So perversions (but not all sexual aberrances) are modifications one must invent in order to preserve some of one’s heterosexuality. The form the perversion takes may be far from the extreme of a male preferring a female and vice versa, with both wholeheartedly enjoying the sexual and loving aspects of their relationship.
Yet, while unseen, that ideal is buried there in most of us even if manifest in only a few.
Now, to return to the idea that diagnoses can be used to push people around. I would still suggest that any diagnosis—not just “homosexuality"—be removed from our classification only when we can prove the condition does not exist, not because the diagnosis may cause pain. That being the case, we have a responsibility to define precisely each of the alleged diagnoses in our classification, for with proper definition, we can determine whether what has been defined in fact exists. Perhaps in time this will occur in a number of conditions now called homosexuality, wherein one’s preferred sexual object is of the same sex. We shall then have a number of subdiagnoses within a major category, “the homosexualities.”
Someday we may know enough to be able to diagnose as does the rest of medicine. On the other hand, we may come to see diagnosis as an illusory occupation when dealing with human identity. In the meantime, I would suggest that we drop diagnosing used only to underline either the most flamboyant sexual behavior (which may have been only a momentary act) or even the preferred sexual behavior, just because the person does not habitually join genitals with someone of the opposite sex.
We can be so clever: we secrete our insults in our grammar. To say, “He is a neurotic" is more absolute than to say, “He is neurotic"; with the first, we have made him synonymous with his neurosis. If, either to be kind or to be accurate, we say, “He has a neurosis,” we lessen our chances of being unpleasant. Now suppose that, wanting to communicate accurately and succinctly, we were to say, “He has a homosexuality": the power of the words to insult is weakened. We are no longer saying either that his sexual customs are the totality of his being or that we—the grand arbiters—simply have no interest in the rest of his personality. A touch of the golden rule might improve our diagnostic habits.
Could we try this: as a holding action, until the day
when we know what we are doing, if the circumstances require that a psychiatric label be given, we proceed in this way:
A. The personality (character) type habitual since childhood, or adolescence, for example, obsessive compulsive, schizophrenic, hysteric, depressive.
i. The presenting syndrome, for example, drug dependence, anxiety neurosis, schizophreniform psychosis.
a. Subsidiary syndromes also present, for example, alcoholism, nonpsychotic OBS with senile brain disease; psychophysiologic respiratory disorder (asthma).
(1) Sexual preference, for example, heterosexual, monogamous, with accompanying fantasies of being raped by a stallion; homosexual, with foreskin fetishism; heterosexual, with preference for cadavers; homosexual, with disembodied pe-nises (tearoom promiscuity); heterosexual, voyeurism; homosexual, expressed only in fantasies during intercourse with wife.
The advantage of this syndrome classihcatory system is that it does not pretend to be a diagnostic system, that is, explanatory. It admits its ignorance: it is descriptive.
This position holds for both disputants, the oppressed and the oppressors (including of course some psychiatrists): diagnoses should not be thrown out because someone is upset by being labeled, and they should not be retained because they can be used to oppress. Neither extreme honors the function of diagnosis. Only when diagnoses fail to describe succinctly and accurately should they be removed. Since that is the case with homosexuality, it cannot yet function as a true diagnosis: we should remove it. And since that is true for most of the rest of the “diagnoses” of psychiatry, let us scrap the system (though not yet all the labels) and start afresh.
Chapter 11 Sex as Sin
Let us start with an ancient thesis: everyone experiences the sexual act as a question of morality. Having examined how hostility, mystery, risk, and revenge can increase excitement, we can see why.
For our present purpose, in which we are concerned only with erotism, let me define sin as the exalted term for the desire to harm others. Ethics and morality, then, are scales society uses for weighing sin, and they exist to justify or mitigate hostility. In demonstrating that hostility plays an essential role in forming and maintaining human sexual excitement, I was also, subliminally, studying some of the dynamics of ethics and morality.
Placing hostility in the center of these definitions puts me somewhat at odds with those who explain sin in sexual pleasure only as a cultural-historical phenomenon. The latter construction describes this sense of sin as the product of a Judeo-Christian heritage, fortified in each different generation and place by local conditions in the service of bigots. If one uses this explanation, the solution for the suffering caused by such repressive forces is simple to conceive (though difficult to effect): when one changes the beliefs of society, the sense of sin will dissipate.
Perhaps. But while we await that happy day, remembering that inner life is not only a result but a cause of culture, let us also look at the dynamics of sexual pleasure within a person. On doing so, we may find that some of the repressive social forces—experienced inside the individual as a sense of sin—have their origin in attacks made by one part of oneself upon another part (such as the bite of conscience); social forces do not just exist outdoors in the wind but, in the final common pathway for each member of society, are present as intrapsychic dynamics.
It is hard in enlightened circles these days to defend the idea that sex and sin are linked. Is there, then, no logical basis for the badness, strangeness, willfully motivated corruptness, unwholesomeness, and unnaturalness that, sadly, people feel in their sexual excitement?
In answering, we may find our first clue in the long-known fact that an awareness that one is sinning often increases sexual excitement. For more evidence, we can look to the thesis suggested by the data in this book that when certain permutations of hostility and dehumanization of one’s desired object are not mixed in, for most people a dull lump of meager pleasure replaces enthusiastic lust. Feeling sinful does not come mainly from effects as superficial as the culturalist explanation has it —that is, it is not just an imposition cruelly laid on one by mindless society—but rather comes also from one’s being at least faintly aware that some of sexual excitement depends on the desire to harm others. Studying perversion shows this mechanism at work and has led me to more understanding of the lesser aberrations, which are usually referred to as "normal sexuality.”