Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?: And Other Reflections on Being Human

by Jesse Bering

  In any event, given the biological (even adaptive) verities of adults being attracted to adolescents, most experts in this area find it completely illogical for Blanchard to recommend adding hebephilia to the revised diagnostic manual (especially since other, more clearly maladaptive paraphilias, such as gerontophilia, in which men are attracted to postmenopausal women, are not presently included). The push to pathologize hebephilia, argues the forensic psychologist Karen Franklin, appears to be motivated by “a booming cottage industry” in forensic psychology, not coincidentally linked with a “punitive era of moral panic.” Because “civil incapacitation” (basically, the government’s ability to strip a person of his or her civil rights in the interests of public safety) requires that the person be suffering from a diagnosable mental disorder, Franklin calls Blanchard’s proposal “a textbook example of subjective values masquerading as science.” Other critics similarly maintain that any such medical classifications based on erotic age orientations are rooted in arbitrary distinctions dictated by cultural standards.

  One unexplored question, and one inseparable from the lightning-rod case that was Michael Jackson’s molestation trials, is whether we tend to be more forgiving of a person’s peccadilloes when we deem that individual as having some invaluable or culturally irreplaceable skills. For example, consider a true story, which I’ll put first into the following general terms:

  There once was a man who fancied young boys. Being that laws were more lax in other nations, this man decided to travel to a foreign country, leaving his wife and young daughter behind, where he met up with another Westerner who shared in his predilections for pederasty, and there the two of them spent their happy vacation scouring the seedy underground of this country searching for pimps and renting out boys for sex.

  If you’re like most people, you’re probably experiencing a shiver of disgust and a spark of rage. You may even feel these men should have their testicles drawn and quartered (halved?) by wild mares, be thrown to a burly group of rapists, be castrated with garden shears, or, if you’re the pragmatic sort, be treated as any other sick animal in the herd would be treated, with a humane bullet to the temple or perhaps a swift and sure current of potassium chloride injected into a vein.

  But notice the subtle change in your perceptions when I tell you that these events are from the autobiography of André Gide, who in 1947—long after he’d publicized these very details—won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Gide is in fact bowdlerizing his time in Algiers with none other than that great Dubliner wit, Oscar Wilde. Here is Gide’s account:

  Wilde took a key out of his pocket and showed me into a tiny apartment of two rooms … The youths followed him, each of them wrapped in a burnous that hid his face. Then the guide left us and Wilde sent me into the further room with little Mohammed and shut himself up in the other with the [other boy]. Every time since then that I have sought after pleasure, it is the memory of that night I have pursued.

  It’s not that we think it’s perfectly fine for Gide and Wilde to have sex with minors or even that they shouldn’t have been punished. (In fact, Wilde was sentenced in London to two years of hard labor for related offenses not long after this Maghreb excursion with Gide and died in penniless ignominy.) But somehow, as with many people’s commingled feelings for Michael Jackson (“the greatest entertainer of all time”) or perhaps even for the director Roman Polanski, the fact that these men were national treasures may dilute our moralistic anger.

  For example, would you really have wanted Oscar Wilde euthanized like a lame animal because he fancied boys? Should André Gide, whom The New York Times hailed in its obituary as a man “judged the greatest French writer of this century by the literary cognoscenti,” have been deprived of his pen, torn to pieces by illiterate thugs? (There’s also Lewis Carroll’s beloved Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, rumored to have been inspired by the author’s hebephilic devotion to an eleven-year-old named Alice Liddell, not to mention the Italian painter Caravaggio’s notoriously homoerotic depictions of “fleshy, full-lipped, languorous young boys,” as one critic put it.) It’s complicated. And although in principle we know that all men are equal in the eyes of the law, just as we did for Michael Jackson during his bizarre legal affairs, I have a hunch that many other people also tend to feel (and uncomfortably so) a little sympathy for the Devil under such circumstances.

  Whatever your feelings on this hot-button issue, one of the most significant challenges in studying people’s erotic age orientation, from any theoretical perspective, is the fact that so many mainstream scientists are leery of commenting on this subject area or engaging with the research and debates surrounding the limited data available. Given that an overwhelming majority of child sex abuse cases involve male perpetrators, we would predict otherwise, but we still don’t know, for example, whether measures of female genital arousal would show equivalent rates of pedophilia, hebephilia, and ephebophilia in women who were recruited from the general public.

  My guess is that this academic unease is due in no small part to fear within the scientific community, since simply addressing the issue from an amoral perspective may be seen by some outraged segments of society as a type of pedophilia apologia. Frankly, I think such limbically fueled moral reactions are not only naive but shortsighted. You can’t adequately address or change what you don’t understand, after all. I’ve also a suspicion that all our fuming on this subject reveals something fairly significant about our sexuality. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about human nature, it’s that whenever society screams about some demon or another, it’s probably just caught an especially alarming sight of itself in the mirror. And while not all men and women are attracted to adolescents, it’s much more common a thing than we’d like to pretend. The bottom line is this: unless you’re practicing mental gymnastics of the variety we explored in that earlier essay on masturbation, people haven’t any say whatsoever about what their genitals respond to. But people do have considerably more control over what exactly they do with these genitals. And at least in my book, those are very different things altogether.

  Animal Lovers: Zoophiles Make Scientists Rethink Human Sexuality

  Out of context, some of our behaviors—if limited to the mere veneer of plain description—would raise many an eyebrow. The most innocent of things can sound tawdry and bizarre when certain facts and details are omitted. Here’s a perfect example: I accidentally bit my dog Gulliver’s tongue recently.

  Now, you may be asking yourself what I was doing with his tongue in my mouth to begin with. But I would submit that that is a better question for Gulliver, since he’s the one that violated my busily masticating maw by inserting that long, thin, delicatessen-slice muscle of his while I was simply enjoying a bite of a very banal bagel. Shocked by the feel of human teeth chomping down on his tongue, he yelped—then scampered off. Fortunately, Gulliver showed no signs of lasting trauma, and I was saved from having to explain to the vet how it came to be that I bit my dog’s tongue off; but for days after the “incident” Gulliver kept his prized possession sealed behind the vault of his own clamped jaw. This gave my partner, Juan, and me at least a temporary reprieve from Gulliver’s normally overindulgent use of that particular organ on our faces. The story was strange enough for me to share with friends, and this particular tale of man bites dog unleashed the predictable onslaught of humorous bestiality innuendos. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where the real story begins.

  These sarcastic remarks from my confidants reminded me of a rather peculiar e-mail that I had received months earlier, written by an unusually erudite reader of my column. This individual was a self-professed “zoophile” (Greek for “animal lover”) with a particular romantic affinity for horses, and he was hoping that I might write about this neglected, much-maligned topic of forbidden interspecies love. “The politics of acknowledging zoophilia as a ‘legitimate’ sexual orientation,” asserted this reader, “often mean that zoophiles are either ignored as a class or subject to
what can only be described as the most vicious, sustained, and hateful attacks by mainstream society.”

  I have my own viscerally based, unreasoned biases, and—I confess—on first reading this message, I promptly filed it away in the untouchable Eww … category of my mind. But Gulliver’s tongue, combined with my sympathy for human underdogs, inspired me to go back and reread it, and I saw a rather intriguing scientific question lurking there. Is it really possible for an otherwise normal, healthy person to develop a genuine sexual preference for a nonhuman species?

  Of course, there’s nothing new under the sun about bestiality as a behavior. Prehistoric depictions of bestiality have been found in Siberia, Italy, France, Fezzan (in modern Libya), and Sweden. The ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Hebrews, and Romans allegedly partook in these sexual activities as well. Roman women were said to have inserted snakes into their vaginas and trained them to suckle from their nipples. Women allowed goats to enter them as part of some religious rituals in ancient Egypt. Monkeys were once commonly trained to fondle men’s genitals in the Nile and Indus valleys. But the act of having sex with an animal is one thing; being aroused more by animals than other humans is a different matter entirely. After all, the fact that I could, in principle, have sex with a woman—if I were plied with enough alcohol and she were tomboyish enough to create a suitable gender-modifying illusion—doesn’t exactly make me a heterosexual. So it is with, say, a randy farm boy who finds himself one day with his phallus lodged curiously in a bucking goat, his eyes closed, and his brain replaying scenes of that flirtatious cheerleader from chemistry class. The act alone wouldn’t make him a zoophile per se.

  For decades, the scientific study of human beings’ sexual relations with (other) animals has concentrated almost entirely on the overt act of bestiality, viewing such behavior as a surrogate for human-to-human sex. As a consequence of this approach, researchers have until very recently overlooked the possibility that some people might actually favor a romantic affair with a horse (or dog, lamb, cow, sow, or some other choice species) over the thought of becoming trapped in such unthinkable carnal relations with another person.

  This emphasis on bestiality as a behavior rather than as a possible sexual orientation can be traced back at least as far as the work of Alfred Kinsey. In the classic book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Kinsey reported that 50 percent of the population of American “farm-bred males” claimed to have had “sexual contact”—he doesn’t analyze further, so heaven only knows what behaviors these men who were raised on farms engaged in, exactly—with various other species, usually hoofed animals. Many of these people, said Kinsey, were ashamed of their early sexual experimentation with animals (most of these puerile encounters took place when the boys were between ten and twelve years of age), and so he advised clinicians to assure these now grown males that it was all part of being raised in a rural environment where females were scarce and premarital relations strictly forbidden. “To a considerable extent,” wrote Kinsey, “contacts with animals are substitutes for heterosexual relations with human females.”

  But the stereotypical portrait of the zoophile as a woman-deprived, down-on-the-farm, and poorly educated male is being challenged by some contemporary findings. The most fascinating of these, in my opinion, is a set of two case studies published by the psychologists Christopher Earls and Martin Lalumière. The first case study documented the story of a low-IQ’d, antisocial, fifty-four-year-old convict who had a strong sexual interest in horses. In fact, this was why he was in prison for the fourth time on related offenses; in the latest incident, he had cruelly killed a mare out of jealousy because he thought she’d been giving eyes to a certain stallion. (You thought you had issues.) The man’s self-reported sexual interest in mares was actually verified by a controlled, phallometric study. When he consented to be hooked up to a penile plethysmograph in prison and was shown nude photographs of all varieties and ages of humans, the man was decidedly flaccid. Nothing happening down there either when he looked at slides of cats, dogs, sheep, chickens, or cows. But he certainly wasn’t impotent, as the researchers clearly observed when the subject was shown images of horses.

  This case and related anecdotal evidence reported by the authors (including a 1950s study of a sixteen-year-old “imbecile” who sexually preferred rabbits to women) were important at the time because they suggested that zoophilia may be an extraordinarily rare—but real—type of minority sexual orientation. That is to say, for some people, having sex with their animal “lovers” may amount to more than just replacing human sex with the next-best thing. Rather, for them, sex with nonhuman animals is the best thing.

  On the heels of their study in 2002, Earls and Lalumière report having received a number of letters and e-mails from people who also self-identified as zoophiles (or “zoos,” as many of these individuals refer to themselves on the Internet, which has served to connect them in unprecedented ways and to attract curious researchers like flies on a barnyard wall). And many of these respondents were vehement that they didn’t fit the mentally challenged, rural stereotype reflected by Kinsey’s analysis. Some were, in fact, highly educated professionals. But what most concerned these people was society’s misconception that they were somehow harming animals by being amorous with them. The majority of zoophiles scoffed at the notion that they were abusive toward animals in any way—far from it, they said. Many even considered themselves to be animal welfare advocates in addition to being zoophiles.

  In an effort to disentangle myth from reality, then, Earls and Lalumière published a new case study focusing on the first-person account of a forty-seven-year-old, high-functioning (he earned his M.D. at age twenty-eight), and seemingly well-adjusted male who had had, by all appearances, a completely unremarkable city upbringing with loving parents and no memories of abuse or neglect. Nonetheless, from an early age this man had struggled to come to grips with his own zoophiliac tendencies. Again, horses served as the primary erotic target:

  As I grew into adolescence my sexual ideation was different from what it was supposed to be. I looked at horses the same as other boys looked at girls. I watched cowboy movies to catch glimpses of horses. I furtively looked at pictures of horses in the library. This was before the Internet and I felt totally isolated. I was a city boy. I had never seen a horse up close, never touched or smelled one. No one in my family had any contact with horses, but for me, they held a powerful, wonderful, and, yes even—well, primarily—sexual attraction. I had no idea that there were others like me in the world. I tried to be normal. I tried to get interested in girls, but for me they were always foreign, distasteful and repulsive. A couple of early adolescent sexual explorations … were mechanical, forced and unsuccessful.

  At the age of fourteen, the boy had managed to find the nearest horse stables, which he would visit frequently—secretly—by bicycle. Imagine him there, a young boy lurking in the fields, leaning against fencing in the meadows, perhaps under the strawberry–pale blue sky of early autumn, longing to be close to these huge, mysterious creatures that created such strange stirrings in his loins. Eventually, they came close enough for him to touch them and smell them, a scent he would describe over thirty years later as “astonishingly wonderful.” This was no copycat version of the fabled play Equus (in fact, it was still years before the alleged British case of bestiality that the play was loosely based on) but instead a real developmental experience for an otherwise normal human being. Three years later, the teenager purchased his own mare, took riding lessons, and began a “long courtship” with the female horse until, finally, the pair consummated their relationship:

  When that black mare finally just stood there quietly while I cuddled and caressed her, when she lifted her tail up and to the side when I stroked the root of it, and when she left it there, and stood quietly while I climbed upon a bucket, then, breathlessly, electrically, warmly, I slipped inside her, it was a moment of sheer peace and harmony, it felt so right, it was an epiphany.

  This c
ase study reveals that, again, it’s not only mentally deficient farmhands who have sex with animals. And neither, it seems, is it simply unattractive, unsavory men who can’t find willing sexual partners of their own species. In fact, shortly after obtaining his medical degree, this particular man married a (human) woman and had two children with her. But their sex life relied on his imagining her to be a horse, and—perhaps not surprisingly—the marriage didn’t last. As my sister said when I mentioned this tidbit to her: “I can see how that would be a problem.”

  Another pioneering researcher in zoophilia, the Maryland-based sexologist Hani Miletski, found similarly that more than half of the ninety-three self-identified zoophiles she’d spoken to (eighty-two men and eleven women with an average age of thirty-eight) reported being more attracted to animals than to people. And just like the mare lover from Earls and Lalumière’s study, the majority (71 percent) considered themselves to be well adjusted in their current lives, with 92 percent seeing no reason to stop having sex with their animal partners. This is an important point, because the current version of the American Psychological Association’s DSM-IV classifies zoophilia as a disorder only if an individual’s sexual attraction to nonhuman animals causes the person to experience distress. Bestiality is still illegal in most states, but it’s rarely prosecuted, mainly because it’s quite a challenge catching an interspecies coital coupling as it’s happening.

  As you can probably imagine, though, the subject of zoophilia is a highly charged one, attracting the ire of animal rights groups such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and causing a knee-jerk moralistic response in the rest of us platonic animal lovers. Ironically, it landed one prominent animal rights defender, the Princeton philosopher and author Peter Singer, in some hot water. In an essay for Nerve magazine called “Heavy Petting,” Singer was asked to review Dearest Pet by the Dutch biologist Midas Dekkers. But he did more than just review the book. Singer also asked readers to reconsider whether humans’ having mutually pleasurable, nonabusive sex with other animals is as inherently wrong as we’ve been led to believe by our traditional Judeo-Christian mores (go on, quote Leviticus). As Singer noted, “The vehemence with which this prohibition [against sex with other species] continues to be held, its persistence while other non-reproductive sexual acts have become acceptable, suggests that there is [a] powerful force at work: our desire to differentiate ourselves, erotically and in every other way, from animals.”