That excitement, stimulated by the sight of the money, comes from hostility. What the inaccurate observer would call passivity in this ritual is no such thing. When we track back and find what this man was thinking, we discover he is using the apparent passivity as an act of hostility, specifically of revenge. Every motion he makes, from the first moment of potential contact until the end of the sexual act, is a successful effort to force the other man to show need, excitement, weakness, and therefore dependence on the hustler. So the other has to ask; the hustler only complies or grants. The customer is sexually excited and in need; the hustler makes him a beggar. The ultimate sign of the customer’s weakness, then, is the money that has changed hands.
The need for such revenge is so strong that the hustler must keep doing these acts; he no longer even rationalizes that hustling is only for money. He spends the greater part of his day repeating this behavior, and even that is not enough. He has episodes, lasting a few days, when he must collect as many men as possible; then he does not go through the added complication of the financial arrangement but simply quickly brings a man to orgasm in some alley or other hidden place and immediately goes to the next, doing this to fifteen, twenty, or more men in a few hours.
Even in the rare relationships he has in which he is seeking sexual gratification (in these first two styles described above, his own sexual gratification plays no part in his motivation), he has to perform each piece of sexual activity and express his excitement in such a way that he demonstrates he is less committed, less eager, less desperate, less involved than his partner.
He tells with chagrin of the very few failures that have occurred in the practice of his perversion. There are, for instance, the men who insisted on a refund, saying that he had not done a good job; or the man who challenged him that he could not get an erection, and so, knowing this man was stronger than he, he was unable to get an erection; or the man who, after going through an elaborate ritual to set up the sexual act, including bringing the hustler to a beautiful, expensive apartment (to demonstrate the customer’s greater strength), said that he was not exciting but that the customer would be glad to hire him now for a reduced rate, $10, to clean house.
The hustler knows he is out for power; he recognizes he has an advantage over most of his customers: he is not excited as are they. But he also knows this struggle for power is present on both sides; his customers are doing the same to him. He notes that hustlers are expected to be strong and dumb; customers need an inferior man for a sexual partner. (Once, in his days of innocence, not understanding the dynamics, he told a customer he was going to college, and the man immediately lost his erection and his interest.) He realizes, regretfully, that once in a very long while, he will meet someone who will outmaneuver him.
In other words, the power struggle in male prostitution is about the same as one hears from female prostitutes and strippers.
One sees here dynamics of hostility comparable to those found in nymphomania and satyriasis, wherein also (though in a heterosexual guise) innumerable partners are necessary for one to keep proving oneself superior. In all these situations—in ail perversions—the sexual object is victimized, in that way aggrandizing the sexual neurotic. Since his infantile traumatic experiences live forever inside him, however, his triumphs last only a short while and must be endlessly repeated. Where the sense of despair and inferiority rides too close to the surface, one must repeat endlessly and rapidly, as in the man described above.
He says the relationship between customer and hustler ends instantly after the customer has been gratified, for whatever hostility was held in abeyance during the sexual act is loosed at its conclusion. The power equation has shifted; the customer no longer lets himself be humiliated. The rich man puts the hustler in a chauffeur-driven car—returning the sexual servant to the street—and lights up a cigar in his drawing room. Both end with remnants from the manic episode each has privately experienced; each is left pretending only the other was fooled and degraded. Each ran the risk of failure, and except in the sad cases of actual failure (such as those
touched on above) each tells himself he has triumphed.
This man awaits suicide, he says, when his looks, fortitude, and sexual powers leave him, and when the attrition from his frantic life finally grinds him down.
(Note: This man does not typify all hustlers; he is struggling even more than do most to contain his rage; his excitement from money and his frantic search for partners exemplify this. His perversion, while sharing features with others, is strictly his own—though that could be said equally for the relation between every perverse person and the diagnostic category to which he can be assigned.)
Some years ago, Khan pointed up these issues with comparable clinical data that described a homosexual man in whom risk and revenge played their essential part.
He scanned every nuance of feeling and tension in their [his partners’] face and posture until he had worked up a “colossal erection” in them. At this point his sense of achievement, triumph over, and mastery of the fetishistic object would be complete. He would now solicitously and compassionately offer to suck them and/or masturbate them. The excited helplessness of these uncouth, strong, aggressive youths had a specially pleasurable impact on the patient. Here a distinctly aggressive-sadistic element entered into his relation to them. He would secretly gloat over them: they were in his power. The more they got excited and frenzied with their sexual tension the more imperturbably quiet and gentle he became in his manner. He would often compel them to watch and see him masturbate them and make them ejaculate.
. . . He always had a guilty apprehension that this state of sexual excitement was not pleasurable for the youths. (75. P 69)
Risk sets the stage for the enactment of triumph, although perverse people load the dice with each episode heavily in favor of success; in the daydreams and their extensions—pornography—risk is only simulated, and so boredom quickly interferes. In the actual perverse act, however, risk is part of the reality, which, I believe, contributes to the greater excitement of such encounters.
Other childhood defeats and frustrations—nongender and nongenital—presumably feed into these dynamics of risk, revenge, and triumph. The tensions of each libidi-nal stage—oral, anal, and urinary, phallic, and finally the full-blown oedipal—with their biological demands controlled (sadistically, in the child's opinion) by parents, are struggles in which triumph for the child would consist of being in control while the other person loses control.* That, I believe, is the central issue in perversions. This struggle for control and its attendant risk may increase excitement, but it can be exhausting.
Again we can give hypotheses a harder test by looking at a condition, exhibitionism, in which this mechanism is less manifest; we shall find that it still takes little clinical skill—or theory-making—to see how the perverse act searches among the dangers for the right sort of risk to create excitement.