Dirty Pictures, Heavy Breathing, Moral Outrage and the New Absexuality

If you keep an eye on sex in the news, no doubt you’ve noticed that some news is about sex itself (and/or the people who have it), while some is about people who obsess about sex (and the people who have it). The latter may make news even more effectively than the former: We never see the headline “Public Figure Has Best Orgasm of Her Life,” but fired surgeons general and anti-sodomy legislators can count on plenty of airtime. Sex-negative news sells, and plenty of public figures are poised to help make it. This has long been the case, but yesterday’s popes and Comstocks have given way to a new parade of anti-sex torch bearers. Have you ever wondered what makes these people tick? Speculating about the psychology of the anti-porn foes, it occurred to me to wonder what Jesse Helms, Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, the now-deposed Ed Meese, the local head of Bay Area Citizens Against Pornography (BACAP) (and her counterparts around the country), a host of sex-negative televangelists, and all of their followers have in common? For that matter, what do these people have in common with the rabid anti-gay crusaders of the last decade and a half, from Anita Bryant to Pat Buchanan to Oregon’s Lon Mabon?

They all obviously think about sex a lot. But so do I—maybe even more than they do. It’s my job, after all—and I freely confess that I’ve followed the path in life that most fascinates me. On both sides of this pro-sex/anti-sex fence, we are perhaps a little more obsessed with sexuality than our neighbors.

The loose coalition I’d identify as “our side” of that fence—anti-censorship activists, gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender rights groups, sex-positive academics, sex radicals, producers of erotic material, and others who identify with sex-positive politics—displays a level of tolerance that the other side does not—that’s a clear difference. Unlike the anti-gay, anti-porn, anti-sex difference demagogues—most of them steeped in fundamentalist Christianity, the rest in fundamentalist feminism—we tend to believe that all kinds of consensual sex are potentially healthy and good.

But a difference in the quality of our and their focus on sex nagged at me. It boils down to prurience—that ineffable variety of sex obsession that they keep accusing us of trying to exploit. I began to think of specific examples:

Susie Bright has said that the best jerk-off book she ever found was the compiled evidence of the Meese Commission (printed, with delicious irony, at government expense). I’ve heard the pornography report from the Nixon years is similarly spicy—but the Meese panel, in particular, was especially focused on the most hard-to-obtain stuff, skewing their report (illustrated, of course) towards the extra-kinky.

When I saw BACAP’s leader, Joanne Masokowski, speak publicly about the evils of porn, I was especially struck by one thing: She recited a list of porno titles available at local convenience stores for five full minutes, getting very worked up about all the nasty words she had to say.

Andrea Dworkin’s impassioned rhetoric and writing are salted with enough pornographic imagery to remind her audience (many of whom are innocents who haven’t had the heinous exposure to pornography she’s had) of exactly what she’s excoriating. You will recall that she’s the author who popularized a notion that the feminist movement is still trying to live down: that any penetration equals rape.

At my first visit to a national NOW Conference, in New York City, I met a woman who preaches on a soapbox in Times Square about pornography’s evils. Another anti-pornster present confided in me that she has the biggest collection of kinky tapes and mags in town. I guess she has to keep current.

Another internationally known anti-pornography lecturer is said to have a great collection of hard-to-find amputee porn, material made to appeal to people who fetishize women and men who have lost a limb. (Aside from the seventies’ notorious porn star Long Jean Silver, this stuff can’t be found over the counter. I wonder how a nice lady like her got onto all the right mailing lists?)

And just watch Helms give any speech in which he gets to talk about sodomy. The fellow sure does get worked up.

The anti-gay material put out by the Oregon Citizens’ Alliance or any other similar group, their carefully concocted “no special rights” message notwithstanding, is only a hobby-horse to carry their real obsessive interest in fisting and feces, gerbils and pedophilia.

All these cases, and many more like them, suggest something very sexual about the anti-porn, anti-gay, anti-sex mania. Whether in service to fundamentalist or feminist politics, a common thread in all of them is the explicitly sexual focus of their attention and/or the aroused affect of their speech or presentation.

Indeed, it is only this sexual focus that unites the various anti-sex forces, for in other respects the politics of fundamentalists, feminists and homophobes are decidedly dissimilar. I haven’t heard MacKinnon and Dworkin going out of their way to go to bat for gay-rights ordinances, but if one was on the ballot in their towns, I imagine they’d vote for it; and even though he is an ally in their quest to sanitize the world, I’m not sure either of them would vote for Jesse Helms. No, the feminist anti-sex forces are not the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the New Right, much as they may sometimes act as though they are. The right wing, after all, has cultivated a Ladies’ Auxiliary of its own, and beds down with feminists only when it’s strategic.

What all these people share in common has nothing to do with political affiliation, though it lends itself to being used in the name of either sort of politics. Rather, these disparate anti-porn, anti-sex activists unite in the particular form their relationship to sexuality takes. For all of them, sex (or a particular kind of sex, or sexual representation) is threatening, fear-provoking—and utterly fascinating. Crusading against other people’s sexual behaviors and images lets them wallow in a very safe form of sexual obsession. I believe that this crusade becomes intrinsic to the way they relate to sex, that their focus on awful, beyond-the-pale sexuality far overshadows the importance of actual body-to-body sex in their own lives. I believe their voyeuristic, judgmental peeping on other forms of sex is, in fact, these peoples’ sexual orientation.

If this is actually an erotic orientation, we need a word for it. Everybody else’s sexual orientation has a name: hetero, homo, bi; sadist, masochist, fetishist; “devotee” (the name for the guys who like to watch the aforementioned amputee porn); the list goes on. (Well, to be precise, every other sexual orientation probably doesn’t have a name yet, in spite of the best word-combining efforts of people like noted sexologist Dr. John Money, who’s been coining new terms for twenty years—invariably some silent or obscure sex-ualist will elude his grasp.) Up until now no one has named these anti-sex enthusiasts because their points of view have been regarded from a political, not a sexological, angle. But up close, their zeal is all too often accompanied by heavy breathing.

My partner Robert, who is a doctor (and hence, like John Money, privy to the arcane art of word-combining) suggested the term absexual. “Ab-” is a prefix meaning “away from.” Certainly that describes the anti-sexuals’ relationship to sex: They hold the sex that fascinates them at arms’ length, trying to turn away, but remaining too fascinated, and putting out then a smoke screen of judgment.

This whole idea renders the phenomenon of the moral crusader easier for me to understand. Many people dislike pornography, for many reasons, or feel uncomfortable or unaccepting about other people’s sexual choices. But not all of these people devote their lives to the crusade! In fact, this garden-variety discomfort usually dissipates when the unaccepting person gets a good, nonjudgmental sex education. Something must distinguish the people who go on the warpath from the ones who don’t. Perhaps it is this uncomfortable fascination, the fact that the crusaders can’t drop their focus.

In a past life (that is, a couple of decades ago), I identified as a lesbian and a gay activist. I’ve been following the gay rights movement for nearly twenty years now, and in that time I have seen several shifts in its philosophy. Looking at this is relevant even for those who are not gay or even particularly gay-supportive. The gay community has shown us what happens when people begin to organize into a community based on their sexual desires or status, rather than their ethnicity or their religious beliefs or any other commonly-held trait or world view. When I signed on, homosexuality was seen as a radical choice with culture-transforming potential. That didn’t fly in the polls, though, so it was replaced with a world view we might call I Was Born That Way.

In the Born That Way debates, one side says: “Gays can’t help the way they are. They/we were born that way. Persecution against them/us ought to stop, because they/we don’t choose their/our lifestyle.” (This belief seems to ignore the fact that plenty of persecution is directed against people who were born one way or another—look at Bosnia, or any race-or-ethnicity-based conflict, including the persistence of racism in America.) The most recent version of the Born That Way debate is happening in America’s research labs, as scientists, some of them gay themselves, search for a gay gene or evidence of differences in the gay brain.

The other side of the debate says: “People have a right to express any form of consensual sexuality they want to. Many people will experiment with diverse forms of sex in their lifetimes, and if gayness fits someone best, they/we should be able to live that way without discrimination.” There is some research that bolsters this side of the debate, too, not to mention the phenomenon of “the political lesbian,” the woman who decides to be with women for ideological reasons.

Frankly, I fall on the Right to Choose side of this debate. Of course, that’s easy for me to say, because I’m bisexual by nature and when I lived as a lesbian I was in a very real sense choosing to do so. Many gay people, however, say they knew they were gay—or at least different—from their very earliest awareness of sexual desire. I’m not about to gainsay them—they know their own experience better than I do. And I would not be too surprised if science discovered a gay gene—or a gene that predisposed one to an interest in S/M, or a hetero gene, or a gene that related to any of the many relations to sex and eroticism the human animal expresses. I just don’t think we understand social conditioning well enough yet to close the book on all the possible social explanations for a person to feel erotically moved by any given person or thing. More to the point, I don’t think it matters. Why is causation of sexual feeling such a big question? Especially since focusing on the origins of erotic desire allows our culture to gloss over the real differences in the way people are treated for expressing those desires—and since even the most conclusive answer in the causation debate is not likely to improve the treatment of gays and lesbians by homophobes. (Furthermore, no one is asking whether homophobes are born that way. Doesn’t anyone want to do any genetic engineering to make people be nice to each other?)

Still, the current research into sex and sexual orientation is fascinating, even if it’s all pretty inconclusive. Given this, is it so far-fetched to suggest that some people might display an ill-acknowledged twist on the old theme of “recognize sexual feelings, find a way to pursue them”? How do homophobes get that way? How do absexuals?

It’s my suspicion that absexuals (among whom I include virulent homophobes) “got that way” through varying degrees of early trauma about sex, either through physical sex abuse, as Dworkin says she endured, or mental and emotional abuse, often religiously inspired. Any psychologist might nod at what they would call the “reaction formation” in this: Sexual trauma of whatever sort makes the individual’s relation to sexuality especially charged and complex. In fact, I know I’m not the first to hazard these guesses about the background of professional prudes; in 1935, anthropologist Adolph F. Niemoeller discussed a state called “antifetishism”: “The condition in which an object, person, part of a person, piece of wearing apparel…etc., acts upon a person beholding, touching, or in some way sensing it, in such a way as to set up in that person a more or less violent sexual disinclination or revulsion.” This is clearly related to homophobia and, indeed, to what I am calling absexuality. But I think I’m suggesting a new paradigm when I repackage these psychological and anthropological ideas in sexual orientation terms.

This leads me to consider Dworkin and Helms, not as Annie Sprinkle does when she calls them the greatest performance artists in the country, but as people who, like me, have a divergent sexual orientation. Perhaps they really can’t help themselves! And this might unravel their particular, peculiar passion from the politics in which they’ve cocooned themselves to justify their interest in porn and to gather support for their way of looking at things.

Do you suppose it would affect their leadership qualities if their minions came to understand that their support had been enlisted not in a crusade but a kink?

Social learning theory can explain the genesis of an absexual: A sexually abused child grows up, looks for an explanation of what happened to them and lights upon pornography. A religiously abused child is rendered hysterical and ashamed about her or his own sexual feelings and ends up with an inordinate focus on other people’s sin. A neat little package of a theory, eh? After all, for years homosexuality in men was explained through reference to the men’s mothers and childhood experiences. Looking to a deviant childhood for an explanation of deviance is, in a way, what the social sciences are all about.

But then Annie Sprinkle came to town to work on her video Orgasm Scrapbook. She asked Robert to explain the physiology of orgasm—which nerve pathways convey the sensation to the brain, that sort of thing. While he was studying up on Western science’s view of orgasm, he came upon something very interesting.

It turns out the hypothalamus is the part of the brain that controls a person’s sexual appetite. If the hypothalamus is injured or atrophied, one result can be a condition called “anhedonia,” in which pleasure in orgasm is lost. Too few studies have been done of anhedonia, though, for us to know whether it’s even a physiological rather than a strictly psychological problem. It’s tempting, however, to speculate that anhedonia might plague a high percentage of absexuals.

Now, the hypothalamus has been in the news recently in relation to the very sexual orientation research I mentioned earlier—Dr. Simon LeVay’s studies of “the gay brain” seemed to indicate that the gay men he observed had different hypothalamuses than the heterosexual men had. I hope I don’t have to ask you to be wary about findings like these; he did his studies by dissecting cadavers, and how the hell did he know which were the gay ones? AIDS deaths? Earring placement? All the ways this research might be entirely bogus just boggle the mind.

If, however, LeVay is on to something, the implications are fascinating. Robert’s trek through Chusid’s Correlative Neuroanatomy yielded more hypothalamic gold. If a person’s hypothalamus is unhealthy, several possible symptoms might result. Their libido might be affected—desire for sex, and/or pleasure in sex, would decline. They might gain weight and might become diabetic. They might be prone to rage states. The picture painted by the reference book is of a most unhappy individual.

For decades scientists and lay people alike have treated minority sexualities as something to study and label. Less than twenty years ago, homosexuality was still categorized as a mental imbalance, which could be diagnosed by referring to the DSM—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual used by psychiatrists and many other therapists. The labeling of sexual orientations, interests and fetishes is part of the history of the attempt to diagnose these “abnormal” behaviors as mental or physical aberrations, and many of the erotic behaviors my friends and I enjoy on the weekends still have entries in the DSM, the Bible of mental illness.

Well, if researchers insist upon continuing to scrutinize these divergent forms of sexuality, how about taking a look at absexuality? Put that in the DSM! Measure Dworkin’s heart rate when she talks about porn. Measure Jesse’s dick with a plethysmograph when he rants about homosexual sadomasochists. Slap a blood pressure cuff on the BACAP lady when she rattles off her list of porno titles. Give them all Rorschach tests! Why do these poor souls show this particular sexual deviation? Can they be helped?

Perhaps it surprises you that I would be arguing to put this newly labeled form of sexuality under the microscope. Didn’t I say myself that it doesn’t matter how someone “got that way,” that all sorts of sexual behaviors ought to be able to coexist? If Lon Mabon wants to break out into a strangely satisfying cold sweat when imagining fags with gerbils up their butts, who am I to object?

(This gerbiling business is, by the way, as far as anyone in the know can figure out, a figment of the very fertile imaginations of the anti-gay absexuals. Don’t believe everything you read.)

I am recommending the phenomenon of absexuality for study not because it is a newly labeled kink, but because, unlike many of the other kinks researchers have wasted precious lab time on, it is often engaged in nonconsensually. Think about the gay guys the men in the military are so concerned about: What does Joe Hetero do if a pass is made at him in the shower? Why, say “No, thank you,” of course. (You guys do realize that’s how to deal with unwanted sexual advances, don’t you?) But do Dworkin and MacKinnon or Meese and Helms give the likes of me the opportunity to say no to their “advances” as they try to curtail my access to sexually explicit materials? No, they do not. The crusading absexuals are fundamentally nonconsensual, for their goal is to impose their standards of sexuality on the rest of society. Talk about recruiting—have you ever seen an anti-porn slide show, viewed an anti-gay rights video? Explicit sexual images are taken out of context to manipulate viewers into the level of titillated shock the absexuals themselves feel, with never a mention that the viewer might not find them shocking at all. Prevailing cultural absexuality is on their agenda, with no room for “live and let live.”

That’s why I’d like to see the gay brain researchers change—or at least expand—their focus of study. Contrary to the anti-gay zealots’ lies, gay people really don’t want to teach your kids anything other than tolerance. The same cannot be said for the absexuals, and I think we ought to start looking at this as the threat to diversity that it is. Are anhedonic, ahypothalamic absexuals trying to manipulate our political system to impose their own sexual mores on the rest of us? You bet. Can they be helped (much less stopped)? Maybe somebody like Dr. LeVay can give us a clue.