SHAME, PRIDE, AND SEX
“The ultimate development of mature sexual intercourse,” said a senior colleague, “is for sex to become play. Sex,” he continued, “at its best, is play for grownups, the adult version of two little kids rolling down the hill together.” Early in a relationship, sex is about excitement; later it is more about contentment. A good sexual relationship, that all-too-rarely achieved goal toward which we are supposed to strive, involves a variable and dynamic alliance. It requires mutual positive regard, a remarkable degree of interpersonal tolerance, and great unselfishness. Nevertheless, for many couples, sex works best when a relationship is new and each can afford to believe that the other really does meet the criteria for specialness that so often lend spice to the mix. With mutual knowledge, unfortunately, often come boredom and contempt, which operate to impede arousal, excitement, and enjoyment. Sexual activity is a highly variable experience, many things to each of us.
The life work of psychoanalyst Robert J. Stoller was to study sex as it is lived, sex as it appears in real life rather than in theory, the sexual lives of those individuals who were willing to share with him their most private thoughts. Stoller traveled all over the planet, interviewing people in far-flung societies as well as probing the sexual psyche of patients in psychoanalysis.
From his research—thousands of hours spent asking questions most of us are far too shy to frame—emerges one sturdy conclusion: Central to the experience of sexual arousal are thoughts related to shame. All of us, he has said in Sexual Excitement, each time we contemplate a sexual event, think about those moments in our lives when we have been traumatized by shame. Man or woman, the process of anticipating a sexual interchange involves the visualization of such scenes and adding to them new scenes that will provide retribution against those who have humiliated us in the past. Pornography, he has written, can best be understood as a group of daydreams designed to cure humiliation (1987). In Stoller’s meticulous and painstaking research it turns out that sexual fantasy (the thoughts that accompany sexual arousal) is one of the ways we try to undo shame, to reverse our life experiences of shame at the hands of others.
I visited him in Los Angeles not long ago so we might discuss in person my attempt to develop this completely new rationale for sexuality and to demonstrate the linkage between sex and shame. Patiently, quietly, this courteous gentleman (whose scholarship in the area of sexual fantasy has made him for more than a generation the unquestioned leader in his field) explained an aspect of his work I had not known. Despite the popularity of sexual excitement as a theme in film and novel, no one really wants to face up to Stoller’s conclusion that sex and shame are intimately connected. His books and papers have reached an enormous audience within the psychotherapy profession. Huge numbers of nonprofessionals have read his books for the lay public; an even larger audience has read about him in the major newsweeklies. Yet almost never does any member of this enormous audience refer to Stoller’s work in public. Psychoanalysts (whose steadfast refusal to discuss shame is the shame of their profession) rarely mention Stoller’s theories when writing about the sexual aspects of their cases. It is almost as if our population were too embarrassed to discuss this relation between shame and sexuality.
We are excited by sexual arousal and calmed when released by orgasm from that arousal. Every aspect of sexuality is capable of triggering intense experiences of the positive affects interest–excitement and enjoyment–joy. Sexual arousal is accompanied by fantasy, by images of scenes in which our sexual wishes will be gratified. To the extent that we can get others to become players in these scenes, we will share with them both our excitement and our release. Sexual success, for man or woman, brings pride.
Yet the human is so constructed that whenever that other person falters for so much as a moment in his or her willingness to resonate with our arousal and its accompanying positive affect, we will experience shame. No matter how sensitive our sexual partner may be, no matter how precisely attuned to the nuances of our arousal, it is impossible for any two aroused and excited individuals to match perfectly each other’s patterns of arousal. Always, inevitably, invariably, our experience of sexual arousal must meet with some sort or degree of impediment. Shame affect, the painfully amplified analogue of this impediment, is as much an accompaniment of sexuality as the positive affect by which we prefer to know it better. And, as I have shown throughout this book, wherever there is a stable and recurring trigger for shame there will form a category of shame-related thoughts capable of intruding into consciousness whenever we are embarrassed for any reason.
Here are three from the infinitude of sexual shames confided by others, observed directly, or experienced personally:
“Is that all he wanted?” exclaimed a young woman who felt suddenly foolish when she realized that the attentions of a lover had represented more his quest for sexual satisfaction than a search for love. Her pain is shame affect triggered by a blow to her sense of safety within a relationship—a reaction to the experience of betrayal. For the moment, at least, she continues to find him interesting, continues to anticipate enjoyment–joy. His perfidy triggers shame–humiliation because it is an impediment to ongoing positive affect, the hoped-for good feelings she cannot yet relinquish. She feels “taken,” used, cheapened. A sexual interaction has caused an acute reduction in her self-esteem.
Returning home late from work, exhausted and drained, a 35-year-old attorney shucked her work clothes and snuggled close to her husband. After a little while they became aroused. “Would you mind . . .?” he asked. It is his preference that they have intercourse by candlelight and with a musical accompaniment. Quickly, so as not to lose the mood of the moment, and hesitantly, for the moment is always ephemeral, she complied by lighting the candles and turning on the record player. On her return to bed she found him reading a magazine. I asked how that made her feel. “I was so hurt,” she said, gesturing to the center of her abdomen. The name of that pain, too, is shame affect—triggered by the sudden impediment to positive affect in a situation where there also remained adequate and continuing reason to maintain that positive affect of excitement.
My mother contributed this anecdote from the elderly widow and widower retirement culture of Miami Beach in the 1970s: “Mr. Rabinowitz walks over to Mrs. Goldstein at the swimming pool. ‘Mrs. Goldstein,’ he says, ‘I’m thinking that maybe you would be willing to join me for a cocktail here at the pool before dinner. And I’m thinking that maybe after we have a couple of cocktails you would be willing to join me for dinner. Then, I’m thinking, maybe we could go out for a little dancing. After that, I’m thinking, I could go back with you to your apartment. . . .’ ‘Please, Mr. Rabinowitz,’ interrupts Mrs. Goldstein. ‘Everybody can see what you’re thinking!’ ”
From infancy to senescence, male arousal is as visible as female arousal is private. Women are allowed by nature to hold sexual fantasy in privacy, a privilege denied to men. For men, shame always hovers around the borders of sexual arousal. Until he learns the skills that will let him control his erections, every boy risks humiliation every time he becomes even mildly aroused within eyeshot of others. It is incomprehensible to me how three generations of psychoanalysts could maintain Freud’s misconception that shame is more important in women than in men. Didn’t Freud have erections? Was he never an adolescent?
As we grow to maturity and learn the interpersonal skills that make us sexually interactive beings, we pass through stages of development characterized by varying responses to sexual arousal and the affects associated with it. We are organisms programmed to experience arousal long before we are capable of achieving the release of orgasm, and long, long before we are able to manage that arousal within a stable and intimate interpersonal relationship. As Tomkins has said, shame will appear wherever desire outruns fulfillment. Given the order in which the various subroutines of the generative system are brought on line, we grow to maturity knowing far more about the impediments to arousal than the enjoyment of its release. (Masturbation to orgasm is a late acquisition.) Any attempt to appreciate the affective climate of sexuality demands an understanding of sexual shame and the myriad of mechanisms by which we defend against it. Conversely, any attempt to understand shame demands study of its relation to sexuality.
There may be no human activity that so opens us to the scrutiny of another, nothing we do that exposes so much of what is normally private. We are embarrassed, or made capable of embarrassment, by nearly everything associated with sexual performance. We worry whether our partner will laugh at us for making too much (or too little) noise during intercourse, for the size of our erection or the degree of our wetness and the size of our breasts. Early on, perhaps until we have become jaded by experience, we are torn apart by fears that a partner has enjoyed our sexual encounter to a degree much lesser than he or she has cold us. Shame teaches each of us special lessons about the safety of privacy and the role of love as protection from shame. Sex without love requires disavowal of shame.
Sexual intercourse provides one of the few situations in which we are allowed (or even expected) to give up the fundamental rule of human sociality, the cultural insistence on modulation of affective display. Everywhere else we are required to match our affective display to the reference standards defined by convention as adult or mature. True, we are allowed to scream, yell, and gesticulate our approval or disapproval at sporting events. But there, too, our behavior is choreographed, held within limits made clear by the behavior of those around us, stylized by conventions and trends legislating our actions. We can choose to go with the crowd or to withdraw from it. Sexual intercourse holds us within a crowd of two, and the moment-to-moment reactions of our partner matter all the more because intimacy offers no place for naked people to hide.
Oftentimes, even the shield of intimacy allows inadequate protection from shame. When love is new, and lovers new enough to each other that interest is linked mostly to novelty, directly proportional to the degree of that interest will be our anticipation of shame. Lovers are well-matched when they enjoy the range and style of affective expression with which they are each comfortable during sexual play.
Not long ago, a young woman called the radio station where I was discussing shame on an interview show. A lover had broken off their relationship, saying that he could no longer tolerate one part of her sexual behavior, even though he had seemed to enjoy it earlier. Furthermore, he left her with the impression that she, too, would have abjured such behavior had she any proper sense of shame. I told her that I considered dating the process by which we screen applicants for the job of best friend; that he had made the short list but withdrawn as unable to handle the job; and that she was all the more fortunate for his withdrawal. Better to know now about this incompatibility than later, when the process of idealization had drawn her more deeply into love.
Gingerly, for I had no way of knowing whether one of them had actually exceeded the norms accepted in our culture, I asked whether she would be willing to divulge the nature of her supposed transgression. Involved (she confided to me and to the listening audience) was only what she had thought their mutual pleasure at arousing each other during telephone conversations. Neither of them, of course, can be considered “wrong.” His discomfort with the self he saw exposed during their sexual intimacy created too much shame to be contained within the fabric of the relationship and so he withdrew to prevent further pain.
Each of the firmware programs produces its own highly specific type of recurrent experience. The nine innate affects produce nine forms of affective experience, all of which must be integrated into the umbrella concept we call the self. I must come to know the angry me over a range from pique through rage, just as I must learn the joyous or content me over a range from the merest hint of a pleased smile to the guffaws of belly laughter. The hunger drive allows me to know myself over a range from the urge to nibble through the voraciousness of starvation. And I cannot be considered either complete or mature until I have come to understand my sexual self over a range from mild to full arousal, whether alone or in the company of another.
We start out in life with innate affects that operate on an all-or-none basis; they are silent until triggered, and operate at full blast when turned on. Growth and maturity require modulation of these occasionally raucous mechanisms. Our need to eat, breathe, drink, defecate, or urinate does not change a whit as we move through time; only the force of the affects with which each of these drives is assembled will change as we mature.
Alone of the firmware programs, the sexual drive mechanism of the generative system does not operate at its fullest level when we are young. It increases in power as we grow toward the child-bearing years. Doubtless this has great evolutionary significance, for no life form could survive were it able to bear young before it had learned to take care of itself.
It is like looking at a graph with lines diverging in opposite directions. On the one hand, we are learning to modulate our innate affects and their coassemblies with the drives, learning to handle and control and accept the workings of our firmware programs. In these areas of life, the roiling forces that afflict the infant are increasingly subdued through growth and development. All the while we are doing this, the sexual drive is stepping up in power and intensity, increasing its capacity to take us over. By adolescence, when we are otherwise prepared to be useful citizens, the sexual drive assumes such power that we are rendered functionally useless to society until it, too, can be tamed within acceptable limits.
SEXUALITY AND AFFECT
At any age, no matter when it is engaged, sexual arousal does not hit us suddenly, at full force. It starts as a murmur and rises in intensity—at first gradually, then with increasing rapidity. Were it the kind of mechanism that when switched on was at its maximum, we might expect it to trigger surprise–startle or fear–terror, the affects of suddenness and overmuch. But we have evolved as creatures perfectly designed to link sex with excitement. The slope of the curve—the rate of rise of sexual arousal—seems just right for something that might work best if associated with positive affect.
Just as with any other psychobiological system, the drive and the affect influence each other in a recursive fashion. The more we are excited by this arousal, the more we become aroused. The addition of positive affect makes the thrilling annoyance of arousal into something even more pleasant; the increase in arousal produced by further stimulation of the affected areas triggers even more excitement leading to even more arousal until the arousal is terminated by orgasm, its genetically programmed terminal analogic amplification. Orgasm is cherished all the more because it triggers the affect enjoyment–joy, which is pleasant in direct proportion to the amount of stimulus it reduces and the rapidity with which that stimulus is decreased. “Good sex” is a paradigm of efficacy experienced in the context of positive affect; a good sexual experience brings pride and a host of thoughts about our best possible self. Repeated sequences of this relation between arousal, excitement, and the calming release of orgasm function as a teacher—one can look forward to sexual arousal with great avidity.
But this logic also helps explain why sexual arousal is so fragile a mechanism, so capable of being turned off even when all the conditions for its amplification seem present. Anything that can interfere with the rising tide of interest–excitement is likely to trigger shame affect. Where sexual arousal will make us turgid, erect, alive, and “up,” shame affect will cause a sudden drooping, a loss of posture, a slump, a turning-away of gaze (and therefore a reduction in our ability to interact with another person), a cognitive shock that renders us momentarily unable to think clearly, then an avalanche of shame-related cognitions that force us to think about our worst and most damaged self.
I guess it is possible to theorize about an upbringing in which interest was never daunted, in which excitement led always to discovery unimpeded by resistance from internal or external sources—a life historically devoid of shame affect. (We have some sort of analogue for this in the medical marvel of children born without an immune system and reared within the controlled environment of a laboratory bubble. What to us might be only an antigen for which we would produce a counterbalancing antibody, to them would be a deadly poison. Thus they must be protected from experiences we find only normal, and from which we draw strength.) Perhaps it is possible to devise a hypothetical human with no life experience of shame, and to imagine that person engaged in sexual interplay with a partner whose history formed an exact match. Arousal could lead to excitement without fear of shame; this couple could make love in full sunlight while gazing at each other unabashedly.
Actually, most of the life forms that evolved prior to the human do seem to prefer sex by day rather than by night. They are enabled by prewritten mechanisms to find each other, built to enjoy sexual interaction, and destined to forget about it as soon as it has been completed. It is the further evolution of memory that has fostered our human ability to turn the brief reaction patterns of the affect system into complex ideoaffective linkages. And it is the very nature of sexual emotionality that has made our species so shy in the realm of generative play.
Through most of our history we have used the cover of darkness to shield our sexual activity from the scrutiny of a shaming world and thus from the possibility of shame. So attuned are we to the merest alteration in the way we are regarded by the other that we dare not look into his or her eyes lest a change in that regard produce shame. So secret are our thoughts during the moments we are sexually excited that we avoid the eyes even of our beloved lest the world of associations created within us by that excitement leak to that other and provide an impediment to the mutuality of our pleasure. Wherever there is secrecy we will find the potential for shame.
Yet a secret hatched by an adult carries with it a different affective charge than a secret kept by a small child. The earlier we can trace the link between sexual arousal and shame, the more clearly can we come to understand the unique character and intensity of sexual shame. I am sure you will accept without question the significance for adult life of embarrassment that begins in adolescence. What if I can uncover evidence that sexual shame can begin before puberty? Or in the toddler? Or in the infant? Each era of development is characterized by its own rich and complex style of thought. The most brilliant insight of a seven-year-old, the genius of a conclusion drawn by a toddler, the primitive linkage assembled by the baby—each of these will influence all subsequent understanding of the issues involved. It matters a great deal how early we begin to see both shame and sexuality. All of the early experiences of sexual arousal discussed in the previous chapter are more likely to produce shame than satisfaction.
We began this chapter with the comment that consenting adults can use their sexuality as play. Yet on the way to such an enlightened maturity one finds a host of impediments. Let us examine what might prevent men and women from free and uninhibited enjoyment of sexual arousal.
MEN
No matter what else it may be, the penis is a source of great embarrassment throughout development. Partly because its proclivity for sticking out and becoming noticeable is in itself a trigger for shame, little boys begin to think that someone is going to cut it off. Some of the fantasy elaborations of this ideoaffective complex lead to what is called “castration anxiety.” Such themes become important when the oedipal phase is made more difficult by other problems in development and can lead to a complex assortment of interferences with adult sexuality. Understandably, every boy must somehow come to terms with the fact that he develops erections at the most unexpected of moments.
A significant portion of male behavior and attitudes is based on avoidance of this embarrassment. Each wave of increase in sexual drive function places the growing boy at greater risk of shame in the presence of others. By the middle of the adolescent phase, when the drive has reached its peak, boys grow increasingly likely to risk some form of interaction with girls. Throughout this early period of experimentation with dating behavior, a boy will live with the constant fear of being laughed at for the visibility of an uncontrollable erection or the far worse horror of an ejaculation that stains his pants for all to see.
In order to contemplate a sexual liaison, a man must anticipate the reaction of a girl to his penis—its size as well as his skill in controlling it. As a diversion from this realm of terrifying humiliation, boys become concerned about the entirety of their bodies. This is one of the reasons boys “work out” to develop whatever physique is currently popular and stare at themselves in the mirror in order to analyze the good and bad features that may bring pride or shame. If he has been raised in an atmosphere of love and acceptance, a boy is most likely to expect that his early sexual experiences will be colored by that affective climate. To the extent that he has been rejected, scorned, or humiliated by his parents, family, and milieu, he will anticipate sexual experience that matches his knowledge of interpersonal danger. It is this latter population of men who search intuitively for partners they can dominate.
To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever tried to catalogue the sequence of shame and its relief during the learning period of dating. Dancing slowly with his partner, she held close to him by the conventions of the dance form, a boy is forced to learn how girls react to his erections. Naturally, a boy who is terrified of shame will either avoid dancing or try to regulate the distance separating him from his partner in order to minimize the possibility of discovery. Each girl’s reaction to his tumescent penis will provoke volumes of excited and frightening fantasies, all of which must be integrated into his rapidly changing self-concept.
It is interesting to note that in this current era, “slow dancing” has been replaced by more theatrical dance forms in which the partners avoid steady pelvic contact, although the participants learn the skills of sexual intercourse much earlier than ever before. I suspect that this represents a move away from intimacy toward the use of sexual experience for its druglike properties. The shame associated with sexual arousal makes intimacy so much more difficult that many people try to keep sex and love as separate as possible. The macho style allows shame to be countered by excitement and anger; it reduces the shame of early sexual interchange at the expense of intimacy.
Directly proportional to the degree and intensity of shame experienced by a man (regardless of its source) will be his tendency to blame others for it. This is one of the reasons some men are so apt to blame women for their own arousal (“She did it to me”) and thereby to excuse behavior for which they might otherwise be ashamed or guilty. But those men who are fortunate enough to learn about sex in the context of an affectionate relationship come to find out a great deal about the inner nature of women and are far less likely to misinterpret their partners’ feelings.
Imagine what it must be like for a boy to incorporate into his concept of self a penis that grows to what seems to be an enormous size, and that demands attention as never before. Scant wonder that many men never quite solve this mystery and treat the penis as if it were another person who happens to live with them. Some even give it a name, like “my John Henry.”
The period during which a boy and his penis get to know each other is characterized by an interplay of arousal, excitement, and shame. His early efforts at masturbation will be colored both by the cultural attitudes within which he has been raised and by the counter-shaming fantasies he uses as inspiration. There may be no antidote for shame so potent or so transient as the pride to be derived from masturbation; for some there may be no shame so great as the fact that one has been forced to achieve it through masturbation. Imagine the sheer volume of psychological material associated merely with any man’s life experience of masturbation! Yet it is precisely this load of fantasy, this burden of shame explored, risked, savored, endured, and feared, that a man brings to any attempt at intercourse.
There is more. As we have discussed, the experience of shame is really just a physiological affect, unconnected to any particular source or trigger. Intense excitement predisposes us to intense shame, and intense shame is capable of dredging up from memory any and all of our worst memories of humiliations past. The more we are aroused and excited, so much more are we liable to experience shame at a density for which we are ill-prepared. In order to offer ourselves to a sexual partner, we must overcome all these terrors of possible shame and convert them to excitement and enjoyment.
Perhaps you recall Woody Allen’s aphorism, “Masturbation is sex with someone who loves me.” Love implies acceptance within a relationship; such relational stability provides a hedge against shame. Masturbation fosters such fantasies as the illusion that there can be a perfect partner who understands us perfectly, desires nothing more than our perfect satisfaction in an atmosphere of maximal arousal, and who experiences our release as a source of joy. Masturbation, therefore, is damn poor preparation for the real thing. Men approach sexual intercourse with great fear that their sexual organs are inadequate, of failing to satisfy their partner, of somehow being found foolish. One of my patients was the sole sibling in an Irish Catholic family who did not become a priest. Referring to the omnipresence of God in his household, he explained his reason for never attempting masturbation by asking, “Could you masturbate with your father watching?” How much more humiliation might he have risked in intercourse?
WOMEN
The extraordinary visibility of male arousal has no counterpart in the lives of women. Arousal is interior, internal, secret. A woman may feel her lips become engorged, appreciate the sensation of vascular change in breasts and vagina, find herself overwhelmed by sexual ideation appearing as if from nowhere—and all this will yet remain a private experience. Triggered by this slow and steady increase in stimulus gradient will be a certain degree of accompanying excitement. And, as we have seen in so many realms of human functioning, whatever impedes the elaboration of that excitement will therefore trigger shame, which will be regarded as purely sexual. To grow up female is to learn that you will be embarrassed at moments when nobody knows why you are uncomfortable.
The hair-trigger response of men to broadcast arousal provides for women another sort of problem. So clearly does arousal broadcast from one person to another that female arousal is in itself a powerful stimulus to male arousal. Although secret in that no one but she knows the extent to which any woman is aroused, masculine response is intrinsically embarrassing to a woman unprepared for it. Women must learn how to handle the effect they make on men lest that effect cause confusion, embarrassment, and anger. Many women will later develop the skills that allow the use of this knowledge in a program of allure, but only after they have taken control of a system otherwise capable of producing shame.
Whereas for men it is the arousal phase of the sexual program that produces the greatest degree of embarrassment, women are discomfited in areas about which men know little. For many girls, the vagina first calls attention to itself by leaking some sort of discharge. Stained underpants call to mind the shame of urinary dyscontrol and all the frailty of early childhood; the fear that one has contracted some deadly disease may follow in rapid succession. As Gail Paster has commented, women often think of themselves as “leaky vessels” that spill whatever liquids are entrusted to them. Menstrual blood, male ejaculatory fluids, even the secretions accompanying sexual arousal, place women at risk of exposure and shame. With the leakage of fluid also comes odor—thus a woman is subject to both self-dissmell and self-disgust merely because she is female. These affects, of course, keep company with shame.
The interplay of affects around the issue of women’s breasts is one of the most complex in Western society. No other part of the body has ever been the source of so much public attention; whole industries have sprung up to capitalize on this dynamic tension. Mammary development is, of course, part of sexual dimorphism. Breasts, which for most of a woman’s life form part of her cosmetic array, are built to supply milk for nursing infants. Like so many other components of the generative system, they have been taken over for far different purposes.
Prepubescent girls compare themselves to adult women and wonder what their own breasts will look like. Not to have breasts means that one is a child; to have breasts implies readiness to compete in the world of women. During the period of breast development, girls compare themselves to each other constantly and relentlessly. Every day offers an opportunity for pride, shame, excitement, or fear. Exposure in school locker rooms becomes for some girls a source of overwhelming shame; the move from “training bra” to real brassiere is marked by relief (the affect enjoyment–joy) and/or excitement (the inevitable responses to any decrease in shame). Almost all clothing is selected in terms of its relation to the display of breast size and shape. Breasts change with age, during pregnancy, as the result of surgical procedures. Every possible alteration in her breasts will be viewed by a woman in terms of the shame/ pride axis.
Female dress is a dialectic between hidden and shown. But it is not from women that breasts are hidden, for all of this affect is generated in terms of male fascination. There is no better way to guarantee interest than to hide something—that girls cover their breasts and giggle among themselves helps set boys on fire. However a girl may feel about her size and physical power relative to the boys who interest her, she has power over them simply because she has breasts that will remain hidden from them as long as she wishes. No matter how much a girl learns from friends and feature films about the power conferred by breasts, nothing equals the thrill of personal experience. Even now, when women appear at the beach in bathing costumes that expose all but a symbolic area of breast surface, the female breast is treated as if it were invisible. Men and women can touch the male chest in conversation or athletic play; neither will touch the female breast.
Think, then, about the woman who has by some fluke of nature been denied the development of mature breasts. She will experience some degree of shame relative to other women, some lessening of her power over men, and significant interference with her ability to admire herself. It is this shame that fuels much of the specialty of plastic surgery; women can purchase what they have not been given. And, should a woman grow to maturity in a milieu that denies her the feeling of full acceptance and love, she may attribute the shame associated with that loss of face to some perceived problem with her body. The breast is a magnet for excitement, pride, and shame.
The foregoing passages are meant only to suggest the wide range of issues that link shame with female sexuality. I omit such book-length topics as the intense pride and shame associated with pregnancy wanted, unwanted, or unattainable. Some of them are intrinsic to the physiological mechanisms involved, others are purely social. Yet men and women differ on the basis of their history of shame associated with the generative system, and this difference must be kept in our awareness if we are to understand the full range of the shame experience.
SHAME AND THE HOMOSEXUAL WORLD
One of the great contributions of Kinsey’s early work on sexual behavior was his patient and understanding approach to homosexuality. Most contemporary investigators agree that very few adults are “totally” heterosexual—we believe that the sexual interests of most people lie on some sort of continuum. My own opinion, based only on a lifetime of clinical experience rather than formal psychological studies, is that most of us are restrained from homosexual experimentation only by the affect disgust.
Somehow, early in development, well-nigh all male children are instilled with disgust at the idea of homosexual activity and with excitement at the idea of heterosexual behavior. Man or woman, it has been my experience that whoever experiments with partners of the same gender has placed a lessened significance on disgust. Much of male homosexual play, as well as heterosexual fetishism, involves excretory function normally kept secret by dissmell, disgust, and shame. Indeed, on the several occasions that men have sought my counsel for the discomfort felt after a first homosexual encounter, it is the displeasure of self-disgust that has forced them into therapy.
I think this is one of the reasons we see so many men experiment with homosexual behavior when they reach 40.* It is at this age that a man has achieved some comfort with his ability to accumulate and handle whatever degree of power he will be allowed; usually he will have been married and had access to heterosexual intercourse with some degree of ease. The general dissatisfaction that permeates his life, notwithstanding its deeper roots, is linked tentatively to an unfulfilled yearning to try this form of sexual behavior. He does so at a time when he is more free from shame than any other.
Yet, in our society, few groups are so closely identified with shame as the male homosexual. Imagine that you, as a small boy, find yourself daydreaming not about sexual liaisons with girls, but about the opportunity to cuddle with another boy. Pretend that you have no real interest in the opposite gender but find members of your own fascinating. Then try to imagine what would happen were you to communicate this interest to your peers. Their disgust and aversion would create in you profound shame in the immediate situation because of the sudden impediment to mutuality (what Kaufman calls “the interpersonal bridge”) and shame at yourself for being wrong, defective, disgusting.
Stoller and Professor Gilbert H. Herdt once studied the Sambia of Papua, New Guinea (Stoller, 1985, 104–34). In this “primitive” tribe, tribal lore states that no boy can become fully male until he has drunk a great deal of semen. All seven- to-ten-year-old boys are brought through a period of obligatory homosexual interaction with their pubertal elders. Following this period of sexual initiation, they go through a further ritual that prepares them for adult heterosexual behavior by making them semen donors for the younger boys. When a wife has been found for the post-pubertal boy he will immediately cease all homosexual activity and become fully heterosexual. Even in this society those few men who remain homosexual are thought of as unusual, defective, or weird; they bear the name “rubbish man.” Stoller forces us to focus on the difference between gender roles (what it means to be male) and erotic behavior (the form of sexual expression one enjoys).
What if I take the position that “pure” homosexuality is only a variant of normal sexuality, representing either some poorly understood program of the generative system or one that fosters the induction of disgust toward the opposite gender? We now understand the obsessive-compulsive disorder to be the result of innate circuits released from suppression by other brain centers. Might not the phenomenon of homosexual interest exclusive from infancy be an example of such a circumstance? Elsewhere (Nathanson, 1990) I have suggested a third possibility—that the degree of homosexuality found in any man (or woman) may be the result of varying patterns of cerebral lateralization (formation of actual hypothalamic structures) produced during intrauterine development by certain shifts in maternal sex hormone levels. These neuro-physiological variants would then be altered still further by family- and culture-based scripts.
My theoretical opinion still does not help the large fraction of our male population that is destined to grow up as identified homosexuals. Each and every one of them will be subjected to taunts, shaming assaults, physical attack and abuse, neglect and outright abuse by the legal system, ostracism, and rejection on a massive scale. Merely to act tenderly toward a beloved companion sets up so much disgust and dissmell in the average heterosexual onlooker that the homosexual world has always been one of secrecy and isolation. “Gay pride” is shame denied, warded off, reversed, occasionally transcended. No one should be forced to defend his right to be sexual with a consenting partner. We know far more about the homosexual world than about the disgust and dissmell in “homophobic” mainstream society. We know very, very little about the bisexual world of men who seem both emotionally healthy and comfortable with partners of either gender.
Listen to your homosexual colleagues and friends; sit in with them at barroom or dinner table. Encoded in the banter of this entire group you will hear wit that is specifically counter-shaming, precisely tuned to the shame, self-disgust, and self-dissmell experienced in everyday life. Within homosexual society, within the personal interactions that characterize individual relationships, are a host of sources and triggers for shame both specific to same-gender sex and common to all adults. The patterns of arousal and excitement choreographed by any group will lead to constellations of shame and pride unique to it. There is yet another group for whom any experience of sexuality seems connected to shame—the officially celibate clergy. A. W. Richard Sipe (1990) discusses this secret world and its reservoir of pain.
The world of female homosexuality is even more secret than that of men. We take it for granted that women (partly because our society pays them less than men) will share living quarters, but rarely do we suspect that the arrangement suggests any sexual connotation. Here, too, shame is associated with the very idea of being “different.” Some segment of the lesbian population has been so since early childhood, while another group enters this life after a series of failures in the heterosexual world or out of a decision to sample what has always been secretly desired. And the patterns of arousal and excitement choreographed within this small society lead to a limited pattern of triggers for shame unknown in heterosexual society, as well as many common to both.
SEXUAL INTERACTION
Sexual arousal exposes us to the scrutiny of another person at a moment when we are ready to let ourselves be taken by forces that overwhelm us. In the moment of sensuous excitement we must handle some combination of arousal and affect—even though we have spent a lifetime trying to control ourselves. Sex is a period of dyscontrol. This loss of control over our feelings and our functions and our ability to think must be experienced in the company of another person whose acceptance of us is critical to our self-esteem. We must believe that this person is capable of accepting everything about us that will be opened to the view of self and other by the experience of arousal. Shame hovers everywhere in the bed of lust.
Small wonder, then, that we rehearse in the private theater of masturbation or search for partners with whom a particular scene can be enacted. If the search for intimacy is difficult, then it is that much more difficult for people to be both intimate and sexual. Usually we lie to ourselves and the other about the degree of intimacy involved in our interaction in order to experiment with the thrilling and rewarding sexual arousal. We bribe each other to avoid shame.
Yet directly proportional to the amount of disavowal that allowed one to get into the game will be the self-disgust, self-dissmell, and shame that follow the act. Many people are literally unable to bear the sight, smell, or touch of the other after sexual intercourse. So diverse are the realms of thought released and amplified during intercourse, so much revealed to the self that usually is held in a hidden state, that often some sedative action is sought to calm the mind. It is for this reason that some will smoke a cigarette, for nicotine soothes while the smoke clears the sensorium of sexual smells.
But we may also be disgusted with self or other after intercourse because the sudden decrease in arousal and excitement that follows orgasm leaves us with no fascination for each other. It takes fascination to overcome the impediment of shame, and now there is no arousal-based interest. Couples have to be pretty friendly to tolerate the period of exposure that follows intercourse.
Each experience of sexual involvement with others teaches us something about the relation between sex and interpersonal life. Occasionally we feel “screwed” or violated; that represents one realm of experience. Alternatively, we can feel glorious, triumphant, full of pride that we have made a partner so happy, and proud of our own pleasure. A good sexual experience need not change us—despite what the gratified other may say, we can maintain our preexisting belief in the nature of our relatedness by becoming paranoid and attributing to the other our worst fears. This parallels the disavowal that had gotten us into the liaison in the first place, and operates to maintain the level of shame with which we entered the interaction. Indeed, the links between sex and shame are so many and varied that it is small wonder that we have until now taken for granted that there is an intrinsic connection between them.
UNDERSTANDING ADULT SEXUALITY
Do you own an automobile? It can be used equally well to take a child to the hospital, to assist a bank robbery, or as an instrument of attack. It is merely a vehicle; only as we use it does it become defined as an ambulance, a getaway car, or a murder weapon. So it is for sexual arousal. The generative system provides us with equipment that needs to operate only once in order to maintain the species. All other applications of the apparatus are to be considered either as some form of rehearsal for the procreative event or as recreational uses. The system is there for us to enjoy to the extent that we are able to integrate all of its power within the self. Adult sexuality is learned behavior that makes use of preexisting biological mechanisms in whatever fashion suits one’s mood of the moment.
Anything with so much power is likely to get out of control. Few of our biological attributes create so much havoc as sexual arousal. With its built-in affinity for excitement and enjoyment, sexual arousal must always bring us in proximity to shame. Both sex and shame involve the infinite variety of possible interactions, of links between self and other. To know sex is to know shame, just as is true that to know shame one must understand sex.
These first three sections of the book complete our survey of what I believe to be the full range of situations in which an individual is likely to experience shame affect. Everything described so far forms the memory bank to which we turn any time shame–humiliation is triggered. In the next section we will see what happens as we try to react, to respond to the combination of triggering source, physiological affect mechanism, and the host of memories laid down by our life experience of shame affect. It is time to learn about the compass of shame.
*Richard C. Friedman (1988, 1989) has written with exceptional sensitivity and good sense about a wide range of such matters involving male homosexuality.