To remind us of the familiar, here is a prostitute talking about mystery and boredom after a year in the trade:
The thing that bothers me about what I am doing is that seeing guys, seeing men’s bodies, gets to be a bore. Part of the excitement was seeing a guy’s genitals or feeling them. But I just don’t get the same reaction now as I used to when it was more or less a mystery to me. I don’t know if it is just because of the job—seeing nude guys all the time and participating sexually with them. Because sometimes I do get it off, even with my customers. Because a lot of them are really good looking, and a lot of them satisfy me. In a way, I almost use the working thing as an excuse for having sexual contact. The time when it is still good is when you become so totally absorbed in your selfsatisfaction and you become so totally selfish.
You have all these men and you see all these men; and at first you are really excited about them being men. That in itself turns you on and gives you orgasms, because of just the sheer feeling of being with somebody. Then they start to suffocate you. I have experienced every type of sexual trip you want to experience, from masochist, sadist, everything; to women. That’s not even men. But now, to achieve an orgasm is like having to almost battle for it; it no longer happens really easily just because of the sheer excitement of it all. A lot of times, I get more excited when I have my clothes on and he has his clothes on and we are making out and playing around. I get really excited then. Then he takes off his clothes and we get into bed, and all of a sudden it becomes— Sometimes, it is even funny. Sometimes I almost want to laugh, because it is like a joke, like laying there and the guy is going bang, bang—you know—bang, bang. A lot of guys I might have been very unfair to: “Let's not make this an athletic event.”
I don't think it is my problem alone. I think that it is men’s too. Sex is so available to men now that they’ve become disinterested in it. All it is to them is getting on top of a woman and then getting it off.
The explanation for excitement in sexual looking goes like this so far: When the inevitable curiosity about the differences in the sexes arises in the small child, the desire to look becomes intense, insatiable, and permanent to the extent that the body parts to be looked at are forbidden and at the same time considered desirable by the parents; in their forbidding, parents let their child know there is dangerous pleasure possible. Therefore, in our society where the female anatomy is the more forbidden, but enticingly so, males will tend to overvalue and be excited by looking and females by being looked at.
Now one major way for the looking to be sexually exciting—if the thesis is correct—is for a man to believe he is acting forcefully, sadistically, upon an unwilling woman: he is doing what, so goes his fantasy, she decidedly does not want. If he can do so, he defeats her; he gets revenge for past frustration. Finally it is woman's turn to suffer; the excitement in pornography requires a depicted victim, though the more normative the perversion, the less obvious the depiction (for example, a picture of a congenial nude female hides the dynamic more than a picture of a woman being tortured). Inherent in sexual looking is a desire to degrade females, to which women may respond with their own attack (“seductive” clothes, “provocative” posturing); the rules of the game at present in our society demand that this take the form (but not the substance) of passivity.* Socarides (132) has noted how “very often sadistic impulses are tied up with scopophilia. The individual wants to see in order to destroy by seeing; or to gain reassurance that the object is not yet destroyed; or else looking itself is unconsciously thought of as a substitute for destroying. ‘I did not destroy it; I merely looked at it’ (Fenichel, 1945) ” (The envy of the opposite sex buried in this—in looker and lookee—will not be discussed here.)
We need not use such obvious perversions as rape, exhibitionism, sadism, or homosexuality for confirmation. We can turn again to the trivial. A woman in a drawing room treasures t the privacy of every inch of thigh £ that might be displayed beyond her permissible level. But on the beach, the formerly contested vision is just skin, simply because the man knows she does not care there. Likewise, a strange woman is exciting, while for too many men the familiar is a bore. The sight he would sacrifice so much for early on quickly palls when
'Perhaps what we too often consider sex appeal in certain provocative women is no more than a compact packaging of the sadomasochism of exhibitionism, a guileful display of sexual vulnerability mixed with erotic attack via posturing, facial poses, and partial nudity. What are the girl's fantasies as she poses for nude magazine pictures? A fuller understanding of perversion may come from analyzing the perverse person’s willing partners.
tOr acts to others and perhaps herself as if she treasures. Under certain circumstances, when she intuitively senses these dynamics of hostility in a man watching her, her own exhibition will excite her, for she too struggles toward revenge and triumph, tit used to be ankles; dynamics are more permanent than borders.
the man realizes the woman does not care that he looks. To repair this psychodynamically based flaw, women resort to fashion; design informs men there really still is a mystery, which can be penetrated only against resistance. Fashions cater to the man’s fantasy that he might forcefully take what would not easily be given.
In the individual, this mechanism is perverse, that is, neurotic; in the society, normative, since the frustration is almost universally applied. (We shall touch on the problem of normative-normal in a moment.)
In this material, I want only to bring out this perspective of frustration by parents and its harvest of rage. What is oversexualized is determined precisely by parents; they do so in this process of frustrating (and in nervously underlining their own secret pleasure in) what would otherwise be, if they stayed out of it as is done in some societies, only a mildly erotic experience or attitude.
Perversion and Normality
The argument about whether to use the terms "perversion” or “variant” and “normal” or “normative” can be approached again here, I think, if we are careful. "Perversion” depends on a connotation of abnormality; yet I have described a perversion mechanism—or can we say "pervertic,” a neologism reminiscent of “neurotic”? —perhaps used by all humans. So we are back with an issue that has been in psychoanalysis for decades: just as one asks is anyone not neurotic, some of us ask is anyone not perverse. Obviously, answers will depend on the matter of degree rather than being absolute Yes or No.
I should make manifest that “perversion” is used two different ways in this chapter. One way signifies a diagnosis, a personality state in which the sexual fantasy motivates the greater part of a person’s behavior. The other labels a mechanism. Just as a neurosis is different from a neurotic mechanism, so a perversion is different from a perversion mechanism. While both of the latter serve to preserve sexual gratification against childhood trauma, in the first case (perversion) this trauma was an onslaught, in the second (the mechanism) a condition of a civilization. Either way, since the original sexual impulse must be thwarted, disguised, and reinvented and the whole process perpetuated, since anxiety and risktaking, violence, and revenge are hidden in the symptomatology, one must use a word that connotes this intense dynamic tension. “Variance” simply won’t do, especially because it is preferred by those who deny these dynamics. Still, for describing a ubiquitous mechanism, “perversion” is too strong; it cannot rid itself of moral taint. The very normativeness demands that one care about the meaning of words. To the point here is a remark of Freud’s: “No healthy person, it appears, can fail to make some addition that might be called perverse to the normal sexual aim; and the universality of this finding is in itself enough to show how inappropriate it is to use the word perversion as a term of reproach” (24, p. 160).