Sexual Excitement

Dynamics of Erotic Life

Robert J. Stoller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780946439218
• eBook ISBN: 9780429919046
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book aims to show that the function of day-dreams is to state a problem that has been disguised and then to solve it, the problem and the solution being the poles between which excitement flows.

Part 1
Hypotheses on Sexuality

1
Sexual Excitement

IT HAS SURPRISED ME recently to find almost no professional literature discussing why a person becomes sexually excited. There are, of course, innumerable studies that have to do with that tantalizingly vague word “sexuality”: studies on the biology of reproduction, masculinity and femininity, gender roles, exotic beliefs, mythology, sexuality in the arts, legal issues, civil rights, definitions, diagnoses, aberrations, psychodynamics, changing treatment techniques, contraception, abortion, lifestyles, transsexual operations, free-ranging and experimental animal behavior, motoro, pornography, shifts in age of menarche and loss of virginity, masturbatory rates, research methodology, bride prices, exogamy, incest in monkeys and man, transducers, seducers, couvade, genetics, endocrinology, existentialism, and religion. Statistical studies of the external genitals, foreplay, afterplay, accompanying activity, duration, size, speed, distance, metric weight, and nautical miles. Venereal disease, apertures, pregnancy, berdaches, morals, marriage customs, subincision, medical ethics, sexism, racism, feminism, communism, and priapism. Sikkim, Sweden, Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, Indonesia, and all the tribes of Africa and Araby. Buttocks, balls, breasts, blood supplies, nervous supplies, hypothalamic supplies, gross national product, pheromones, implants, plateaus, biting, squeezing, rubbing, swinging. Nude and clothed, here and there, outlets and inlets, large and small, up and down, in and out. But not sexual excitement. Strange.

There is another problem: even the term “sexual excitement” is inexact. “Sexual” has so many uses that we scarcely comprehend even the outer limits of what someone else indicates with the word; does he or she refer to “male” and “female,” or “masculinity” and “femininity,” or “erotism,” or “intercourse,” or “sensual, nonerotic pleasure,” or “life-force”? Similarly, “excitement” suggests not quite an affect but rather what may color an affect. “Excitement” unmodified by fuller description can indicate a wanted or an unwanted quality. It is a present state that carries within itself a future expectation. But what pleasure is anticipated, what danger awaited; what risks may arise and what hopes of avoiding them are built into one’s subliminal awareness? Does “sexual excitement” not refer to the period of anticipation before an act; and to the sensual build-up during an act; and to the genital sensations alone; and to nongenital sensations alone; and also to a total-body erotic involvement? To me, “excitement” implies anticipation in which one alternates with extreme rapidity between expectation of danger and just about equal expectation of avoidance of danger, and in some cases, such as in erotism, of replacing danger with pleasure. And certainly excitement is a mental state, that is, a perceived complex sensation that one senses is the product of fantasy (past experience remembered and reinvented to serve a need).

With customs changing and sex a subject of open discourse, we may turn up practical reasons for a more precise vocabulary; but until now, our language has only perpetuated a blurring of related yet different sensual, emotional states. “Lust” means thick, mindless excitement; “erotism” implies “capacity for” more than “presence of’; “desire,” “urge,” “appetite,” “longing,” “craving,” “wanting,” “coveting,” and “need” are a bit vague and can refer to states in which the body’s anatomy and physiology are not yet fully engaged; “attraction” is too low-keyed; “voluptuousness” is too round and turgid to fit most circumstances; “lasciviousness” and “prurience” too fancy-dirty; “concupiscence” and “carnality” too biblical; “libido” too vague; “sexy” too cute; “homy” is good but slangy and useful only for an anticipatory state; “hot” is real but too provocative for scientific propriety; “lechery” is too snickering; “passion” or—even more swooning—“ecstasy” too operatic or, like “fervor,” “amorousness,” and “ardor,” too literary; “tumescence” too objective and anatomic; “stimulation” connotes cause more than resultant feelings; “response” is too objective. “Arousal” is close; the new slang expression “turned on” is perhaps even closer. But I only note our awkwardness; I have not invented the indicated vocabulary.

It would help discourse if we could be clearer about this interesting activity. (Considering how appalling existence is for most humans, we in our society are lucky to be able to wring our hands over flawed sexual pleasure.) My concern with preciseness comes, not from love of pedantry, but rather from the hope that we can communicate more clearly and learn more about the nature of these different states of subjective experience. For instance, the excitement of an impotent voyeur is different from that of a fetishistic cross-dresser who gets an erection while fondling women’s clothes, or from the trembling, diffuse but intense, nongenital body excitement of a woman daydreaming a sadistic attack. These states differ physiologically, and in the fantasies that accompany them, in the daydreams that for years anticipated them, and in the earlier events in life that for each of these people made an erotic experience out of what is nonerotic for another. But when “sexual excitement” is used for all without also a full description of the subjective experience, not enough is communicated. In fact, most of the time the term unwittingly obscures our understanding of what goes on mentally.

This chapter serves to review my ideas of what mental common denominators, regardless of culture or era, energize sexual excitement—and only sexual excitement. Not gratification; the two are decidedly not the same. And I shall not take up such qualities as beauty, virginity, gracefulness, perfection of physical appearance, conformity to a society’s professed ideals of character or anatomy, or other attributes that may be laudable, noble, or saintly but that by no means necessarily induce excitement. In fact, such attributes, when sensed unambivalently as worthy, generally dampen sexual excitement unless one is excited at the idea of sullying them. The epitome of this sad situation is that for most people, just those qualities in another that produce a feeling of love work against being able to lust.

I am unable, from published reports, to simulate a theory of the origins of sexual excitement. Even in the psychoanalytic literature, where there are extended discussions about the origins and dynamics of other affects, no theory of sexual excitement is propounded. It is time to try. The following attempt is at best incomplete; in significant parts it may be wrong. But it can serve as a start, against which to place other data and hypotheses. (In order not to obscure the weaknesses in my argument, I shall not translate the ideas into psychoanalytic language.)

In setting forth this theory, I leave as background two givens: physiologic mechanisms, and the chronic, institutionalized “character structure” of a society as implied in the concept of culture. (The latter, for our present purpose, need be drawn on only when its presence is causing mental activity in an individual.) In other words, this theory attempts only to delineate mental factors at work in the individual. Because these ideas come out of my work of the last twenty or so years, they may be distorted from the start. If this research had begun as a study of sexual excitement, it might have been slanted differently; instead it is the product, across the years, of the two intertwined areas of sexuality I have studied: the development of masculinity and femininity (gender identity), and the dynamics of perversion. As time passed, the first led to the second, and both then brought me to this third: the study of sexual excitement.

My theory is as follows: In the absence of special physiologic factors (such as a sudden androgen increase in either sex), and putting aside the obvious effects that result from direct stimulation of erotic body parts, it is hostility^*—the desire, overt or hidden, to harm another person—that generates and enhances sexual excitement. The absence of hostility leads to sexual indifference and boredom. The hostility of erotism is an attempt, repeated over and over, to undo childhood traumas and frustrations that threatened the development of one’s masculinity or femininity. The same dynamics, though in different mixes and degrees, are found in almost everyone, those labeled perverse and those not so labeled.

That, baldly, is the theory; the rest of this book will elaborate on these ideas.

I came to these hypotheses as I sought—and failed to find, as many others (including Freud) also had failed—a line on the continuum of sexual behavior that could separate “normal” from “perverse.” Looking at the manifestations of sexual excitement or the enticements to it that are accepted by society at large—as revealed in such communications as the entertainment media, advertising, books, jokes and cartoons, newspapers and journals, and pornography for the masses—I felt that either the mechanisms to be described were not restricted to the perversions or that most people are perverse (as others of more cynical bent have long been saying). How you want to put it is your choice; the evidence for either statement is the same.

The following, then, are the mental factors present in perversions that I believe contribute to sexual excitement in general: hostility, mystery, risk, illusion, revenge, reversal of trauma or frustration to triumph, safety factors, and dehumanization (fetishization). And all of these are stitched together into a whole—the surge of sexual excitement—by secrets. (Two unpleasant thoughts: First, when one tabulates the factors that produce sexual excitement, exuberance—pure joyous pleasure—is for most people at the bottom of the list, rarely found outside fiction. Second, I would guess that only in the rare people who can indefinitely contain sexual excitement and love within the same relationship do hostility and secrecy play insignificant parts in producing excitement.)

Excitement—any, not just sexual—is a dialectic, a rapid oscillation between two possibilities (and their affects). One we tell ourselves has a positive, the other a negative outcome: pleasure/pain, relief/trauma, success/failure, danger/safety. Between the two lies risk. The synthesis is the creative product: daydream, pornography, painting, symphony, religious ritual, drama.¹

Let us take fetishization as the key process in the creation of erotic excitement. We might best begin by calling it dehumanization; the fetish stands for a human (not just, as is sometimes said, for a missing penis). A sexually exciting fetish, we know, may be an inanimate object, a living but not human object, a part of a Jiuman body (in rare cases even of one’s own), an attribute of a human (this is a bit less sure, since we cannot hold an attribute in hand), or even a whole human not perceived as himself or herself but rather as an abstraction, such as a representative of a group rather than a person in his or her own right (“all women are bitches”; “all men are pigs”). The word “dehumanization” does not signify that the human attributes are completely removed, but just that they are reduced, letting the fetish still remind its owner of the original human connection, now repressed. As a result, the same move (like a seesaw) that dehumanizes the human endows the fetish with a human quality.

Why do people do this to those they might love? In the first place, dehumanization is a throwback to the earliest stages of one’s development before the world becomes “humanized.” The infant, most of us assume (who is to know?), does not at first comprehend a class of objects around it as being humans; only gradually do attributes congeal into the complex abstraction of a separate, whole being who is like itself. When that awareness begins, its development is not arrested by reality but instead expands, especially in childhood fantasy, to include non-humans: animals, plants, inanimate things. Anthropomorphizing is ubiquitous and, in this form, nonpathologic in small children; that is, such animism occurs without being motivated by intrapsychic pain and the need to resolve conflict.

But this capacity for humanization is not absolute. It varies from time to time in a person’s life, and from person to person as well. It is scarcely there in the severely retarded or the autistic, is badly awry in schizoid people or psychopaths, and is as rare in saints as in sinners. But in most of us who develop the capacity to know another as human and similar to ourselves, it is vulnerable to regression. If my theory is right, only those who can perceive people as people are able to be perverse, for that perception, obviously, is needed in order to perform the act of dehumanization. A child, virtually defenseless against those who threaten or actually harm it, can invent fantasies and restore the balance, or even make the attacker suffer in the fantasy what the child has had to suffer in reality. Revenge. What purer form can it take than to inflict on one’s attacker the same trauma or frustration one has been forced to suffer? The torture of one’s object in fantasy becomes even more exquisite if one degrades him or her into nonhumanness or to the status of part-object. In that way, one torments the fantasized victim by letting him or her continue to exist but robbed of human—that is, valuable—qualities (as children believe is done to them when they are traumatized); pure obliteration would not be enough. For a child feels that those who inflict pain on it do so in part to crush one or another of its human attributes.

To fetishize, one must also deal with the excremental. The anatomic closeness of the reproductive and excretory systems, the overlapping of intense sensations between the two, and the tension between dirtiness and cleanliness created by toilet training erotize urination and defecation and give erotics an excremental cast. It is therefore all too easy to deal with a sexual object as if he/she/it were fully or in its sexual parts an eliminatory organ, or were a product to be unconsciously retained or discharged or both at once. Some people do their fetishizing by forming a cleaned-up object; the dirty details of reality are left out of their scripts: pinup girls are airbrushed to remove blemishes; one closes one’s eyes to dandruff, a snotty nose, poor taste in underwear, skin lesions, or smells.

On the other hand, some people need the excremental: to use language they consider filthy, to defecate or urinate on or be defecated or urinated on by their partners, to lick or be licked on the anus, to choose people they consider fecal (e.g., black, Jewish, poor, uneducated, prostituted).

The creation of a fetish, then, is made up of several processes (fantasies). (1) A person who has harmed one is to be punished with a similar trauma. (2) The object is stripped of its humanity.^* (3) A nonhuman object (inanimate, animal, or part-aspect of a human like a breast or penis) is endowed with the humanness stolen from the person on whom one is to be revenged. In this way the human is dehumanized and the nonhuman humanized. (4) The fetish is chosen because it has some quality that resembles the loved, needed, traumatizing object.

Fetishization, therefore, is an act of cruelty. The completed, complicated mechanism (fantasy) is attached to—“put into”—the (mental representation of the) nonhuman object, upgrading it to a humanoid toward which one need not feel hatred. It is now a fetish, while the human who is being punished is consciously no longer so important, not seen fully any more as the person he or she is. Thus, frustration and trauma are converted to triumph, and, in fantasy, the victim of childhood is revenged: no more a victim but the erotically successful victor.²

A woman patient, for whom, since childhood, fear of humiliation had colored every move she made, said that her finest moment in intercourse is not her orgasm but earlier, just before her partner comes, when she knows that now he can no longer control himself. Late in analysis, she caught for the first time her awareness that she did with her body whatever was needed to guarantee that her lover would always ejaculate prematurely.

A useful ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART 1 Hypotheses on Sexuality
• PART 2 Data: Belle
• PART 3 Theories of the Mind
• PART 4 Conclusions
• Appendix A
• Appendix B Fixing
• Abbreviations Used in the Notes
• Notes
• Index