The Brain in Love: 12 Lessons to Enhance Your Love Life (19 page)

Can You Say Mooo …

Zoophilia, or bestiality, is usually condemned as animal abuse and outlawed as a crime against nature. Scientific surveys, however, have shown that it is more frequent than most people would think. One to two percent, and perhaps as many as eight to ten percent, of sexually active adults have had significant sexual experience with an animal at some point in their lives. In the past, bestiality was particularly hated for the fear that it would produce monsters. Just over half of U.S. states explicitly outlaw sex with animals. In some countries laws existed against single males living with female animals. For example, an old Peruvian law prohibited single males from having a female llama. The Bible clearly prohibits bestiality. Leviticus 18:23 says, “And you shall not lie with any beast and defile yourself with it, neither shall any woman give herself to a beast to lie with it: it is a perversion.” And 20:15–16 continues, “If a man lies with a beast, he shall be put to death; and you shall kill the beast. If a woman approaches any beast and lies with it, you shall kill the woman and the beast; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them.”

A commonly reported starting age for bestiality is at puberty, which is consistent for both males and females. Those who discover
an interest at an older age often trace it back to memories or feelings that developed during this earlier period. As with human attraction, zoophiles may be attracted to only particular species, appearances, personalities, or individuals, and both these and other aspects of their feelings vary over time.

A colleague of mine from North Dakota once treated a man who had an obsession with heifers (young cows). It started when he was nine years old. While milking a cow, the scent and feel aroused him. Later that day he masturbated to the experience. Thirty years later he had had sex with more than five hundred heifers, but no human females. He had the cows perform oral sex on him by placing peanut butter or honey on his penis.

In October 2005, a Bangladeshi man was sentenced to three months in jail after pleading guilty to charges of bestiality in the United Arab Emerites. The camel involved in the case was put down in accordance with Islamic law. A court official said the man, who worked as a driver, had been spotted going into his employer’s barn on a regular basis. His employer became suspicious as his duties did not involve him dealing with animals. The employer followed his driver into the barn one day and saw him starting to have sex with a female camel. The owner lost his temper and started beating him. He then took him to the police station to press charges. The driver confessed to police that he had fallen in love with the camel and had sex with the animal.

Anatomy of a Fetish and the Arousal Template

According to sex addictionologist Mark Laaser, PhD, “the arousal template” underlies many sexual fetishes and paraphilias. The theory of the arousal template says that it is important to understand where you were and how old you were when you experienced your first sexually arousing experience. This often lays the neural tracts for later excitement, even if the experience happened as early as age two or three. The first experience gets locked into the brain, and when you get older, you seek to repeat the experience because
it was the way you had the initial arousal, like the first time you fell in love, used cocaine, or had to cope with pain. Here are several examples,

Adam, a forty-five-year-old stockbroker, grew up with an incredibly demeaning, shaming mother who gave him no love and acceptance. Four little girls lived next door to him when he was growing up. The little girls often came over to his house to play. They usually wore white socks and black patent leather shoes. When Adam got married, his fetish was that he wanted his wife to wear lacey dresses, patent leather shoes, and look like a little girl. It took him back to the arousal template of playing with the neighbors. His wife was initially okay with the sexual play, then not, as he wanted it every time to get an orgasm.

Gary also had a harsh and critical mother, plus an alcoholic dad. He grew up in Texas playing rodeo with a neighboring girl. They tied each other up as part of their play. It gave him a sense of control and pleasure, control he did not have over his erratically behaving mother or father. When he became sexually active as an adult, he wanted to tie women up, which eventually turned into an S&M fetish.

Lucy was an adult woman whose fetish was being spanked, slapped, and tied up. When she was five years old her father sexually molested her, including digital penetration. When she told her mother about the abuse, she was slapped because she didn’t want to hear about it. The arousal template got mixed up with messages of pleasure and pain.

When Fred was a little boy, he was molested by an uncle. He felt ashamed and furious. As an adult he got married and loved his wife deeply, but also went to adult bookstores that had video booths. He would invite strange men into the booth and offer to do oral sex on them. When they dropped their pants, he would go into a rage and beat them up. His behavior was attempting to right a past wrong.

For children raised in the 1950s, there were some mothers who were overconcerned with their children’s bowel regularity and
gave them frequent enemas. If it was arousing to them, they would later insert objects into their rectum. I once treated a patient whose mother subjected him to frequent enemas. He was also a coffee addict. Twice a day he would brew coffee, put it in an enema bag, insert it into his rectum, and then masturbate.

At age thirteen, a boy was coming out of the shower naked and looked out the window toward next door. In the window he saw a woman washing the dinner dishes. She saw him and smiled at him. Subsequently, he would shower at the same time each night hoping to get a smile from the woman next door. As an adult he became a male exotic dancer and would also pose nude for art classes.

Chuck was a church pastor who got caught looking at porn, exclusively of Asian women. He had served in Vietnam in 1965 and 1966 as a medical corpsman. It was common for him to deal with death and disfigurement. For R&R he went to the massage parlors in Tokyo where he wanted only local women. He was emotionally locked into these women from dealing with the trauma and stress of wartime. Part of the arousal template occurs when you go through a stress, such as something that happened at an earlier point in life. Subsequent stress can trigger how the sexual arousal helped you escape the earlier turmoil.

The arousal template can happen later in life. For example, when a young college couple was driving home from a concert and the woman was masturbating her boyfriend with her feet; he ejaculated in front of a woman for the first time. Subsequently he became obsessed with feet. He collected woman’s running shoes and took pictures of female marathons, but only of the women’s shoes. He had a collection of two hundred pairs of female running shoes and wanted his wife to wear them as a part of sex. They came into treatment because she discovered him looking at Internet foot pornography sites.

Further Dynamics

One of the doctors in my clinic, Leonti Thompson, has extensive forensic experience. He was the former chief of psychiatry for the
Department of Corrections in the State of California. In his role with prisoners he examined and treated many sex offenders. Often his work involved trying to explain seemingly bizarre and/or offensive behavior in a way that could help to provide a basis for more objective dispositions of the inmates. He found that explaining these unusual behaviors from a developmental point of view was helpful. In this explanation he explained that libidinal/sexual drives—not yet given a definitive sexual categorization in the immature brain—could be attached to a variety of activities based on co-occurring emotionally laden experiences. These involved the tying together in the brain patterns that were out of the ordinary. An example comes from Victorian schools in which (probably sadistic) teachers would emphasize caning problem boys on their buttocks. As adults a number of these men would go to receive their “discipline” from the ladies in the leather boots and whips. He explained that the sexual receptive areas in the brain overlap the areas receiving stimuli from the rectal areas and with punishment an association was set up between those two areas. There was confusion then between pleasure and relief from pain. As the individual matured, the previously undifferentiated libidinal valences became more clearly defined as erotic. Pain and sex became conjoined in the mind and relief from pain and pleasure also became conjoined and confused. In this way one could understand how masochistic experiences might be related to sex.

Dr. Thompson has seen a number of patients at our clinics who have sexual problems involving legal considerations, and explanations to the families are helpful. He uses brain-SPECT imaging findings to explain relevant brain dynamics as the obsessive aspects represented by the anterior cingulate gyrus hyperactivity, for example. He recently had a patient who had a diaper fetish in a small town. Both he and his wife held visible positions and the public revelation was painful. The couple was severely traumatized. He had anterior cingulate behavior that was getting him into potentially serious consequences with the court. He was also very depressed. An important part of helping to bring a more therapeutic slant into
the process was trying to have the couple see his behavior in a more logical way.

The Brain and Paraphilias

Three different areas of the brain are involved in paraphilias: pre-frontal cortex (PFC), anterior cingulate gyrus (ACG) and basal ganglia (BG), and limbic or emotional structures. Each of these areas contributes in a different way and they may, in fact, act together in a circuit or system that reinforces the reoccurrence of the sexual behavior. Hormonal issues are important as well. Paraphilias are what I term an impulsive-compulsive disorder. They have features of both a lack of impulse control, that involves the PFC, and compulsion, that involves the ACG and BG.

The PFC, as we have seen, is critical to executive function. Damage to this area causes disinhibition and a lowering of impulse control. Therefore, people are more likely to behave in ways that are not acceptable and feel no qualms about their behavior. An article in the Archives of Neurology from University of Virginia researchers described a case of a man with a right pre-frontal cortex tumor who developed pedophilia and was unable to inhibit his sexual urges despite knowing his behavior was wrong. The behavior resolved following tumor removal.

In a study from McLean Hospital in Boston, researchers evaluated 120 men with paraphilias, including 60 sex offenders. As a group, they were more likely to report a higher incidence of physical abuse (often associated with brain injuries), fewer years of completed education, a higher prevalence of learning and behavioral problems, more psychiatric/substance-abuse hospitalizations, increased work-related problems, as well as more lifetime contact with the criminal justice system. All of these issues are associated with low PFC function.

Overactivity in the ACG and BG are associated with compulsive behaviors and cause people to get stuck on negative thoughts and behaviors. In addition, a part of the BG called the nucleus
accumbens is associated with pleasure sensations. When it is triggered by something perceived as pleasurable, it reinforces or encourages the behavior to happen again and again.

The limbic or emotional structures in the brain, including the hippocampus in the temporal lobe, add the spice or emotional charge to the paraphilia. The brain’s memory centers work through association. One memory can trigger off a series of emotions, such as how hearing a song can trigger a happy memory of your lover, or the same song may trigger the sorrow of a failed relationship or deceased spouse. Likewise, certain paraphilias can trigger pleasure. There is a reported case of a sixty-five-year-old man who became obsessed with the desire for a peg leg. His fascination with peg legs began when he was young after seeing people with false legs. He thought they were fascinating (pleasure) and the prosthetics devices became more and more important over the years. It got to the point where he was aroused by them. He related the peg leg with positive feelings, generated from the brain’s limbic system, so that whenever he would see or think about peg legs he would experience very positive feelings. He was unhappy at the time of his evaluation and believed that if he had a peg leg, he would be happy.

As we saw in Lesson Four, men and women have a number of important anatomical differences in the brain; one important area is called the hippocampus, part of the limbic system, on the inside aspects of the temporal lobes. Most paraphiliacs are men. In men, the hippocampus is known to be involved in the control of erection. There is evidence from animal studies that a larger hippocampus is related to polygamous behaviors. The hippocampus is involved in both mating strategies of these animals and their “geographic range.” Paraphilacs are often diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder, have a larger number of sexual partners, and show greater geographic range than most men. Sociobiologists even distinguish their polygamous mating strategies than those of other people. Essentially, they are in a class of their own and the size of the hippocampus may have something to do with it.

Paraphilias have been reported with multiple sclerosis (MS). Multiple sclerosis is a disorder of the central nervous system where neurons lose their coverings and plaques become deposited into nerve-cell fields causing short circuits. MS affects multiple areas of the brain, including the prefrontal cortex. A wide variety of symptoms are associated with this disease, and usually it affects mood or cognition. There is a case report in the medical literature of a man recently diagnosed with MS who began displaying paraphilic behavior. He had no previous history of sexual abuse or dysfunction and was in a long-term relationship. As the MS worsened, he began to masturbate incessantly and sexually accosted strangers on the street. His behavior became so out of control that it eventually led to his incarceration. In his case, the changes in his brain precipitated the sexual behaviors. Paraphilic symptoms have also been associated with other brain diseases such as epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, dementia, and tumors.