You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book is divided into Part I, Dynamics of Erotic Behavior, and Part II, Observing the Erotic Imagination. Stoller states that the book is part of an ongoing project of his study on gender identity which leads him to a study of perversions. Included in his discussion are erotic advertisements and personal accounts of patients. From the evidence he concludes that humiliation during the first three years of life is the originator. Perversions involve dehumanization of the self and the other in order to be safe from merging with another who, like an evil spirit, may take possession. He claims to avoid discussion of male/female differences because the social climate is not conducive. It is his opinion, however, that pornography exists for women, but because it is different, it is not recognized as such. “Perhaps the ultimate putdown for women is that legislators, judges and juries—and women, including militantly alert women—do not even know that women's pornography is pornographic” (p. 40).
He concludes that men are driven to orgasm, and women are different, too different in fact for the sexes to understand each other. What results then is increasing hostility in men and masochism in women. He acknowledges that his gross generalizations are colored by his personality and untested by objective studies.
He defends past work when he says he has been misunderstood when quoted as saying that sexual excitement is based on hostility toward the object. He is also aware of “positive affective responses.” He views perversion as a failure to achieve intimacy and informs the reader that his bias is intimacy.
Quoting from an unpublished, anonymously written monograph about the preferences of a melotatists, persons with an erotic inclination toward those lacking a limb, he concludes that anything can be given an aesthetic treatment.
Regarding his position on homosexuality, he concludes that there is not homosexuality but there are homosexualities, and he considers a person healthy if