Sexual Images of the Self

the Psychology of Erotic Sensations and Illusions

Seymour Fisher

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138981737
• eBook ISBN: 9781317784609
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This volume documents how sexual practices and fictions infiltrate and are influenced by a person's feelings about the self and the body. Using paradigms derived from self and body image theory, Fisher combines research from the past several decades dealing with sexual behavior to test major theories concerning diverse sexual phenomena. The book integrates, within a broad conceptual scheme, research findings concerning major aspects of sexual behavior such as the development of sexual competence, orgasm consistence, clitoral versus vaginal preference, and homosexuality.

1

The Impact of Early Implanted Sexual Fictions

BODY UNCERTAINTY AND GUILT

There are many ways to view your own body. Each of us constructs a “body map” quite analogous to the maps we evolve of the outside world in which we live. A good deal has been learned about body maps, which are generally referred to with terms like body image and body scheme. Extensive accounts of the scientific research dealing with body image can be found elsewhere (Fisher, 1970, 1986; Fisher & Cleveland, 1968; Shontz, 1969). We have solid information about numerous aspects of body experience. Briefly, it can be said that we have defined the principal dimensions of the body image. We possess reasonable notions about the factors shaping the development of the body image in children. We understand the major ways in which males and females differ in their body perspectives. We know in some detail what happens to the body image during such diverse conditions as stress, body incapacitation, pregnancy, and hypnosis. Also, as is seen here, we have evidence that body image variables mediate sexual behavior. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of body attitudes in human conduct. This importance is sensed and intuitively understood in every culture. Why else would such cultures expend so much energy to implant highly censored and controlled versions of the body image in children?

As one surveys the body images current in different times and places, it is impressive how often they have negative connotations. Although most people describe their body appearance in mildly favorable terms, their negative attitudes do break through in multiple other ways. For example, it is striking how often guilt is linked to one’s body. Body shame is everywhere. Several studies have shown a trend for persons, especially children, to feel guilty when they become sick. They irrationally blame themselves for any body damage they experience. Gellert (1961) reported that when she interviewed a sample of sick children and asked them how a child in a projective picture might have become ill, two-thirds perceived the illness as due to misdeeds or bad behavior. Cruickshank (1951) found the responses that adolescents with body disabilities gave to a sentence-completion test contained an unusually high number of guilt themes. Schechter (1961) was surprised at how often children in an orthopedic hospital interpreted their bodily deformities as visible badges of badness. In short, such studies have uncovered an inappropriate readiness to attach blame to one’s body.

Related material has surfaced in the voluminous literature concerned with the impact of seeing the mirror image of one’s body. Thus, it has been shown (Ickes, Wicklund, & Ferris, as cited in Kleinke, 1978) that when persons are exposed to a television picture of themselves, their self-esteem is significantly lower than when exposed to a television picture with no self-implications. But perhaps more importantly, exposure to one’s mirror image seems to increase behavior expressive of conformity and guilt. By way of illustration, note that Diener and Wallbom (1976) observed less cheating by college students who could see their mirror image than those who could not. Duval, Duval, and Neely (1979) demonstrated that subjects exposed to images of themselves on a TV screen and asked to help unfortunate disease victims were more willing to take responsibility for assisting the victims than did subjects in a control condition who were not confronted with their own images. Further, I (Fisher, 1986) reported that men highly focused on their own body, as defined by number of body references in their reports of the content of their immediate awareness, are often typified by a guilty outlook. This was not true for women. It is pertinent, too, that rendering persons more aware of certain body areas (for example, heart, back, head) may increase sensitivity to several classes of stimuli with guilt implications (Fisher, 1970, 1986). This is illustrated by an experiment in which I found that men who are asked to focus their attention on their heart, manifest increased selectivity in their memory for guilt as compared to nonguilt words.

Various other data have accumulated concerning the negative connotations of body in our culture. Elsewhere, I have reviewed (Fisher, 1970) several studies indicating that persons typically react in a depreciatory fashion when listening to recordings of their own voices (which is, after all, as aspect of their body). They are uncomfortably critical and derogatory. This uneasy feeling about one’s body emerges fairly consistently whenever persons are asked to judge or to observe their own body attributes. Studies have shown they are significantly more inaccurate in judging the size of their own body than they are with reference to nonself-objects (Shontz, 1969). They also have unusual difficulty in making accurate observations of their own body events. For example, they cannot realistically estimate their own heart rate or the amount of activation of specific muscle groups (Fisher, 1986). Indeed, people may even be unable to identify their own photographs. Lefcourt, Hogg, and Sordoni (1975) reported that 10% of the college students they studied did not recognize their own front-view photographs when they encountered them in an unexpected context! This is astounding if one considers the infinite number of times people see their own face.

Most cultures are uncomfortable with the average body in its natural state. Elaborate rules and customs prevail as to how the body must be decorated and wrapped to render it acceptable. These customs often call for radical revisions. It may be necessary to cover all visible skin with tattoos or large areas with prominent scar tissue (Vlahos, 1979). What is striking is how frequently the culture requires equivalents of ruthless attack on the body in order to put it into proper shape. It may call for cutting off a piece of the penis or the removal of the clitoris. It may call for extreme flattening of the skull or surgical enlargement of the breasts or even chronic self-starvation to limit body bulk to an ideal. The average individual gets the message that the body, as is, cannot be acceptable. Revisions are obligatory and repeatedly feature mutilations. One would have to say that uncertainty, negativity, and guilt usually infiltrate the modal body image. This impresses me as extraordinary. Is it not strange that one should regard one’s only somatic base in the world as unworthy or wrong? Most people do not recognize the peculiarity of this phenomenon. They have adapted to their chronic sensations of body disrepute and are no longer sensitive to the strangeness. However, this is a matter calling for explanation.

How did the idea of the body as a disreputable object develop in Western culture? No one really knows in the sense of being able to trace a logical chain of psychological determinants. However, certain historical conditions were probably influential. Bullough (1977), who has written one of the most detailed histories of sexuality, tells us that a negative body attitude typified the early Christians and also certain of their antecedents. He indicated that Christianity evolved in an atmosphere of asceticism and antisexuality derived from notable Greek thinkers. He stated:

Though an ascetic tradition can be traced to the beginning of Greek history, asceticism became more powerful during the Hellenistic period, after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. By that time the old beliefs in the Olympian gods were no longer tenable to the more sophisticated, and the growing power of Rome and the political failure of the Greek world disenchanted many. In their search for certainty in a troubled world, the Greeks turned to other-worldly answers and to asceticism. This group of ascetic thinkers encouraged man to forget he was flesh and to regard himself as a separate soul lost and imprisoned in a body. When this spirit-flesh dichotomy infiltrated Christianity, it broke down the psychosomatic unity characteristic of the Old Testament view of man. (p. 160)

Plato was particularly prominent in splitting the individual into a body and a nonmaterial soul. The soul was depicted as superior to the body but interfered with by the body in performing higher psychic functions. Sexuality was a body function that demeaned. Bullough remarked that “Love, to Plato, became … the mutual attainment of the self-mastery that cured the disease of physical craving. … In his mind, copulation lowered a man to the frenzied passions characteristic of beasts, and he relegated sexual desire to the lowest element of the psyche” (p. 165). Other important Greek philosophers like Democritus and Epicurus were similarly denunciatory of sexual expression. As noted, such antisexual themes were inherited by the early Christians. With few exceptions, the church leaders viewed sex as a disgusting activity. Celibacy was the ideal. Jesus was regarded as strongly opposed to sexual passion. Some Christian men were so imbued with the celibate vision they castrated themselves. The influential St. Augustine, after converting to Christianity, adopted a life of celibacy and eventually declared celibacy to be the highest good and intercourse an animal lust justified only for the limited purpose of procreation.

The passionate anti-body, antisex themes dominant in the Christian imagery (and still powerfully present today) are remarkable.¹ They call for a rejection of the body as an object worthy of being equated with the self. They classify the body as lowly and depraved and hardly worthy of representation in one’s self-awareness. Bullough, in speculating about possible personal motives for this antisex orientation, noted a large proportion of the proponents were bachelors. He implied they were persons who needed to rationalize their own negative experiences in getting along with women sexually. However, he pointed out other relevant variables, one of which relates to issues of death and immortality. The body, by way of contrast with the soul, was regarded in numerous religious and philosophical contexts as the weak, perishable part of self. Only by going beyond the body and cultivating the superiority (divinity) of the soul could one expect to dodge death and attain immortality. To invest in one’s body meant resigning oneself to a brief temporary existence. Obviously, the fear of death was strongly involved. At another level, the division into body and soul had implications for the task of segregating good and bad. Body is animal and, contrastingly, soul is spiritual. The animal side of self was equated with immoral passion. Spirit was the virtuous principle and often considered to be imprisoned within the body. The early Christians were endlessly preoccupied with anxieties about committing wrong. Presumably, they were in need of strategies to manage their guilt. Perhaps in fantasizing they were composed of dichotomized good and bad elements, they maintained a sense of resisting evil and of not permitting self to be taken over by it. Religious asceticism was actually intended to weaken the body and thereby to give the good spiritual element an advantage. The badness of the body was primarily dramatized via sexual imagery. The body was despicable because of its evil sexual capabilities.²

SEX GUILT

Guilt about body sexuality is an ongoing vector. There have been increasing attempts to study it empirically and to explore in finer detail how it influences behavior. Much of the research in this area is based on the use of a measure devised by Mosher (1966). This measure is a self-report questionnaire calling for forced-choice responses to complete a series of statements designed to tap guilt about sexual feelings and behaviors. The following are examples of sex-guilt items:

As a child, sex play

a. was a big taboo and I was deathly afraid of it.

b. was common without guilt feelings.

When I have sexual desires

a. they are quite strong.

b. I attempt to repress them.

Mosher conceptualized sex guilt as a self-blaming, self-punishing attitude with respect to violating internalized standards of proper sexual conduct. Diverse studies employing the Mosher technique have offered support for its validity. These studies need not be reviewed in detail. However, an overview follows of a number of the major findings. This is intended to illustrate the multiple ways sexual guilt can influence response systems. First, and as might be expected, it has been shown that the higher a person’s sex-guilt scores, the more inhibited his or her sexual responses. Mosher and Cross (1971) found sex guilt to be negatively correlated with the amount of sexual experience college students have accumulated. Sexual experience was evaluated with a questionnaire inquiring whether the individual had engaged in each of a series of sexual activities (e.g., kissing, oral contact with genitals of opposite sex, intercourse with opposite sex). When questioned, high sex-guilt subjects gave moral beliefs as their reason for avoiding more intimate forms of sexuality. Galbraith (1969) also reported sex guilt was positively correlated with repression of sexuality and negatively correlated with sex drive, sex interest, and promiscuity. Mosher (1973) noted that high sex-guilt individuals were likely to rate explicit sexual films as offensive and disgusting; and Mosher and O’Grady (1979b) were able to show that high sex-guilt women report relatively few genital sensations while watching sexually arousing films. Kelley (1985) detected that high sex-guilt individuals were particularly likely to be repulsed by stimuli referring to same-sex autoeroticism. The inhibition displayed by high sex-guilt persons is highlighted in studies by Janda, O’Grady, Nichelous, Harsher, Denny, and Denner (1981). Male subjects were introduced into a paradigm in which they were given permission to administer, by means of a machine, what were apparently intensely pleasurable body stimuli to an attractive female confederate of the experimenter. Sex guilt proved to be negatively correlated in several samples with the amount of “pleasuring” subjects chose to administer.

Moreault and Follingstad (1978) provided a good deal of data concerning differences between high and low sex-guilt women with respect to their accounts of their sexual fantasies. The high guilt subjects entertained less sexually explicit fantasies; used descriptive words like “penis,” “clitoris,” and “sexual intercourse” less frequently; and depicted their sexual images as low in vividness. In addition, they were attracted to fantasies in which they were not responsible for the sexual activity taking place. With reference to their fantasies, they more often endorsed such statements as “I imagine that I am being overpowered or forced to surrender” and “I enjoy imagining that I am being dominated sexually and that I am helpless.” It is noteworthy that high and low sex-guilt women have even been differentiated in terms of their heart-rate (HR) responses to stimuli dealing with heterosexual coitus. Although the stimuli produced cardiac acceleration in the high guilt subjects, they resulted in HR deceleration in the low guilt subjects (Ray, 1970). However, the issue of physiological differentiation between high and low sex-guilt persons seems to be quite complex and awaits further clarification. For example, Morokoff (1985) found suggestive evidence that although high sex-guilt women feel subjectively less aroused by sexual stimuli than do low sex-guilt women, they actually show greater vaginal physiological arousal.

The impact of sex guilt also can be detected in the cognitive realm. When subjects are asked to give associations to double-entendre sexual words (e.g., “lay,” “screw,” “rubber”), sex guilt is negatively correlated with number of sexual associations given. High guilt subjects are inclined to focus on the nonsexual meanings of the words (Galbraith, Hahn, & Lieberman, 1968). Related other forms of cognitive inhibition have been demonstrated. Schwartz (1973) observed that high sex-guilt subjects retained less information from a lecture on birth control than those low in sex guilt. Binder (1976) ascertained that high sex-guilt persons were less efficient than those low in sex guilt when processing sexual information. Pertinent to this same issue, Mosher (1979) observed sex guilt in male and female college students to be positively correlated with amount of incorrect sexual information (“sex myths”) they had accumulated.

A spectrum of other variables has been explored in relation to sex guilt. Gerrard (1977) showed that unmarried women with unplanned pregnancies (presumably due to failure to use contraceptives effectively) were high in sex guilt. Abramson, Mosher, Abramson, and Woychowski (1977) discerned sex guilt to be correlated with certain personality traits. For example, in a female sample, sex guilt was negatively correlated with autonomy; and in a male sample, it was positively correlated with an inclination to affiliate with others. One particularly interesting report (Abramson, Michalak, & Alling, 1977) found ties between offsprings’ sexual behaviors and their perceptions of how much sex guilt typified their parents. Illustratively, males who perceived their mothers as high in sex guilt reported the fewest genital sensations while viewing an explicit sex film. Males and females who perceived their fathers as high in sex guilt reported lower average frequencies of orgasms per week.³

Sex guilt is obviously involved in multiple levels of sexual response and function. It plays a role in how intensely people respond to sexual stimulation, the sexual fantasies they entertain, and their modes of processing sexual information. There are suggestions, too, that it is linked with certain personality variables. We have reasonably good documentation that the sex guilt⁴ so pervasive in our culture has complex reverberations.

SOME SPECULATIONS ABOUT BODY IMAGE PROSCRIPTIONS

Of course, we will never be in a position to reconstruct the actual motivations of those who ultimately saturated Western culture with negative images of sexuality and the body, but let us look at some of the possible body image implications of such negativity:

1. The negative sexual images could result in the genitals being perceived as base and a source of alien sensations. As such they would become a focus of anxiety.

2. The evil image of the genitals could turn children away from clear awareness of them. In fact, children could, in the best repressive tradition, not acquire an adequate vocabulary to refer to genital functions or experiences. There would be an incentive to isolate the genitals and treat them as if they were not truly part of the body.

3. Through generalization and confusion, body areas adjacent to the genitals could share in their negativity. Indeed, the whole body, being the site for genitals, could take on bad connotations.

4. The concealment, exaggeration, and deception attendant on presenting the body as a forbidden object could result in experiencing it as mysterious, threatening, and strange.

5. A “mysterious body” might, like any poorly understood phenomenon, incite the invention of explanatory m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. THE IMPACT OF EARLY IMPLANTED SEXUAL FICTIONS
• 2. THE FEMALE BODY IN SEXUAL AWARENESS
• 3. THE SEXUAL SPACE OF THE MALE: THE DYSFUNCTION APPROACH
• 4. EROTIC FASCINATION WITH THE SAME SEX
• 5. THE CONCEPT OF CONVERTIBLE PENISES, VAGINAS AND OTHER GENITAL ACCESSORIES
• 6. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ANATOMY OF REPRODUCTION
• 7. AN OVERVIEW OF STRATEGIES AND ILLUSIONS MEDIATING SEXUAL TUNING
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index