Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us

by Bering, Jesse

  To address this potential gap between chronological age and biological age, the models selected for use in today’s plethysmograph studies are matched in terms of where they fall on the so-called Tanner scale. In his 1978 book, Foetus into Man: Physical Growth from Conception to Maturity, the eponymous British pediatrician James Tanner charted, in blushingly intimate detail that includes everything from the width of the areolae to the girth of the penis to the hue and texture of the vulva and scrotum, the precise physical changes that go along with each of six distinct stages of sexual development (from birth to full reproductive maturity) in both males and females. I can only imagine the auditioning process for becoming a Tanner stage model must be incredibly awkward for children and teens given such specificity of gonadal detail. And I say this having once had a Turkish pediatric endocrinologist who smelled of cigarettes and gauze pads thumbing my testicles with one hand while using the other hand to demonstrate to my parents how their thirteen-year-old son’s dangling parts should be more walnut- than grape-size, so perhaps they ought to consider growth hormone injections (which I in fact received for several years). But the main point is that each of the Tanner stages is defined by a unique constellation of maturation-graded physical cues; whichever constellation of bodily traits best ignites your passions reveals your erotic age orientation.

  At the time of that embarrassing doctor’s visit, I’d probably have been in “Tanner Stage III,” which on average is seen in boys around eleven to twelve and a half years of age. “Testicular volume between 6 and 20 ml,” goes this clinical description, “scrotum enlarges further, penis begins to lengthen to about 6 cm, thicker pubic hair spreads to mons pubis, voice breaks, increase in muscle mass, may have some breast swelling (gynecomastia), sperm production may begin, growth accelerates to 7–8 cm per year.” If the plethysmograph shows that particular type of organism to be the perfect one for you, then you’re a homosexual hebephile … and quite possibly a priest.

  Oh, I’m only joking about that last bit, of course. But as we’ve indeed seen from the Catholic Church sex-abuse scandals, in which 90 percent of the victims have been boys, homosexual hebephilia is one of today’s most poisonous slot machine outcomes. You’d have hit the jackpot with this particular alignment back in ancient Greece, though; Plato famously claimed that pederasty was the one true feature distinguishing Hellenistic society from all the other “barbarians.”* In fact, consider yourself lucky if you’re a gay man who prefers men instead of boys. Throughout most of human history, you would have been rejected by society, or at least even more than you are today. (John Money, ever the rogue sexologist among his forensically minded peers, believed that some young boys are “androphilic,” or aroused by adult men. “If I were to see the case of a boy aged 10 or 11 who’s intensely erotically attracted toward a man in his twenties or thirties,” Money said in a 1991 interview with Paidika, which was arguably less of a science journal than a pedophilia support group newsletter, “if the relationship is totally mutual, and the bonding is genuinely totally mutual … then I would not call it pathological in any way.”†)

  In fact, two adult men of equivalent age and status being in a “versatile” romantic relationship (which is to say, they take turns being the insertive partner and the insertee) is a contemporary gay ideal. Basically—how do I put this delicately—in the past a man was often permitted his homosexual affairs as long as he wasn’t the “bottom”; if he were the one doing the penetrating, his masculinity was unimpeachable. And this implied, needless to say, that a man could only have sex with males of lower social standing, which typically meant boys. This wasn’t just the case in ancient Greece, either. Throughout ancient Asia, Australia, Melanesia, China, Japan, and most of the Islamic world, men are also frequently depicted in the historical literature as having intercourse with boys. A few centuries ago in traveling warrior societies such as the Japanese samurai and the Berbers of the Siwa oasis, pubescent boy “brides” accompanied jealous soldiers on their tours of duty while girls and women tended to things back at home. Today’s ultraconservative Saudis might be interested to know that an eighteenth-century Englishman once observed how, on strolling by the Great Mosque at Mecca one day, he spied in its sacred halls men fornicating with adolescent boys while nonchalant passersby merely shook their heads and grinned. (Lesbians aren’t without their share of hebephilic traditions either. For example, in the mid-1980s, a type of institutionalized lesbianism was discovered in Lesotho, in southern Africa. Prior to marriage, some young women in Lesotho courted pubescent girls, the two then forming an intense romantic bond. These “mummy-baby” relationships, as they’re called, provided not just opportunities for sexual experimentation but also emotional support for girls with unstable family lives.)

  The homosexual factor aside, one of the most heated debates in this subarea centers on how hebephiles should be conceptualized and, more to the point, whether they should be treated as having a disorder. Most psychiatrists believe that pedophiles are mentally ill.* But there’s a sharper division in the field over whether hebephiles are psychologically sick. That’s to say, should those who are attracted primarily to pubescent children be added to the DSM as having a mental pathology, as pedophiles are conceived, or is a man’s primary attraction to pubescents, although not as common (nor, certainly, as socially acceptable) as attraction to adults, still “natural” and “normal” enough to make such a diagnosis illogical? There are policy implications for whatever answer goes here. With the formal backing of the APA confirming that the individual is mentally ill due to his erotic age orientation, in some states a hebephile in prison for a sex offense (hands-on or hands-off) can be held indefinitely in a U.S. psychiatric hospital after he’s served his sentence in full, if he’s found to be at high risk of committing another offense in the future.

  Making the determination of whether a sexual orientation is a genuine mental disorder has gotten increasingly challenging over the years. In 1992, the psychiatrist Jerome Wakefield suggested that for a trait to be considered diseased in this way, it must be biologically dysfunctional; that is, the trait must be at odds with an evolutionarily adaptive response. That sounds logical enough. But then if such a criterion were to be adopted by the APA or some other mental health organization as the defining factor, one could reasonably conclude that homosexuality should never have been removed from the DSM, nor should other deviant psychosexual traits (such as “gender identity disorder,” which could be used until 2013 to diagnose well-adjusted transsexuals with a mental illness) should ever have been plucked out.

  When it comes to homosexuality, there are plenty of unconfirmed and circuitous theories about the possible evolutionary “reasons” for it (such as helping to raise your nieces or nephews, who share a quarter of your genes—and I’m afraid I’m a very bad uncle in this sense, living hundreds of miles away). But whether there’s any truth to these Darwinian hypotheses or not, it’s rather silly to argue over the blatantly obvious fact that being attracted only to the opposite sex is a much more effective gene-reproducing strategy than is being attracted only to the same sex. The APA’s reclassifying homosexuality as a “normal form of human sexuality” in 1973 set an important precedent, because thereafter the psychiatric use of the word “normal” as applied to sexuality could never again be perfectly synonymous with “biologically adaptive.”

  Now, I realize how such a concession might encourage more than a few social conservatives out there to celebrate. “You see!” I can picture them saying. “I told you it was all just politics. The APA just caved to threats by the queers back in the 1970s, but gay people really are mentally ill!” Before such individuals break out the free champagne bottles that came with their membership in the Family Research Council, they might want to reconsider using “normal” and “abnormal” for the basis of their moral reasoning. After all, under the guidelines of reproduction and biological dysfunction suggested by Wakefield, the people that most conservatives would erroneously refer to as “pedop
hiles” are, in fact, far more “normal” than homosexuals.

  A girl who has just started menstruating isn’t nearly as fertile as she’ll be a few years later, and her reproductive anatomy is still very delicate. Furthermore, there’s some anthropological evidence that women who have their first child before the age of fourteen bear fewer offspring overall than those who become mothers in their late teens or early twenties. So although young females are high in “reproductive value” (in terms of the total number of their fertile years remaining), this evolutionary logic may not extend all the way down to gangly pubescent girls. Furthermore, the female’s reproductive value is rather moot in this sense for a hebephile, given that, to use the modern example, he’d lose his attraction for the girl around the time she gets her braces off and grows out of her Justin Bieber fan T-shirts. Still, in the ancestral past, hebephilia may have represented an adaptive strategy under conditions where the risk of cuckoldry (unknowingly raising, and therefore investing one’s resources in, another man’s child) was especially high. After all, assuming she was at least reproductively able, the younger a girl was, the more likely she was to be a virgin, thus virtually guaranteeing the man’s paternity if she became pregnant.* Depending on the most pressing adaptive problem for a man living in the ancestral past, different reproductive strategies varied in their effectiveness. And under such conditions of high paternity uncertainty (perhaps combined with high rates of STIs, as well, since youthfulness would also correspond with less prior exposure to sexually communicable diseases), impregnating, say, a dozen pubescent girls over the life span may have been a more adaptive strategy—at the heartless level of the man’s gene replication motives only—than a monogamous man raising two children together with an adult woman. (Incidentally, if such an adaptive trait were heritable, it could help to explain recent genetic findings showing that identical twins raised apart are far more likely to share a hebephilic orientation than are fraternal twins raised together.)

  Yet even if hebephilia weren’t evolutionarily adaptive under any conditions, in the history of our species, there have been far more babies born to ovulating thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls than there have to men who have sex with men. So for social conservatives to draw from that insipid old argument that homosexuality is “biologically unnatural” and therefore “morally wrong” is essentially for them to say that sex with pubescent girls is “biologically natural” and therefore “morally right.” And that’s rather ironic, isn’t it, given that so much of the fuel for today’s pedophilia panic and antigay mentality lies at the fiery heart of the right-wing community.

  It was due in no small part to these reproductive realities (well, that and the challenges of doing a Tanner scale classification for every child involved in a sex-abuse investigation) that the APA ultimately rejected a proposal to add hebephilia to the DSM-5, voting instead to keep only pedophilia as a mental illness. But it was an intense debate while it lasted. Ray Blanchard, who spearheaded the campaign to enter hebephilia into the diagnostic manual, used plethysmography to prove that many sex offenders incarcerated for crimes against children are in fact hebephiles (attracted mostly to pubescents) and not pedophiles (attracted mostly to prepubescents) and therefore presumably constitute a separate threat. Yet many of his fellow colleagues failed to see how simply being able to distinguish between pedophiles and hebephiles in prisons meant that the latter should also be diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder. One of Blanchard’s most vocal adversaries was the forensic psychologist Karen Franklin, who accused him of confusing morals and science (much as the Victorian-era doctors had confused morals and science in the case of nymphomania, which similarly gave the courts license to confine individuals in mental hospitals against their will). Blanchard’s bid to add hebephilia to the DSM-5 was also met with resistance from the sexologist Richard Green, founder of the International Academy of Sex Research. Green titled one of his critiques of Blanchard’s arguments with just a hint of transparency: “Sexual Preference for 14-Year-Olds as a Mental Disorder: You Can’t Be Serious!!”

  * * *

  A sole attraction to pubescent girls is another thing altogether, perhaps, but in keeping with this amoral, mechanistic reasoning, and given that most of a woman’s eggs are gone by the time she reaches the ripe old age of thirty, the inability to be attracted to young females who display visible signs of reproductive capacity (such as breasts and widening hips) would be decidedly abnormal (and I hope you’re able to see clearly by now, by the way, why the issue of “normality” is so morally vacuous and why the question of harm must instead prevail before we can ever hope to make any real ethical progress in these debates). In the ancestral past, a man aroused more by women in their thirties or forties than he was by those in their teens or twenties would have been at a distinct reproductive disadvantage. Regardless of monumental changes since the Pleistocene days in our understanding of teenage emotions, our appreciation of older women, and the extension of the average life span, it’s these youth-detecting ancestral men’s brains that modern men still come standard equipped with. Age is just a number, yes, but as that number rises, the amount of a woman’s eggs declines. That’s not a sexist or ageist statement; it’s simply a plain biological fact. (Note also that lust and love are wholly different; what inspires a man’s lust will never change, but his love will adapt to whatever nature can throw at it, which certainly includes something as insignificant to an otherwise happy and successful marriage as his wife’s menopause.)

  None of this is to say that men who find women of more “suitable” ages attractive aren’t exhibiting a biologically adaptive response. So long as the woman is still showing signs of being fruitful (whether by a genuine ripeness or false advertising by Botox), the capacity to become aroused by, say, those forty-something women popularly known as MILFs (get thee to urbandictionary.com if you don’t know) is clearly biologically adaptive. It’s just not as adaptive as being attracted primarily to younger women. As we saw in our discussion of parental investment theory, men have more than enough (and then some) spermatozoa to spare, so even if there’s only the remotest chance of impregnating an older female, the inability to be aroused by her could work against a man’s genetic interests. (It’s basically the same principle at work behind most men’s capacity to be aroused by pubescent girls, only it’s applied to the other far end of the female reproductive age spectrum.)

  This evolutionary logic is also why gerontophilia is so uncommon. An attraction to the elderly is apparently so rare, in fact, that even Alfred Kinsey doesn’t mention it in his otherwise exhaustive Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.* (He included plenty of other deviant sexual behaviors, such as pedophilia and bestiality, so it’s a revealing omission.) Any man whose erections are reserved for women over sixty, no matter how lovely, active, and intelligent those ladies may be, isn’t much of a threat to other males in the genetic arms race (he’ll have a great sex life, though, with not only less competition but the appreciation, experience, and accumulated wisdom of his erotic targets).*

  Wakefield’s criterion of biological dysfunction aside, if it doesn’t bother the gerontophile or his elderly partner (and by the way, many older women near and dear to me would wring my neck for calling them “elderly,” but I mean no harm, I speak only of your absent ova), there’s no reason for gerontophilia to be seen as a mental disorder. And indeed, you won’t find it in the DSM-5. Its only dark manifestation would involve (as it does on some occasions) elder abuse.† But otherwise, it’s kind of a win-win. Remember, the erotic age orientations are lifelong arousal patterns, and so a true gerontophile is a gerontophile at the age of twenty just as he is at the age of eighty. If such a man finds himself with a woman younger than he prefers, she’s literally becoming more beautiful to him as she ages. From his subjective perspective, she’s still merely larva slogging through the ravages of her youth throughout her thirties and forties, but by the time she’s in her fifties, she’s entered the dreamy chrysalis stage and will emerge as
the most spectacular butterfly—entirely white and ever so fragile—at age eighty-five. That’s the gerontophile’s erotic ideal. You may see it as peculiar, but I suspect you’ll find it less disturbing than the lamentations of a pedophile. “Little girls are hopeless causes because they grow into big girls in short order and then are unattractive,” a team of sociologists quoted one such dreary figure. “That is why it is rare I know a girl for more than a few months or years. Once they grow into puberty, we slide apart and go our separate ways.”

  Pedophilia is a mental illness in the DSM-5, whereas gerontophilia is not. Both are quite clearly biologically dysfunctional, the former by having an erotic target (a prepubescent girl) who is much too young to conceive, the latter by having an erotic target (a postmenopausal woman) who is far too old to conceive. In both cases the individual’s erotic age orientation is out of joint with the most basic mechanics of reproductive biology. Both, arguably, also involve erotic targets who are vulnerable physically and often mentally as well. That one is included in the DSM-5 as a mental illness and the other is not tells us that it’s not adaptation-based logic about “normal” and “natural” alone that guides psychiatric opinions on which erotic age orientations to pathologize, and perhaps it’s not even only about harm. Maybe there’s something else at work, too. And given that society takes the psychiatric community’s nod over what’s “normal” and what’s not and applies that to its treatment of minority sexual orientations, it’s worthwhile for us to try to get to the bottom of what that “something else” is, exactly. (If you doubt this, ask an older lesbian what it was like being gay when the APA still considered her mentally ill, then compare her response with what a young lesbian couple has to say about being gay in the United States today—but don’t rush them, for crying out loud, wait until they’re back from their honeymoon at least.)