Chapter 6
GRANDPARENTS AND GRANDCHILDREN
The average grandparent is probably 45 to 50 years older than his oldest grandchild. And it would seem that with an age span like that there could be little interest of a sexual nature between them. Yet young children are curious, innocent, touch. And men in their fifties and beyond are more susceptible to pedophilia than younger persons, often due to pre-senility and senility and other gerio-psychoses.
Close to half a million American females over the age of 14, judging from an analysis of the Kinsey studies, have had sexual contact with their grandfather. And while the interest between a grandmother and her grandchild would appear far less possible, even these situations do occur, and many have been documented.
Grandparent-grandchild incest seldom is mentioned in history or literature, and the reason is most-likely that the idea has no appeal for the average person. The basic incest-wish, whether conscious or sub-conscious, is on the parent-child situation, while brother-sister and step-parent relations have always fascinated a great number of people.
We find grandparent-grandchild erotic activities to be almost always a result of a highly neurotic or psychotic grandparent or a mentally disturbed child. The age difference alone almost precludes any kind of natural sex attraction even from a physical standpoint.
One factor sometimes involved is that the grandparent finds a reincarnation of his own son or daughter in the grandchild. In his old age and approaching senility, the matter of responsibility and clear thinking is often eased and age can be rationalized as an excuse for erratic behavior. There may be a forbidden urge to caress a well-formed thigh of a child and the opportunity to do it. The relation may stop at that point and never be recorded as a sexual contact. Or the desire may build from that point and develop into something more overt.
Rarely do we find gerontophilia (sexual interest in a much older person) expressed by a grandchild for a grandparent. But a recent report by one of America's most highly regarded psychiatrists provides a vivid example of this rarity in the childhood history of a man in his thirties arrested for molesting children.
Case History (24):
SEXUAL PRECOCITY TOWARD A GRANDMOTHER BY A TEENAGE YOUTH
The patient in this case had indulged in voyeurism since about age 7, having viewed his playmates in actual intercourse with a promiscuous girl on more than one occasion. He had attempted coitus with her himself, but in spite of his fascination with sex, could not achieve it.
Mutual masturbation with other boys began at age ll, and coital intercourse with cows and fellatio from a calf was experienced at about 13 years of age. It might be well to mention that this patient was raised on a farm where animal contacts are not at all uncommon in curious children and adolescents.
One Saturday afternoon when he was alone in the house, he became highly excited upon finding a pair of his stepmother's underpants. Erection resulted and he masturbated, allowing the semen to fall into the crotch of the underpants.
Women's underpants held a rapt fascination for him after that. He found the dresser drawer in his grandmother's bedroom the most vulnerable and amused himself often with her bloomers and pants. The pink ones appealed to him the most.
His voyeurism became more pronounced and he devised a way to at least partially satisfy it. To paraphrase his written statement:
"I could peek through this heat vent in the wall between Grandma's bedroom and my own. I could see right in there. I could see up to her thighs and more when she undressed ... watch her under-things fall to the floor. I masturbated when I watched."
This pastime apparently grew boring for the boy, and when he was 13 years old, he devised a more devious plan to satisfy his desires. He told about it this way.
"I was alone with my grandmother on the weekends when my father and step-mother used to go out a lot. I was lying on the floor reading a book one Saturday night in the living room. She was sitting in a chair in front of me. Her legs were spread and I could see all the way to her underpants. I got an erection from looking. She couldn't see me because she was reading a book, and I kept on looking.
"I had this sudden idea. I got up on my knees and reached up quick to slap the inside of * her thighs. I claimed I'd seen a big black spider run up her dress and slapped her thigh and missed. I had figured this would be a way I could maybe get my grandmother to take off her pants right there so I could see her privates.
"She believed me, all right. She was scared. She said she'd better go in the bathroom and take her dress off to look for it. She was 65 years old and not too fat. Her breasts were big. I guess she weighed about 150. I got so excited when she went in the bathroom ... I kept thinking about her stripping down in there ... I got breathless.
"I walked right in on her and said I thought that black spider was very dangerous. I asked if I could help. She was in her slip and had the dress in her hands shaking it. When I suggested she take off the slip, she said she didn't think it was in there. Her dress was still off when she returned to the living room. We talked for a while. I was still trying to get her to strip down more. I still had an erection when I looked up her legs again and saw her naked thighs and her underpants. I was back on the floor and she was sitting down. She fell for my act again when I reached up and slapped her thigh. I got her to stand up on a chair this time and take off her slip. She was in a corset that had a brassiere connected with it. The underpants were on over the corset and I pushed my fingers under the crotch and felt everything, hunting for the spider. While I was feeling her privates, I told her I thought the spider was up there, but she said it wasn't and pushed my hand away. That was that. But I had an ejaculation right there without having to masturbate. I did it right in my pants, I think at the time when I touched her privates.
"Every Saturday night after that for a year, I'd walk into her bedroom. She left the door open when she undressed. I'd ask her about her parents. That was a good excuse because she liked to get people to listen to her talk about them. I saw plenty those times. She would be just in step-ins and try to hold something over her bare breasts. That made me so hot I had to fight from reaching over and grabbing her clothes off. When I went back to my room I could masturbate good thinking about having sex relations with her-intercourse."
PSYCHIATRIC COMMENT: The psychiatrist in this case attributes the boy's fantasies and voyeurism in regard to his grandmother to evidence of an Oedipus situation whereby the grandmother represented a mother-surrogate. His libido became more complicated by the equivalent of incestuous guilt.
The patient's pedophilia in later life became a reverse of his earlier experiences. Instead of being the "innocent" and unsuspected child, he probably projected himself into the roles of the children he accosted. He may have felt he was actually doing them a favor by affording them the kinds of adult reaction that he wished he had received as a child.
As the psychiatrist commented, in effect: "The libido of this patient was fixated at an infantile stage of sexuality. What we call 'polymorphous perverse.' The libido expressed itself in exhibitionism, voyeurism, masturbation, oralism, masochism, pedophilia, etc. Fetishism was also present. The incestuous fixation was to mother surrogates ... There was an unconscious wish to regress, back to his childhood represented in his neurosis."
Case History (25):
GRANDFATHER-GRANDMOTHER ORAL RELATIONS RESULTING IN FALSE COITOPHOBIA
Twenty-one-year old Paula, a glamorous and sexual blonde model, consulted us on the insistence of her boyfriend because of what he had incorrectly diagnosed as coitophobia, a distinct fear of normal coitus. Paula admitted to being very passionate, particularly with men who had a penis immensus. She was almost a phallic worshipper in this regard and reported a revealing experience with an exhibitionist that gives a rare insight into the nature of his behavior, as well as hers.
"I was walking home from work late one night last month after I had been posing for this photographer near my apartment building," she explained in a voice that seemed calculated to sound sexually excited, her expression denoting equal erotic excitation, "I sensed that this car was going along very slowly right beside me. That wasn't an unusual thing to happen the way I was dressed-a sort of sheer white sheath that clung to my body. I had on hardly anything else.
"Suddenly, the car speeded up and stopped by the curb ahead of me, directly under a street light.
There was a man in it all by himself, who called me over as if to ask a question. I walked over very slowly, letting my hips sway the way men enjoy watching. When I stuck my head in the window-wow! Did I have something to watch? He was holding this gorgeous tool right in his hand. Oh! It was a foot long, I'll swear it was. It was beautiful!
"I ... I told him he ought to be ashamed for showing a thing like that to a girl! I was kidding, of course. I wanted to take him right upstairs to my apartment and eat him up! But do you know what the stupid fool did? He rubbed it up and down real fast and wasted it! All over himself!"
It was easy to understand, after this graphic recitation, that Paula had a mania for fellatio. She performed it willingly, aggressively, and at almost every opportunity with her boyfriend, as well as on other males with whom she became intimately involved. The sight of an erect penis of average or greater size made her almost helpless, she claimed. "Oh, when I see a man's tool so nice and big," she exclaimed with glowing frankness, "I just have to eat him up!"
Paula also claimed that she achieved violent orgasm while performing fellatio and enjoyed the sensation of swallowing the semen. The following excerpt from her long and detailed accounts proved the key to her problem:
". . . brother's was so small it never interested me, and father was always locked in his room when he dressed or undressed. We had a palatial home in a lovely resort town and everyone had their own room with lots of privacy.
"I had always-ever since I could remember-wanted to see what the tool on a grown man looked like. My girlfriend had seen her father nude and used to regale me with stories of how utterly huge it was and it made me jealous. It wasn't passion then. I had no feeling in my 'love nest.' I knew that's where men wanted to put it, yes indeed. I'd heard all about that. I was curious about it, entranced by it, but without any feeling yet.
"My dream came true when I was 12 years old. But don't ... don't get the idea I dwelt on the subject all the time then. If someone talked about it or I saw a bulge in a man's trousers, I got interested. I didn't dwell on it for long periods of time by myself, or anything perverted. But when I was 12, and grandpa-my mother's father-was staying with us, I got my wish.
"Dad was at work and mother was off to some social convention in Atlanta or somewhere. I had been in my room studying after school. I went to the kitchen to get a drink of water. The guest-room door was wide open, and grandpa was sitting in his chair facing the hall-masturbating.
"Grandpa was in his 50's and a pretty handsome old man. I remember that he was looking at me, the funniest look in his eyes. They were glazed and excited! We had always been so close and affectionate, and he'd never looked at me like that before.
"I didn't look at his face long. I must have gasped when I saw his tool-so long and slender as he squeezed and rubbed it. I was hypnotized, helplessly hypnotized! He motioned me into the room and I closed the dc r behind me. He stood up and went over to sit on Lie bed, motioning that I should follow. I ... I don't honestly know what happened next, except that I was feeling it, stroking it, and the silky smoothness positively hypnotized me.
"I can't remember his words. I should, because they were so important, but I can't. I know he began to tell me a story. It was like the fairy tales he used to tell me when I was much younger. It was about a beautiful young princess who brought the kiss of youth-or something like that-back to this kind old man.
"It was such a beautiful story, and I knew he meant that I was to kiss it. I leaned over and...(Author's note: Paula went into vivid detail here of how she fallated her grandfather, speaking with dramatic passion of the great pleasure it brought to her and the particular lingual and labial ministrations she performed to effect ejaculation.)
"It was 'our secret' after that. Whenever he came to visit us, we repeated the scene over and over. We both liked it that way. No talking. No planned assignation. We would both know we were alone in the house, and I would walk by his door and he would have his tool out.. .
". . . wasn't ashamed. That's not why I stayed away from his funeral last year. I was afraid ... afraid I'd cry too much ... break down and cry too much. I was never in love with him ... like a romance with a boyfriend who has a penis I like. I just adored him. I loved to (fellate him). It was sex ... separate from love. I loved him as a grandfather, and I liked to (fellate him). "
". . . at Jerry's place (her boyfriend's apartment), I like to watch him handle his tool. I beg him to do it, and then I'll take over and (fellate him). I'm in love with Jerry, and that makes it all so beautiful. But I can't (have intercourse with him) because we're not married. I might get pregnant. I'm scared to death of getting pregnant, and pills and rubbers are not to be trusted, of that I'm sure.
"If Jerry loves it so much for me to go down, and he has a fit every time I do because he's wild about it, then what's wrong with saving the other until we're married?"
". . . could be a problem. I know I'll never ... never cease to be hypnotized every time I see a nice tool on a man ... and he's handling it...."
PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENT: Paula understood that there was a connection between her traumatic and "thrilling" experience with her grandfather that first time, and her adult preference. However, she assumed that it dated back much farther, that the episode at age 12 was merely her first exercise of this preference.
It was explained that while her oral eroticism was an infantile throwback, her particular mania for "surprising" a male at masturbation undoubtedly resulted from the experience with her grandfather. This was the first time she had ever seen an adult penis, an object of extreme curiosity for her, as with many children. Had she merely seen him naked in a true accidental situation, the mania would undoubtedly not have been so pronounced.
We have come across many instances where females (and homosexual males) are so strongly oralerotic that, like Paula, they can achieve fully satisfying orgasms while fellating the phallus, and with no genital contact for themselves.
Paula's parents had provided her with neither the most basic sex education, nor with the usual set of social and religious taboos. She was left to discover these things completely on her own and, as often happens, her curiosity grew almost to the same morbid degrees as the desires of the first person to introduce her to sexual practices.
This case demonstrates rather clearly that a lack of the so-called repressive taboos does not by itself create a healthy attitude toward sex. While Paula seemed unconcerned about her preferences and the degree of her desires, almost any male with whom she established a genuine love relation would look upon them as abnormal. Certainly, he would not approve of her becoming "hypnotized" by every pervert who might expose himself to her.
The false coitophobia was not so much a fear of coitus, but an excuse to allow full practice of her more pronounced oral demands. And we see in her constant use of the word "hypnotized" a transparent reference to her own disguised concern. So long as she was "hypnotized" by these sights, she could not be personally blamed for her desires and subsequent actions.
With the sympathetic understanding of her boyfriend, Paula was able to develop a normal attitude toward the role of sex in her life. At the same time, her desires became more and more oriented toward genital relations in preparation for her planned marriage.