What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [80]
Leopold was eight when his half sister taught him to masturbate while they were playing “doctor.” As he came, she accidentally touched his penis with her slipper. Within a year, he began masturbating regularly. His masturbatory fantasies revolved around girls’ feet and shoes. He got in trouble at school for caressing his teacher’s shoes. He eventually married, but was unable to have intercourse unless he was caressing his wife’s feet or fantasizing about shoes. Leopold took a job as a shoe salesman in an expensive boutique, and spent his days in a constant state of arousal as he assisted female customers with their footwear.
Sammy was ten when he had his first wet dream. In this never-to-be-forgotten event, his playmate Susan had taken off her bathing-suit bottom and let him rub his penis between her buttocks. It felt great and he came. He woke up gooey, confused, and shocked. Up until that dream he had not the slightest intimation that his penis was for anything except peeing. When he began to masturbate three years later, he found that his fantasies focused on girl’s bottoms, particularly as climax neared. As a thirty-five-year-old, he ejaculates only during intercourse from behind. Everything else is foreplay.
These two stories are typical of the histories men give when asked how they come by their sexual preferences. The stories fit the prepared conditioning theory we used to explain why phobias are selective and so resistant to change. Like phobias, the objects of sexual preference are selective. Panties, feet, hair, breasts, velvet, spanking, and about a dozen other objects are the common ones. Phrases like “whatever turns you on” and “polymorphous perversity” miss the mark. Almost all objects of male sexual preference are somehow related to female body parts and to intercourse. Colors, sounds, flowers, and food are never fetishes. Occasionally, as with phobias, a truly bizarre proclivity sneaks in: dead bodies or feces, for example. But these are usually the fetishes of psychotic people. Also like phobias, the sexual preferences, once acquired, endure.
The prepared conditioning view holds that there is a “short list” of evolutionarily significant stimuli that are potential sexual objects for men. Once there happens to be a pairing of one of these conditional stimuli (feet for Leopold, buttocks for Sammy) with a sexual unconditional stimulus (masturbation for Leopold, wet dream for Sammy), conditioning begins. Late-childhood sex play and wet dreams provide ample opportunity for pairing of the prepared objects with sexual excitement. Once this happens, the objects themselves become imbued with sexual excitement.
Masturbation is the answer to why your sexual preferences continue for a lifetime once they start. After these objects have become arousing, you start to masturbate about them. Masturbation in men is always accompanied by fantasy. You are again in the presence of the conditional stimulus, and you have an orgasm. This is yet another conditioning trial—and it happens a dozen times a week in the lives of most adolescent males. That’s a lot of practice. Usually, intercourse for men is either accompanied by variations on the core fantasy, or it actually enacts the fantasy. That’s a lot more practice. In my view,