Sex: The Good, The Bad and The Kinky

Why does one man prefer blondes and the missionary position? Why does another expose himself to strangers? Why do women like to cuddle? Why do some men rape and murder?

According to Dr. John Money, who has studied the development of human sexuality for 40 years, the child is father of the man. Dr. Money is professor of medical psychology in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He cofounded the Gender Identity Clinic and founded the Sex Offender Program at Johns Hopkins.

In two recent books, Lovemaps and Vandalized Lovemaps, he argues that we each have a hidden agenda--a love map that contains an idealized lover, love scene and program of erotic activities--that will guide us through our adult sexual life. The patterns are laid down in early childhood, probably between the ages of four and nine, and, some research suggests, as early as the age of three. Money believes that love maps are very fragile--they can be distorted by a repressive upbringing, one in which the parents never mention sex or actively punish or prohibit normal child sex-rehearsal play.

Adults with normal love maps have a balance between love and lust--each serves the other. Adults with vandalized love maps will develop a sexual dysfunction, or worse. Some develop bizarre sexual preferences, others molest or abuse children, some take sex by force, others become martyrs to abuse.

Money believes that repressive sexual attitudes--not permissive values--will increasingly breed aberrant behavior.

At the urging of Hugh Hefner, we interviewed Money for The Playboy Forum. What started as a simple Q.&A. about the McMartin controversy turned into a wide-ranging conversation. We found his outspoken views to be provocative and dead-on.

[Q] Forum: Hefner suggests that the McMartin sexual-abuse case grew out of a hysterical atmosphere created by antisexual forces.

[A] Money: In the Sixties, America experienced what the media called a sexual revolution. However, if we wanted to be accurate, we would call it a reformation. Like all reformations, it was spontaneous rather than planned. It was triggered by the discovery of penicillin, which controlled the scourge of syphilis and gonorrhea, and by the appearance of the pill in the Sixties, which gave women a new form of control over reproduction.

[A] Historically, all reformations are followed by a backlash, a counterreformation. We are currently in a sexual counterreformation.

[Q] Forum: What are the dynamics of this counterreformation?

[A] Money: Essentially, some people are taking everything that is sex-positive and labeling it sex-negative. Today's witch-hunt goes after women's liberation, gay liberation, sex education, contraception, teenage pregnancy, abortion and pornography.

[A] Let me tell you a few of the themes of the counterreformation and how the antisex people use them.

[A] First, infection. In the early Eighties, Time magazine published story after story on herpes. Of course, the virus has been around since the ancient Egyptians, but it suddenly became the Devil's scourge. It wasn't something new that created its newsworthiness. Time used herpes as a piece of propaganda, telling its readers that they should quit having sex and go back to the traditional monogamous family. Tongue-clacking moralisms were inserted into each paragraph of the articles.

[A] Second, homosexuality. The counterreformation loathes homosexuality. In the Sixties, people viewed it as something no more dangerous than lefthandedness. The counterreformation view is that God is punishing homosexuals by plighting them with AIDS.

[A] Third, sex education. Counterreformationists say that sex education is dangerous and must be done at home or in the church--another way of saying that it won't be taught at all. They are against openness. They fear questions.

[Q] Forum: It seems that the counterreformation is full of contradictions. It rants against teenage pregnancy but is against birth control and sex education.

[A] Money: The counterreformationists do rant against teenage pregnancy, the fourth of their themes, and much of what they say is bogus. They include nineteen-year-old married women in the statistics of teen pregnancies. They are dishonest. They label teen pregnancies as acts of immorality, an attempt to impose a white, middle-class morality on everyone. They should put their efforts into changing the financial conditions of young mothers.

[A] Another recurring theme is pornography. The counterreformationists propagate the phony theory that pornography is progressive and contagious: You start out drinking milk, then looking at women in underwear catalogs, then looking at snuff movies and then the only thing that will allow you to ejaculate is committing murder. The idea is absurd. When you criminalize pornography, you criminalize sex.

[Q] Forum: If you can't say something bad about sex, don't say it. Which leads us to the American obsession with sexual scandals--the Bakkers, Swaggarts and Trumps.

[A] Money: Yes, the fascination with the sexual errancy of public figures is the final result of an antisexual strategy. It is the oldest hypocrisy--you can talk about anything forbidden as long as you condemn it. A tool of the counterreformation is the manipulation of language. You can trace the history of sex-negative ideas through language. During the time of the Inquisition, some people thought that sex was the result of demonic possession; hence, the term sex fiend. Later, some theorists thought that sex resulted from a flaw in heredity, an evolutionary throwback to a more primitive state; therefore, the term sex monster. Two hundred years ago, it was suggested that masturbation caused degeneracy, which in turn caused sickness and death; thus, the term sex degenerate. Now we have the term sex addict. The attempt to pathologize sex is the culmination of the counterreformation.

[Q] Forum: When did the sexual counterreformation begin?

[A] Money: It began in the Seventies. Its agents were trying to get people thrown into jail for distributing any heterosexual pornography that displayed a man's penis. They weren't too successful. It became clear by the end of the Seventies that the big push was going to be on kiddie porn. The idea was to ?et people mobilized against kiddie porn--which, naturally, is easy to do--in order eventually to mobilize against sex itself.

[Q] Forum: In the midst of the counterreformation atmosphere, we had the McMartin child-abuse case. In order to detect abuse, the kids were subjected to abuse. They were poked, prodded, video-taped and their private parts were examined by doctors with colposcopes. This is not the first time abuse has occurred in the name of care.

[A] Money: In the 1880s, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg wrote a book about the dangers of masturbation. Kellogg's Corn Flakes were invented as antimasturbation food. For intractable cases of masturbation in boys, Kellogg recommended sewing up the foreskin with silver wire, and for girls, carbolic acid applied to the clitoris. He recommended that fathers creep up on their sleeping sons and pull back the blankets. An erect penis was prima-facie evidence of the sleeping sinner caught in the secret vice. Kellogg said nothing of nocturnal penile tumescence. He slept alone and never consummated his marriage. In fact, he was a klismaphiliac [an enema fetishist]; his orderly gave him an enema every morning after breakfast.

[A] Kellogg published a list of things to look for in a child as signs of masturbation: sleeplessness; a sudden change in disposition; a love of solitude; bashfulness; unnatural boldness; mock piety; fickleness; untrustworthiness; being easily frightened; confusion of ideas; capricious appetite; eating clay, slate pencils, plaster, chalk; acne; biting fingernails; bed wetting; unchastity of speech. A list that is nearly the same is circulated today as evidence of child abuse.

[Q] Forum: Where do the sex-negative images that many people have come from?

[A] Money: Every religion has a philosophy of sex that influences the childhood development of love maps and paraphilias, or sexual perversions. Christianity has the split between saintly love and sinful lust, a doctrine that penetrates our child-rearing practices. It is impossible for children to grow up without assimilating the concept that the genitals are a prime source of sin.

[A] But the sex-negative ideas don't come only from religion. They also come from fairy tales and medieval and Renaissance art. I've written about a concept called paleodigms, which of course borrows from paradigms. Paleo means old, and digma means example or illustration.

[A] One of the oldest themes is that of sacrifice and expiation. One concept that floats around in our awareness from an early age, for instance, is the purification from sin through sacrifice. That's the story of Abraham and Isaac, of God and the Crucifixion of Christ. Some people develop paraphilias that permit them to experience lust only if there is also atonement. In these situations, the penalties for having sex range from humiliation and hurt to blood sacrifice and death. Self-imposed atonement often appears as masochism; performed on the partner, it is sadism. For the victim of abuse as a child, that tragedy can be turned into a bizarre triumph: The victim re-enacts the abuse as the only act of love he has ever known. Some people, in turn, abuse their own children--as living evidence of the sin of their own sexuality. The execution of a sex criminal is a way of telling our children that all sex is a sin of such magnitude that it can be atoned for only in the electric chair.

[Q] Forum: One of the curiosities about the McMartin case was the similarities in the stories the children told about satanic rituals, human sacrifice, digging up coffins, drinking blood. Is this a case of paleodigms in action?

[A] Money: Well, I would think it's one person's paleodigm in action, and it was transmitted to the children during questioning.

[Q] Forum: A story in the Memphis newspaper The Commercial Appeal reported that there have been thirty-six instances nationwide in which children told of satanic rituals combined with?sexual abuse. Is there a source of contamination? A made-for-TV movie? Saturday-morning cartoons? Sunday school?

[A] Money: I don't think we have a factual basis on which to make any speculation. You've given me a good clue, though. We should look at Saturday-morning cartoons to see what paleodigms they transmit.

[Q] Forum: Tell us more about how paleodigms influence sexual behavior.

[A] Money: Some paraphilias are based on paleodigms of marauding and predation. For example, some people incorporate lust into their love map on the condition that it be stolen, abducted or imposed by force. Some people steal sex by attack, assault and seizure. They take without consent. Images of cave men stealing love, of savages raiding the neighboring tribe to carry off women fuel the rapist.

[A] Some paraphilias are based on mercantile and venal strategies, where lust is incorporated into the love map only if it is traded, bartered or purchased--not freely exchanged. Those people feel that carnal passion belongs not to the Madonna and the provider but to the whore and the hustler.

[A] Some people have to substitute objects--a fetish or a talisman--for their lover, since lust defiles saintly love. Some people associate underwear with sex. They may end up wearing ladies' lingerie in order to become aroused. Some people substitute an act that belongs in courtship or foreplay for actual copulation. Touching and rubbing, displaying and watching, talking or listening become more important and more arousing than intercourse. One of my patients was punished as a child when his mother found him showing off his erect penis to his playmates. He became an exhibitionist, or flasher. What is fascinating is how unique and idiosyncratic each love map is. You cannot learn someone else's love map or borrow someone else's fantasy. It won't work.

[Q] Forum: Counterreformationists look for single causes of paraphilias, such as pornography. You argue that most disorders are biographically determined from events in the individual's life and that sex-negating antecedents in childhood produce sex pathologies in adulthood.

[A] Money: The counterreformationists reason by analogy, not by cause and effect. They have gotten incredible mileage out of the theory of the social contagion of pornography. If pornography had the power to contaminate, everyone on the Meese commission, given the amount of pornography viewed, would be in jail for killing countless people.

[Q] Forum: Ted Bundy said that a childhood encounter with pornography turned him into a serial killer.

[A] Money: You know why he did that. He was having the last laugh on all of us, justifying himself by using James Dobson's [the minister who interviewed him] own justification as to why he was a killer. Bundy blamed society for all that he did.

[A] It has been previously reported that Bundy may have been the product of incest, of his mother with her father. That was the most hideous secret in the family. Bundy's mother denied it. I didn't talk with Bundy, but I have talked with other serial lust murderers and I know that they become puppets for the mental imagery and fantasy of the parents. If, in some way, Bundy was aware that the reason he was treated peculiarly as a child had something to do with his mother's relationship with her father, who possibly brutalized her, it's not too difficult to imagine that he concluded that sex was the most hideous and horrible thing in the world. People like him are never able to put the story together in a logical form. The very nature of a paraphilia is that it is illogical. The illogicality of it solves the immediate problem but creates worse ones.

[Q] Forum: How do you disprove the social-contagion theory?

[A] Money: Some men are one hundred percent against putting their penis in someone else's mouth; some women are one hundred percent against having someone's mouth enclose their v?lva. Watching a porn movie will not change their views; the activity is not in their love maps. You can't hang the coat on a hook, because the hook isn't there.

[Q] Forum: Do you see positive benefits of pornography?

[A] Money: Many. I have one patient who, when he is exposed to normal erotic images such as you find in Playboy, has normal sexual fantasies. In the absence of healthy erotica, he has sadistic, brutal fantasies about bondage, rape and death.

[Q] Forum: Close a newsstand, create a killer. Some people say that porn is the theory, rape is the practice. They also say that men are rapists at heart, that all sex is rape. How do you answer them?

[A] Money: There is something historically understandable about women whose dam of rage bursts over on men--men in the generic sense. In order to liberate themselves from the prison of forced motherhood, women had to relinquish all claim to any source of sexual enjoyment. Their major source of oppression was being made pregnant too often without any option. Right up to the time I was a graduate student, it was illegal to obtain any kind of contraception. Women could not control their own reproductive life; they weren't sure they wouldn't die from their first pregnancy. Before they could claim they were equal to men, they had to give up their sex life, because only whores and harridans were interested in sex.

[A] What has happened in the revival of the women's movement is that not only do 'women have to sacrifice their sex life if they want to be equal to men but, by God, men had better sacrifice theirs, too.

[Q] Forum: Are men targets of the counterreformationists?

[A] Money: The counterreformationists portray women as the victims of carnal knowledge without consent. In the old form of witchcraft, women were the accused; now men are. The uncompromising evidence of their heresy is not only rape but also pornography. Here lies the onset of a new inquisition, this one directed chiefly at the lust not of wives and daughters but of husbands and sons. If unhalted, we could see a progressive increase in the prevalence of accusations of the marauding and predatory paraphilias. As each new generation of boys matures into puberty, their manhood would, in increasing numbers, be sexually traumatized and disabled.

[Q] Forum: If all penises are outlawed, only outlaws will have penises. In short, the propaganda that all men are rapists will only breed rapists.

[A] Money: Exactly. Not only women are doing this, of course; a lot of the religious-minded are joining their pure-minded sisters.

[Q] Forum: In your books, you cite examples of severe distortion of love maps. Can you cite some examples of ordinary damage stemming from sexual repression?

[A] Money: There are very few parents who have rehearsed what they would do if they found their children playing at having sex. So they do what every parent has done before: They lose their cool and they inflict punishment. The tragedy for the children is that there is an extremely good chance that their love maps will become distorted. The girls will be able to relate to sex in terms of romance only above the belt; they will be unable to reach orgasm. Sex, for them, will be an act of breeding, not an act of pleasure. The boys will not be able to satisfy ordinary lust in an ordinary way. They become locked in sex below the belt.

[Q] Forum: How should parents react to childhood sexplay?

[A] Money: They should not be surprised, for all children have a curiosity about sex. But they should certainly remain calm and under no circumstance should they punish the children. However, they should tell their child that sexual curiosity is not necessarily socially acceptable.

[Q] Forum: And what are some of the more extraordinary forms of repression?

[A] Money: One stepmother took a sewing needle and jabbed her stepdaughter's lab?a, threatening to sew her up, when she discovered her masturbating.

[Q] Forum: What is the effect of all this repression?

[A] Money: That's a tough question. I would say that fifty percent of the nation get fifty-seven cents to the dollar on their sex lives. Maybe ten percent get the full dollar.

[Q] Forum: At the beginning of the Seventies, we had a genuine concern about child abuse in the context of violence in the family that seems to have dissipated. What happened?

[A] Money: Criticizing violence came too close to criticizing punishment, the old Christian notion of spare the rod and spoil the child. It is the right of parents to discipline their children; they must be disciplined in order to be moral. Punishment in the name of discipline can lead to horrible forms of abuse.

[Q] Forum: What do you make of the sociologists who find child abuse lurking in every other household, or the researchers who claim that childhood sexplay is a form of sex abuse?

[A] Money: Unfortunately, they have never defined abuse. I do know that many social scientists will call it abuse if a child sees her father naked in the bathroom. They call it exhibitionism and abuse of the child's eyes. But all of these researchers get money from the Government. And the only way a researcher can get Government funding is to be against sex.

[Q] Forum: What do you advise in order to increase the sexual health of American children?

[A] Money: It should be public policy to strive for better sexual health in our children. We should establish a pediatric sexology clinic. There are no doctors who specialize in pediatric sexology and who offer child care in cases of ill health. There's not even a clinic for teenagers, even given all the talk about the terrible difficulties we have with teenagers. If we were really dedicated to sexual health, if we didn't want teenagers running out and getting AIDS soon after puberty, we would have a special television channel dedicated to sexual everything--learning, entertainment--where kids could get the information they needed.

[A] Anyone who does not learn about and actively encourage the normal development of healthy sexuality in children is running a terrible risk of contributing to pathology in their development. We should be just as fussy about sexual health as we are about nutritional health.

[A] We made a decision to get rid of small pox and we did. If we made the same decision about sexual health, we could prevent the spread of the epidemic of sexual ill health. If we opened a national pediatric sexology clinic, and the President came and cut the ribbon, imagine the difference that would make.