Doctor of Sexology
(A Profile of Dr John Money)

Written by Constance Holden
Source: Psychology Today ; May 88
A Risqilly BBS reprint (203-644-4236)

It is likely that no person has probed so deeply into the mysteries of sex and sexual identity as John Money, who for 37 years at Johns Hopkins University has done pioneering research in a field where, for all society's alleged liberation, titters are still aroused at the notion of "sexology."

Indeed, there still seems something mildly shocking about the way the man smoothly natters on about micropenises and strangulation paraphilias in his urbane New Zealand accent.

Money, 67, has a calm, academic manner, but one would never mistake him for a conformist as he sits in an office adorned with Third World artifacts, including larger-than-life-size wooden hunting sculptures from Mali.

An emeritus professor for the past two years, Money still carries on several research projects on sex-related birth defects, especially abuse dwarfism, a growth hormone disorder resulting from child neglect and abuse. He also counsels families of children with gender disorders and continues to churn out books the latest being "Gay, Straight, and in Between",more than you ever wanted to know about homosexuality, which was published in April. Another recent book "Venuses Penuses", a collection of his writings ("My publisher said no book has ever had the word 'penis' or 'vagina' in its title," he says so he developed a hokey Latin-sounding title.)

Money, who immigrated to the United States in 1947, launched his career at Harvard University with a dissertation on hermaphroditism and soon afterwards came to John Hopkins to work with Lawson Wilkins, who had founded the world's first pediatric endocrine clinic. There Money became the first pediatric psycoendocrinologist.

He is still one of very few. "It's not been a field with a high degree of growth potential in it," he says with a sardonicism that is never far from the surface. You want to know why it's so hard to get money for sex research?" He brings out a book with pictures of young monkeys having sexual intercourse and of young children similarly engaged. "You have just become a criminal by looking at those pictures of children." In this kind of moral atmosphere it is difficult to get a levelheaded look at sex. "It's sort of like physics before the atomic age." The sexual revolution of the '60's, he says, was really more of a "reformation". But now we are already in the counterreformation."

In a field as small as his, Money has chalked up many firsts. He cofounded the Gender Identity Clinic at Hopkins and designed the first curriculum in sexual medicine for medical students. In 1965, he collaborated with the surgeon on the first sex-change operation at the university. He introduced the hypothesis (now widely accepted) that androgen is the libido hormone for both sexes. He was a pioneer in hormonal treatment to improve self- control of sex offenders and was the first to explore what he calls "behavioral cytogenetics" .. the psychological concomitants of sex chromosome disorders. A greater coiner of terms, Money is responsible for "gender identity", now a staple term in the language, and others such as "lovemap" (what you need to get turned on).

Since sex is intrinsically interesting, one would think that a lot of what Money has to say would be common knowledge. That men and women have different sexual turn-ons, for example, because men's brains, more so than woman's, are wired for visual stimulation. That pornography is not responsible for sexual degeneracy since people's lovemaps are pretty much set by the age of 8. That homosexuality is not a mater of choice.

Money has had an uphill struggle against popular sexual taboos and misconceptions but also against simplistic notions held by experts in related fields. First there are the enviornmental determinists, who have held much of psychology in their grip since Freud, and now there are the behavioralists. Psychologists and other social scientists ..... even sex therapists ... have "a very difficult time dealing with anything that is labeled biology," Money says. "They don't know how to incorporate it into their system of thinking." In the 1950's, he says, when he was publishing papers on the behavioral influence of prenatal sex hormones, "many people in various branches of the social sciences were just enraged at the idea that hormones in the bloodstream before you were born could have a sex differentiating influence on you." People are starting to come around, but it is slow going.

Money has also done battle with the physiological deterinists, with whom he has dealt on cases involving babies with ambiguous sex organs. These specialists "are totally convinced that the testicles dictate everything ... and don't want to hear anything about psychological determinants."

Such reductionists, for example, want to treat cases of babies born with micropenis (fully formed testicles but vitually no penis) with male hormones and rear them as male. But, says Money, each case should be decided individually. While it is possible to manufacture a functional penis for these people, they can be successfully reared as heterosexual women with the aid of surgery and hormone treatment.

Gender, Money emphasizes, is a "multivariate and sequential process." There are chromosomal sex, gonadal sex, prenatal hormonal sex, internal genital sex, external genital sex, pubertal hormonal sex, assigned sex and rearing and gender identity/role. With all these variables, it's a wonder so many people manage to develop unequivocal sex organs, much less routine heterosexuality.

The reasons for going off on the wrong track are far more complex than portrayed in the nature vs. nurture debate. Indeed, Money says the correct concept is more like "nature .. critical period hormonization, when the fetus becomes masculinized or not masculinized. Masculization of a female fetus (when it is flooded with an excess of androgen), for example, will result in a hormonal syndrome that may be manifested both physically and behaviorally ... in an enlarged clitoris or even a fully formed penis, and in tomboyishness and lesbianism.

Another critical period is late infancy and earl childhood, when environmental determinants, including sex rehearsal play and parental sexual problems, can have a profound and lasting effect on sexual identity. "One must never forget there's a biology of learning and memory too," says Money, "and it's just as permanent as if you've put it in with the genes and chromosomes." He compares gender identity with native language: The basic structure enabling language learning is laid down before birth; the specifics are installed afterwards, through the senses.

This is why homosexuality is so difficult to explain. The evidence suggests that it can result from prenatal hormonal events or from early childhood conditioning in a vulnerable individual. One thing that has been established is that sex- hormone levels are no different in gays than in straights. If hormones are responsible for homosexuality they are prenatal hormones.

The situation is very tricky, as Money illustrates with a film about a sheep experiment at the veterinary school at Edinburgh University. The sheep were exposed in utero to implants of androgen at the precise time when their sex organs had already been formed but "their brains were still open to being influenced by androgen." The result ? "One hundred percent perfect lesbian ewes," who urinated like rams and engaged in mating behavior just like rams. "These sheep are incredibly important theoretically because even though they behave like rams, they have only female hormones coming out of their ovaries. So the female hormone turns on the brain, but the pattern laid down in the brain is how to behave like a male."

Of course, it's simpler with four-legged species than with primates, Money says. "You can't do that with monkeys or humans because their lovemap isn't finished by the time they are born." Thus, a homosexual direction could could be established in early childhood, but not later. Gays talk of "sexual preference," says Money, but there is no choice.

Money is acquainted with several cases involving "sissy boys" in which early childhood experiences are likely to tip the balance toward homosexuality in vulnerable children. In one case a psychiatrist asked for consultation about his son, who was becoming a sissy. When the man showed up with his wife, it became clear at once that "the relationship was one of extreme antagonism." The father liked to go out at night to hear loud rock music, which his wife couldn't stand. So he brought the 5- year-old boy along for companionship. "the question came up to what I thought the prognosis would be for this little boy, who really did want to be a girl. I said I am never totally pessimistic about a child as young as this. And the father looked at me and said, really shaken, `Why am I feeling so angry with you for telling me that?' " He then acknowledged it was "probably something he didn't want to hear."

This was a tremendous insight for Money. "This suddenly gave me an understanding of why fathers of these sissy boys have not lived up to their stereotype," which is being disgusted with their sons for not being more macho. In truth, says Money, it is almost always the mothers who get alarmed enough about their sissy son's to seek help. In this case, "the father was getting an understudy, so to speak, so that this little boy would be a companion, a replacement for his wife, a little bride." The boy had figured out that "daddies come home at night because mommies are there, so if you play the wife, then Daddy won't leave."

In a similar case, the parents of a sissy boy fought all the time. he underlying cause was the father's reluctance to have sex. On Money's instructions, they ceased overt hostilities. "Within a week all the sissy behavior disappeared."

Money likes to talk about tribes in East Melanesia and New Guinea as illustrative of the amazing and still little-understood plasticity of the sexual response. It seems that in one village in East Melanesia all boys go through a period of exclusively homosexual activity as part of their passage into manhood, from the age of 9 to 19. After that, they get married and become heterosexual. One tribe in New Guinea has a similar set-up. "They have their own folk medical story, which is that a child needs it's mother's milk to thrive when it's born, and then, to become a man and a head-hunting warrior he has to have a man's milk." So part of the ritual of going through puberty is to solicit semen from other young men. Says Money: "It's tremendously important that any theory of how people become heterosexual or homosexual or bisexual be able to account for this phenomenon of cultural bisexuality."

Money often compares modern attitudes unfavorably with those of primitive cultures. He attributes most pathological sexual behavior to society's "antisexual" attitudes. One of the most damaging of these, in his opinion, is the belief that "childhood erotic rehearsal" is bad. When monkeys' juvenile sex play is prevented, they do not grow into normal heterosexuals. The same is true of other primates.

This attitude, according to Money, plays a large part in the formation of parahilias, the psyciatric and biomedical word for sexual perversions. These generally occur when young children, whose brains are vulnerable for reasons yet unknown, undergo experiences that make their wiring jump the normal tracks, and inappropriate stimuli, such as physical pain, get permanently associated with erotic responses. Men, because of the way their brains are made, tend to have visual paraphilias ... such as transvestophilia in which they need to wear women's clothing to perform sexually. Women are more likely to have "touchy-feely, masochistic." paraphilias.

Money is one of very few researchers who have done the kind of detective work necessary to track down the origin of a paraphilia. One thing all paraphiliacs have in common is the inability to form a romantic love bond. "I think the basic theorem of all the paraphilias is that probably from the time of childhood sexual rehearsal play, lust gets separated from love. Anything below the belt is lust and punishable, and love, affection and poetry go above the belt with kissing."

Money believes we have barely progressed from the days when aberrant sexual behavior was ascribed to demonic possession. "Everything in sex and sexual medicine is influenced by the fact that we have sexology .... the science of sex ... which is not very well developed, and we also have sexosophy [another Money neologism]. Every society had it's own sexosophy as part of it's religion millennia before it got down to having any science of sex." And unlike most other branches of science, where religious explanations have given way to scientific facts, our "sexosophy" continues to dictate many of our attitudes.

"We don't believe in demon-possession theories, we've given up the mid 18th-century idea that you degenerate yourself by losing your vital fluids. So now we're absolutely certain we know what causes all this weird sexual behavior: pornography." Anyone who thinks otherwise need only look at the work of the pornography commission headed by Attorney General Edwin Meese, which "totally disregarded" scientific testimony from several witnesses, including Money. Money says pornography, contrary to persisting beliefs, is not "contagious" and isn't going to make you do anything you didn't want to do anyway. "the only kind of pornography you can like is that which corresponds to your own lovemap. An example I give in lectures is that I could shut you up in a room for five hours of coprophilia movies and there's no chance you'd eat shit sandwiches for breakfast in the morning."

Money has earned the ire of some feminists by insisting that Women Against Pornography "was one of the biggist catastrophes that happened to the women's movement... It let the cat out of the bag that these women really hated men. They put ammunition into the hands of the archconservatives, who were able to say with total justification that women are not really equal to men, they're very weak and sensitive and need to be protected from men's pornography." (Over the past two years, however, new women's groups have emerged that support pornography, particularly pornography for women, Money says.)

Again and again Money reverts to religion, with it's concepts of sacrifice, guilt, and atonement, as being twisted in with pathological sexual attitudes and behavior. "It's quite uncanny how many rapists and lust murderers come from homes that were rigidly religious and antisexual." He cites one case of child abuse in which the mother was atoning for her sin by sacrificing her child: Her sin was that she had been conceived by incest between her father and her sister. Or take lust murderers. Money suspects that a common theme in their backrounds is having had sex forced on them as little boys by older women. Murdering the sex object is the expiation for the childhood sin.

Money thinks probably all superrighteous moral crusaders are kinky. In a 1985 book, "The Destroying Angel", Money recounts the history of antisex crusader John Harvey Kellogg, the originator of Kellogg's breakfast cereals, which were developed to quell lust. According to Money's interpretation, it seems Kellogg was a man who eschewed sex with his wife and got his sexual gratification from enemas .. known as klismaphilia. "When I see someone who cares self-righteousness to excess, I just automatically say if I scratch the surface on this one, I'll find the sin under there."

Although Money has often written about the need for a "sexual democracy" characterized by a realistic and unbiased approach to sexual problems, he won't say just how much taboo is a good idea. He muses over possible benefits: "What if we did what some of the tribal peoples do and at least felt good about kids discovering their sexuality?" But asked if it would be a good idea to encourage unbridled sexual play among children, he finally says: "No. Because I don't think our society would know how to do it yet. They would all fight each other."

Money does have some specific ideas on what to do about AIDS. He thinks the gays themselfs had the right idea ... before AIDS made it's appearance ... when they started masturbation clubs that enable sexual stimulation without body contact. "What we should be doing as a society is giving very explicit and strongly positive messages to young people getting ready for puberty on the positive joys of masturbation ..... not general instruction, but very explicit teaching."

There is no chance of that in the present moral climate, Money says. "I just sit here sometimes totally dumbfounded ... I see a nation sitting around complacently watching itself being destroyed by AIDS and not really doing very much about it."

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