Read Online Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us by Jesse Bering - Free Book Online

Presumably, this is why we’re so enamored of slogans such as “A diamond is forever” and why poetic lines like Emily Dickinson’s “Unable are the Loved to die / For Love is Immortality” strike a true and universal chord. Compare those maudlin sentiments with Shakespeare’s lurid metaphor for sex in Othello as “making the beast with two backs” or his describing a couple as “prime as goats” and “hot as monkeys.” You’d find Shakespeare’s language here especially gross, the argument goes, right after being told you’ve got an inoperable brain tumor and have only a few months to live. Like another famous theory that’s based on subconscious anxieties, it has its limits, but I think there’s probably something to terror management theory. It could explain Rick Santorum believing gay marriage is a stone’s throw away from interspecies marriage, anyway. That poor man—the mere act of ejaculating, reminding him that he’s an animal, must be so existentially terrifying to him.
    Yet we don’t need complex psychodynamics to understand how it all really works. We lost our rodent tails and whiskers long ago, but even for us postmodern animals it’s still best not to think too much about all those bodily secretions and worrisome odors of ours while having sex. Even the best relationships can be strained by having to explain to your loving partner why you look as if you’ve just gotten a nose full of rancid vinegar while performing oral sex on him. Fortunately, most of us can overcome these seemingly insurmountable sensory barriers thanks to a brain that’s able to subjectively sanitize such sticky situations. One that evolved to be overly sensitive to disgust during sex wouldn’t have been very adaptive after all; so prudish a creature would perish in its own purity as a genetic dead end. Rather, as Sigmund Freud wrote, “our libido thrives on obstacles” and “in its strength enjoys overriding disgust.” Indeed, more recent scholars have found that our willingness (and sometimes our eagerness) to let others’ body products make contact with our lips and tongues or even to slip down our throats entirely is a product of our fluctuating arousal levels. When we’re horny, we’re happy to dip into someone else’s organic buffet. Really. There are even data on it.
    In a study with straight undergraduate students in Denmark, for example, most of the males said they’d be willing to taste a woman’s breast milk if they were aroused, but far fewer said they’d ever do so if they weren’t turned on. Similarly, most women could see themselves ingesting semen if they were hot and bothered, but the thought of swallowing fresh seminal fluid when not in the mood was enough to send shivers up many spines. Imagining having to taste someone else’s sweat, tears, and saliva, meanwhile, wasn’t especially sickening to the students either way. By contrast, very few men or women—no matter how concupiscent they might be—ever wanted to taste menstrual blood. And wouldn’t you know it, while most of the female students said they’d be willing to give it a go if they felt sufficiently lustful, only 3 percent of the males in the study warmed up to the idea of ever tasting another man’s smegma.
    This overall pattern of findings makes some sense in evolutionary terms. When the system works smoothly, sexual arousal can serve to anesthetize the otherwise adaptive disgust response long enough for people to get on with the Darwinian business of reproduction. (Well, heterosexual people, anyway. It just allows us homosexuals to have decent sex.) But questionnaire studies aren’t the greatest when it comes to tapping into behaviors fueled by strong emotions. Even if a straight man were willing to taste another man’s smegma when drunk with desire, he might not know it himself, or he might not share that fact on a survey. More creative approaches induce actual sexual arousal in participants to see how the state of