CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Pervert’s Lament
Paraphilias are not universally present in human societies, their incidence could be greatly reduced if tolerance and education in sexual matters were more widespread. This is a most important but socially sensitive area of sex research.
ALAN DIXSON1
While many women are freed by their erotic flexibility, men can find themselves trapped by the rigidity of their sexual response, like the male sheep and goats mentioned earlier. Once determined, male eroticism tends to retain its contours throughout life, like concrete that has set. Consequently, the theory of erotic plasticity predicts that paraphilias (abnormal sexual desires and behaviors) should be far more prevalent in men than in women who would presumably be more responsive to social pressures and find it easier to abandon previous turn-ons or ignore unseemly urges. Nearly every source of evidence supports this prediction. Most researchers and therapists agree that these unusual sexual hungers are almost exclusively seen in males, appear to be related to early imprinting, and are difficult, if not impossible, to alter once boyhood impressions have hardened into adult yearnings.
Purely psychological treatment for paraphilias and pedophilia have shown little success. The most effective treatments for the latter tend to be based upon biological approaches (hormone therapy, chemical castration). Once beyond the age of malleability, males seem to be stuck with whatever imprint they’ve received, latex or leather, S or M, goat or lamb. If the influences during this “developmental window” are distorting and destructive, a boy may grow into a man with an unalterable, nearly irresistible desire to reenact the same patterns with others. The ritualized, widespread pedophilia in the Catholic Church appears to be a prime example of this process (as does the Church’s centuries-long attempt to cover up the issue). Recall Schopenhauer’s famous quote, “Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will.” (One can choose what to do, but not what to want.) Desire, particularly male desire, is notoriously unresponsive to religious dictate, legal retribution, family pressure, self-preservation, or common sense. It does respond to one thing, however: testosterone.
A man who suffered a hormonal disorder that left him with almost no testosterone for four months discussed his experience (anonymously) in a radio interview. Without testosterone, he said, “Everything I identified as being me [was lost]. My ambition, my interest in things, my sense of humor, the inflection of my voice…. The introduction of testosterone returned everything.” Asked whether there had been an upside to being testosterone-free, he said, “There were things that I find offensive about my own personality that were disconnected then. And it was nice to be without them…. I approached people with a humility that I had never displayed before.” But overall, he was glad to have it back, because, “When you have no testosterone, you have no desire.”
Griffin Hansbury, who was born female but underwent a sex change after graduating from college, has another well-informed view of the powers of testosterone. “The world just changes,” he said. “The most overwhelming feeling was the incredible increase in libido and change in the way I perceived women.” Before the hormone treatments, Hansbury said, an attractive woman in the street would provoke an internal narrative: “She’s attractive. I’d like to meet her.” But after the injections, no more narrative. Any attractive quality in a woman, “nice ankles or something,” was enough to “flood my mind with aggressive pornographic images, just one after another…. Everything I looked at, everything I touched turned to sex.” He concluded, “I felt like a monster a lot of the time. It made me understand men. It made me understand adolescent boys a lot.”2
It doesn’t take a sex-change operation to understand that many adolescent boys have a frenzied focus on sex. If you’ve ever tried to teach a class containing more than a few, or tried to raise one, or recall the turbulent desires yourself, you know the phrase testosterone poisoning is not always used ironically. For most adolescent boys, life often seems (and is) violent, hectic, and wild.
Countless studies confirm that testosterone and associated male sex hormones are at high tide from puberty to a man’s mid-twenties. Here we have another massive conflict between what society dictates and biology demands. With every voice in a young man’s body screaming for SEX NOW, many societies insist he ignore these incessant urgings and channel that energy into other pursuits, ranging from sports to homework to military adventure.3
As with other attempts to block the unignorable importations of biology, this one has been a centuries-long disaster. Testosterone levels correlate to the likelihood of a young man (or woman) getting into trouble.4 In the United States, adolescent males are five times more likely to kill themselves than females are. A government study found that homosexual youth are two to three times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers.5 Among Americans between fifteen and twenty-five, suicide is the third leading cause of death, and teenage boys kill themselves at a rate double that of any other demographic group.
Well-intentioned websites and presentations rarely, if ever, mention gut-wrenching, identity-clouding sexual frustration as a possible cause of some of this destructive adolescent behavior. Despite the omnipresence of billboards and bus stops featuring semi-naked barely pubescent fashion models, significant parts of American society remain adamantly opposed to any suggestion that sexual activity may commence before the law allows.6
In 2003, seventeen-year-old honor student and homecoming king Genarlow Wilson was caught having consensual oral sex with his girlfriend, who had not yet turned sixteen. He was convicted of aggravated child molestation, sentenced to a minimum of ten years in a Georgia prison, and forced to register as a sex offender for life. If Wilson and his girlfriend had just enjoyed good old-fashioned intercourse, as opposed to oral sex, their “crime” would have been a misdemeanor, punishable by a maximum of a year in prison and no sex-offender status.7
The previous year, Todd Senters videotaped consensual sex with his girlfriend, who was over the age of consent. No problem, right? Wrong. According to Nebraska state law, although the sex itself was perfectly legal, taping it constituted “manufacturing child pornography.” The seventeen-year-old was legally permitted to have sex, but images of her doing so are illegal. Go figure.
Adolescents all over the country are getting into serious trouble for sexting one another: snapping a risqué photo of themselves with their cell phone and sending it to a friend. Turns out, in many states, these kids can be sent to prison (where sexual abuse is rampant) for photographing their own bodies (manufacturing child pornography) and sharing the photos (distributing child pornography). They’re being forced to register as sex offenders despite the fact that they themselves are the “victims” of their own “crimes.”8
Just Say What?
A 2005 survey of 12,000 adolescents found that those who had pledged to remain abstinent until marriage were more likely to have oral and anal sex than other teens, less likely to use condoms, and just as likely to contract sexually transmitted diseases as their unapologetically nonabstinent peers. The study’s authors found that 88 percent of those who pledged abstinence admitted to failing to keep their pledge.9
If our distorted relationship with human sexuality is the source of much of this frustration, confusion, and ignorance, societies with less conflicted views should confirm the causal connection. Developmental neuropsychologist James Prescott found that bodily pleasure and violence seem to have an either/or relationship—the presence of one inhibits development of the other. In 1975, Prescott published a paper in which he argued that “certain sensory experiences during the formative periods of development will create a neuropsychological predisposition for either violence-seeking or pleasure-seeking behaviors later in life.” On the level of individual development, this finding seems obvious: adults who abuse children were almost always victims of childhood abuse themselves, and every junkyard owner knows that if you want a mean dog, beat the puppy.
Prescott applied this logic on a cross-cultural level. He performed a meta-analysis of previously gathered data on the amount of physical affection shown to infants (years of breastfeeding, percentage of time in direct physical contact with mother, being fondled and played with by other adults) and overall tolerance for adolescent sexual behavior. After comparing these data with levels of violence within and between societies, Prescott concluded that in all but one of the cultures for which these data were available (forty-eight of forty-nine), “deprivation of body pleasure throughout life—but particularly during the formative periods of infancy, childhood, and adolescence—is very closely related to the amount of warfare and interpersonal violence.” Cultures that don’t interfere in the physical bonding between mother and child or prohibit the expression of adolescent sexuality show far lower levels of violence—both between individuals and between societies.10
While American society twists itself into positions no yoga master could hold (Britney Spears was a vocal virgin while pole-dancing in bikinis on TV?), other societies ritualize and seek to structure adolescent sexuality in positive ways. Mangaian youth are encouraged to have sex with one another, with particular emphasis on the young men learning to control themselves and take pride in the pleasure they can provide a woman. The Muria of central India set up adolescent dormitories (called ghotuls), where adolescents are free to sleep together, away from concerned parents. In the ghotul, the young people are encouraged to experiment with different partners, as it’s considered unwise to become too attached to a single partner at this phase of life.11
If we accept that our species is and always has been optimized for a highly sexual life and that adolescent boys are especially primed for action, why should we be surprised by the explosions of destructive frustration that result from the thwarting of this primal drive?