Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us

by Bering, Jesse

  †A Swedish study found that transvestic fetishists are more likely to be sadomasochists than the general male population. See Niklas Långström and J. Kenneth Zucker, “Transvestic Fetishism in the General Population,” Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy 31, no. 2 (2005): 87–95. When the “Voice of Basketball,” the legendary sports broadcaster Marv Albert, was arrested in 1997 on charges of rape and sodomy (he was alleged also to have violently bitten a woman on her back), one of his accusers added that he was wearing women’s panties and a garter belt when the assault occurred. See Brooke A. Masters, “Albert Apology May Clear Record,” Washington Post, October 25, 1997, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/longterm/albert/albert.htm.

  ‡There are also several chromosomal perturbations of biological hermaphroditism, which can complicate both the subjective sense of gender and the individual’s expression of gender identity. But since our focus here is on the psychology of sexual deviance rather than gender and biological sex per se, we won’t be exploring these in any detail.

  *In Far Eastern countries such as Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand that have considerably less tolerance for effeminate men leading openly gay lives as males, it’s the polar opposite pattern. More than 95 percent of the MTF transsexual population in those regions consists of biological males who are attracted exclusively to men. In their early development as boys, these kathoeys, or “lady-boys,” of Southeast Asia tend to be extremely feminine in their mannerisms and appearance. They’re not accepted as gay men, but they do have an easier time than more masculine sorts in making “convincing” (in other words, socially acceptable) women after their physical transition to female. See Anne A. Lawrence, “Becoming What We Love: Autogynephilic Transsexualism Conceptualized as an Expression of Romantic Love,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 50, no. 4 (2007): 506–20.

  *This escalated to peak intensity upon the 2003 publication of the psychologist J. Michael Bailey’s book, The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism (Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press). In the book, Bailey embraced the controversial autogynephilia theory to explain heterosexual MTF transsexuality, with many people in the trans community being exposed to these ideas for the first time.

  *In her memoir, Mirror Image: The Odyssey of a Male-to-Female Transsexual (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1978), the now-adult MTF Nancy Hunt describes her adolescent feelings as a boy this way: “I was feverishly interested in girls. I studied their hair, their clothes, their figures … brood[ing] about the differences between us. I seethed with envy while at the same time becoming sexually aroused—I wanted to possess them as I wanted to become them. In my night-time fantasies, as I masturbated or floated towards sleep, I combined the compulsions, dreaming of sex but with myself as the girl” (60). And in her rather deliberately titled book, Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism (New York: Springer, 2013), the self-described autogynephilic transsexual therapist Anne Lawrence provides many similar anonymous accounts of an underlying erotic motivation as shared by her heterosexual MTF patients.

  *“A man crosses his legs by resting an ankle on his knee; a sissy drapes one leg over the other,” wrote the novelist Edmund White in A Boy’s Own Story (1982; New York: Penguin Books, 2009). “A man never gushes; men are either silent or loud. I didn’t know how to swear: I always said the final g in fucking and I didn’t know where in the sentence to place the damn or hell” (8).

  *There are massive cultural differences in parents’ attitudes to their children’s private parts; what would be seen as sexual abuse by most of us is normal in other parts of the world. In the 1940s, an anthropologist studying the Sirionó Indians of Bolivia noted, “Parents are very proud of a display of sexual desire on the part of their infants. One afternoon,” he recalled of an incident with a Sirionó father, “Eantándu was fingering the penis of his young son who was sleeping. The boy got an erection. Eantándu called my attention to it and proudly said: ‘Very hard penis; when grown, he will have a lot of intercourse.’” Like the Sirionó, the Hopi of North America were also known to stimulate the genitals of their young children as a means of soothing them. Grandmothers would mouth the genitals of their grandchildren because they believed it pacified colicky babies. Alorese mothers of Indonesia also fondled their infants’ genitals while nursing.

  *It’s not a perfect predictor, but knowing the erotic age orientation of a sex offender is useful to law enforcement because pedophiles who do abuse children are more likely to re-offend than are the opportunistic offenders. After all, the former have an erotic age orientation that isn’t going to go away, and by offending, they’ve already demonstrated their difficulty in controlling their sexual urges. The latter, by contrast, can attribute their crimes to a more transient problem, or something other than having an exclusive sexual interest in children, anyway. (The perfect-storm equivalent of a child molester is a pedophile who clinical tests reveal is also a certifiable sociopath. Very few pedophiles actually fit this bill, but such a person is an enormous threat to children.) See Seto, Pedophilia and Sexual Offending Against Children.

  *A small inflatable cuff is placed around the base of the phallus. The cylinder is then tightly secured over the cuffed organ so that the air inside is isolated from the atmosphere outside. A rubber tube attached to the cylinder connects to a pressure transducer. This, in turn, converts air pressure changes affected by increases in penile volume to some measurable voltage output for the scientist to read. See Kurt Freund, “A Laboratory Method for Diagnosing Predominance of Homo- or Hetero-Erotic Interest in the Male,” Behaviour Research and Therapy 1, no. 1 (1963): 85–93.

  *In 1976, the psychologists Vernon Quinsey and Sidney Bergersen discovered that some pedophiles had been deceiving forensic technicians by the act of “pumping” on the task, which is the voluntary contraction of the abdominal and perineal muscles to momentarily “inflate” the flaccid penis and thus have it register as an erectile response to the images of adults. (In the nonforensic world of bladder control and prenatal exercise classes, this is usually referred to as Kegel exercises.) Pedophilic or not, my male readers can tend to this exercise easily enough in order to grasp how it would work; I’m afraid there’s no clear way to convey the exact process to my female readers except to suggest that you ask some helpful male, preferably one you know, to demonstrate with his limp organ. In addition to pumping, some pedophiles took to sneaking into the lab a pin to surreptitiously prick themselves when images of children appeared, with the pain killing their arousal. See Vernon L. Quinsey and Sidney G. Bergersen, “Instructional Control of Penile Circumference in Assessments of Sexual Preference,” Behavior Therapy 7, no. 4 (1976): 489–93.

  *At least one scholar, Brandon Centerwall, has argued convincingly that Vladimir Nabokov himself, not just the fictional belletrist Humbert Humbert that the author famously created, was a closet hebephile (or “pedophile,” as Centerwall calls him), with the book being Nabokov’s attempt to exorcise a wanton demon haunting him all his life. See Brandon S. Centerwall, “Hiding in Plain Sight: Nabokov and Pedophilia,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 32, no. 3 (1990): 468–84.

  †This ensures that you’re not closing your eyes or looking offscreen as the nude models appear before you, but pupil dilation also correlates with sexual arousal.

  ‡Men’s attraction to older adolescents is considered “normal” by most forensic psychiatrists—“barely legal” or “teen porn” isn’t exactly a rare niche in the adult entertainment industry—so the ephebophile category usually isn’t included. Instead, the teleiophile category may include young adult models in their late teens or early twenties. “True gerontophiles,” on the other hand, are so rare that elderly models would only be included if the sex-offender subject has shown a history of targeting such-aged victims.

  *Incidentally, if you’re a blind sex offender and can’t see the nude models, don’t feel excluded, because some early research has shown that an
audio version of the standard plethysmograph may be just as effective. In Blanchard’s “Narratives Slides Test,” the images are paired with provocative audio narrations to amp up the male subject’s arousal. For instance, you might hear through a set of headphones: “You are with your neighbors’ 12-year-old daughter … you have your arm around her shoulders and your fingers brush against her chest. You realize that her breasts have begun to develop.” See Ray Blanchard et al., “Pedophilia, Hebephilia, and the DSM-V,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 38, no. 3 (2009): 339.

  *Racial differences in age of menarche have also been used to discriminate against immigrant families, with lawmakers arguing that African American, Mexican, and Italian girls should have lower ages of consent than their white peers since they develop faster. See Stephen Robertson, “Age of Consent Laws,” http://chnm.gmu.edu/cyh/teaching-modules/230.

  †In parts of the Pacific, the average age of menarche is as high as eighteen. So technically, in some areas of New Guinea, a heterosexual hebephile could be defined as anyone aroused by seventeen- to twenty-one-year-old indigenous women.

  *The aristocrats of Athens, most of whom were men in their twenties and thirties, romantically courted boys of eleven or twelve as their special “pupils.” A free boy was expected to allow an influential suitor to have exclusive intercourse with him (or at least “intercrural intercourse,” sex between the thighs) in exchange for an elite education and sociopolitical benefits that would extend to the boy’s family. In Xenophon’s Symposium, the wealthy Callias bargains with the father of a boy named Autolycus for such an arranged relationship as the boy leans against his dad. What strikes the reader is the businesslike nature of the trade. There’s no evidence that these boys were thrilled about this grown-up affair happening between their thighs, and some modern scholars believe that it was child abuse then just as it is now. See Enid Bloch, “Sex Between Men and Boys in Classical Greece: Was It Education for Citizenship or Child Abuse?,” Journal of Men’s Studies 9, no. 2 (2001): 183–204. (Actually, in Phaedrus, Socrates warns these young boys of the real motives of at least some of their idolized mentors: “Consider this, fair youth, and know that in the friendship of the lover there is no real kindness; he has an appetite and wants to feed upon you.” See David West, Reason and Sexuality in Western Thought [New York: Polity, 2005], 23.) Others point out, however, that such institutionalized pederasty was widespread throughout ancient Greek civilization, and there are no obvious records of any mental or physical trauma suffered by these boys.

  †Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia ran from 1987 to 1995. Published by the Stichting Paidika Foundation, the mission statement of the journal read as follows:

  The starting point of Paidika is necessarily our consciousness of ourselves as pedophiles. To speak today of pedophilia, which we understand to be consensual intergenerational sexual relationships, is to speak of the politics of oppression. This is the milieu in which we are enmeshed, the fabric of our daily life and struggle. Through publication of scholarly studies, thoroughly documented and carefully reasoned, we intend to demonstrate that pedophilia has been, and remains, a legitimate and productive part of the totality of the human experience. (Stephanie J. Dallam, “Science or Propaganda? An Examination of Rind, Tromovitch, and Bauserman,” Journal of Child Sexual Abuse 9, nos. 3–4 [2001]: 109–34.)

  *Interestingly enough, not all psychiatrists consider even pedophilia a mental illness (Richard D. Green, “Is Pedophilia a Mental Disorder?” Archives of Sexual Behavior 31 no. 6 [2002]: 467–471.)

  *Such evolved motives have been portrayed unwittingly in many books and films, including the controversial movie Pretty Baby, in which a young Brooke Shields played the role of twelve-year-old Violet, a prostitute’s daughter in New Orleans in 1917 whose coveted virginity goes up for auction to the highest bidder.

  *It bears asking whether there are meaningful cultural differences when it comes to the sexual appeal of the elderly, particularly of elderly women. Writing of the Wogeo tribe of New Guinea, the anthropologist Ian Hogbin came upon a woman advanced in years who still actively seduced and had intercourse with many of the youths on the island. “Desire doesn’t disappear with the teeth,” she told Hogbin. “And so long as a woman can still dig she wants to do a little something now and then.” Similarly, Bronisław Malinowski, an anthropologist in the early twentieth century known for his frank and unapologetic accounts of explicit sexual behavior among the natives of the Trobriand Islands of Melanesia, traced an outbreak of venereal disease to a woman who was, according to him, “so old, decrepit, and ugly” that nobody suspected her of being the source of the epidemic. Such ethnographic data may imply a greater willingness to have sex with the elderly in some cultures. But in support of the evolutionary account, at least one survey has revealed that the most common cross-cultural reaction to the elderly as prospective sexual partners is, by far, one of pronounced erotic distaste. See Rhonda L. Winn and Niles Newton, “Sexuality in Aging: A Study of 106 Cultures,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 11, no. 4 (1982): 292.

  *John Money defined gerontophilia as “the condition in which a young adult is dependent on the actuality or fantasy of erotosexual activity with a much older partner in order to initiate and maintain arousal and facilitate or achieve orgasm.” See John Money, “Paraphilias: Phyletic Origins of Erotosexual Dysfunction,” International Journal of Mental Health (1981): 75–109. But neither Money nor Krafft-Ebing, who first described this condition, said how old old really was in the case of gerontophilia. In 2005, the psychiatrist Hadrian Ball suggested the clinical cutoff should be an erotic target aged sixty or more. Regardless of chronological age, it’s the physical signs of advanced age that do it for the true gerontophile.

  †In the U.K., for example, somewhere between 2 and 7 percent of all rapes involve victims over the age of sixty, and at least a subset of these cases are believed to involve a specific targeting of elderly victims. See Hadrian N. Ball, “Sexual Offending on Elderly Women: A Review,” Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology 16, no. 1 (2005): 127–38.

  *In a creative effort to address child sexual abuse, the German government launched a massive media campaign in 2004 to encourage self-identified pedophiles to reach out and get help from supportive professionals. Using a blitz of public service announcements—highway billboards, prime-time television commercials, full-page newspaper ads, spots before movie previews in cinemas—in the hopes of coaxing police-wary pedophiles out of the closet, the ad campaign read, “Do you like children more than you/they like?” (And notice the two meanings.) This was accompanied by images of coquettish children. “You are not guilty because of your sexual desire,” it went on to say, “but you are responsible for your sexual behavior. There is help! Don’t become an offender!” Over the next three years, 808 men responded to the ads. Of these, however, only 358 followed through with a face-to-face consultation with the psychologists in Berlin, so that’s quite a lot of skittish pedophiles who slipped through the cracks after an ambivalent attempt to seek help. The ones who did follow through were committed to the project. Some had traveled all the way from Austria, Switzerland, and even England to volunteer. See Klaus M. Beier et al., “Encouraging Self-Identified Pedophiles and Hebephiles to Seek Professional Help: First Results of the Prevention Project Dunkelfeld (PPD),” Child Abuse and Neglect: The International Journal 33, no. 8 (2009): 545–49.

  *Thomas Mann penned Death in Venice (something of the gay Lolita, or in Mann’s words, “a case of pederasty in an aging artist”) only after becoming entranced in real life by what Nabokov would call a “faunlet” while vacationing with his wife in Vienna. In the true story, the Polish boy whom Mann had become infatuated with wasn’t fourteen but only eleven, and the child was later identified as the Baron Władysław Moes. See Gilbert Adair, The Real Tadzio: Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice” and the Boy Who Inspired It (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2003).

  *Leading the charge for this monkey-testicle cure for male homosexuality was a med
ical professor from the University of Madrid named Gregorio Marañón. In his Evolution of Sex and Intersexual Conditions, published in 1930, Marañón writes: “Several [physicians] have endeavored to combat homosexuality by replacing the testicles of the invert by those of a healthy man; or by grafting upon him the testicle of a monkey … with results that are favorable, though still subject to criticism.” He confesses, however, that he’s had a hard go of finding these “favorable” results in his own experimentation: “[In] one of my own cases of homosexuality, the grafting of the testicle of a monkey augmented the libido, but in a homosexual direction” (168–69).

  *Féré believed that although the genital organs of gay men looked normal in appearance, they acted differently: “In most cases there is irritable weakness. Orgasm often occurs with them as the result of a mere touch, of the sight or odor of the one they love” (146).

  *Gay men “practice gymnastics,” the doctor added to his list. “They do not give way to tears. As a rule, they like dancing, but with persons of their own sex … the effeminized man especially likes coachmen, butchers, circus-riders, etc., or persons who have large sexual organs” (154).

  †Féré describes one of his own lesbian patients with this background, coming of age in France: “She was attracted by girls and felt an urge to caress them … she noticed the rubbing of her breast against theirs caused specially pleasing sensations. When she was 16, she felt for the first time her genitals sharing in the excitement, becoming wet. From that time she began to have voluptuous dreams in which girls always played the most important part” (222). Even after she was introduced by another lesbian to what Féré calls “the mysteries of vulvar rubbings,” it was always breasts that did it for her.