Four Kinds of Sexual Deviancy and What They Really Mean

We don’t typically imagine that sexual deviants have very much to teach us about anything. We tend to read of their antics, sigh at their strangeness, and move on, as puzzled as we are sickened.

But this is to miss out on a disquieting reality: these deviants are manifesting in an extreme form proclivities in which we are all to some extent implicated. Behind such varied phenomena as exhibitionism, voyeurism, sexual murder and zoophilia lies a dynamic that sounds almost shocking in its apparent mundanity: a fear of intimacy. What distinguishes sexual deviants is not so much the fear of intimacy itself as its intensity, the extent to which a discomfort at human connection can come to inspire the most radical kinds of harm.

Take the exhibitionist. With their rain coat and abrupt unsolicited exposures in parks or city streets, they are at heart attempting to master a dread of rejection – by ensuring that it will occur at a time and in a manner of their own choosing. They transform the ordinary passive human anxiety at potentially being unwanted by someone they know into an active desire to cause certain revulsion in strangers – normally because they have, somewhere in their past, been made to suffer a devastating letdown by an early caregiver. Their antics constitute a particularly intense bid for control; if one is to be rejected, better to orchestrate the rejection oneself rather than risk the unpredictability involved in a two-way encounter. They chose to frighten someone they can disdain instead of running the risk of being humiliated by an intimate who, at a time and in a manner of their choosing, may fail to reciprocate their desires. They would rather make absolutely sure they will be met with horror rather than risk what feels to them like the even greater threat of foiled hope.

The voyeur demonstrates a comparable manic defence against closeness. Their need to limit sex to observation from across a calculated distance represents an extreme version of the more widespread fear of entering into a properly mutual relationship in which one can see and also be seen. Though we may not study our neighbours through a telescope, we may still recognise echoes of the voyeur’s drives in our hesitation to make eye contact in bed, in our greater ease with pornography than actual sex and in our interest in unavailable partners.

It’s in cases of sexual murder that the fear of intimacy manifests itself in its most catastrophic forms. The person who immediately has to kill the person they’ve had sex with is driven by a wish to extinguish any chance of reciprocity. They have to eliminate the very existence of the one who has witnessed them, in order to remove an untenable prospect of being judged, disapproved of and abandoned. Only death promises to alleviate the killer’s panic about negative appraisal and loss. But however horrific murder may be, it is still on a continuum with what many of us may do in more innocent ways after love making (the closest encounter of which we humans are capable) when, for example, we are beset by a sudden need to find another lover or to go to the opposite side of the bed and absorb ourselves in our screens, lest we be overwhelmed by the tenderness we’ve just been party to.

The terror of reciprocity can be played out across different species. The zoophile’s choice of non-human objects represents an attempt to avoid what feels to them like the appalling possibility of being seen, understood, or judged by a corresponding consciousness (an analogous pathological concern being at play in those who target children).

However dispiriting such cases may be, they serve to illuminate something profound about all relationships. Whenever we notice ourselves keeping our distance, flinching at declarations of love, or deliberately not answering our partner’s messages after a warm evening together, we are being visited by milder versions of a related fear of being dependent on another. 

Interpreting pathological cases can help us to recognise and gently address our barriers to connection. In some of the most shocking behaviours of which humans are capable, we can trace magnified versions of our own ongoing difficulties balancing a need for connection with a discomfort at being properly seen, known and accepted.