Different Loving: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission (6 page)

The latter half of the 19th Century saw doctors and theorists hunting busily for the hereditary factors of insanity and psychosexual deviance. Many believed that congenital conditions were manifest in anatomy and physiognomy. Physicians asserted they could diagnose, at a glance, a neuropath afflicted with “masturbatory insanity.” He would be, if not raving, at least
identifiable by his pallid complexion, downcast eyes, and air of brooding melancholy. Similar fallacies (some of which will be familiar to contemporary readers) spread as gospel: Lesbians were all mannish; homosexual men couldn’t whistle.

Neuropaths aside, however, there was a larger question that nagged at Victorian scientists: If modesty, reserve, and sexual continence were the imperatives of human goodness, why were these qualities absent in so many Victorians?

He was not the first to devote himself to the study of sexuality, but no one had a greater impact on the future course of sexology than Richard von Krafft-Ebing. He popularized the terms
sadism
and
homosexual
, invented the terms
masochism
and
paranoia
, and his classification system of sexual deviance remains the foundation of modern psychiatric diagnostics. But science and its theories do not develop in isolation: Krafft-Ebing’s assumptions mirror many of the prejudices of his age. His biases remain a matter of debate.

Like Freud after him, Krafft-Ebing considered reproductive relevance the benchmark of sexual normality. Psychiatry was the heir of moral theology: Sex was a biological mechanism devised by God or Nature to ensure the production of offspring. Sex for pleasure and intimacy which did not induce pregnancy was a perversion of biology as much as of God’s will. In this system “missionary,” man-on-top intercourse—a position believed to aid man’s seed in reaching its goal—was the only acceptable position; it also spared women from too active a role in their disagreeable but obligatory reproductive duties. Given this narrow definition of acceptable sexual activity, it is not surprising that Krafft-Ebing found an abundance of deviance.

Three things are remarkable about
Psychopathia Sexualis
. The first is its breadth of inquiry; then and now, psychological theory often rests on an extremely limited statistical base. Second is his compassion toward those who practiced acts that personally disgusted him; he advocated leniency, tolerance, and legal reform, arguing that one should not be punished for a condition for which there was little hope of a cure, as in the case of homosexuals. But most remarkable of all was the enormous distribution of his book: Krafft-Ebing, a medico-forensics expert who was specifically interested in the legal ramifications of sexual deviance, never intended
Psychopathia Sexualis
to be popular.

It was sensational, shocking, and irresistible. As a medical book it escaped the taint of deliberate salaciousness; its stringent moral tone reinforced social ideals. Genteel readers entered a dizzying vortex of vampires, ghouls, lust murderers, shoe fetishists, groveling masochists, heartless sadists, pederasts, and bestialists—many of whom apparently drank tea in the cozy drawing rooms of bourgeois Europe.

Actually, Krafft-Ebing’s behavioral “discoveries” had been known for centuries, if not millennia. Yet some readers found in
Psychopathia Sexualis
the first inklings that their sexual desires were not unique.

For the first time there was an exhaustive, accessible work that dealt not only with sex but with the types of sex that people seldom discussed. But even as
Psychopathia Sexualis
was going to press in Stuttgart, in England Havelock Ellis had begun the research that would culminate in his massive—and virtually unmatched—
Studies in the Psychology of Sex
.

Contemporaries in time and discipline, these two scholars had dissimilar motivations. Ellis had a vested interest in demystifying sexuality: He had a lifelong titillation with urination that he credited to his mother having urinated openly in front of him when he was 12. His vocation as sexuality educator resulted from a religious experience he had as a young man. While reading a work by Dr. James Hinton that attempted to reconcile Christianity with science, Ellis was struck by a sense of utter harmony and euphoria. He decided then to become a doctor and to devote himself to the study of sexual behavior so that future generations might be spared the shame that ignorance and repression had caused him.

Ellis ultimately produced the seven volumes of
Studies in the Psychology of Sex
(1897 to 1928), but his greatest goal was never achieved. His works had limited success in combatting condemnation of unusual sexual behaviors. Freudianism was already growing apace, and its emphasis on psychoanalysis and intuitive theory was at odds with Ellis’s cross-cultural studies and scholarship. Still, Ellis’s sympathetic point of view helped popularize his work among members of the sexual minorities he wrote about, some of whom seemed to receive his conclusions as gospel. After reading in Ellis’s
Sexual Inversion
(1897) that turn-of-the-century American gay male prostitutes wore red ties, for example, countless gays began wearing them as a recognition device.

The possibility that gay men, after reading Ellis, wore red ties illustrates
the observer effect
. Simply stated, the observer effect involves learning of a behavior (whether by direct observation, reading, or word of mouth), finding the behavior personally appealing, and then emulating that behavior. This is
not an unthinking imitation of the “monkey-see, monkey-do” variety. The observation elicits feelings of identification in the observer. By emulating the behavior, one gains an affiliation with one’s fellows which leads to increased self-esteem and social power. The gay men who learned that red ties could discreetly communicate their orientation to other gay men adopted the code as a standard, much like the contemporary gay man who wears a colored hankie in a rear pocket to “flag” his sexual interests.

This process of observation-identification-emulation-affiliation must be distinguished from fallacious assertions (such as those made by the Meese Commission in its study of pornography in the 1980s) that exposure to unusual sexuality (paraphilia) contaminates individuals who are otherwise uninterested.

A heterosexual cannot be transformed by reading Ellis—or anyone else—into a homosexual, any more than this book will transform a sexually conventional reader into a sadomasochist. The person whose sadomasochistic desires were previously limited to fantasy or occasional furtive encounters is the one whose behavior may be affected by discovering that a community of shared interest and sympathetic understanding exists.

The life sciences still battle for the ground that was scorched and denuded before the 19th Century’s end. Science has failed to adequately explain the origins of sexual proclivities. Instead, today’s popular media, bolstered by rafts of self-appointed experts, seize on idiosyncratic theories, such as sexual addiction, as if they represent progress in thought and knowledge. But the “diagnosis” (that too much sex is always bad) is warmed-over Victorianism, and the “treatment” is unchanged: strive to overcome, sublimate, repress.

Indeed, the scientific study of sexuality languishes. Scientific methodology demands, among other things, that when an experiment is repeated
under all the same conditions, the results must be identical. A truly scientific study of sexuality is perhaps an impossible task, since we do not have the ability to replicate genetic structure or behavioral conditions in different human beings. Further, scientific study requires long and painstaking research and, most important, funding.

Sexual research has invariably incited storms of hostility and outrage. In Britain Havelock Ellis’s publisher faced criminal prosecution for issuing
Sexual Inversion
. The Institute for the Study of Human Sexuality (1919–1933), founded by eminent German scholar Magnus Hirschfeld, was sacked and its priceless documents and library burned by the Nazis, who shipped some of its staff members to concentration camps.

In the United States
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
(1948) was a pioneering work that gained Alfred Kinsey the title “The Columbus of Sex” from
Time
magazine. Kinsey examined sexual behavior as practiced, not as idealized. Among many other findings, he reported that 20 percent of the men and 12 percent of the women who participated in his original surveys expressed some degree of arousal in response to sadomasochistic stories. By 1954 Kinsey was under attack from the American Medical Association and Congress for the depravity his works allegedly engendered. The House Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations pressured the Rockefeller Foundation to withdraw financial support from Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research. The U.S. Customs Service seized materials addressed to the Institute. Kinsey died of a heart attack in 1956, his research incomplete, and colleagues allege that the “scrutiny, criticism, and harassment took an emotional and physical toll.”
¹²

A decade later William E. Masters and Virginia Johnson published
Human Sexual Response
, based on 12 years of direct laboratory observation of sexual activity. Laymen and clergy attacked their work for, among other things, the use of sexual surrogates in studying orgasm and for their conclusion that almost all sexual dysfunction originates in religious orthodoxy. Conservative psychoanalysts ignored or dismissed some of Masters and Johnson’s more controversial findings.

Between 1988 and 1991 three federally funded studies of potentially invaluable worth (particularly at a time when transmission of the HIV virus that causes AIDS is epidemic) were proposed to examine patterns of sexual behavior. The two that were approved were ultimately canceled under pressure from Senator Jesse Helms and Congressman William Dannemeyer. The third was dismissed as political suicide despite the high regard with which it was received in peer review.
¹³

Although over 100 years have passed since Krafft-Ebing first identified sadomasochism and classified it as a pathology, his theories remain the
foundation for current perceptions and clinical diagnoses. Official changes in the classification of unusual sexuality—when they occur—seem to be driven by changing social attitudes rather than new data.