would a group of frenzied primitive worshippers before a weird fetish-God.
As the dress was lowered upon Bruce, he found his heart was pounding, his emotions were stepped up and he was breathless with eager anticipation. He dared not admit his true feelings to anyone; even to himself! After all, he had been FORCED into this whole thing ... by his frat brothers and then he was CAPTURED and BOUND BY FEMALES and compelled to follow their orders . . .
How can humiliation produced on being forced to put on women’s clothes by hostile women cause sexual excitement? There are several explanations that can (almost) account for this excitement.*
First, although the man in the illustration is humiliated, the man reading the book is humiliated only in effigy; while he identifies with the illustrated man, he is very clearly also safely not so identified. He knows this experience, taking place via pornography, is only a fantasy.
Second, the excitement is accompanied by a guilt-removing device inherent in the story: since the pathetic boy-man is being forced to dress by the cruel women, he cannot be accused of wanting to do this himself. (In pornography, as in humor, there is always a device for reducing guilt. This could be true for many other sublimated activities with hostile components, such as the theater, visual arts, and “normal” sexual relations . . . Imagine considering heterosexual intercourse a “sublimated activity”!)
•We do not quite know how sexual excitement is produced in anyone, not just in the perverse. How does a woman (’s body) excite a heterosexual man? What has he learned from infancy on and how do the nongenital responses of infancy and childhood become converted into the adult genital response? Is the explanation simply physiological? (Not likely.) Does anxiety play a role in normal persons as in the perverse? Just as Masters and Johnson did the naturalist's task of revealing the gross physical appearance of sexual excitement, so should the mechanisms of the psychological experience of sexual excitement be discovered—what sets it off; what maintains and protects it, what makes it recur or subside in time into boredom.
Yet the two reasons above are only secondary devices to protect the excitement and are not causes in themselves. We come closer if we study the life history that is present in the pornography in such condensed fashion.
The man who first showed me these dynamics, who also brought in the pamphlet just quoted, had been forced to dress thus by women in childhood. I have told his story before (137, 142).
Fortunately for the research (and disastrously for him), he was posed for snapshots, placed quite openly in the family album, tracing the development of his crossdressing. In addition, the women who did it to him are alive; though I could not interview them, they gave information to him and his wife, filling in the story indicated by the snapshots.
The patient is a biologically normal man in his midthirties, married and with children. The dominating interest in his life is sexual excitement produced by women’s clothes; he is masculine in behavior, in choice of clothes when not expressing his perversion, and in profession.
For the first almost three years of his life, he was treated by his mother and father as if he were what he was, a normal male whom they expected to grow up to be a man. They gave him an unequivocally masculine name at birth and sent out no covert messages to contradict their recognition that his assignment to the male sex was correct. As a result, he developed, as do almost all little boys, the conviction that he belonged to the male sex, a necessary first stage in the development of masculinity in all males. Then his mother developed a chronic illness that removed her from the home, ending with her death less than two years later. When she was first hospitalized, his father mobilized the boy’s aunt and this aunt’s teen-age daughter to take care of the child. These two women unfortunately shared an immense hatred for males and for males' masculinity. Given the freedom to act upon him, they were able safely to attack his expanding masculinity. They did so by altering his appearance. It is easy; women can simply put unmasculine or even women’s clothes on a boy. What incites them to do this, I underline, is his already present masculinity; that is what they hate, and it is best attacked, they know, by damaging, not destroying it. Such women do not want the boy not to be a male; rather, they want to assuage their envy by saying that maleness is unimportant and inferior. To do so, they make clear to themselves and to the boy that they wish to humiliate him, which requires that he forever retain his wish to be a male and his awareness that he can be humiliated.
On his fourth birthday, a few weeks before she died, his mother came home to visit him. On that occasion, the aunt and cousin introduced his mother to "a new neighbor girl,” in fact the dying woman’s son, and took photographs to memorialize the joke. The man who had been this boy has no memory of that traumatic event; it was only discovered by his wife in a family album, during the time they were being seen by me. The story was then corroborated by the aunt.
So far as we know, sexual excitement began two or three years later. Only at this point does the patient’s memory regarding transvestism begin. At that time, as a punishment, he was forced by another woman to put on her stockings. He was instantly struck by a voluptuous feeling he is sure he had never experienced before. As pleasurable as it was, he also sensed an aura of guilt and so for several years repeated the experience only a few times. At puberty, however, it became linked to orgasm and from then to now it has been his dominating pleasure. Even during intercourse, he is fully potent only when cross-dressed. (Perhaps not coincidentally, the woman who cross-dressed him as punishment had a son who was treated similarly; I have a picture of him, dressed as Shirley Temple.)
Throughout those years of childhood and then on into adolescence and adulthood to the present, his masculinity was not destroyed, only damaged. That is how the attacking women would have wished it; had he turned completely into a normal-appearing “woman,” they would have lost their victim. But instead, he struggled secretly against them so as to protect this essence of his self.
I have discussed elsewhere (137) the evidence that the core of one’s gender identity—the sense of being a male or a female—is laid down by the first three years of life and is pretty much unalterable thereafter, as was true with this boy. If one has developed that sense unequivocally, later experiences can threaten it, forcing modifications upon one as one attempts to protect that core, but the core will remain.
Up to now, we have noted the effort the traumatized child makes to save himself. The case above exemplifies this struggle but also, by introducing the issue of threat to one’s masculinity or femininity, expands our understanding of the precise nature of that victimhood: the fear that one’s already established sense of belonging to one’s sex may be destroyed. In analytic circles, this is called “castration anxiety”;* but that term is too narrow, for one fears more than the loss of one’s genitals. Rather, it is that if one loses one’s genitals, that may signify a more profound loss, one’s no longer belonging to the class male, the conviction of which is at the core of one’s being. Adult males whose genitals are damaged or destroyed do not lose their sense of maleness, much less their sense of existing; while the experience is traumatic, it does not create perversion or—in the person with intact gender identity—psychosis.