Then there are sexual styles in which the actor seems the victim, rather than the perpetrator, of hostility: those who hang or anesthetize themselves to have an orgasm, those who need to be bound in ropes, chains, or tight garments, those who wish to be beaten or cut, those who are excited when defecated or urinated on, those who endlessly choose partners who humiliate and abandon them. Here, hostility in the perverted act is disguised, maintained secretly in the fantasies of what one is doing to one’s partner when one is “victimized.” These people have lusciously martyrish gratifications, such as “they’H-be-sorry-when-I’m-gone” or “at-least-God-loves-me” or “contrast-my-saintliness-with-those-who-hurt-me,” which convert the physical victim into psychological victor over his tormentor; the act is performed before a fantasied audience whose function is to recognize that the sadistic partner is a brute. In addition, as creator of the performance, the masochist is never truly a victim, because he never really relinquishes control, and in that sense the whole scenario is known (preconsciously if not consciously) to portray only fraudulent suffering. I doubt if masochists, in the strict sense of sexual perversion, often choose sadists, in the strict sense of sexual perversion, for their sexual partners. I would think that each intuitively knows, when observing the other’s excitement, that the partner's fantasies do not fit his. If a sadist’s partner is lustful, then the sadist knows the partner is not the humiliated sufferer fantasy demands, no matter how many welts are raised or how many painful cries elicited. This is an example of the masochistic contract Smirnoff has described (129).
Freud long ago (24) noted that sadism and masochism are partners. And countless people, from analysts with their patients to spouses of the masochists, have been the focus of the sadism (retribution and restitution) in masochism. A patient says with quiet sadness, apologetically, and with understanding of my great goodness, “I don’t blame you that you can’t stand my sweat on your couch” (which, being leather, bears the proof of her suffering). Of course, what she is saying is, “You beast; you allege you’re an analyst—a physician, healer, empathizer, understander, and forgiver of the natural pain of humanity —but actually you cannot escape your past: you are a male and are disgusted with my female body’s dirty secretions.” Her sexual fantasy, from adolescence till her masochism was analyzed, was that a frozen-cold, sadistic male director forced her to be raped into a frenzy of excitement by a sexually crazed stallion in a public performance on a stage witnessed by a circle of silent men with erections.
Finally, there are the perversions in which hostility of any sort seems absent—the fetishisms. These range from necrophilia (where one chooses a corpse one has not oneself killed) through the use of inanimate objects (usually garments whose connection with a human object has been reduced to the symbolic) to the ubiquitous fetishism of treating people as if they were only organs (for example, breasts or penis) or functions (beater, screwer, victim, automaton, slave). Since hostility often seems absent, especially in the classic fetishisms, which use inanimate objects such as garments, these ought to test the hypothesis of hostility’s presence more vigorously than do the sadistic and masochistic perversions, where the hostility is so patently visible.
A closer view of fetishism shows that the desire to harm is only silent, hidden. When one challenges, “Where is the hostility in becoming excited by a piece of cloth?” an answer is possible. In the next chapter, we shall look at that great dehumanizing device—pornography—and examine a case that makes explicit my proposition about hostility. This patient shows us the anger hidden in the fetish and, beyond that (as I believe is true for all perversion), the source of the anger in the patient’s victimization in childhood, usually by parents or their surrogates. Through the perversion, anger is transformed into a victory over those who made him wretched, for in perversion, trauma becomes triumph.
Part II
Dynamics: Trauma, Hostility, Risk, and Revenge
Chapter 3
Pornography and Perversion
If fantasy is what determines whether or not any given sexual act is perverse, then we should look more closely at what an individual is thinking and feeling in order to understand his perversion. Pornography allows us to do this with ease.
Pornography is a complex daydream in which activities, usually but not necessarily overtly sexual, are projected into written, pictorial, or aural material to induce genital excitement in an observer. No depiction is pornographic until an observer’s fantasies are added; nothing is pornographic per se.
Here is the cover picture from a pornographic pamphlet, that is, a booklet produced by someone who thought there was a large enough audience to make the printing profitable. The booklet was purchased by a man who knew it would excite him sexually. Those who look at this picture can be divided into those who get excited and those who do not. The latter group, I assume, is by far the larger. Most readers will be unable to understand why the picture and its story excite; they will not even seriously believe the pamphlet could do so.
PANTY RAID
What—if you are not a transvestite—do you see in the picture? Probably not very much: just women who are supposed to depict powerful, dangerous, feminine beauty and who are bullying a defenseless, cowering, humiliated man dressed in women’s garments.
Each of the many genres of pornography is created for a specific perverse need by exact attention to detail, and each defines an area of excitement that will have no effect on a different person. Thus, for example, a sadist will choose depictions of sadistic acts, and a fetishistic transvestite will choose depictions of acts of cross-dressing. As with all perversions, pornography is a matter of aesthetics: one man’s delight is another’s boredom. Also, as with all perversions, at its heart is a fantasied act of revenge, condensing in itself the subject’s sexual life history—his memories and fantasies, traumas, frustrations, and joys. There is always a victim, no matter how disguised: no victim, no pornography. The use of such matter is an act of perversion with .several components. The most apparent is voyeurism. The second, hidden (unless the person is an overt sexual sadist), is sadism; sadism is, however, rather easily demonstrated. The third, more hidden (unless the person is an overt sexual masochist), is masochism; masochism is hard to demonstrate, since it is hidden in an unconscious identification with the depicted victim.
These three components are universal for users of pornography. To be dwelled on more in this chapter is a fourth component, which is specific to each user—his own style of perversion.
Pornography is for restitution; its creation and its use are ritualized acts, and deviation from a narrow, prescribed path will produce decreased sexual excitement. The perversion functions as a necessary preserver of potency. The actual sexual life history—the unconscious memory of real historical events—exists in the conscious fantasies expressed in the pornography.
The development of the manifest complex daydream that the pornography exteriorizes is a chronicle, over the years, of fantasies, each elaboration occurring at the moment when a piece of pain (or of incomplete pleasure) is converted into (greater) pleasure, until all these fantasies, like building blocks, have been assembled to create the adult perversion that presents itself overtly. But there is a grain of historical reality embedded in each fantasy, and the differences between what actually happened in different people’s lives account in good part (though not completely) for the minor variations found even in a group of people homogeneous for a particular perversion.