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Those whose sexual behavior deviates from the generally accepted, we, without hesitation, call perverts. Meanwhile, sexual interest in bees, amputees, or the Berlin Wall is not always a mental disorder. Explanations by psychologist Jesse Behring.
Sadism, fetishism, voyeurism, bestiality… These and many other sexual deviations are not so deviant. And the very concept of “sexual perversion” is outdated and is not used in modern medicine. Any unusual intense and sustained sexual interest is called “paraphilia” by experts, which does not necessarily imply pathology. “No matter how strange your desires may be, if you do not harm anyone or anything, and if your sexuality does not cause personal distress, then you do not meet the criteria for a mental illness associated with paraphilia,” says American psychologist and science journalist Jesse Behring. (Jesse Bering). The forms of realization of sexual desire are extremely diverse: “There is no single correct perception of sex. Let everyone in the world, except one, feel harm in exactly the same way, and, nevertheless, this one person will be just as right (or wrong) as everyone else. So what do we know about paraphilias? Three curious facts from Jesse Bering’s book “Me, You, He, She and Other Perverts”1.
Sexual deviance is formed at an early age
According to the most conservative estimates, the ratio of men and women among paraphiles is 99 to 1. The only exceptions are subjectophiles (among them women are found as often as men) and sadomasochists (there are many more masochists in this subgroup than masochists). Why is the difference so big? Many sexologists (and many paraphiles) are convinced that attraction to unusual erotic objects is associated with some event or events in early childhood. We are talking about sexual imprinting – fixing in memory, imprinting a sexual partner (which may be a person, object or other object). In men, the “imprint” appears very early, usually between the fourth and ninth years of life. Most of us consider children 4-9 years old to be asexual, but if this is indeed the age when sexual imprinting occurs, denying childhood sexuality may increase the likelihood that we will raise wonderful deviants.
The social psychologist Roy Baumeister, after examining numerous studies of male and female sexuality, has come up with something like a paraphilic axiom: “By the time men begin to develop sexual tastes, they are less likely to change or adapt than women are.” The vast amount of data he analyzed supports the theory of greater sexual flexibility in women and its limited range in men. That is, if sexual imprinting in women occurs in the early stages of development, then for the vast majority of them it is much easier to “rewrite” it than when it comes to men.
Read more:
- Where does perversion begin?
Excited man is prone to deviant behavior
From an evolutionary point of view, a too choosy and squeamish man misses many opportunities to pass on his genes. And therefore, the acquisition of the ability to overcome disgust was an important adaptive task for our ancestors, with which they did an excellent job. This was confirmed, in particular, by social psychologists Dan Ariely and George Levenstein. Their experiment involved 36 male students from the University of California at Berkeley. Approximately half of the participants (the control group) completed a questionnaire at home about attitudes towards different types of sex. The questions were of the kind you might hear eighth graders talking in the cafeteria: “Can you imagine being turned on by an animal?” “Can you imagine what it’s like to have sex with a sixty-year-old woman?” she offers to have a threesome with another man. Do you agree?” and so on. No one found these sexual acts attractive.
But the second half of the participants received homework. Before answering questions, they were asked to masturbate to their favorite porn and stop before they reached their release. The responses of these young people differed markedly from those of the control group. These eager young people turned out to be much more “free-thinking”, not only in relation to the activities listed above, but also to sadomasochism, fetishism (shoes, sweat, cigarettes), sexual violence. As the results of the study showed, most men had only to plunge into voluptuous dreams a couple of times, and they began to transform into “real perverts.”
Read more:
- “I fell in love with a woman with a disability”
Deviance is inseparable from the cultural context
A man from Pennsylvania was jailed for two years for piercing the lids of yogurt that his colleagues put in the office refrigerator with a syringe and injecting his sperm into it. The judge called it “the most disgusting act” he had ever experienced (and he served as a judge for a long time). This act is shockingly anti-social, causes health anxiety and is a grotesque form of sexual assault.
But every crime is evaluated in a cultural context. If this man lived in ancient times in the Egyptian oasis of Siwa, the headman (about the same as our judge) could well recommend that he mix sperm into the food of a girl in whom he is romantically interested. The girl would not have considered the act disgusting, but on the contrary, she would have been flattered. The very concept of perversion (“doing what is wrong”) is a product of moralizing. If you remove the emotional burden from this concept, sexual deviance will appear as a statistical fact, incomplete compliance with social norms. Human sexuality is extremely diverse. And if we recognize the lack of homogeneity, the illusion that there is an objective positive and negative in the spectrum of sexual relations of our biological species will disappear.
1 J. Behring “Me, you, he, she and other perverts: On the instincts that we are ashamed of” (Corpus, 2015).