* “Dr. John Money is the Duke of Dysfunction, a man who writes about “unspeakable” human sexual problems with such dignity and care that his case histories make me feel almost normal.”
— John Waters, jacket endorsement for John Money, Gendermaps: Social Constructionism, Feminism, and Sexosophical History
* Fuckology: Critical Essays on John Money’s Diagnostic Concepts:
* [Robert] Stoller’s most famous work, Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred (1975), posits that the defining feature of “perversion,” by which “one can recognize [it] when it appears,” is “hostility.”52 Stoller explains: “Perversion, the erotic
form of hatred, is a fantasy, usually acted out but occasionally restricted to a daydream. . . . It is a habitual, preferred aberration necessary for one’s full satisfaction, primarily motivated by hostility. . . . The hostility in perversion is a fantasy of revenge hidden in the actions that make up the perversion and serves to convert childhood trauma to adult triumph”53 and “in the perverse act the past is rubbed out. This time trauma is turned into pleasure, orgasm, victory.”54 We can see a similarity here between Money’s formulation discussed above—“The negative becomes positive. Tragedy becomes triumph. Aversion becomes addiction”—and Stoller’s pronouncement. Given that Stoller’s canonical text was fi rst published in 1975, while Money’s major
works on paraphilia date from about ten years later, it is likely that Money has borrowed Stoller’s logic…* Stoller’s Perversion is replete with language that, to the critical contemporary reader, appears freighted with ideology that we might term both homophobic and “kinkphobic.” A prime example is his formulation “such obvious perversions as rape, exhibitionism, sadism, or homosexuality.”
* Religion, indeed, is the prime target for both Money and Stoller. Stoller describes the idea that perversion is merely sinful sexuality as “the product of a Judeo- Christian heritage, fortifi ed in each diff erent generation and place by local conditions in the service of bigots. . . . When one changes the beliefs of society, the sense of sin will dissipate”;63 while Money opines in 1988 in a letter to a colleague with whom he has a correspondence on pornography: “I have come to the conclusion that everything about pornography is so religious, moral, political, legislative, and judicial, and so epistemologically chaotic, that it is beyond science. It’s like trying to argue against the death sentence while the prisoner is already in the death chair.”64 Religious authority thus serves as an irrational, outmoded benchmark against which to assert the progressive, rational, modern neutrality of science. As in the case of Money’s expressed desire to obliterate American religiosity, which he claims in Vandalized Lovemaps is “on another crusade . . . against the heresies of the sexual revolution,”65 Stoller’s book has an apparently radical, social reformist conclusion. Stoller argues that the nuclear family itself produces perversion, and that doing away with the family would decrease the frequency of the condition: “Not knowing
what will come if the family disappears, we cannot know how human sexuality will, in adapting, be modifi ed. My guess is that if all goes well for our race, perversion will die down and variance increase. Perhaps some day perversion will not be necessary.”* “Professor Money . . . discounted the view that rape is about power not sex. [He] said rape was a specific medical syndrome. He believes 90 per cent of rapists genuinely ‘can’t help themselves.’” (Money has coined a term for this “specific medical syndrome.” Raptophilia is the name he gives to paraphilic rape.) Further, Money is quoted as stating, “They don’t know why they do it, they hate themselves afterward and you can’t help these men till you give them a rest from the sexual drives.”
* Professor Money concluded they were raised in an atmosphere of sexual taboo ‘which is just as strong in New Zealand as it is in Baltimore.’” The article tells us that Money claimed that rapists were likely to have been boys whose healthy sexual rehearsal play between the ages of five and eight had been punished, such that they grew up believing that sexuality was bad. Money is
quoted as saying, “Rapists were never able to believe that sex could be had under normal caring circumstances. It could only be had if it was wicked and naughty and never with a virgin. The woman had to be kicking, fighting, biting and screaming and, more importantly, terrified.”
The New York Times wrote in 1990:
THE derailed sexuality of child molesters, exhibitionists, rapists and deviant murderers, as well as others with peculiar erotic interests that are less repugnant, has its roots in early childhood when the first links between love and sex are forged, a pioneering researcher has demonstrated.
The researcher, Dr. John Money, has traced the development of sexual perversions in scores of people and is the first to track their development from childhood origins to adult expression. He has coined the word lovemap to represent the seemingly indelible brain traces that ultimately help determine what arouses people sexually and enables them to fall in love. A lovemap, as Dr. Money defines it, depicts an idealized lover, love scene and program of erotic activities. Lovemap patterns develop similarly in both heterosexuals and homosexuals, he said.
Through interviews and treatment of adults and children with distorted lovemaps, Dr. Money has concluded that the relevant brain connections are formulated between ages 5 and 8. In fact, a child psychologist in Oslo, Thore Langfeldt, has identified the first indications of sexual perversions in children as young as 3 to 5.
Aberrant erotic development is often fostered by traumatic family and social experiences, and becomes solidified in fantasy, dreams and sometimes sex acts, during adolescence when a floodtide of sexual feelings naturally emerges, said Dr. Money.
The distortions that result, long called sexual perversions, are now known medically as paraphilias. There are no statistics on how many people have paraphilias. While they are believed to be far more common among men than women, Dr. Money suggests they may simply be less violent and better hidden in women, sometimes under the guise of sexual unresponsiveness. …
Paraphilias result when the natural link between romantic love and sexual lust is severed, blocked or distorted. Dr. Money said that the majority of patients with paraphilias he has interviewed have described a strict antisexual upbringing in which sex was either never mentioned or was actively repressed or defiled. Based on reports from adults with paraphilias, Dr. Money predicted that current repressive attitudes toward sex will breed an ever-widening epidemic of aberrant sexual behavior.
Actions that can distort a child’s lovemap include incest, physical abuse or neglect, emotional indifference and seduction by a much older or younger person.
While many, if not most, people emerge from such influences with their lovemaps relatively unwarped, others are severely and permanently traumatized, he said.
”Some children apparently have an inherent vulnerability to develop a vandalized lovemap,” Dr. Money said. But it is not yet known if that vulnerability is determined by genetics, anatomy, hormones, brain development or a combination of factors.
Dr. Money explained that because of experiences or messages received in childhood, some susceptible adolescents are unable to unite ”defiling lust” with ”purifying love” and instead develop a warped or distorted lust-love connection. The resulting sexual pathology represents an unconscious move to preserve lust by separating it from love or, in some cases, to maintain the purity of love by repressing lust, he said.
In one case, for example, a 40-year-old man who was born with a thyroid deficiency had been overwhelmed as a boy by an alternatingly seductive and tempestuous mother who was preoccupied with his lagging physical and mental development. The mother had obvious disdain for her acquiescent husband, and the marriage ended in divorce during the boy’s teens.
A Traumatic Experience
The child was further traumatized by one of his first sexual experiences just before adolescence, a masturbation episode with other boys and one young girl. When the girl was killed by a car a week later, the boy interpreted the tragedy as God’s punishment for his sin. In his early 20’s he recognized his attraction to young girls. Even though he was able to perform sexually with women his own age, he had evolved a pedophilic lovemap that precluded his falling in love with anyone but early adolescents like the girl who died.
Even though the events precipitating a paraphilia may be initially terrifying and painful, they can ultimately emerge as a compelling source of pleasure through a twist in the brain that converts aversion to addiction.
In the development of a paraphilia, Dr. Money explained, lust becomes merged with a ritual or act that not only negates love but may also invite punishment. After the merger, what was once repugnant or forbidden is sought in an addictive fashion, despite the risks and threats of reprisal.
According to Dr. Money, a learning theory known as opponent-process describes this unconscious mental switch of negative to positive as a kind of psychological survival mechanism. Rather than caving in under the negative stress, the person turns it into an advantage, a desirable end.
As for malignant social influences, he and other researchers found no evidence that pornography causes or fosters the development or expression of paraphilias. Rather, he explained, a person with a particular pattern of erotic arousal seeks out pornographic material that ”turns him on” because it meshes with that pattern.
Categories
From Fetishes To Predation
To obtain a clearer perspective on the nature and origin of paraphilias, Dr. Money has grouped the 40 or so of them that are known into six major categories, or strategies, which are described in detail in his 1986 book ”Lovemaps” (paperback, Prometheus Books, $15.95).
* Sacrifice and expiation. These allow for the expression of ”sinful lust” on condition that the person atone for its irrevocable defilement of ”saintly love.” Attempts at atonement may take the form of penance, for example, by self-administered asphyxiation or electrical shock, or the form of sacrifice of the partner through sadistic acts or lust murder.
* Marauding and predation. Sinful lust is permitted into the lovemap on the condition that it be stolen, abducted or imposed by force. A person with a predatory lovemap may be either predator or prey. Examples include rape and stealing to induce erotic arousal. Dr. Money pointed out that a rape paraphilia demands that the victim be terrified and struggle against the rapist; a victim who does not resist may incite the rapist to deadly threats or violent assault to induce the resistance needed to maintain his sexual arousal.
* Mercantile and venal strategies. Here lust is granted expression on the condition that it is traded, bartered or purchased, not freely exchanged, for example, by buying sex from a prostitute or hustler or by exchanging play money with a spouse.
* Fetishes and talismans. Lust is given expression through a token, fetish or talisman that is a substitute for the lover, such as certain odors or tactile sensations, as in fetishes involving rubber, leather, fur or silk fabrics or garments.
* Stigmata and eligibility strategies. Lust can be expressed without defiling the lover by having a partner who is not part of the person’s social set and would evoke disapproval from the family. Such partners include children, people with missing limbs and those of another race or religion. A well-known example, Dr. Money noted, is Peter Pan, who as the boy who never grew up was the erotic self of his creator, Sir James Barrie, known to have had intense attachments to sexually immature boys.
* Solicitation and allure. Exhibitionism, voyeurism and the dependence on pornography for sexual excitement are the best known examples of this paraphilic strategy, in which a kind of foreplay is substituted for the actual act of copulation. Dr. Money explained that a flasher’s excitement depends on a reaction of fear, disgust or surprise from the victim. If she shows indifference, this may prompt him to come closer or try harder to frighten her. The most effective deterrent, he said, would be a matter-of-fact comment that is sexually defusing, such as ”Don’t you know you should keep your pants zipped in public?”
Here are some excerpts from this 1986 book:
* Lovemaps! They’re as common as faces, bodies and brains. Each of us has one. Without it there would be no falling in love, no mating, and no breeding of the species.
* There is a rather sophisticated riddle about what a boyfriend (or girlfriend) and a Rorschach inkblot have in common. The answer is that you project an image of your own onto each. In many instances, a person does not fall in love with a partner, per se, but with a partner as a Rorschach love-blot. That is to say, the person projects onto the partner an idealized and highly idiosyncratic image that diverges from the image of that partner as perceived by other people. Hence the popular idiom that love is blind, for a lover projects onto a partner, or love-blot, his/her unique love image, as unique as his/her own face or finger print.
* a lovemap is not present at birth. Like a native language, it differentiates within a few years thereafter. It is a developmental developmental representation or template in your mind/brain, and is dependent on input through the special senses, it depicts your idealized lover and what, as a pair, you do together in the idealized, romantic, erotic, and sexualized relationship. A lovemap exists in mental imagery first, in dreams and fantasies, and then maybe translated into action with a partner or partners. Under optimum conditions, prenatally and postnatally, a lovemap differentiates as heterosexual without complexities. Age-concordant, gender-different, sexuoerotic rehearsal play in infancy and childhood is prerequisite to healthy heterosexual lovemap formation. Deprivation and neglect of such play may induce pathology of lovemap formation, as also may prohibition, prevention, and abusive punishment and discipline. Conversely, exposure too abruptly to socially tabooed expressions of sexuoeroticism may traumatize lovemap formation.
* Lovemap pathology, whereas it has its genesis early in life, manifests itself in full after puberty. The three categories of pathology are hypophilia (also referred to as sexual dysfunction), hyperphilia (erotomania), and paraphilia (legally known as perversion). In all three, there is a cleavage between love and lust in the design of the lovemap. In hypophilia, the cleavage is such that lust is dysfunctional and infrequently used, whereas love and lovebonding are intact. In hyperphilia, lust displaces love and lovebonding, and the genitalia function in the service of lust alone, typically with a plurality of partners, and with compulsive frequency. In paraphilia, love and lovebonding are compromised because the genitalia continue to function in the service of lust, but according to the specifications of a vandalized and redesigned lovemap, and often with compulsive frequency, also. The redesigned lovemap manifests itself in fantasy, and in the staging of that fantasy in an actual performance. A paraphilia typically has a dual existence, one in fantasy, and one as fantasy carried out in practice. On the criterion of its mental imagery, a paraphilia is a mental template or lovemap that, in response to the neglect, suppression, or traumatization of its normophilic formation, has developed with distortions, namely, omissions, displacements, and inclusions that would otherwise have no place in it. A paraphilia permits sexuoerotic arousal, genital performance, and orgasm to take place, but only under the aegis, in fantasy or live performance, of the special substitute imagery of the paraphilia. A paraphilia is a strategy for turning tragedy into triumph according to the principles of opponent-process theory. This strategy preserves sinful lust in the lovemap by dissociating it from saintly love.
* Sexosophy, the philosophy of sex characteristic of each major religion, influences the childhood development of lovemaps and their paraphilias. The definitive characteristic of the sexosophy of Christendom is the doctrine of the split between saintly love and sinful lust. This doctrine is all-pervasive. It penetrates all the institutions of contemporary Christendom. One way or another, usually quite deviously, it penetrates all of our child-rearing practices. Inevitably, therefore, it penetrates the formation of lovemaps in the early years of childhood. That is why, in this book, the pathological lovemaps of the paraphilias are developmentally explained in saint and sinner terms.
* Paraphilias are not generated at random. They belong to one of six categories: sacrificial/expiatory; marauding/predatory; mercantile/venal; fetishistic/talismanic; stigmatie/eligibilie; and solicitational/allurative.
* Paraphilias are not socially contagious.
* Kinky and bizarre are the popular words for paraphilic sexual fantasies and practices. Legally, they are called perverted and deviant. Medicine and science only recently gave up using the legal terms and adopted for full-time use the formerly neglected biomedical term, paraphilic, and its noun paraphilia.
* The word, paraphilia, is constructed from two Greek roots. Philia means love, as in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. Para-, the prefix that precedes it, means that the love goes beyond what is ordinarily expected or is apart from it. Thus, in medical usage it also means abnormal. Paranoid, by analogy, refers to abnormal thinking that goes beyond, or is apart from the usual by being delusional.
* Lifelong lovebonding that begins at age eight and continues through marriage into adulthood demonstrates that the imagery of erotic attraction and genital arousal can, like native language, be well established at an early age.
* An eight year old’s lovemap of the standard, heterosexual boy-meets-girl, girl-meets-boy design may be carelessly vandalized by adults.
* On the basis of what can be ascertained ethnographically from societies that do not blanket their children’s sexuoerotic development under such a taboo, it is reasonable to infer that the lovemaps of the majority, if not all of the children, turn out to be heterosexual.
* Vandalism of the developing lovemap under the aforesaid circumstances is effected because the experience constitutes entrapment in a catch-22. That is to say, the children are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t disclose what has happened. The penalty of nondisclosure is continued entrapment with no escape possible.
* As in the case of any wound, a vandalized lovemap tries to heal itself. In the process it gets scarred, skewed, and misshapen. Some of its features get omitted, some get displaced, and some get replaced by substitutes that would not otherwise be included. Omissions transform an ordinary heterosexual lovemap into a hypophilic one. Displacements and inclusions transform it into a paraphilic one. The paraphilic transformation seems at the time to be a satisfactory compromise. It disassociates lust from its vandalized place in the heterosexual lovemap, and relocates it. In the long run, however, the relocation proves to be a compromise that is too costly. In a paraphilic lovemap, lust is attached to fantasies and practices that are socially forbidden, disapproved, ridiculed or penalized. The penalty may be very severe. It may be the death penalty.
* Conjecturally, the most vulnerable years for lovemap vandalism are likely to be between ages five and eight.
* Major erotosexual traumas during this period may disrupt the consolidation of the lovemap that would otherwise be taking place. Further disruption may take place during the peripubertal years; but after puberty, the lovemap, if it changes, does so chiefly by decoding what has already been encoded into it. Once a lovemap has been formed it is, like native language, extremely resistant to change. Like native language, a person’s lovemap also bears the mark of his own unique individuality, or accent. Even though it be a conventionally heterosexual one, it is usually quite specific as to details of the physiognomy, build, race and color of the ideal lover, not to mention temperament, manner, and so on.
* As paradoxical as it appears, corporal punishment may affect the genitals and their sensations. In boys the evidence is visible, for they get a panic erection. The best explanation of this reaction is in terms of a spread of autonomic nervous-
system activity governing the response to bodily injury into that which governs the sexuoerotic response. Such a spread or overflow is acknowledged in the vernacular of a former era in which sadomasochism was known as the English or the German perversion. This was in recognition of the harshness of repetitious corporal punishment of young boys in the elite schools of those two countries. The effect may have been supplemented by repetitious homosexual submission enforced by older boys.
* Even detailed peculiarities of the lovemap may be traced to early origins, as in the case of an exhibitionist who exposed his penis to elderly ladies in church, and then urinated on the floor. He had a history of being an abused foster child. One foster mother, a devoutly religious and church-going lady, punished him for being a bed wetter by requiring him to sleep on urine-stenched straw in the basement and to wear his urine soaked underclothing to school. In his next foster home, he had a positive relationship with younger parents. There he underwent the development of puberty. Proud of his first ejaculation, he showed his erected penis to his foster mother, for which he was expelled from the home by her husband. Thenceforth, he was permanently addicted to exhibiting in church, more frequently during periods of work or marital stress than at other times. A lovemap may develop to replicate a juvenile sexual experience, but with the ages of the participants reversed.
* The sexuoerotic relationship of his parents together, when it is subject to disharmony and feuding, may have a paraphilic effect on a child’s developing lovemap. The child is caught in the crossfire, so that his allegiance cannot be shared equally with both parents. In a case of somnophilia, or the sleeping princess syndrome, the juvenile history illustrates the subtlety of this dilemma. The boy would see his mother, in the aftermath of marital strife over the husband’s infidelity, sleeping alone on the couch in the living room, clad only in a negligee. He was a favorite son, and he could imagine her pose being a solicitation. In recall, he cannot distinguish whether it was in actuality or in vivid fantasy that he performed cunnilingus on her. From adolescence onward, his paraphilia was to intrude illicitly on a sleeping woman and offer her the gift of cunnilingus. If asked to leave, he would. Eventually he was arrested, charged with rape, and imprisoned. It is quite possible that in actual paraphilic rape, as in this case of somnophilia, there is a high prevalence of incest, in fact and fantasy, in the history.
* There are some cases in which a paraphilic lovemap has its genesis in a lonely struggle in which other people are involved by default, not by direct participation. This type of struggle goes on in children who grow up stigmatized by a deformity that threatens their future eligibility as a romantic romantic and sexuoerotic partner. Birth defects of the sexual organs exemplify this threat explicitly. One type of birth defect is micropenis (Money, Lehne and Pierre-Jerome, 1984). One youth with this defect discovered in himself at adolescence a paraphilic. gothic fantasy of bondage and death: after a wild sexual fling, he tied the woman to an ivy vine. By daybreak it had entwined her and so luxuriantly overgrown the wall of the house that her fate was never discovered Nor was the secret of his small penis.
* a child who enters adolescence with an eccentrically developed lovemap will not readily find a partner whose lovemap reciprocally matches his/her own. In the absence of a sufficient degree of mutual lovemap matching, the first culmination of a sexuoerotic relationship in intromission is likely to be experienced as perfunctory, crass, exploitative, defiling, or traumatic. The dual buildup of sensual excitement that belongs to the limerent (Tennov, 1979) or love-smitten couple will be deficient or missing. The experience will have, rather, an aversive quality. In a comparison of college men who sought sex therapy and those who did not, Sarrell and Sarrell (1983) reported that both groups could remember equally well the situation in which their first ejaculation, or semenarche, occurred. The sex-therapy group recalled the situation as predominantly negative, and the control group as positive. Situational components of women’s first experience of intercourse (Weis, 1983) influenced also its negative or positive aftermath, according to their own affective ratings.
* Not only at college age, but also during the developmental years of childhood, sexuoerotic rehearsal play, matching of the lovemaps for age synchrony and image reciprocity has a more healthy developmental outcome than does mismatching.
* that the male’s threshold for visual erotic arousal is set lower than the female’s, prenatally. Conversely, the human female’s threshold for tactile erotic arousal is set lower than the male’s.
* One source of evidence is that explicit erotic pictures, movies and videotapes appeal more to males than to females, whereas women turn more to tales of romance and soap operas of yielding and being taken. Another source of evidence is that boys at puberty are greeted with very explicit visual images of eroticism in their wet dreams, for which there is no exact pubertal counterpart in girls.
* The mental content of a boy’s wet dreams, or his masturbation fantasies, does not appear out of the blue, but has its history in the development of his lovemap. In fact, it is a vivid presentation of his lovemap. His first wet dream may, in fact, be the first full unveiling of the design of the lovemap.
* the greater paraphilic vulnerability of the male is somehow based on his greater dependency on the visual image for the arousal of erotic initiative.
* Just as boys are more vulnerable than girls to developmental developmental speech and reading disabilities, so also are they more vulnerable to developmental lovemap disabilities. The imagery of their predominantly visual lovemaps is subject to a wider variety of paraphilic disruptions than is the predominantly tactual imagery of the lovemaps of girls.
* It goes without saying that girls are developmentally exposed to vandalism of their lovemaps, just as are boys. Their response to such vandalism is in keeping with their lesser dependence on visual imagery than on tactual imagery and the skin senses for erotic arousal and initiative. Vandalism destroys or distorts their future potential to respond not to the romantic strategies and initial approach of the male, but to the follow-through in naked body contact, especially contact of the sex organs, and orgasm.
* Vandalism of the lovemap in girls is more likely to issue in hypophilia than paraphilia. The canon of hypophilia includes erotic apathy or inertia, erotic revulsion, genital penetration phobia, lubrication failure, vaginal spasm (vaginismus), failure to climax (anorgasmia), and coital or postcoital pain (dyspareunia).
* The distinguishing mark of a paraphilia is the imagery of its lovemap, which appears as dream or fantasy and gets translated into practice. Thus it is feasible to designate paraphilic disorders as disorders of proception, by contract with hypophilias, which are disorders of acception. The distinction is often fuzzy for, behind many a disorder of acception there lurks, covertly, a paraphilic proceptive fantasy. It may remain covert, even in the course of sex therapy, unless subject to explicit inquiry. Being disorders of proception, paraphilias are also disorders of pairbonding and, therefore, of falling in love. It is actually a misnomer to call them sexual disorders. They are disorders of love, not lust.
* In mythology and folklore, there are many versions of woman as the madonna and woman as the whore. Man is, correspondingly, the provider and the profligate. Female or male, one is the saint, and the other is the sinner. One typifies love. The other typifies lust. The cleft between saintly love and sinful lust is omnipresent in the sexuoerotic heritage of our culture. Love is undefiled and saintly. Lust is defiling and sinful. Love exists above the belt, lust below. Love is lyrical. Lust is lewd. Love is heralded in public. Lust is hidden in private. Love displayed is championed, but championships for lust are condemned. Love is candid, and speaks its name. Lust is clandestine and euphemizes its name. In some degree or other, the cleavage between love and lust gets programed into the design of the lovemaps of all developing boys and girls. In mild degree, it is accommodated in the lovemap by means of evasiveness or joking. In serious degree, it defaces the lovemap and leaves residual hypophilia, hyperphilia, or paraphilia in which the irreconcilability of love and lust is perpetuated.
* For some paraphiles, there is a two-step, or split solution. It lies in carrying out the paraphilic lust ritual on different occasions than when engaging in sexual activity with the regular partner. Then, while having sexual intercourse with the regular partner, the imagery of the paraphilic ritual is replayed in memory, in order to achieve genital response and orgasm. It is just such a disjunction that astonishes the neighbors, the wife, and the family of the model husband and father when he is arrested as a Jack-the-Ripper lust murderer.
* Disjunction between a paraphilic fantasy and the bodily performance of copulation includes the regular partner only as copulatory vessel. He/she is spared from the defilement of lust enacted in the paraphilia. Excluded from the dramatis personae in the replay of the paraphilia in fantasy, the partner has, albeit inchoately, a sense of being superfluous—an escort, maybe, wanted as a body, but not as a lover.
When there is no such disjunction between two people having a sexuoerotic encounter together, the conjunction of the erotic imagery of their matching lovemaps serves its arousal purpose during the proceptive phase. Then, as the proceptive phase assimilates into the acceptive one, lovemap imagery yields to the sensuousness and sensuality of bodily contact, especially the voluptuous feeling of approaching orgasm. The two partners become oblivious of all else as they correspond bodily with one another, and feel metaphorically merged as one. As compared with such a complete matching of two lovemaps a partial match is like two chimeras, each pressurizing the other to fit its own image. There are three possible outcomes. One is to separate, either amicably or acrimoniously. Another is to stay together, feuding. The third is to stay together, one partner yielding to the other in what amounts to a collusion or complicity.
* For the average person it is an enigma that a wife would stay married for 25 years to a husband whose paraphilic sadism was always injuriously abusive; or that an abducted ten year old boy would pass up many opportunities for escape from his pedophilic abductor and stay with him after witnessing the lust murder of another boy his own age; or even that the girlfriend of a paraphilic transvestite would advise him on fashions and cosmetics, help him cross-dress and then escort him in public, and eventually marry him, and get pregnant by him.
* The collusional type of marriage may be maintained also when a husband, after revealing himself as a paraphilic masochist, becomes relegated to a role like that of a family dog, chained and locked in the house by his wife, totally dispossessed of all his savings and investments. After escaping with the help of friends, he then escapes from them and returns back to his domestic prison.
* The postmantal collusion of a marital partner in paraphilia that was previously kept hidden suggests that there were some premonitory signs of temperament or personality by which the couple recognized themselves as mutually matched, before the details were spelled out. The premonition may be something as nonspecific as a recognition of who would be the domineering.
domineering partner, and who the submissive one. The premonition may be reciprocal, or it may be one-sided. If one-sided, then the recruitment of the one partner into the other’s paraphilia may be a by-product of falling in love. It could be that the love affair marks the onset of a new phase of development in which partners assimilate each other’s quirks and foibles, as well as the principles they live by They may do it reciprocally, or it may be one-sided, with one partner being more dictatorial than the other. To understand better the power that one person may have in shaping the destiny of another, it is necessary to think in terms of the phenomenon known as brainwashing.
* In the course of the genesis of paraphilia in childhood development, there are two principles according to which a regular, heterosexual lovemap gets redesigned into becoming paraphilic. One is the principle of inclusion: something or someone not expected to be in a lovemap becomes incorporated into it. The other is the principle of displacement: one of the proceptive features of the lovemap becomes dislocated or displaced into the acceptive phase.
* A shared principle of all paraphilic lovemaps is that they represent tragedy turned into triumph. The tragedy is the defacement of an ordinarily developing heterosexual lovemap. The triumph is the rescue of lust from total wreckage and obliteration and its attachment to a redesigned lovemap. The new map gives lust a second chance, but at a price. The price is that the new map dissociates the saint from lust, and the sinner from love. The madonna and whore are forever sundered, and likewise the provider and the profligate. Lust belongs only to the whore and the profligate, love to the madonna and the provider. The madonna and the provider are, like Dr. Jekyll, dissociated from the whore and the profligate, their equivalents, respectively, of Mr. Hyde. A paraphilic lovemap is a ruse of sorts—a circuitous or behind-the-scenes way of getting a certificate of admission to the theater of lust. Paraphilia is almost always imbued with some degree of furtiveness, deviousness, and deceit. At the same time, it is histrionic, flamboyant, and self-incriminatory. The paraphile whose lovemap is the means of his sexuoerotic survival is like the survivor of torture or catastrophe—or even surgery—who reiteratively dreams and tells, over and over, the story of how he/she turned the tragedy of suffering into the triumph of survival. This pride of survival is careless about self-incrimination. Paraphilia notoriously leaves incriminating evidence by which it may be traced.
* The paraphilic triumph over tragedy has many affinities with addiction. In the language of common sense, an addiction always has a predicate: one is addicted to something, as in being addicted to alcohol, heroin, or other chemical substance.
* Eating addiction has a parallel specificity. The obese binge eater is addicted not to eating in general, but to specific foods, such as chocolates or other sweets, carbohydrates, and fatty dishes. The same type of specificity applies also to sex. It is, however, currently fashionable to use the term, sexual addiction (Carnes, 1983), as though the addiction were to practicing anything and everything sexual, if not now, then progressively in a downhill slide. This doctrine of progression is a recrudescence of degeneracy theory—a leftover from antisexualism of last century (Chapter 20). It is just plain wrong. Sexual addictions, like drinking and eating addictions, are extremely particular. The sexual addict is always addicted to something sexually specific. Thus a woman who sought therapeutic help because she despised herself as a nymphomaniac was, in fact, addicted to men whom she could pick up in a singles’ bar. They were good for a one night stand, and then no more. She would resolve to quit her compulsive cruising, but the addiction proved stronger than her resolve, and she repeated it over and over.
* The recipient person or thing of the paraphilia is what defines the addiction, and is its predicate. Another illustration, from one of the fetishistic/talismanic paraphilias, is that of the male transvestite or transvestophile who can perform sexual intercourse with a partner, female usually, but in some cases male, only when he wears female garments, usually underclothes. He is addicted to women’s clothing—the transvestophilic addiction does not, it would appear, occur in women.
* Becoming positively addicted to what initially was negatively aversive is a manifestation of what the psychologist, Richard L. Solomon (1980), has formulated as the opponent-process theory of learning. Opponent-process is seen at work when daredevil stuntmen overcome their initial panic and terror and become addicted to their daredeviltry. Joggers and marathon runners transcend the bodily pain and exhaustion of their exertion and, becoming addicted, get euphoric and high from it. As aforesaid, even the victims of cruel child abuse become addicted to abuse so that, having been rescued, they maneuver to become abused again, as perpetual martyrs. Opponent-process learning takes place quite rapidly. Like all addiction, it is remarkably resistant to change.
* It is possible that the resistance of paraphilic addiction to change lies also in the fact that a paraphilic attraction is the equivalent of the normophilic attraction of falling in love. Love is blind, according to popular wisdom. Criticism of the beloved falls on deaf ears, no matter how rational and logical it may appear to the critics. Family interference meets with resistance and intensification of the bond with the beloved. So strong is the bond that the lover may, indeed, be said to be addicted to the beloved. Being love-smitten may even be the prototype of all addiction. The opponent process can be discerned in all the paraphilias, insofar as they all predicate orgasm on an activity that only the paraphile appreciates as erotic. Others regard the erotization of that acitivty as completely inappropriate, and react with outrage, contempt, or ridicule. For them it would prevent orgasm, not build up to it.
The paraphilic opponent-process strategy for turning tragedy into triumph appears at first glance to generate a motley array of paraphilias, more or less at random. Upon closer inspection, however, it appears that the paraphilias are not generated at random, but that they subdivide into six classes or strategies. Each strategy is a means of triumphing over tragedy. The six are: sacrificial/expiatory; marauding/predatory; mercantile/venal; fetishistic/talismanic; stigmatic/eligibilic; and solicitational/ allurative. In each of the six strategies, a paraphilia is a substitute for normophilia—heterosexual or homosexual, according to the sex of the partner. By definition, a paraphilia has a dual existence, one in fantasy, and one as fantasy carried out in practice. On the criterion of its mental imagery, a paraphilia is a mental template or lovemap (Money, 1983b) that, in response to the neglect, suppression, or traumatization of its normophilic formation, has developed with distortions, namely, omissions, displacements, and inclusions that would otherwise have no place in it. A paraphilia permits sexuoerotic arousal, genital performance, and orgasm to take place, but only under the aegis, in fantasy or live performance, of the special substitute imagery of the paraphilia.
* The sacrificial and expiatory paraphilias are those in which sexuoerotic triumph is wrested from tragedy by means of a strategy that incorporates sinful lust into the lovemap, though only on the condition that it requires reparation or atonement, by way of penance or sacrifice, since it irrevocably defiles saintly love. One or both of the partners may perform the atonement. The penalty ranges from humiliation and hurt to blood sacrifice and death. Self-imposed atonement is masochistic. Performed by the partner, it is sadistic.
* In the irrational syllogism of extreme paraphilic sadism, the transgression is postulated as the heinous and criminal pleasure of sexual orgasm. It requires atonement, and it is the partner who must be afflicted on behalf of the sadist.
* Lust as ordinary sexual intercourse seldom takes place only once in a person’s lifetime. So also the enactment of a paraphilic ritual seldom takes place only once. The occasion when paraphilic murder is discovered is not necessarily the paraphile’s first murder. Self-incrimination is not atypical in the paraphilias. Thus, once traced, a paraphilic murderer may disclose the history and details of his killings—with a virtual vanity of achievement, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, relief that external intervention will, at last, do what internal forces failed to do, namely prevent further recurrences.
* There is no hard-edged dividing line between the abusive and the playful sadomasochistic paraphilias. Nonetheless, many S/M people appear to be permanently anchored on the playful side. With a partner appropriately attuned, it may be possible for the fantasy to be staged as a piece of personal, sexuoerotic theater. Otherwise, it may remain forever coded in the lovemap as fantasy, exclusively. The expiatory and sacrificial paraphilias are not invariably malignant. For some they are benign. Statistically, those may rate as abnormal, but ideologically they are acceptable.
* The marauding and predatory paraphilias are those in which sexuoerotic triumph is wrested from tragedy by means of a strategy that incorporates sinful lust into the lovemap, though only on the condition that it be stolen, abducted, or imposed by force, since it irrevocably defiles saintly love. The person with a predatory lovemap may be either the predator or the prey. Predator and prey may set themselves up as actors in a prearranged paraphilic drama or they may be strangers, the prey being completely unprepared for the imposed role of victim. There are two classes of marauding and predatory paraphilia. One is characterized by attack, assault, and seizure; and the other by stealth, theft, and abduction. Together, they are characterized by taking something without consent.
* The lovemap of a paraphilic rapist excludes the possibility that lust can be expressed by mutual consent. Typically, the partner is a stranger, ambushed and captured by force. Compliancy implies consent, and evokes an escalation of paraphilic intimidation and violence. The victim may, therefore, fare better by an escalation of panic and aversion.
* The obverse of paraphilic marauding and predation is being sexu-oerotically turned on only by a partner who has a predatory history of outrages perpetrated on others.
* The paraphilic appeal of the lover as criminal may entail that he/she be a convicted criminal who has been convicted and spent time in prison. The relationship between the hybristophile and the criminal may actually begin in the prison where the offender is serving time, and the partner is a visitor.
* There is a variant of the syndrome in which the hybristophile taunts and provokes a lover or spouse to commit a criminal act, so as to fulfil the requirements of the paraphilia. The offender is then reported to the police and arrested, or a warrant is put out for his/her arrest. If the next step is imprisonment, then the hybristophilic role is to visit the prisoner, to incite sexual arousal, and then to thwart it, unfulfilled, when the visiting hour terminates. If the prisoner is finally released, and if reconciliation is consummated in sexual intercourse, then the experience of the reconciliation orgasm is one of extravagant intensity and ecstasy. It is the ultimate fulfillment of the imagery in the hybristophile’s lovemap.
* The hybristophilic lovemap excludes the possibility of oneself as the victim of an outrage successfully effected.
* The mercantile and venal paraphilias are those in which sexuoerotic triumph is wrested from tragedy by means of a strategy that incorporates sinful lust into the lovemap, though only on the condition that it be traded, bartered, or purchased and paid for, not freely exchanged, since lust irrevocably defiles saintly love.
* Paraphilic buying and selling may be engaged in not as an actual business contract, but as a form of play acting in a prearranged drama of an as-if contract.
* The prearranged drama may be one of as-if prostitution, without exchange of actual money. Thus, a pair of lovers or spouses may play act a vernacular script of a prostitute and her trick, liberally using dirty words, so-called, that would at all other times be forbidden. A related version of this drama requires that a boyfriend or husband play the role of pimp who picks up a trick to have sex with his own partner.
* There are some people whose sexuoerotic relationship is satisfactory when they live together before the official contract of marriage, whereas after they are legally wed it degenerates. The explanation rests on the familiar sinner/saint principle, for marrige legally transforms a disreputable and lusty sinner relationship into a respectably chaste and saintly one. In this circumstance, the survival of lust may be at the cost of adultery.
* The fetishistic and talismanic paraphilias are those in which sexuoerotic triumph is wrested from tragedy by means of a strategy that incorporates sinful lust into the lovemap, though only on the condition that a token, fetish, or talisman be substituted for the lover, since lust irrevocably defiles saintly love.
* Brassieres, garter belts, hose, and high heels are standard paraphernalia in the visual turn-on of millions of American males, for whom they may be regarded as fetishes, but not to the degree of constituting a complete paraphilic pathology. They are not absolutely prerequisite to most men’s erotic arousal to orgasm, but are rather an extra option. Their absence does not preclude ordinary sexual participation with a partner, nor are they a substitute for the partner. Wearing these garments is also not essential to the woman’s sexuoerotic arousal and climax. They are worn as a concession to the man’s sexuoerotic fixation on them. It is rare to hear of women with a fetishistic fixation on men’s underwear.
* The stigmatic and eligibilic paraphilias are those in which sexuoerotic triumph is wrested from tragedy by means of a strategy that incorporates sinful lust into the lovemap, though only on the condition that the partner be, like a pagan infidel, ineligible to be a saint defiled.
* To be ineligible as a saintly partner, in these paraphilias a person must be socially stigmatized or ostracized as an outsider not suitable for kinship by marriage. The criterion of exclusion may be age, race, nationality, language, religion, social class, occupation, wealth, health, physique, physiognomy, or some insignia of group membership such as the right to wear a uniform.
By shaping an idealized lovemap, a social tradition serves also to ensure assortative mating within its own particular social, tribal, racial, or regional group. Assortative mating preserves group cohesiveness by preventing changes brought about by miscegenation and the hybridization of group values. Historically, the tradition of the arranged marriage has served the same purpose.
* In childhood, to be respected as an equal by an adult is rare, and greatly appreciated. Conversely, the pedophile greatly appreciates being given equal status as a juvenile by his young friend.
* Failure of the idealized image of the lover in a person’s lovemap to advance in age goes hand in hand with failure of the sexuoerotic age of the person to advance in synchrony with his/her chronological age.
* The solicitational and allurative paraphilias are those in which triumph is wrested from tragedy by means of a strategy that incorporates sinful lust into the lovemap, though only on the condition that a solicitational/allurative act belonging to the prelimary or proceptive phase be substituted for the copulatory act of the central or acceptive phase, thus ensuring that saintly love be not defiled by sinful lust.
* The converse of compulsive cruising is unilateral limerence (Tennov, 1979) and compulsive fixation on an unattainable lover, despite desolate failure to lure a reciprocal response. This autistic form of lovesickness goes by the little known name of Clérambault-Kandinsky syndrome (Chapter 16), and may lead to suicide or homicide.
* Ordinary people who are consumers of commercial erotica do not become addicted to it. On the contrary, they become rather rapidly satiated. Thereafter, it occupies a peripheral place in their sex lives, to be called upon when the occasion and the circumstances are fitting.
* On the basis of subjective report, self-mutilation has a paradoxical effect of reducing tenseness and agitation. The calmness that ensues may expand into euphoria and even reach a peak of mystical ecstasy.
* The Hinckley pathology of love goes by the name of the Clérambault-Kandinsky syndrome (Jordan and Howe, 1980). in this syndrome, the more ordinary vicissitudes of love unrequited or unfulfilled are greatly magnified. Similarly, the extremes of paraphilic fugue state are also magnifications of less extremely altered states of consciousness. There are many instances in which the transition from the nonaroused to the aroused, fugue-like paraphilic state escapes attention, or is more or less equated with what ordinarily happens in the transition from being sexuoerotically quiescent to aroused, in response to a present or potential partner.
* The paraphilic fugue or fugue-like state constitutes a dissociation or splitting of the personality so that the sexuoerotic component that constitutes the paraphilia is on one side of the divide, and not the other. The extent to which other components are also split varies. Thus, the personality on the paraphilic side of the split may not only have its own name, but may also dress differently, speak differently, and have different body language than the personality on the non-paraphilic side of the split. It may also have a different social age, and even a different social sexual status. It may have a different balance of traits of temperament—violence versus martyrdom, for instance, in association with the expiatory paraphilias.
* Overall, the paraphilic personality may be more antisocial on the criteria of lying, stealing, gambling, breaking contracts and appointments, failing to carry through on promises, duties, and obligations. All told, the personality on the paraphilic side of the split is more likely to be unorthodox than orthodox with respect to conventional criteria of morality. It could hardly be otherwise. Sexuoerotic dissociation or splitting has its childhood genesis in persona! inability, for whatever reason, to conform to the interventions imposed on sexuoerotic development in the name of obedience to someone else’s moral authoritarianism which is unjustly imposed. The devious ruse of the paraphilia is the childhood solution to this otherwise unnegotiable imposition.
* Exposes of some of the most morally self-righteous crusaders, preachers, and legislators of antisexualism have revealed that their secret personality practiced in private what their public personality crusaded against in the media and elsewhere. In the aftermath of exposure, it is quite possible for the tables to be turned, so that a person crusades in favor of that which he formerly crusaded against. This turning of the tables may also occur in the aftermath of treatment, as when a former paraphilic rapist becomes an advocate of women’s sexual rights; or when a former pedophile becomes an advocate of sexual age-matching. Such a turnabout may, or may not be accompanied by religious conversion, extreme self-righteousness, and not only an altered, but an exalted state of consciousness resembling that of the paraphilic fugue state itself.
* To be able to live with a paraphile over an extended period of time, married or not, the partner needs to have a lovemap that reciprocally matches his/hers, either because they started out that way, or because her/his lovemap adaptively accommodated to his/hers. A girl with a childhood history of sexual abuse, for example, developed a lovemap in which she is an abused martyr. As a young woman, she married an older man newly released from serving time in prison as a pedophile. He was potentially more attracted to her young daughter than to her. The woman was thus exempted from coitus which, in her lovemap was equated with further victimization, as in childhood. At the same time, her abused-martyr role was not threatened, for his syndrome daily threatened her with martydom as a potential prisoner’s widow. This relationship held together until he went on antiandrogen treatment, and was relieved of the threat of a pedophilic relapse.
* Kellogg’s medical hobby was dietary health. He processed cereals and nuts as substitutes for meat, to suppress carnal desire induced by the eating of meat. Few of today’s eaters of Kellogg’s Com Flakes know that he invented them, almost literally, as antimasturbation food.
Kellogg was degeneracy theory’s most ardent antimasturbation advocate. For intractable cases of masturbation in boys he recommended sewing up the foreskin with silver wire; or, if that failed, circumcision without anesthesia. For girls, he recommended burning out the clitoris with carbolic acid. For fathers, he wrote detailed instructions of how they should silently encroach upon their sleeping sons and rapidly pull back the blankets. An erect penis was prima facie evidence of the sleeping sinner caught in secret vice. Kellogg knew nothing of nocturnal penile tumescence. Whatever his wife might have told him about his own erection during sleep was forever unknown to him, because he saved his semen by sleeping alone and never consummating his marriage. Instead, he was a klismaphiliac who had his senior medical assistant give him an enema every morning, after breakfast.