlying health problem, but “conditions” such as “madness from the womb,” “nymphomania,” “satyriasis,” and, more recently, “hypersexual disorder” have been conceptualized as diseases in their own right. Other than reflecting our own moral biases, the practice of medicalizing these erotic outliers has arguably done much more harm to those diagnosed as such than good. As we’ve seen, not everyone has equivalent TSOs, and any such scatter plot of lust is simply a display of biological variation for this particular human trait. The variance of our natural libidos (even the points at the extreme ends) is the same as differences in our skin color, the shapes of our noses, or our tolerance for dairy products. Just as it’s illogical to judge a person for his or her unique expression of those traits, it makes little sense to ascribe moral significance to the way a person’s genes happen to be expressed on this particular spectrum of sexual diversity.
Whatever your views on hypersexuality (or “excessive expressions of culturally tolerated sexual behavior”), I’m willing to bet that you noticed aspects of yourself in one or two of the “normophiles” appearing in this chapter. The likelihood of you empathizing with the characters we’re about to meet in the chapters that follow may be considerably less. Look a bit closer, though, and look honestly, and I have a feeling you’ll see glimmers of yourself in them as well.
FOUR
CUPID THE PSYCHOPATH
Winged Cupid, rash and hardy, who by his evil manners, contemning all public justice and law, armed with fire and arrows, running up and down in the nights from house to house, and corrupting lawful marriages of every person, doth nothing but evil.
—Lucius Apuleius, The Tale of Cupid and Psyche (late second century A.D.)
I didn’t fear Cupid when I was a child, but little did I know he was a malevolent demon. By the time I first came to know him in the 1970s, Cupid’s dark side was unrecognizable, having long since been painted over with baby fat and giggles by Hallmark and other great cultural bowdlerizers. This dramatic transformation of evil Cupid into a jubilant cherub, pink as a piglet’s bottom and sweet as a lamb, who spies you each approaching Valentine’s Day with twinkling eyes from the greeting-card display of your local pharmacy, who twirls with his arrow drawn ever so gently in the form of a paper mobile pinned to the ceilings of third-grade classrooms, bears faint resemblance to his original manifestation. He still strikes me as a bit cheeky, but the real Cupid was a genuine psychopath.
It was the Roman writer Lucius Apuleius who brought Cupid to life in his ancient book of fables, The Golden Ass. Apuleius’s Cupid was no mischievous toddler with hummingbird wings but an impulsive god who rejoiced in causing sexual havoc for all earthly creatures. Even the fearless Apollo refers to Cupid as “serpent dire and fierce”:
Who flies with wings above in starry skies,
And doth subdue each thing with fiery flight.
The Gods themselves and powers that seem so wise
With mighty love be subject to his might.
The rivers black and deadly floods of pain
And darkness eke as thrall to him remain.
Apuleius’s story reads like a second-century black comedy. Cupid’s mother, Venus, is jealous of a mortal girl named Psyche whose beauty surpasses even her own. Seeking vengeance, Venus recruits her son, this bringer of misplaced desire, to shoot one of his fearsome poisoned arrows into the young maiden so that she’ll forever covet the first reproachful thing she sets eyes upon, thereby pu
nishing Psyche’s “disobedient beauty” with a shameful attraction. “I pray thee without delay,” says Venus pleadingly to her son Cupid, “that she may fall in love with the most miserable creature living, the most poor, the most crooked, and the most vile, that there may be none found in all the world of like wretchedness.” Cupid breaks into Psyche’s house one night and fully intends to do just this for his mother, but in the end he becomes so smitten with Psyche that he accidentally pricks himself with his own poisoned arrow while watching her sleep. This forever binds the two and leads to Psyche’s entry by marriage into the Roman pantheon—and, to put it mildly, a rather tense relationship with her new mother-in-law.
Love may have saved him in the end, but Apuleius’s Cupid wasn’t so much a romantic matchmaker as a devil subjecting hapless people to a toxic lust, one that blinded them with the sorts of hypersexual urges we saw in the previous chapter. This allegory of a capricious god who pierces mortal hearts only to burden them with some scandalous attraction out of sheer boredom or as favors to other gods is reminiscent of nature’s cold mindlessness when it comes to the paraphilias. Individuals with the most deviant desires have similarly found themselves at the whim of a terrible randomness.
During the 1920s, many also found themselves lying on a couch in the office of the German psychiatrist Wilhelm Stekel, who saw their existential plight as anything but unfortunate … for him. The most exotic “perverts” always put a smile on his face. “Variatio delectat!” Stekel marveled in his nightmarishly titled book, Sexual Aberrations. “How innumerable are the variations which Eros [Cupid’s original Greek name] creates in order to make the monotonous simplicity of the natural sex organ interesting to the sexologist.” It was Stekel who coined the term “paraphilia.” The first part of the word, para-, is Greek for “other” or “outside of,” and -philia translates roughly to “loving.”*
The son of an illiterate Orthodox Jew and an unpleasant but at least educated mother, Stekel had trained briefly under Krafft-Ebing and was a former friend and apostle of Sigmund Freud’s. The two had a massive falling-out when the indiscreet and famously ornery Sigmund spilled the beans about Wilhelm’s own mysterious perversion to a mutual colleague, the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones. It remains mysterious to our inquiring minds because Ernest proved to be a much more reliable confidant than Sigmund. Whatever it was, Stekel’s erotic peculiarity went with him to his grave in 1940, an event hastened through suicide when he overdosed on aspirin in a London hotel room at the age of seventy-two to avoid a gangrenous foot having to be amputated due to his diabetes.*
This pitiable ending caught my attention for two reasons. First, I’m diabetic as well, and in my neurotic imaginings of a distant future I’ve been dispensed to some godforsaken outpost of geriatric infirmaries, and there I sit alone, day after day, in a room made bleary by retinopathy while rubbing the smooth stumps of my amputated legs. So I can commiserate with Stekel as he pondered a similar fate in that lonely hotel room in London. The second reason that this depressing denouement to Stekel’s life story registered in my mind is that eighteen years before he swallowed that fatal dose of aspirin to escape the prospect of an amputation, he’d ironically chosen to highlight the case of an amputee fetishist in Sexual Aberrations. The fetishist was an eloquent physician whose dreams involved bedding the ultimate prize: a “pretty young girl who has been amputated at the thigh and wears a wooden leg.” Like many with paraphilias, this fetishistic doctor was quite picky about the specific details, too. “The sight, image or even intercourse with a woman amputated on both sides,” he clarified, “would leave me absolutely cold.”
Such lovers of lost limbs are now politely called “acrotomophiles” (from the Greek, akron, extremity + tomein, to cut), but amputee fetishists have been around for some time. We know they date back to at least 1890, which is when a Chicago surgeon named G. Frank Lydston described a patient obsessed with a woman whose right leg had been removed. They’d dated for a while, and once they split up, the man was only interested in seeing other young ladies with a similar defect. In his original write-up on the subject, Stekel also describes others with this strong attraction to amputees, and he refers to it as the “negative fetish” (not in a judgmental way, but simply as a matter of bodily arithmetic). It’s tempting for us to assume that deviant desires such as those of the acrotomophiles are merely the products of today’s online carnivalesque porn (and there are indeed plenty of adult websites catering to acrotomophilic lust, which some aficionados playfully refer to as “monopede mania”).* But given the preexisting history of most of the paraphilias, it’s more likely that the Internet has served to pull together marginalized people who’d have otherwise been sexually isolated rather than to create fundamentally new kinds of paraphilias altogether.† (Another reason to doubt the latter hypothesis, as we’ll see, is that the psychological origins of paraphilias are usually traced back to a person’s early childhood, long before these people go online for porn.)
Just knowing that there are acrotomophiles out there brings me comfort, though. Whenever I hear woeful tales like that of Wilhelm Stekel’s, I have only to remind myself that with every toe that blackens from the syrup gurgling in my diabetic veins, I’m being slowly made over into a ravishing beauty for someone out there with just the right configuration of urges. To that gay acrotomophile, my losing a foot would be no less than an aphrodisiac, just as much so as was having it attached for my old podophilic friend. (He surprised me before, so it’s hard to say, but I suspect he might have drawn the line at sucking on gangrenous toes.) The thought that I’d lose a body part but gain an admirer isn’t that consoling, now that I think about it. Nonetheless, it’s entirely true that there are people in this world for whom the seemingly rigid standards of beauty—youth, a nice complexion, being in good shape, a full complement of limbs—just don’t apply.
* * *
It’s been well over a century since they were first examined, but scientists still know astonishingly little about the paraphilias, whether they involve an attraction to amputees, horses, corpses, feet, or whatever else.* We can certainly describe the paraphilias in graphic, shocking detail (which makes us no more than gawkers at a sideshow), group them into exotic genuses and families (which is what many psychiatrists specialize in doing and will soon come in handy for getting our ducks in a row), and maybe even trace the trajectory of a paraphilia from the person’s childhood (or its “etiology,” in clinical terms, which psychoanalysts sometimes attempt to unravel). But with all of these approaches, many questions will linger, such as why one person but not another with a very similar set of genes and experiences becomes paraphilic, why paraphilias are so overwhelmingly a male phenomenon (with experts reporting a sex-difference ratio of as much as ninety-nine paraphilic men to every paraphilic woman), and why paraphilias are so irreversible once they’re set in motion.†
These questions remain unanswered not for lack of interest or talent. To the contrary, the area has been drawing some of the brightest minds since the earliest days of sexology. Rather, the difficulty in solving these riddles lies in the nature of the questions themselves, one that makes them impossible to address through controlled experiments. I mean, think about it. Let’s say you’re a researcher hoping to crack the case of what makes one child grow up to become—oh, I don’t know—a melissaphile (which sounds like a cute moniker for someone who only wants to be with women named Melissa, but in fact it’s an erotic attraction to bees, with melissa being Greek for “honeybee”) while another turns into an adult who insists there be no stinging insects around during sex.
Giving them that clichéd old story about the birds and the bees at a fortuitous moment might do the trick, but you can’t exactly randomly assign one group of children to a “bee condition” (the experimental group) and another to the “bee-less condition” (the control group) and twiddle your thumbs while waiting to see if any of them ends up a melissaphile fifteen years later. First of all, it’s unclear what the experimental man
ipulation should even, ahem, be. Perhaps it would involve parents switching on a continuous audio recording of bumblebees buzzing before tucking their little ones into bed each night so that the ambient sound coincides with their first erotic dreams? Or maybe a special honeycomb hive built into a corner ceiling of their bedrooms so that when they’re innocently playing doctor with another child, the presence of the bees comes to be automatically associated with their lifelong sexual arousal. So you see the problem (I hope). The cause of melissaphilia, and of every other paraphilia, indeed exists, but how to establish that cause ethically is the bane of every science-minded sexologist.
Given that experiments capable of tapping directly into the root causes of the paraphilias are methodologically verboten, research into the childhood origins of sexual deviance has necessarily been limited to conducting interviews, doing detailed case studies, and administering questionnaires to people who are already openly paraphilic. These are all examples of qualitative studies (rather than quantitative studies, in which experiments generate data that can be converted to objectively crunchable numbers, whereas interviews, case studies, and questionnaires usually produce narrative responses for the researchers’ subjective analysis), and they’re limited in their ability to get to the bottom of things. It may seem straightforward enough to just ask adults about their sexual experiences, but unfortunately such methods are notoriously susceptible to human error and bias.
On the subject’s end, everything from false memories, to bending the truth by telling the researchers whatever it is he or she thinks they want to hear, to issues of outright deception can hugely distort the real picture. Investigators, meanwhile, who ask leading questions, who word their survey choices ambiguously, or who interpret the subject’s vague responses in ways that support their preferred hypothesis also make data useless. Good qualitative scholars anticipate these factors and stem them off with research designs that can minimize such flaws, but even the best qualitative study can’t definitively determine causation. On the positive side, qualitative research provides far richer descriptions and more detailed accounts of the subject’s own experiences and interpretations, giving us glimpses into a person’s private mental life that would be impossible to see with behavioral experiments alone. Such qualitative approaches have produced invaluable information about the paraphilias and have led to plausible, convincing theories (some of which we’ll be examining). So I suppose a reasonable caveat emptor is this: whenever a study depends solely on what people say about their erotic desires or their sex lives, rather than on what they actually think or do, buyer beware.
Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us Page 11