Kinky People and Psychological Theory

Gloria Brame has an interesting post on the deficiencies of current psychological theory about so-called paraphilias - kinks:

Nothing, however, in the research and science of sexuality in the past 20  years (and especially not since we wrote Different Loving in 1991) suggests that SM or fetishes are necessarily the product of trauma, much less a response to shame or guilt about sex. There MAY be a traumatic sexual event and there may be shame and guilt in a person's past--and those events likely affected their sexual development. However, no statistics exist to prove either childhood trauma or sexual guilt are more common among SMers than among the non-kink-inclined; and much data exists to support the idea that two people may experience the same exact trauma but while one fetishizes it, the other is permanently turned off as a result.

...

For some people, fetishes and SM fantasies are the products of pleasurable experience. They may be the products of positive re-enforcement in childhood; or later in life from friends, lovers, or a peer group. The "kink switch" may be thrown at nearly any age. Even in our 50s and 60s (and older still) we may "discover" a buried sexual need or may develop a penchant for something that never turned us on before.

Neither do I believe that SM desires are divorced from love, or that we are, as a group, emotionally disconnected, or that we are the way we are because our lust was thwarted. If thwarted lust was enough to make a person perverse, well, it would be a better world, perhaps, because sexual frustration is so common an event, it would guarantee a world of perverts.

There is an interesting nature v. nurture subtext here.  The assumption - even on Brame's part, I think - by neo-Freudians seems to be that absent certain environmental factors, humans will display only heterosexual genital sexual behavior.  The argument is over what throws the "kink switch."

I think that gets what happens exactly backward.  Humans start out their development with a potential range of behaviors, and from there, environmental factors winnow them down.  Think of language.  If a child is sufficiently exposed to multiple languages when very young,  that child will retain certain linguistic skills into adulthood.  If the child is only exposed to one language, then the ability to hear or speak the sounds that are not in that language will not be present in adulthood.  What's happening here?  I think that the human language response in children is a very broad range of undeveloped abilities.  As the child matures and hears others speak, those abilities either develop or they wither, often permanently.  If you grew up speaking Spanish and can roll your Rs, it's not that you were "taught" to roll your Rs, it's that hearing people do it developed the latent skill in you.  But if you didn't hear it as a child, as an adult you still have some potential to roll your Rs, you just will never be as good at it.

Similarly, I think, human sexual response starts out as a wide range of potential behaviors that gets winnowed down.  In essence, we all start out with a rich array of potential sexual interests, and then our culture impoverishes that array in order to achieve certain social ends.  But sex is an even more basic drive than language, so people retain plasticity in their bag of sexual tricks even when it doesn't get developed early in life. 

What's remarkable is not that some people are kinky, it's the huge percentage of people who have been conditioned by their environment to ignore every urge other than heterosexual genital sex.  Even in these people, though, fantasies develop unbidden by anything, which accounts for the huge consumption of gay and fetish porn by straight, vanilla people who would never, ever act on their fantasies.   

Those people who do display a wider range of behavior are just those on whom the social conditioning has not worked perfectly.  Some of those people, of course, are acting from a reduced capacity to conform their behavior to a norm and can present what (almost?) everyone agrees are problems - rape and pedophilia.  Most, though, are simply those who have retained a wider range of sexual interests, which gets expressed sooner or later depending on a number of things, like emotional maturity and the strengthening of the ability to think for oneself.

This is not to say that kinky people reject all cultural norms and are therefore inherently more independent or more dangerous (depending on your perspective).  Of course, kinky people would like to think the former and some vanilla people would like to think the latter. In all cases sexual activity is mediated and shaped by culture.  There is nothing "outside" culture.  For example, black leather is heavily prevalent in SM because certain people adopted it and that expression of SM sex was transmitted to those who were interested in it.  There is nothing inherently exciting about dyed animal hide.  But when someone does decide to indulge their fantasies, the images and practices they encounter among other people interested in such things have a certain style, and so they adopt that style, more or less. Again an urge has butted up against a social norm, and they have shaped each other.

Update:  Dr. Brame emailed, and the corrections are the result.  I knew I shouldn't have thrown that in, because I wasn't on firm ground ("I think").  Sorry about that.

Comments

[Nyneve]

You wrote:What's remarkable is not that some people are kinky, it's the huge percentage of people who have been conditioned by their environment to ignore every urge other than heterosexual genital sex.That's not remarkable; that's the behavior of an animal carrying a gene that selects for primarily heterosexual genital sex, and because it does so, it necessarily spreads through the population more than the gene for any other type of sexual behavior.

Also, though your comments about language are totally correct, if sexual behaviors worked like languages, you'd think we would see the same range of primary sexual behaviors that we hear in languages, i.e., an enormous diversity; and yet heterosexual genital sex is overwhelmingly -- probably ubiquitously -- the most "popular" primary sexual behavior around the world.

[emma goldman]

You wrote: Those people who do display a wider range of behavior are just those on whom the social conditioning has not worked perfectly.

I both agree and disagree with this, I think. (I realize we're all generalizing from our own experience nets here, which is always a little dangerous.) That is, it is possible for (a) social conditioning to have worked imperfectly on someone, while, simultaneously, (b) that person doesn't have a lot of kinks. Kinks are evidence that social conditioning didn't work, but they're not the only evidence, and the lack of that particular evidence doesn't mean the person has been "properly" conditioned.

[J-Tom]

I like your theory, but I'm suspicious of my very enthusiasm. After all, in addition to kinky people who cheerfully adopt new kinks, there are kinky people who stick steadfastly to a single kink and who simply cannot get turned on without it -- people for whom, say, Japanese bondage >is< sex. That's a failure of conditioning, certainly, but it doesn't fit with the delightfully polymorphosly perverse picture you paint of our originary sex. Their sexuality, if anything, reminds me of the sexuality of the steadfastly normal who simply can't get interested in wacky, non-teleological, non-genitally focused sex.

Not that I have a better theory to offer.

[Mithras]

Nyneve-
that's the behavior of an animal carrying a gene that selects for primarily heterosexual genital sex

You're right, of course, that the drive for heterosexual genital sex is biologically based. I skipped a step there. But I think it takes more than that to prevent people, in some cases, from even thinking about other kinds of sex.

Emma-
Kinks are evidence that social conditioning didn't work, but they're not the only evidence

You're absolutely right. I was only referring to conditioning about what is normal and desireable sex, which, by the way, I also don't see as somehow intrinsically evil. Using a humanist standard, a vanilla person who finds conventional sex exciting and fulfilling is better off than a kinky person who is dissatisfied. Rejecting conventions is only important if the conventions are making one unhappy.

J-Tom:
it doesn't fit with the delightfully polymorphosly perverse picture you paint of our originary sex.

I wasn't trying to say that if one were kinky, then one had achieved escape velocity and was off to explore the whole universe of sexual activity. Culture is omnipresesent and powerful. Fixating on one kind of activity and forming one's identity around it is valued in the culture here and now, so it's not surprising that "even" the shibari person, say, also absorbs that value.