What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [79]
This important phenomenon, inhibitory wrapping, is not confined to human practices. There are two kinds of rats: mouse-killers and nonkillers. When natural mouse-killers—about half of all rats—see a mouse for the first time, they jump on it and kill it. The other half—the nonkillers—either pay no attention to the mouse or even run away. But an experimenter can induce a reluctant rat to kill, by starving the rat and then parading a mouse in front of him. When this happens, a nonkiller will, out of desperation, kill. Once a nonkiller has killed for the first time, once he loses his mouse-killing virginity, he becomes a habitual killer. Thereafter, whenever he sees a mouse, hungry or not, he will jump on it and kill it.14
Now remember when you were a child and you first found out about sexual intercourse or, later, about oral sex. “What a disgusting thing to do,” you probably thought. “My mother and father don’t do that. I know I never will.” But as the hormones of adolescence began to seep through your body, or as peer pressure built, or out of bravado or curiosity or rebellion, you found yourself prodded into such acts. You discovered, in doing them, all the good things about them. You soon sought them out and even began to crave them. Most human sexual preferences are like this: a strong inhibitory wrapping around a delicious core. So too with what we eat, with substance abuse, and—I sadly suspect—with violence.
The oyster-eating and mouse-killing stories warn us that there once might have lurked inside us the potential to become erotically attached to any of a large variety of things. That we are breast men, or willing spankees, or women turned on by cheek-to-cheek dancing and sympathetic listening is, while not wholly an accident, a product of what we happened to sample when we were young. I suspect that if we had sampled peeping or rubber clothes, for example, we might have come to crave these instead.
There are two morals to the oyster tale. The first comes from knowing that the potential for arousal by almost anything in the whole gamut of erotic objects lies in each of us: This moral is sexual tolerance. The second moral is caution: The early sexual decisions we make—or are cajoled, seduced, pressured, or forced into making—are matters of real moment for us; more moment, for example, than whom we marry or where we go to college. For once the inhibitory wrapping is torn open, we want the sweet core again and again. What we start doing sexually as teenagers will, by and large, be what we want for the rest of our lives. Yet we make these decisions almost accidentally. As a young person, you should be armed to answer the question “Why not?” with “Do I really want to live my whole life this way?”
Sexual orientation—heterosexual or homosexual—is a close neighbor of sexual identity in its depth and inflexibility, and it is deeper than sexual preference. Once orientation is dictated, the sexual preferences are elaborated around it: breasts or bottoms, peeping, lace panties, calves or feet, rubber textures, the missionary position or sixty-nine, sadism, blond hair, bisexuality, spanking, or high-heeled shoes. These preferences, like mouse-killing, are not, once acquired, easily shelved. Unlike exclusive heterosexuality or homosexuality, they surely do not arise in the womb (the fetus may “know” men from women, but he doesn’t know from spiked heels). Rather, our sexual preferences have their beginnings in late childhood as the first hormones of puberty awaken the dormant brain structures that were laid down in the womb.
At this time, play begins to lose its innocence and