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an earlier stage in evolution, rats’ ancestors were either homosexual or susceptible to bestiality (desire for cats).
Nonetheless, I agree with those who call these behaviors in animals variants. But I disagree with them on the larger issue; the error in logic comes only if one says that because animals are not perverse, because there are brain structures available to start and guide all sorts of behavior, because animals can be forced by experimentally driving the brain with hormones, drugs, electricity, or surgery, or because animals can be experimentally conditioned, then these same stimuli, because they are at times at work in humans, are the causes of our species’ aberrance. That is poor argument.
Perversion is exclusively human.
Chapter 4
Perversions: Aberrations That Are Not Variants
Chapter 2 reviewed arguments sex researchers use to deny that aberrance can be due to willed—moral— choice. Let us extend that discussion, leaving behind the study of animals, of the brain, of evolution, of statistics, of samples—all important but dangerous to linger over here. From now on, I shall emphasize an element— known but not directly observable—that challenges that research: desire as a primary motivation for behavior. To the physiologist, the awareness ‘‘I want” may be a mirage, just an emanation of the brain; to the strict behav-iorist, it is a manifestation, a correlate, or a result, but not a cause; to the statistician, it is a superfluous effect in a world whose inevitability is predetermined by that prime mover, the bell curve: without the urge of “I want,” actions and drives would still supposedly distribute themselves from likely to unlikely. But there is no question that we who feel these attitudes are simplistic are not home free when we recognize that desire is a true cause of behavior; no one has learned to handle desire in the laboratory. Even when language is available for expressing feelings, we cannot accurately measure something as complex, paradoxical, variable, and contradictory as our
desire for, rage against, envy of, pleasure in, or love of another person. How much less, then, can we know the mind—or more accurately, the protomind—of the preverbal infant, one of the necessary objects of a study of perversion. Well-bred scientists, deprived of all but fragments of the experimental method in the face of mental life, shun study of the effect of desire on sexual function and especially of the origins of desire in the whirlwinds of infancy. At the extreme, some even deny that desire exists.
The additional evidence, I repeat, that shifts our opinion from the conclusion of modern sex researchers that humans do not choose their sexual styles but have behavior thrust on them is found in the study of fantasy, that vehicle of hope, healer of trauma, protector from reality, concealer of truth, fixer of identity, restorer of tranquillity, enemy of fear and sadness, cleanser of the soul. And creator of perversion. Since Freud first showed it, we have known that in humans fantasy is as much part of the etiology of perversions—more, of all sexual excitement —as are the physiological and environmental factors the sex researchers are helping us understand. The details of the perversion—the story line—are incomprehensible in their origin and meaning if one ignores the process and function of fantasy. You can study every cell of the brain and every animal in the kingdom and not know why a man gets excited by wearing a woman’s shoe, or by a dead body, or by an amputee, or by a child, or by a penis. Even more, if one examines the fantasy, ignoring no details, I think one finds embedded therein remnants of the individual’s experiences with other people who in the real world, during childhood, provoked the reaction that we call perversion. And at the center is hostility.
When we expand our definition by using hostility as the measure, we now include a lot of sexual behavior, certainly much that is ubiquitous and therefore, in a statistical sense, not even an aberrance. The hostility is often easy to find. For a number of perversions, it is a central feature of the manifest content and marks, even for the untrained observer, the bizarreness of the condition. The more gross the hostility, the less question that one is dealing with perversion. Murder that sexually excites, mutilation for excitement, rape, sadism with precise physical punishments such as whipping or cutting, enchaining and binding games, defecating or urinating on one’s object—all are on a lessening scale of conscious rage toward one’s sex object, in which an essential purpose is for one to be superior to, harmful to, triumphant over another. And so it is also in the nonphysical sadisms like exhibitionism, voyeurism, dirty phone calls or letters, use of prostitutes, and most forms of promiscuity. Statistics, watching animals, and manipulating the brain put us nowhere in understanding why and how these excitements work, but getting into another’s mind and searching out the nature and origin of the need to harm one’s partner are possible and tell a great deal.
Take the most common of these behaviors, promiscuity, the one with the least hostility visible, the one most often used these days for discussion by those who would free up society by arguing that if a behavior is ubiquitous it is normal. The logic goes like this:
1. Most animals are not monogamous; man is an animal.
2. Promiscuous desires are found in almost all humans and therefore are far from statistically aberrant.
3. Those who deny having such desires and those unable to act on them are not superior and sinless, as they claim, but cramped and inhibited; the ideals of the Victorian era have been unmasked.
4. Therefore, let people enjoy their bodies freely if they wish, so long as they do not victimize others.
5. When that is done, it will be seen that the term “perversion” was only one more technique a frightened, inhibited society used to protect its massive neurosis.
I almost completely agree with the argument. As technique for social action it is quite good, for it is, I believe, almost correct, a good mix of observations and sensible conclusions. It lets us conclude that promiscuity is fun, harmless, invigorating, mind-expanding, and liberating for society. But can one thus short-cut his personal— albeit neurotic—sense of sin? The error is that the argument leaves out the hostility. Think of the Don Juan, that paradigm of promiscuity, who reveals his hatred of women so innocently and unwittingly to the audience he must gather to vouch for his performance: his interests are in seduction, not love, and in recounting for friends how many women he has had and how they degraded themselves in the needfulness of the passion he induced. His excitement and gratification do not come from the sensual pleasures of the sexual act or the intimacy that he might have established with another person; in fact, he shows little interest in intercourse, his concentration being on overcoming the resistance of an apparently reluctant woman. Easy women do not attract him. His unending, frantic need to prove himself—his gratification only in numbers of conquests—reveals that his body is more in the service of power than of erotism.
So, we ought not to generalize, when we see a promiscuous person, that he is simply a free soul, expressing the natural sexual exuberance inherent in the species as we all would were we not enslaved by society. Such could be the case, and perhaps will be in time if society shifts, but it is the difference in what the act means to us that measures whether it is perverse or not, not what anatomical parts are used on whom or what. (Nonhostile, joyous promiscuity is portrayed regularly in books, films, and the theater, creating the illusion that it is not rare.)