Getting In Touch With Your Inner Sexual Deviant

Getting In Touch With Your Inner Sexual Deviant

Science writer Jesse Bering has been called “fearless,” “witty,” “madly provocative,” ”smart” and “deeply compassionate.” Yale professor and author Paul Bloom has gone so far as to call him the “Hunter S. Thompson of science writing.” In his latest book, Perv: The Sexual Deviant In All Of Us, Bering uses the tools of science to crack open more than a few taboos, and shows why he’s deserving of the accolades. I recently spent some time with Bering discussing his newest book and its wealth of eye-openers.

DiSalvo: Reading your new book, Perv: The Sexual Deviant In All of Us, feels like being told the truth (and not in hushed whispers) about an ocean of assumptions most people never think to question. Did you feel like you were on a “truth telling” mission writing it?

Bering: I don’t think I ever framed it in my mind in such explicit terms, but now that you mention it, yes. Oftentimes, as I was trying to explain a particularly challenging or difficult topic, I had the image of myself at, say, fifteen or sixteen, a closeted boy straining to understand things that nobody was willing to have a frank conversation about. That’s to say, much of what I write in this book involves what I only wish I had known back then.

One of the themes that comes through is that we feel so sure about the origins and motivations of various sexual behaviors, and for a good many of them there’s no scientific basis for feeling this way – indeed, in many cases science is far from reaching a conclusion. Why do you think we’re so prone to staunchly believing that how we feel about a sexual behavior is automatically true?

It’s certainly one of those areas where everyone has an opinion. But if there’s one thing I discovered while working on this book, it’s that the strength of one’s moral convictions about sex usually reflects the depths of one’s ignorance about the science of sex. The more one learns in this area, paradoxically, the more uncertain one becomes.

Human beings are “stomach philosophers”—we allow our gut feelings to make decisions about other people’s sex lives on the basis of whether or not we’re personally disgusted or uncomfortable with their erotic desires or behaviors. I draw the line at harm, but defining harm can be a slippery matter, too. Since we would be harmed, we presume that others must be harmed as well, even when that’s far from apparent. I joke in the book about how I’d be irreparably damaged if Kate Upton were to pin me to my chair and do a slow strip tease on my lap. Lovely as she is, I’m gay, and not only would I not enjoy that experience, I’d be made deeply uncomfortable by it. My straight brother or my lesbian cousin, by contrast, would process this identical Upton event very differently.

Our acceptance or rejection of others based on their sexuality can have life-changing consequences for them. The fact that disgust is the blind engine of hate is a big problem, in my view. To make ethical progress in these discussions, even the most open-minded among us must abandon the continued harmful delusion that our own visceral feelings mark a clear moral reality outside of our heads. Instead, we must be vigilant about putting our own emotional biases aside when considering other people’s subjective experiences.

In the book you talk quite a bit about the early “sexologists” who daringly delved into questions about sexual proclivities and orientations that were anathema to even discuss at the time. And yet, as far as we’ve come, it still seems like we’re in the dark about many sex-related topics. What would you say are our “last frontiers” of figuring out why we think as we think and do as we do sexually? Who’s doing the hard work of answering these questions?

I’m not sure that there will ever be a last frontier, because the boundaries continually change with shifts in societal attitudes. In the pathologically prudish Victorian era, research on women’s sexuality was especially scandalous, since any woman who masturbated or wanted to have sex (in other words, any woman with a pulse) was seen as a “nymphomaniac.” This was a period when overzealous Darwinians were pointing out how human beings share a common ancestor with gorillas and chimpanzees, and so sexuality became even more disturbing to people due of its animalistic connotations. Throughout the early to the middle of the twentieth century, when gender relations had become increasingly tense due to an urbanized workforce and the military demands of two world wars, sexologists who objectively studied homosexuality, and who didn’t see it as intrinsically diseased, were likewise accused of trying to normalize this “perversion.”

Today, in the wake of the Catholic Church abuse scandal and the domestication of the Internet, sexologists who study pedophilia and other “chronophilias” (there are five of them, including “gerontophilia,” or attraction to the elderly), are often looked at askance. Seeing pedophiles as anything but evil monsters is, to many in society, to flirt dangerously with the prospect of their acceptance. But there’s certainly a lot of good amoral work being done even on this very important issue.

In my book, we can’t fix what we don’t understand, after all, and screaming and shouting isn’t terribly productive. Research into the nature of “erotic age orientations” by scholars such as Michael Seto and James Cantor makes a careful distinction between pedophilia as a fixed psychosexual orientation and the inherently harmful act of sexual abuse against children. Not all pedophiles abuse children, they point out, and half of all abusers aren’t pedophiles, but “opportunistic offenders” who are actually more attracted to adults. In general, I think we’re particularly uncomfortable today with what sexologists refer to as “intergenerational sex.” And our discomfort isn’t just with pedophilia, but with notable age differences even between parties who are both legally and reproductively mature.

Today’s sexologists are pushing other boundaries as well. For instance, Meredith Chivers of Queen’s University in Kingston (who just happens to be the wife of Michael Seto) has been investigating why women become genitally aroused even by sexual stimuli that they find completely abhorrent and far from erotic or desirable, such as violent rape scenes or graphic videos of apes having sex. (Spoiler: Chivers’s “ready-for-anything” evolutionary interpretation is that the capacity for women to respond to any sexual signal in the ancestral environment with vaginal lubrication protected their vulnerable reproductive anatomy—and hence genetic interests—even when they were not consciously aroused.)

Talk a bit about the fetishes you cover in the book, and if at any point even you were stunned at the breadth and variety of the things that people fetishize. And what in a nutshell is a fetish really all about?

In the book, I mention 46 paraphilias, which is a primary attraction to a target or activity outside of the statistical norm. These included both exceptionally rare paraphilias (such as “climacophilia,” in which a person can only get off while tumbling down a flight of stairs) and the more run-of-the-mill ones that are detailed in the DSM-V, such as voyeurism, sadism, and frotteurism (which is gratification by touching people in crowded public places, such as subways). But that’s just a small sampling. The most authoritative list, cobbled together by an Indian psychiatrist named Anil Aggrawal, includes a total of 547 distinct paraphilias.

And yes—I was skeptical about many of them too, to say the least. I mean, are there really people out there who experience their most intense orgasms while watching tornadoes (“lilapsophilia”) or who can only become sexually aroused when their partners pretend to be dead (“pseudonecrophilia”)? Early on, I reached out to Aggrawal, asking him as much. After directing me to a few obscure clinical case studies in the literature (including a piece on “emetophilia,” or erotic vomiting), he indeed confirmed that each named paraphilia in his list had been the subject of either a peer-reviewed, published report or had been otherwise documented by therapists who’d seen such a patient in their private practice. But it’s also important to remember that, with some of the more exotic paraphilias, there may be just one or two people in the entire world whose sexuality is expressed in that particularly unusual way. I’m doubtful there’s more than a smattering of “phthiriophiles” (those attracted to lice) walking among us.

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http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2013/10/24/getting-in-touch-with-your-inner-sexual-deviant/