Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us

by Bering, Jesse

  Being able to reason about another person’s thoughts also brought with it a strange, and sometimes disconcerting, mental effect in our species: the feeling of sexual shame. By using our theory of mind to take the mental perspective of someone else, we were able to see ourselves as he or she saw us. That could be a rather unflattering sight when it comes to sex. Just as their attention could turn to someone else’s erotic motives, our ancestors became cognizant of the fact that another person could speculate on their desires. This led to unspoken rituals of sexual deception. It can get quite Machiavellian, but in one of its simplest forms, if you’ve ever had a crush on someone whom you didn’t want to know about it and so you deliberately hid those fire-in-your-pants feelings, you’ve engaged in such theory-of-mind-driven deception.

  Related to this is another unpleasant reality: We may desperately want to be seen as sexually desirable to someone else, since that’s how we feel about the particular person, but unfortunately we’re just not his or her type. (Trust me, few know unrequited love better than a gay man.) Yet as the trillion-dollar cosmetics industry attests, that definitely doesn’t stop us from trying. On the other hand, being intensely desired by someone toward whom we feel no attraction at all can also be disconcerting. It’s not merely finding out that someone you don’t really fancy has a harmless crush on you. That may be. But there’s also a distinctively unpleasant phenomenology (or the what-it-feels-like sense) that comes from knowing that your body is inducing an intense degree of sexual arousal in someone you’d actually prefer it didn’t. This is precisely the state of mind that many feminist writers are referring to when they use the word “objectification,” or when they define porn—aptly so—as the “articulation of the male gaze.” Here’s how the author Angela Carter describes this peculiar feeling of being someone else’s erotic target in her short story “The Bloody Chamber” (which is the one for you if you’re a man who’d like to know what it feels like to be a woman but you’re not so committed as to invest in a whole new wardrobe):

  I saw him watching me in the gilded mirrors with the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting horseflesh, or even of a housewife in the market, inspecting cuts on the slab. [The effect] was strangely magnified by the monocle lodged in his left eye. When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me … the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire.

  “There are some eyes,” writes Carter, “that can eat you.” Of course, a person’s sexual subjectivity, as we’ve seen throughout, complicates these matters even more. After all, an exhibitionist revels in this very notion of being consumed by others’ eyes. (And in fact Carter’s own empowered female characters often find their loins stirring unexpectedly at the thought of their trembling “horseflesh” being held and rotated in a man’s carnivorous mind.)

  Beyond our own private liaisons, our evolved theory of mind system also enables us to morally evaluate (as we’ve been doing all along in this book) those whose sexual natures differ so drastically from our own. And when this system isn’t held in check by scientific facts, our impulsive judgments of these erotic outliers can be heinously harsh. Much of the trouble in this area stems from the fundamentally egocentric nature of our social cognition. I can no more reliably take the perspective of a middle-aged straight man aroused by the sight of a woman’s genitalia, for example, than I can that of a male hamadryas baboon getting worked up over the amorphous, rainbow-colored swelling on the calloused rear of his female lover. (I mean that, for better or worse. If it’s not perfectly apparent to you already, I’m as gay as they come, a “Kinsey 6,” you might say.) Yes, understanding reproductive biology enables me to think logically and mechanically about such heterosexual cues. But metaphorically speaking, having to slip into either of these male primates’ skins isn’t the most pleasant form of virtual reality for my gay human brain. And as we saw earlier, when we’re blue around the gills, our moral reasoning abilities aren’t exactly at their sharpest.

  Let’s flip this example around and see what happens when a completely heterosexual man (a “Kinsey 0” on the zero-to-six scale) is told to imagine having sex with another man. In a 1979 study by the psychologists Donald Mosher and Kevin O’Grady, straight college guys were shown clips from gay male porn and instructed to identify with one of the actors in the film: “[Experience] the emotions that you would have if you were, indeed, engaging in the sexual behavior.” The result, as you’d guess, was disgust, anger, shame, contempt, and greater agreement to such eloquent survey items as “I’ve never been able to understand why anyone would fuck a man in the ass when you could have better sex with a woman”; “You can’t walk into a men’s john these days without some guy looking at your cock or showing his hard-on”; “I’d rather be dead than queer”; and “You can tell a pansy by the flowers and butterflies that he wears.”*

  Fortunately for both fashion and gay rights, the 1970s were laid to rest under an orange-and-brown linoleum floor somewhere decades ago. But although their exact contents may be different, the brains of college students today work pretty much the same as the brains of those in 1979, just as their brains worked the same way as those of the eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds who lived millennia before them. Natural selection is an incredibly sluggish business and doesn’t move at anywhere near the lightning pace at which human knowledge accumulates. This is a vital point in the context of this discussion, because until our species evolves a totally new kind of brain, any moral progress made toward the subject of sexual diversity hinges solely on the use of our acquired knowledge to defuse our crueler, instinctive biases.

  In the modern world, which is a land where entire lives are tidily reduced to a letter on a string of ciphers (“LGBTQ” and whatever else gets thrown onto such messy sandwiches of community acronyms), it has become more imperative than ever for us to resolve this terrible tug-of-war between our innate judgments and our critical-thinking skills. With human beings carved up into so many sexual “types” (and subtypes), negative stereotypes will spread over them like some invidious algae. If these continue to grow for too long without anyone putting a stop to them, it will become all but impossible for us to make out the actual human being—the individual person—beneath. In fact, that’s exactly how it all evolved to work. Negative stereotypes develop immunity to moral logic because they have an undeniable adaptive currency. Our brains systematically collect and aggregate all the negative information they can about the most salient categories of people in our social environments. Since we can never meet every member of every category, the unpleasant tidbits gathered by our brains come from a very limited sample only. Yet that doesn’t keep these prejudiced organs of ours from automatically and unconsciously—and often against our own better thinking—ascribing these undesirable traits to everyone in that demographic.

  Take our heroic homeless man back on the subway, for example. Which of the following was in fact the safer assumption? (And before you answer this, remind yourself how you were traveling at a high rate of speed beneath the surface of the earth in a confined vessel at the time, and so you couldn’t exactly run away to safety as the incident flared up.) Was it that the homeless man had psychiatric problems making him dangerously unpredictable, or that the silver fox in the thirty-five-hundred-dollar tailored suit must have done something nasty to provoke the attack? It’s wonderful, really, that your negative stereotype of homeless people as being mentally unstable was so fantastically wrong in this case, but your negative stereotype was still “right” in the amoral sense of leading you to err on the side of caution for your own selfish genetic interests. (You may be all winks and smiles with the chivalric transient now, but had that mother never screamed about her daughter, you’d still be diligently avoiding any eye contact with him.) As I mentioned briefly in the first chapter, this better-safe-than-sorry function of stereotyping helped our ancestors to make the best split-second decision
possible with only limited social information to go on. But it also turned us into ready-made bigots. With our biased attributions made possible by our theory of mind, we simply expect the very worst in strangers.

  By stereotyping individuals due to their sexuality—the “lesbian,” the “transvestite,” the “pedophile,” the “fetishist,” the “exhibitionist,” the “masochist,” and so on—we’ve lost the trees for the forest. The reason our knowledge of a person’s hidden sexual desires overshadows everything else we know about him or her becomes clear in the context of evolutionary theory. At their core, of course, adaptive behaviors are those that aid an individual’s reproduction, and so it’s hard to imagine having any more useful, or strategic, information about a person than the nature of his or her sexual desires. Aside from the fact that it tells you I’m not an adventurous person when it comes to Asian cuisine, for instance, I doubt it would interest you to know that I had a humdrum plate of chicken pad thai last night. But if I told you that after dinner I finally lost my heterosexual virginity to a stunning, and unusually patient, given the circumstances, Thai waitress in the restaurant lavatory, I suspect your ears would perk up a bit more. (And on that example, remember what your mother told you: “If it sounds too good to be true…” Unless I get a brain transplant, and therefore I cease to be me, I’m afraid this particular penis will never see the inside of a vagina.)

  People have no control over their sexual orientation, but likewise we have no control over the fact that our brains evolved to pay special attention to and systematically accrue information about other people’s sexuality. Again, from an evolutionary perspective, those details are high-dollar knowledge. So let me come clean. The truth is that the “Thai waitress” from last night was in fact a married man sitting with his wife at the next table over. After he made eyes at me for the better part of an hour, we met in the restroom and exchanged a brief but passionate moment in one of the toilet stalls. Oh, I’m still pulling your leg. But you see how sex stirs the social brain. Flitting quickly through your head a moment ago were probably incoherent thoughts such as “Hold on, did the man’s wife know what he was doing?” and “Where was Juan during all this?” The critical takeaway here is that while we can’t undo natural selection and reengineer human social cognition so that we’ve no interest in other people’s sexual desires and behaviors, we have considerably more control over what we do with that information once it’s been revealed to us and how we treat a vulnerably “exposed” person as the result of our knowing. Like fighting alcoholism, the first step in overcoming our sexual bigotry is recognizing that we’re sexual bigots.

  * * *

  In all of the many case studies I’ve read while working on this book, one that stands out as especially moving is an autobiographical account from a 1957 issue of Psychiatric Quarterly. Written under the pseudonym “Boots” (fitting, given that the man was a rubber boot fetishist, men’s and boys’ were his thing), this letter to the editor of that journal is an eloquent description of a man’s erotic fascination with rubber boots and the perils of having to hide this “devil of a torment” from others throughout his life.* But Boots’s tale is also a celebratory ode to the transformative power of human friendship. The fetishistic author realized that if he were ever to bring his beloved boots out of the closet, as it were, from that point on society would see him as no more than a “weird” pervert. The prospect of forever losing his more nuanced, more positive social identity by letting others know of his unusual sexual desires had long been a source of great unease to him. Boots was quite bright, and whether or not anyone else could see it, he knew there was a lot more to him than the fact that his lovers were born on a production line in Boise. “It is possible for fetishists to be ‘raving mad’ about their fetishes,” he writes, “but outside of an irresistible, compelling obsession for them, be in all other respects as intelligent and sane as the president of the United States” (this was of course years before George W. Bush came around to muddy that claim, but you get Boots’s point). In any event, it seems that while Boots was out searching for used boots one day (he did so under the guise of a hobbyist or scrap-rubber trader), he happened to make a new friend—a “true friend,” he stresses repeatedly. “Normal men cannot comprehend, or fully understand, any odd, unusual feelings of this sort that are entirely foreign to their own natures … However, some persons do exist who possess the rare gift of profound understanding when it comes to sensing the secret sorrows that shroud the lives of many folks.” Boots then proceeds to dedicate page after page to the virtues of this sympathetic new compadre of his, an unnamed figure whom he describes as a “normal, married heterosexual person with an independent business of his own”:

  This friend is one who fully fits the best description of a true friend that I have ever come across: “A true friend is one who knows ALL ABOUT US, but still remains our friend.” With a sense of humility, knowing that each man has a weakness of some kind, he accepted the truth of my strange and haunting obsession … he knew I was in many other ways not too greatly different from many other men. My friend did not add to the weight of “my secret cross” by shunning me. He provides my ailment with palliatives to ease my “fetishistic hunger” whenever necessary.

  And by this, Boots means that not only was his “true friend” a nice guy and a good listener but he even went out of his way to supply him with the objects he desired most:

  Knowing that these cast-off articles of footwear are a peculiar treasure of mine, he collects all he can obtain to give to me as sentimental keepsakes that symbolize my tragic and unreturned love of man for man … [He] does not condemn, ridicule or scorn. My friend is not a psychiatrist, but he has done more to contribute to my happiness and peace of mind than any psychiatrist trying to chase elusive bats out of the belfry possibly could. It is a “peaceful co-existence” between two persons whose sexual emotions are as different as night is from day.

  Charles Dickens wasn’t a homosexual boot fetishist (at least as far as we know), but he did pen that immemorial line, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” I think the same can be said for where we are today as a society when it comes to sex and sexuality. In fact, we’re not altogether unlike the primmer characters in A Tale of Two Cities, many of whom discover that their ethical sensibilities and cherished traditions are being strained or upended altogether by the French Revolution. Our own “Enlightenment” is the unprecedented pace at which the science of human sexuality is now advancing, and with it that gathering storm of data showing that deviance is more status quo than any of us imagined. Like the French monarchy, our sexual morality was built on the unsteady grounds of myths and customs, which can clearly no longer sustain it under the deluge of facts now raining down. There’s no question that we’re presently standing at a moral crossroads and getting soaking wet from anger and confusion in the process; the question, rather, is where to go from here. And we could use a nice solid pair of boots of our own these days to keep from slipping as we step forward. (By the way, if you want to spend some private time with them out in the woods first, have at it, I say.)

  Now, if we go in the direction of those still mourning the loss of the “good old days,” which, as we’ve seen, weren’t so good at all for the erotic outliers among us, then we’d be continuing to harm others with our closed minds, fostering their “personal distress,” while heading knowingly into the terminal sunset of an outdated worldview. Going in the other direction may seem obvious enough, but it’s a far rockier road than it appears at first glance, which is precisely why we’ve been idling before it for so long. It’s not just the road less traveled; it’s the road never traveled. Since no society has ever ventured this way before, doing so requires us to lay brand-new tracks for a sturdier framework of sexual ethics and morality, one that those following in our footsteps can trust never to give way beneath them or fall crashing down upon their fragile heads.

  To avoid the type of decay that’s rotted away the entirety o
f that other man-made path, our new value system would need to be constructed of the brick and mortar of established scientific facts, its bedrock being the incontrovertible truth that sexual orientations are never chosen. It must also have walls of iron to protect us from the howling winds sure to arrive as we move along, walls forged by the knowledge that there is no evil but that which comes from thinking there is so. To guide us forward, we must emblazon every star in the sky with the reminder that a lustful thought is not an immoral act. And our handrails would have to be painstakingly carved from the logic that in the absence of demonstrable harm the inherent subjectivity of sex makes it a matter of private governance. Finally, and most imposing of all, we’d each have to promise to walk this brave new path completely naked from here to eternity, removing this weighty plumage of sexual normalcy and strutting, proudly, our more deviant sexual selves.

  You go first.