Sexual aberration leading to orgasm is almost never seen in animals (unless they have been manipulated by unnatural forces like experimentation or captivity). On the other hand, such needs are ubiquitous in man; erotic deviance is as specially human as are murder, humor, fantasy, competitive sports, art, or cooking. This observation is so grossly manifest that one wonders why it has no force in the speculations of modern sex researchers. Almost every notable study on human sexual behavior since Freud has tried to prove that a person does not create his own deviance but rather it is thrust on him—by genes, by hormones, by electrical circuiting in the brain, by imprinting, by conditioning, by statistics. How Freud has disturbed us; we still cannot bear his “accusation” that we are human.
Will someone please explain pedophilia in geneticists’ terms? Or shoe fetishism as the product of a brain mechanism constant through evolutionary development? Or penile exhibitionism as a hormonal defect? Or the need to rape old women as the effect of conditioning? Or necrophilia as merely a statistic at the outer reaches of a bell curve?
The new research, which takes place in the physiology and chemistry laboratories, in the intact animal and human experiments, and in naturalistic observation, seems aimed unanimously at tearing down the conflict theory; no other aspect of Freud’s system has created such resistance, perhaps because Freud believed perversion is motivated, that is, a person somehow, in his depths, feels in part responsible for his perversion. The sexual act, Freud felt, is the product of the great human capacity for choice and so ultimately has a moral quality (even if one’s responsibility is mitigated since the choice is unconscious and was arrived at because of unsought threatening circumstances in childhood). The modern researchers, however, deny that intrapsychic conflict plays a part or that fantasy propels and perpetuates aberrant activity. In other words, these critics say it is not psychically motivated. Oddly, their research can also apply to nondeviant behavior, for their logic says that all sexual behavior is not psychically motivated. They believe this in their laboratories and at their desks. Do they also believe it in bed?
The attack on conflict theory has taken four forms. The first says that the aberrations in humans are due simply to physiological mechanisms—either organic dysfunction or inherited normal physiology that merely produces behavioral variance similar to that seen in lower animals and resulting from the same brain and hormonal mechanisms. In the second explanation—learning theory—the deviation is inflicted by an outside force, such as conditioning, and so is not a matter of choice and has no origin in fantasy. The third is statisticaclass="underline" there is a bell curve for sexual behavior and the variations are not abnormal, just not normative. The last says that while cultures may pronounce an aberration pathological, the social condemnation may be all that is pathological, not the behavior; that is, the society, not the individual, is sick.
Genetics and Constitution
The following represents the kinds of studies trying to demonstrate that sexual aberrations are induced by physical, not mental, forces.
There is much fine animal work (summarized in 37 and 140), for now there are techniques to influence large areas of the brain by electrical and chemical stimulation or ablation, or by the deprivation of REM sleep. These experiments create disruptions in normal sexual patterns in animals, hypersexuality or indiscriminate sexual behavior, during which the animal may not care about the sex or sometimes even the species of the object of its attentions. Then there are experiments in which minute electrical or hormonal stimulation of tiny, circumscribed areas of the brain can change sexual function (104). But our old problem remains: How do these neural substrates in animals relate to that man buying photographs of enchained women? Why did that woman, who was a feminine girl till age six, grow up to be so masculine?
As yet, obviously, no comparable work has been done on humans, though we know that sexual behavior can be changed by brain manipulation (66). I have already mentioned the report of neurosurgical cure of male homosexuality (122). A cure of male homosexuality (85) and the treatment of hypersexuality (12) by antiandrogens have been reported. Several reports have tried to implicate the temporal lobes in fetishistic behavior, especially cross-dressing, but these have either been single cases or have involved too few subjects (summarized in Blumer, 5), have lacked adequate controls (151), or have simply been ruminations on research (16). They indicate that a rare case may be associated with temporal lobe disorder but do not encourage belief that such brain disorder underlies all such behavior (145). (Why are there no reports of females so affected?)
As to the claims that constitutional predisposition may make certain people susceptible to their particular deviance, there simply is no acceptable evidence as yet, except in the rarest instances (108, 137). No competent studies have shown family tendencies in any of the perversions, except perhaps in homosexuality. The view generally held in the early igoos, that perversion was the result of “degeneration,” meaning some diffuse physical inferiority, has never been backed up by evidence. But all studies—and there are very few—that have tried to demonstrate genetic factors in homosexuality (72, 128) have been unable to withstand the attack of critics so far (reviewed in 73, 101, 115). Even Money’s observations of fetally androgenized females show that the girls become only mildly masculine in behavior; they are nonetheless heterosexual (108).
It is too soon to say whether this work on genetics and brain function tests psychoanalytic theory (though it should result in treatments that would make psychoanalytic therapy obsolete for some sexual disorders). One must always be cautious (as I was not quite when speculating above about the significance of a CNS pleasure center) not to equate the discovery of midbrain mechanisms with discovery of the causes of integrated, motivated human behavior. The limbic substrates for oral and genital behavior lie close together; how many people seriously think that is how man invented oral intercourse? Is the foot center close to the genital center in a foot fetishist? Is masturbation due to activation of a masturbation center in the hypothalamus? I think some of the modern theories were invented by a computer. At the least, it will take a few generations of research on the cortex before we know much about thinking, desire, and behavior; that cortex does not exist in other species.
Perhaps the greatest recent challenge are the reports (noted earlier, in the discussion of bisexuality) which show that the more exclusively homosexual a man, the lower are his testosterone levels and the more defective his spermatogenesis. Such findings, if confirmed, would greatly reduce the importance of a theory that says the condition is caused by disruptions in a boy’s relationships with his mother and father. We shall have to await further studies that control for nonspecific influences like stress, normal variations in level during a diurnal cycle, normal variations in semen quantity and content, drug intake (marijuana may lower plasma testosterone levels), and so forth (20, 84). The nonconfirming reports are beginning to outnumber the early challenges (10, 15, 117. >49)-