What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [73]
The third layer is sexual preference. What parts of the body and what situations turn you on? What scenes do you masturbate about? What is on your mind at the moment of orgasm? For most men, the most erotic parts of the body are the female face, breasts, buttocks, and legs. For most women, the preferred body parts are the male chest and shoulders, arms, buttocks, and face. Caressing a member of the opposite sex, seeing him or her naked, dancing, intimate conversation, subdued lighting, and music are common arousing situations.
But these are not—by any means—universal. Many people crave nonstandard objects and situations: Common ones are feet, hair, ears, the belly button; silken and rubbery textures, panties, stockings, jeans; peeping, flashing, receiving and inflicting pain. Animals, children, urine, and even an amputee’s stumps are rarer and more bizarre. Lust-murder and arranging one’s own death are the most erotic acts for the extremely rare person. If any of these are your turn-ons, forget the bizarreness of the object for a moment, and ask yourself this important question: “Does the object of my passion get in the way of an affectionate, erotic relationship between myself and another consenting human being?” When the panties or the pain become more important than your partner, you have crossed a line.
The fourth layer, the one next to the surface, is our sex role. Do you do what most men do or what most women do? Most people who feel they are male adopt male sex roles, and most females adopt female roles. But we know of the separate existence of sex roles by the not-uncommon dissociations of identity and role. For example, some women become truck drivers—dominant, aggressive, and tough. Some men become nurses—caring, gentle, and compassionate. The term sex role makes role sound arbitrary, a mere costume that can be shed at will and easily replaced with one more suitable to the moment. In this view, sex roles are creations of fashion: The macho male and bimbo female stereotypes are just accidents of the way Americans now happen to be raised. And as accidents of socialization, they can be changed simply by altering the way we raise our children or by some other act of will. We shall see if this is really so or if this is just ideological fantasy.
The surface layer is sexual performance, how adequately you perform when you are with a suitable person in a suitable erotic setting. Normal performance consists of arousal and orgasm. Do you have problems in either of these areas? Frigidity and impotence (what pejorative words!) are common problems, as are premature ejaculation for men and absence of orgasm for women.
I have ordered your erotic life into five layers for one basic purpose—to answer the questions of what changes and how easily it changes. Lack of change, I believe, corresponds to depth; the deeper the layer, the harder it is to change. (This is a preview of the global theory I will put forward in chapter 15.) My theory of sex is that transsexuality is a problem at the identity level and simply will not change; sexual orientation, the next deepest layer, very strongly resists change; sexual preference, once acquired, is strong, but some change can be wrought; sex role can change quite a bit, but change is by no means as easy as feminist ideologues contend, nor as difficult as antifeminists would like; correcting sexual performance is painful, but because performance problems are at the surface layer, you should be very hopeful that they will change.
Layer I: Sexual Identity and Transsexuality: What Are You?
Transsexuals are biologically normal. An average transsexual man has a penis in good working order, 46XY chromosomes, hair on his face and body, lots of testosterone, and a deep voice. An average transsexual woman has a vagina, working ovaries, 46XX chromosomes, breasts, and all the rest of the female physical features. Transsexuals are physically indistinguishable from average men or women. Yet psychologically, they are as abnormal as anyone can be. By the three major criteria of