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

lust alters their real-time perception of disgusting objects or affects their behaviors. In one study, researchers first exposed straight male subjects to porn. Only then did the real testing begin. The psychologists behind the scenes, led by Richard Stevenson, were curious to know if sexual arousal lessens disgust for sexual cues only or for nasty things altogether . We can therefore think of their experiment as pitting a “local anesthetic” hypothesis of disgust management against a “general anesthetic” one. To get at this, the scientists invaded the sensory systems of these now very aroused men with terribly yucky things, comparing their perceived grossness of gross sex cues with their reactions to cues that were just generally gross.
    For the sensation of touch, for instance, the lustful men were told to dip their hands into a bucket filled with either lubricated condoms (for sexual disgust) or cold pea-and-ham soup (for general disgust). For hearing, they listened to a brief sound bite of someone either performing oral sex or vomiting. (These do sometimes go together, but let’s not complicate matters.) Smell, meanwhile, was a whiff of rotting fish (for sexual disgust) or of feces (for general disgust). Seeing involved being exposed to the image of a horribly disfiguring scar on a naked woman or a pile of decomposing garbage. Fortunately for the participants, the researchers chose not to include the sense of taste in this particularly interactive study of disgust. That would have probably been “a little much,” as my dad likes to say.
    The findings support our local anesthetic hypothesis. Sexual arousal, or at least male sexual arousal, numbed the participants’ gut-level aversion to sexual unpleasantries only, not to the whole disgusting lineup. Even when we’re in the middle of doing disgusting things with each other under the sheets, in other words, we’re just as sensitive to the revolting features of the noncarnal world above. Think of it this way: When you’re in the throes of orgasm, the fact that the hot guy or gal you met at the club last night hasn’t showered since yesterday and smells a little funky probably isn’t too much of a hindrance to your ultimate pleasure. But if you move your passionate lovemaking to the other room, where in your mad dash to tear each other’s clothes off, your nostrils suddenly detect the unmistakable smell of decomposing human flesh coming from beneath the bed, that would probably be a sensory deal breaker for your bliss. (Not to mention you’d have a different type of “happy ending” to worry about now—in the form of getting out alive.) In fact, the olfactory category in Stevenson’s study, which, if you recall, compared the rotting fish smell with the feces smell, was the only one for which the lustful male raters found the stimuli to be equally pleasant (or unpleasant, depending on how you look at it). But that’s actually not very surprising if we understand lust as dampening sex-related disgust for all bodily effluvia, not just those emanating from one particular orifice. Necrophiles aside, the smell of a moldering corpse tends to be sexually off-putting. Yet there are plenty of smells from living bodies that most of us don’t find too pleasant, either. And it’s not just “fishy” smells that can be an orgasmic barrier for straight men, after all. Women, from what I understand, have anuses too, and an odeur de colon can be a psychological impediment to sex for both men and women, gay or straight.
    By virtue of certain “anatomical affordances,” however, and the limiting nature of homosexual male intercourse (that is, anal sex), gay men are frequently the targets of a cheap rhetorical strategy designed to evoke a moralizing disgust response. “It’s wrong because it’s gross” is, of course, a rather transparent case of moral dumbfounding. Yet painting gay men as depraved creatures rife with infectious disease whose idea of a relaxing