PEEPERS: VARIETIES OF OFFENDERS
The commonest variety of peepers are the sociosexually underdeveloped: nearly one third of the peepers fit this description. They have much less heterosexual experience than is customary for their age and socioeconomic status, they are shy with females, and have strong feelings of inferiority. Intelligence does not seem a significant variable; these men range from dull to superior. As 6 have said, marriage does not remove a man from this category—it. \s no cure for peeping.
Among the sociosexually underdeveloped peeping often becomes a repetitive and important part of sexual life, frequently substituting for masturbation fantasy. The linkage between masturbation and peeping is mutually reinforcing, and for some men peeping-plus-masturbation becomes a truly compulsive activity carried on over lengthy periods of time.
A classic example is a man who was in his midtwenties when we interviewed him. He had begun petting at fourteen and had petted with a modest number of females, but had gone beyond above-the-waist stimulation with only two girls. When he was seventeen he had coitus three times with one girl and none thereafter. Timidity and an overwhelming fear of being rejected kept him from seeking more heterosexual activity which he strongly desired. His fear of rejection began, insofar as he knows, with a traumatic event shortly after he reached puberty and was experiencing the usual quick and intense sexual arousal at that period of life. Circumstances forced him to share a bed with his married sister and he became extremely aroused and desirous of coitus. Unable to express his wish he simply showed her his erect penis. She rejected him violently and harangued him at length on how vile he was. Ever since then he had felt extremely awkward and hesitant about approaching females sexually, and every rebuff was excruciating.
He began peeping regularly, first at his sister through a keyhole, and later at other women through windows, usually masturbating while doing so and reaching orgasm. The peeping became a compulsion which he was unable to resist despite repeated arrests. Heterosexual petting—in which he engaged to a mild degree—did not satisfy his sexual or emotional needs, and his sensitivity about being rejected was so great that he ceased trying for coitus after four rebuffs. He found the idea of coitus with a prostitute unappealing and, moreover, he was strongly afraid of catching a venereal disease.
Of the five peepers who exhibited fetishistic behavior (in every case female lingerie was the fetish), three belonged to the sociosexually underdeveloped variety.
Another variety, constituting perhaps one peeper in ten, is the drunk. In essence, these are men who would not, and did not, peep while sober, but when their control was weakened by alcohol they either deliberately set out to peep or else took advantage of an unexpected opportunity to do so. Of the six men whom we classed as of the drunken variety, three were chronic vagrants and one was a professional criminal. This leads us to suspect that the peeping may have had economic as well as sexual reasons.
About one fifth of the peepers may be regarded as of the situational variety—men who availed themselves, while sober or reasonably sober, of the opportunity to peep. This variety runs a wide gamut. At one end of the range is a virgin college freshman who had never seen a nude woman and who stopped to peep into a room where a woman was undressing. At the other end of the range is a married man with a grammar school education, in his thirties, who had spent nearly half of his life in juvenile homes, jails, and prisons, who evidently combined pleasure (peeping) with business (burglary) when the opportunity presented itself.
Perhaps one eighth of the peepers owed their trouble with the law to their mental deficiency. These men could not control their impulses adequately nor could they peep discreetly enough to avoid being caught. Many of these mental defectives tend to blend with the situational and drunken varieties of peepers, but the root of their trouble was their low intelligence rather than circumstances or alcohol.
After subtracting these four varieties, we are still left with about one quarter of the peepers unclassified. These men were neither drunken nor mentally deficient, their sociosexual behavior was generally within normal limits, and their peeping was not an opportunistic offense. Upon closer examination it was found that ten of these 14 men had been convicted of rape and three of exhibition. In the case of five rapists the peeping antedated the rape: these are the men who generate the popular notion that peepers become, in time, rapists. While it is true that an occasional peeper of one of our four varieties may rape, the use of force is generally uncommon—it happened in only three cases (all of the sociosexually underdeveloped variety) out of the 41.
We cannot determine from our data what behaviorisms differentiate the harmless peeper from the peeper who will subsequently rape, but we do have the impression that peepers who enter homes or other buildings in order to peep, and peepers who deliberately attract the female’s attention (tapping on windows, leaving notes, etc.) are more likely to become rapists than are the others.
From all this it is evident that the statistics on the heterosexual behavior of the peepers are the results of two major conflicting influences. On one hand are the men who had little heterosexual activity, the sociosexually underdeveloped plus some of the mental defectives and drunks. On the other hand there is an essentially equal number of persons with an average or above-average amount of heterosexual activity. This has unfortunate statistical consequences on occasion: confusing bimodal distributions, or meaningless averages.
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