Part 2: He Who Pun Would Pick a Pocket and T’is a Sin to Steal a Pin
I recall one of the cases my mother oversaw, when she sat on a state board for educators, involving a junior college professor who was caught breaking into a house to steal furs. He had responded to an ad but arrived late at the house and missed the seller. He could not wait, however. He needed his fur fix.
The board ruled that he could keep his job and his credentials for teaching. I don’t recall but expect, since it was back in the benighted twentieth century, therapy was part of his sentence.
My mom agreed with the rest of the board in this decision. She told me the reasoning was that, since he was teaching at the junior college level, dealing with older students, the board did not believe his fetish posed a threat.
At the time that struck me as a peculiar way for the board members to think about this crime. My understanding back then was still informed mostly by psychological forensic lore. Typically, the belief ran that there is a natural progression; an escalation to more violent behavior naturally follows once a certain path has been embarked upon.
For example, if a child shows an obsession with fire, enjoys hurting animals or other children, it was more likely that person would engage in escalating antisocial behavior at later stages in life. This is still the stuff of folk wisdom and TV crime scene investigation plots.
From the same received wisdom I had absorbed from various popularized sources, I explained to my mother that if this man’s desire to get hold of furs drove him to commit the crimes of breaking and entering, and theft, he was more likely to escalate into more serious violations of normative behavior.
I may have used this example: A compulsive peeping Tom first masturbates, then escalates to a rapist, then to a serial rapist, and may slip from there to serial killer. To this day even experts still hold these kinds of connections to be reasonable assumptions about patterns of human behavior.
These misunderstandings held to be self-evident and inevitable are scientifically neither. Also, it was not lost on me at that time that the board’s reasoning about the age of students was somehow a relevant consideration. Their thinking was not too far from the idea that drag queens reading stories to young children – we’re talking My Pet Goat here, not The Joy of Sex – should be considered inappropriate.
I have known more than my share of closeted crossdressing men and likely have had more friendships and acquaintances with LBGTI persons than average. Still, at various times in my life, I engaged in utterly false reasoning about what patterns of behavior non-heterosexual persons could be expected to engage in.
My faulty thinking was based on the assumption that once a person broke one taboo, all bets were off. Even though I believed Bernard Shaw’s observation that the presence or absence of one vice or virtue in a person does not indicate the absence or presence of any other vice or virtue, I held contradictory ideas. I can say now that this cognitive dissonance derives from the neuroscience of us/them thinking.
Let us acknowledge there are more constraints on our behavior than we like to accept in our imaginative moments. Time and energy limit us. We may not accept that when we are young but later in life, we become all too aware of it.
The flaws in our reasoning are usually based on faulty knowledge or on what we do not yet know. It is at the limits of our understanding that our conclusions often go astray. Take the example of our hypothetical young pyromaniac. I knew at least one kid who went through that. The way the adults handled it caused a different outcome.
Not to oversimplify but often community response can help determine how and why anyone engages in chronic antisocial behavior. Sometimes it is as simple as accepting and accommodating differences.
In certain cases, it seems easier for us to conclude that acting out, say like a child’s misbehaving, is a “cry for help.” We all know cases of humans who prefer negative attention to being ignored.
Before science had identified that damage to areas of the brain from injury or the onset of dementia could cause a person, previously socially appropriate in all ways, to begin urinating in public and doing other socially inappropriate things, it was just assumed that those persons suddenly decided to behave badly.
There are, however, cases similar to a fur fetish, in which we learn to associate pleasure with something previously repulsive.
From my own experience, I recall when I first started dating a smoker. Because the act of kissing was pleasurable, I learned to like the taste of cigarette smoke on her mouth. The smell of stale cigarette smoke reminded me of her.
I dated another woman who told me she enjoyed it when I had had a couple of beers and then kissed her. She would ask me to drink a couple of beers before we had sex.
The areas of the brain involved in these responses include the insular cortex, which is responsible for gustatory and moral disgust, and the dopaminergic centers for pleasure. It involves in its entirety a more complex network of interconnections among many parts of the brain – the hippocampus for memory and the entire limbic system for emotional responses.
What fascinated me at the time in both these relationships was how our responses could redirect under the inducement of sex. The disgust did not necessarily go away, it just rewired to a positive association.
This ought not to be surprising at all, if we understand the neuroscientific details of ejaculation and orgasm. Next up: It’s a miracle humans can successfully procreate at all or it’s best not to think about it and just do it.
I Dwell In Possibility 