Sexual Behavior in the 1970s Part VI: Deviant Sexuality

One of the things the Playboy survey sought to learn was whether or not sexual liberation has made deviant sexual behavior more widespread and more frequent than it was when Dr. Alfred Kinsey took his historic census of American sexual behavior a generation ago. Although deviant is often loosely taken to mean abnormal or perverted, its scientific meaning is merely "nonconforming or differing from the norms of the society in question." Much mildly deviant behavior, dealt with earlier in this series--e.g., masturbation, premarital coitus and oral-genital practices--is, in fact, psychologically and biologically normal.

Here, however, we are concerned with four forms of sexual behavior that are more markedly deviant, being overtly in conflict with custom, law and social institutions, and at the same time psychologically or biologically abnormal, or even manifestly pathological. One of them, homosexuality, straddles the border line: Though it always has been socially deviant, some homosexual behavior is psychologically and biologically normal, some of it is grossly pathological and some of it is in between. The three other forms that are to be considered here--sadomasochism, incest and bestiality--are all primarily pathological. Rarer forms of pathological deviance--pedophilia, urolagnia, coprophagia, exhibitionism--are beyond the scope of our inquiry.

Homosexuality

Sexual liberation has considerably moderated public antipathy toward homosexuality. The gay world is discussed and portrayed openly--and often sympathetically--in fiction, nonfiction and drama; many gays have "come out" and today live openly and without shame as homosexuals; gay liberationists fight publicly for equal rights. In late 1973, in fact, the American Psychiatric Association voted to drop its classification of homosexuality as a "mental disorder" and to reclassify it in some cases as "a sexual orientation disturbance," and in other cases not even that. The Playboy survey found these indications of liberalism toward homosexuality:

• Nearly half of the men and women in our total sample feel that homosexuality should be legal.

• Nearly half of the sample agree with the statement "There is some homosexuality in all of us," and a quarter agree with the statement "Being homosexual is just as natural as being heterosexual."

• Less than one tenth of the women in Kinsey's sample expressed definite tolerance of homosexuality in others; in our sample, half do. (In this and all other direct comparisons with Kinsey, whose data were based on whites only, we use data based on whites in our survey.)

In view of the above, one would expect the incidence of homosexual experience to be much greater today than it was in Kinsey's time. Astonishingly, our survey shows no increase; indeed, it seems to show a sharp decrease, at least in male homosexuality, but this is due to sampling errors in both surveys. Many experts--including several of Kinsey's own co-authors and colleagues--have criticized Kinsey's data as seriously exaggerating the picture: He had assiduously sought out and interviewed male homosexuals, instead of relying on random-sample methods, and thus overloaded his sample with them. Fortunately, he also published some key data on clubs, college classes and other groups whose entire memberships took part in the survey, which constitute more nearly random samples than his over-all sample. On the other hand, the Playboy survey measured chiefly the homosexuality in essentially straight society; it missed much of the homosexuality of the overt, committed gay community. We have used Kinsey's more representative sample as a guideline and have made allowance for shortcomings in both surveys, to arrive at these comparisons:

• A generation ago, about a quarter of all American males had at least some homosexual experience at some point in their lives after the onset of adolescence. Today, between 20 and 25 percent do so; i.e., we find no significant change.

• Today, estimating lifetime experience from our data, about one in five single women and one in ten married women sooner or later have some homosexual experience. Although Kinsey's figures were compiled on a different basis, they indicate that our findings represent essentially no change.

Relatively few of the people in either sample were involved in serious, long-term adult homosexual activities; for most, the experience was early, transient and experimental: Our best estimates indicate that, beyond the age of 15, only one in ten of today's men ever has a significant homosexual experience. This is far lower than Kinsey's published figure, but it comes relatively close to an educated revision of his data.

• Beyond the age of 19, only about ten to 12 percent of today's single women and three percent of married women ever have homosexual experiences. Kinsey's figures, although they were compiled on a different basis, suggest that there has been no change.

There is still other evidence, in our survey, that most contemporary homosexual experience is early and transient: Three out of five men and seven out of ten women in our sample who have ever had homosexual experiences had them during two years or less of their lives, and half of all men and well over half of all women with any such experiences stopped having them by the age of 15.

Only very small minorities of men and women in our survey have any homosexual experiences in adult life in any given year. (Again, of course, we speak of homosexual activity within the ostensibly straight community.) Only one percent of our married men and six percent of our single men, and less than one percent of our married women and slightly more than three percent of our single women had any homosexual experience in the past year. Sexual liberation may well have increased the frequency of contacts and broadened the range of techniques used by gays, but in our sample half of the men who had any homosexual contact in the past year did so three or fewer times in that year; among the women, one third of those who are homosexually active had three or fewer contacts in the past year and only a third had six or more. Kinsey was surprised at the low rates in his own time; his figures were higher than ours because of the over-weighting of his sample with committed homosexuals, but they were far lower than his coital frequencies for heterosexuals except for single females.

The adults in our sample who are now engaged in homosexual behavior do not seem to be notably free in their use of variant techniques. Among men, only two out of three who had homosexual relations in the past year experienced fellatio as inserters, and only half as insertees. Only about half of those who had homosexual experiences engaged in anal intercourse either actively or passively, or both, which is many fewer than the literature and mythology of homosexuality would lead one to expect to find. Manual mutual masturbation remains the most common technique for men. (There are no comparable Kinsey data.)

Only about half of the women in our sample who had homosexual relations in the past year engaged in cunnilingus either as active or as passive participants. The use of dildos was rather limited (roughly one out of six in the active sample was an insertee or an inserter in the past year). Among those with relatively little experience, general body contact is the most widely used technique today, as it was in Kinsey's time.

In sum, while homosexuality has become far more visible in the past generation, its incidence in the general population and the role it plays in the lives of the vast majority of men and women appear not to have changed.

Sadomasochism

Ads like these in scores of underground newspapers, and sadomasochism in novels, movies, hard-core and soft-core porno and even mass-circulation magazines, give the impression that S/M has become fairly common. The Playboy survey finds a distinct increase in it since Kinsey's time, (continued on page 183)Sexual Behavior(continued from page 55) but some of the increase consists of teasing, relatively mild, and mutual activities rather than genuine S/M. In any case, the incidences today are extremely few, as this table shows:

Ever Obtained Sexual Pleasure from Receiving Pain

Males 4.8%

Females 2.1%

Ever Obtained Sexual Pleasure

From Inflicting Pain

Males 2.5%

Females 4.6%

Within these small percentages, however, a generational increase is apparent: In every instance, figures for the younger half of the sample are roughly twice as high as those for the older half.

S/M, whether homosexual or heterosexual, is not largely confined to adolescent or youthful experimentation and abandoned early in life, as we found homosexual experience in general to be; in our sample, three quarters of those with S/M experience began it at 18 or later, and most of them are still active. But not very: More than half of the active males had no more than three sadistic or masochistic experiences in the past year, and nearly half of the active females had no more than three sadistic or five masochistic experiences.

Spouses seldom practice S/M with each other. In fact, it is primarily an activity of the unmarried: The proportions of those with sadistic or masochistic experience were four or more times greater among singles than among the married. It may be that the pathology that drives individuals into S/M behavior also prevents them from marrying. It may also be that some people with tendencies toward mild S/M suppress those tendencies when they marry.

Real-life S/M activity, unlike the clichés of S/M fiction, rarely is bizarre or extreme; most of it involves biting, hitting, slapping, and the like, rather than heavy B and D (bondage and discipline), whipping or traumatic injury. Also contrary to fictional cliché, S/M activity does not yield superorgasms; indeed, about half of the S/M practitioners in our sample sometimes or usually end the activity without orgasm.

We conclude that only part of the increase in S/M--that part limited to playful roughhouse--is directly related to sexual liberation. The rest of the increase may result from the greater opportunity afforded by the freer milieu to turn fantasies of pathologically deviant behavior into reality--but the reality has nothing in common with the central meaning and values of sexual liberation.

Incest

Long the most severely condemned of sexual activities, incest has become a subject of ribald humor (Candy, Blue Movie) and even of sympathetic romance (as in the French film Murmur of the Heart) in the era of sexual liberation. Where there are such changes in attitude, changes in behavior often accompany them. In seeking to measure behavioral change, however, we will have to rely on our own survey data, since Kinsey published no data on the subject.

When we define incest so that it includes sexual acts with relatives outside the nuclear family, and petting as well as coitus, we find that a startling 14 percent of the males and 9.2 percent of the females in our total national sample have had incestuous experience. When we divide the sample into an older half and a younger half, we find evidence that the over-all incidence has increased by 25 percent to 50 percent in the past generation.

But these data are less remarkable than they seem. For one thing, two thirds of the incestuous experience of our males and nearly two fifths of that of our females involves cousin contacts (only about one half of the states forbid first-cousin marriage and only about one third classify first-cousin sexual contact as a crime). For another, half of the men and four fifths of the women who had incestuous experience went only as far as petting. And, for a third thing, more than half of these people had such experiences only in childhood or adolescence, and the great majority had a half dozen or fewer such encounters.

Incest within the nuclear family is almost nonexistent in our sample, except for brother-sister relations. We found no mother-son relations. and only a .5 percent incidence of father-daughter relations, but an incidence of brother-sister relations that neared four percent.

When we define incest more narrowly as involving coitus, the incidence is very much less. We found no parent-child coitus at all and very little of most other kinds:

Thus, sibling coitus is the one category of heterosexual incestuous coitus that is psychologically and socially serious, and significant in incidence. Even this, however, is extremely rare and usually is abandoned after one or two episodes. Our figures are too small to warrant an age breakdown: we canot say whether or not this genre of behavior has increased in the past generation.

Bestiality

Sexual contact between a human being and an animal--bestiality--has been unacceptable in most societies, and it has long been severely condemned in our own. Biologically and psychologically, it is pathological if it consists of more than youthful experimentation. To judge from the use of the theme in recent satire and humor, and at least one mass-market film (Everything You Always ...), the public attitude has moderated from horror and indignation to mere scorn and amusement. We find no evidence, however, that this attitudinal change has resulted in any increase in the incidence of human-animal sexual contacts. The data indicate a sharp decline since Kinsey's time, and analysis indicates that the decline is real. The figures:

Why the drop? The Playboy sample has a much smaller proportion of farmreared males than Kinsey's had--quite properly so, considering the changes in social make-up of the nation--and since it was largely the farm-reared youths who had had bestial contacts in Kinsey's time, there has been a real decline in over-all male incidence. The decline in female incidence, however, has little to do with farm upbringing and is probably due to the large preponderance of single females in Kinsey's sample and the more normal proportion in our own. But even so, we think some part of the decline is real and has to do with the greater ease with which single women today have coitus and the consequent reduced pressure to resort to other expedients.

In other respects, our data are much the same as Kinsey's. Now, as in Kinsey's time, most male contacts with animals occur before the age of 15; now, even more so than in Kinsey's time, female contacts with animals are largely ended by 21. Now, as then, men typically have only a handful of such experiences, women even fewer. Kinsey's men mostly engaged in vaginal coitus (usually with farmyard animals); only a third of ours have done so, the others using various forms of masturbation and fellatio (more than a third inducing animals to lick or mouth their genitals, a rare choice in Kinsey's sample). Kinsey's women relied on household pets, as do ours; the principal activity Kinsey found was general body contact, while today it is cunnilingus by the animal. (Coitus was, and is, all but nonexistent.) The increased incidence of the use of oral techniques with animals, reported by both sexes, is probably a result of the greater acceptability of oral sex practices between human beings.

We conclude that bestiality has decreased in general, that today it consists almost entirely of isolated and infrequent experiments by immature people (this being socially deviant but not pathological) and that pathological bestiality--repeated sexual contacts with animals by adults--is exceedingly rare and has not increased since Kinsey's time.

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This is the final article in a series reporting the results of a comprehensive Playboy Foundation--funded survey of sex in America. Morton Hunt's full report will be published as a book, "Sexual Behavior in the 1970s," by Playboy Press.