Psychology & Sexuality

Vol. 1, No. 3, September 2010, 275287

John Moneys Normophilia: diagnosing sexual normality

in late-twentieth-century Anglo-American sexology
Lisa Downing*
Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Sexuality and Gender in Europe, University of Exeter,
Exeter, Devon, UK
(Received 8 December 2009; final version received 24 March 2010)
This article considers the treatment of the concept of paraphilia in the work of sexologist John Money (19212006). It argues that Moneys writing on paraphilia in the 1980s
and 1990s, while both prolific and influential for clinical practice, has been ignored by
historians and critics who have instead paid attention to his controversial pioneering
work on gender identity and sex reassignment. First, the article reveals and analyses
Moneys indebtedness in conceptualising paraphilia to a nineteenth-century sexological model of perversion, based on a notion of the natural gone awry, which stands in
contradiction to his explicit political distancing from ideas of nature in favour of the
social constructionist concept of the lovemap. Second, it considers Moneys invention of the term normophilia which works to construct an impossible standard for
sexual behaviour. An analysis of the rhetorical uses of normophilia, by Money and
others (including a self-identified fetishist writing on the internet), shows up the limits of Moneys claimed ideal of a liberal sexual democracy and reveals the normativity
inherent in his system. In pursuing both of these lines of enquiry, the article casts historical light on current debates about the legitimacy of paraphilias continuing status as
a mental disorder in the DSM.
Keywords: John Money; paraphilia; perversion; normophilia

Introduction
John William Money (19212006) was a New Zealand-born psychologist, who practised
sexology at Johns Hopkins University from 1951 until his death. Scholarly attention to
Moneys work has been skewed towards considerations of his interventions in the fields
of gender identity and sex reassignment, principally owing to the high-profile nature of
the case of sex-change patient David Reimer during the 1960s.1 However, as well as making this pioneering and controversial contribution to sexology, Money wrote widely in the
1980s and 1990s on paraphilia, or the condition of being dependent upon unusual stimuli
or non-normative practices for sexual arousal. In this way, Money was a key figure in shaping late-twentieth-century attitudes towards normal and pathological sexual behaviours
and practices; in fact, Money is one of the most prolific sexological writers on sexual
paraphilias of the past century.
Email: l.m.downing@exeter.ac.uk

ISSN 1941-9899 print/ISSN 1941-9902 online

2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/19419899.2010.494904
http://www.informaworld.com

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The absence of attention to the paraphilia diagnosis in Moneys work by historians

of sexology and critics of Money is a meaningful lacuna that needs to be addressed.
Paraphilia is still defined in psychiatry as a mental illness, as seen by its inclusion in the
most recent edition of the APAs Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders
DSMIV-TR2000 (2000) and in its international counterpart produced by the World Health
Organisation (1990), the ICD-10, despite the ongoing campaigns of BDSM activists
wishing to see sadism and masochism removed from the ranks of pathologies. And, all
indications are that the next edition of the DSM, soon to be released, will retain most of the
subcategories of paraphilia that appear in the current imprint.2 During his lifetime, John
Money was at the forefront of efforts to keep the paraphilias listed as mental illnesses.
Unlike the opposition led by Milton Diamond to Moneys experiments with gender reassignment, little opposition to Moneys work with paraphiliacs has been voiced, and the
meanings of the disciplinary politics in which Money was engaged when propounding his
theories about paraphilia have accordingly been overlooked.
This article aims to redress the critical balance. It examines two major aspects of
Moneys writing on paraphilia that have particular import for a consideration of the conceptualisation of the natural and the normal in the recent history of sexual science. First, it
explores the extent to which Moneys contribution to the theory of paraphilia can be seen
to exist in a continuum with nineteenth-century European sexological ideas of the normal
and the perverse (despite Moneys strong claims to the contrary) to show that the logic
that keeps paraphilia categorised as a mental disorder today is largely based on an archaic
model of idealised normality. Second, it explores Moneys introduction of the bizarre diagnosis of normophilia into his lexicon of paraphilias. This rogue concept not only reveals
much about the ideology of Moneys system, but also works as a spoiler that sows the seeds
of contradiction and confusion in his delineation of normal and abnormal.
Paying close attention to John Moneys work also allows the role of paraphilia in
twentieth-century Anglo-American sexology to be fully appreciated. Studies of other
twentieth-century sexologists, such as Alfred Kinsey, silence the story of paraphilia to some
extent. Kinseys sex research in America in the 1940s and 1950s attempted a non-normative
statistical and descriptive approach to the study of sex, in which diversity was nominally
celebrated. However, as has been widely noted, even this self-avowedly value-free science
of sex appeals to concepts of nature and normality in suggesting that more forms of sex are
natural than was previously considered, and, by extension, that the natural, in its expanded
as well as narrow definition, is necessarily healthy.3 A focus on Kinseys method, then,
can give the false impression that paraphilia had both lost its conceptual specificity and
been largely de-pathologised in the twentieth century. This is by no means the case, as a
reading of Moneys works and a consideration of his clinical methods show.
Paraphilias and Lovemaps
As we are aware, the early European sexologists had termed non-normative sexual practices
perversions, a diagnostic label that persists in psychoanalytic terminology to the present
day, whereas Anglo-American sexological and psychiatric orthodoxy adopted paraphilia
(literally beside love), after a suggestion by Wilhelm Stekel in 1908. It was first used in
the English language in a 1934 article by psychiatrist Benjamin Karpman. The intention
behind introducing the term paraphilia was both to free psychiatric terminology from
its proximity to psychoanalytic concepts and to reject the originally religious implications
of perversion as a moral turning aside from the path of righteousness. In this way,
paraphilia was designed to be a less moralistic term than perversion (see Nobus, 2006).

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It is, of course, the case that there are significant differences between the intellectual
frameworks and scientific beliefs according to which perversions/paraphilias were conceptualised a century apart and on different continents, and it would be deleterious to historical
scholarship to downplay these divergences. However, John Moneys work on paraphilia
displays striking echoes of the logic of his European nineteenth-century sexological forefathers, for example Richard von Krafft-Ebing, such that it would be equally misleading
to accept unquestioningly the hypothesis of a radical and complete paradigm break, such
as Money claims. Before exploring these unacknowledged resonances, I shall briefly detail
the most obvious and uncontroversial conceptual differences.
Nineteenth-century scientists worked with a concept of sexuality in which sexual desire
was identical with the instinct for reproduction (arguably a legacy of theology, as much
as an interpretation rooted in biology or psychology). Where the aim of reproduction
was absent from an individuals erotic activity, there arose the problem of perversion.
Paul Moreau de Tourss Des aberrations du sens gnsique [Aberrations of the reproductive instinct] (1877) was particularly influential on Krafft-Ebings Psychopathia Sexualis
(1886), often thought to be the bible of nineteenth-century sexology. For Krafft-Ebing,
influenced by the increasingly fashionable theories of degeneration spreading through
Europe at the fin de sicle, these aberrations could, despite the logical incompatibility of
the models, be the result of both inherited and acquired corruption. Tainted blood, as well
as exposure to immoral persons or literature, could render defective a persons reproductive
instinct.
Conversely, Moneys sexology is influenced by the constructionist turn taken by the
social sciences in the late 1960s and 1970s, such that paraphilia is seen as a result of environmental, developmental and social factors. Central to this is the concept of the lovemap,
which provides the title of Moneys well-known works, Lovemaps: Clinical Concepts of
Sexual/ Erotic Health and Pathology, Paraphilia, and Gender Transposition in Childhood,
Adolescence and Maturity (1986) and Vandalized Lovemaps: Paraphilic Outcomes of Seven
Cases in Pediatric Sexology (Money & Lamacz, 1989).4 The lovemap is, Money states, like
a native language, in that it develops several years after birth. It is a developmental representation or template in your mind/brain. It depicts your idealized lover and what, as
a pair, you do together in the idealized romantic, erotic and sexual relationship (Money,
1986, p. xvi). Visible then, at the surface level at least, is a significant move from an essentialist understanding of inherited aberration towards a developmental model of sexual tastes
and behaviours. Paraphilia occurs, according to Money, when the lovemap is inhibited from
forming normally or is vandalized. Vandalisation may come about as a result of abuse, of
a traumatic experience that then gets eroticised in the service of preserving sexual feeling,
or simply owing to inadequate education about sex and lack of appropriate rehearsal play
with other children.
Money defines paraphilia as:
A condition occurring in men and women of being compulsively responsive to and obligatively
dependent upon an unusual or personally or socially unacceptable stimulus, perceived or in
the imagery of fantasy, for optimal initiation and maintenance of erotosexual arousal and the
facilitation or attainment of orgasm. Paraphilic imagery may be replayed in fantasy during solo
masturbation or intercourse with a partner. In legal terminology, a paraphilia is a perversion
or deviancy; and in the vernacular it is kinky or bizarre sex (1986, p. 267).

In Lovemaps, Money explains in detail his hypothetical constructionist theory of the genesis of paraphilia as social development gone awry, which differs (in content but not

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structure) from the nineteenth-century understanding of a model of nature gone awry. This
book also establishes a catalogue of the subsets and types of paraphilia. It offers a twentiethcentury taxonomy of the paraphilias that resembles Krafft-Ebings taxonomic nosography
of the perversions from exactly a century earlier. Where Krafft-Ebing famously names
sadism, for example, Money gives us such neologisms as apotemnophilia and autassassinophilia, to pick just two examples from the start of the alphabet.5 However, despite
the shared zeal for ascribing nomenclature, Money is very keen to point out the differences
between Krafft-Ebings foundational texts and his own work. Vandalized Lovemaps offers
a partial and sometimes inaccurate history of the development of the perversion/paraphilia
diagnosis. This is done to demonstrate the dangerous errors made by our forbears which,
Money tells us, are all too often still with us in mainstream culture and in clinical sexology,
and which this volume and the previous one are designed to correct.
Money first criticises the prevalence of the historical idea of degeneracy and its influence on the foundational texts of sexology. He draws this idea with very broad historical
brush strokes, failing to delineate a clear historical or conceptual distinction between
the concept of seminal weakness in the writing of Swiss physician Simon Andr Tissot
(17281797) and the fin-de-sicle degeneration theory adopted by Krafft-Ebing associated with such names as Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso. Money seems genuinely
unaware of distinctions between the social and intellectual factors shaping medicine and
social theory in these respective epochs and national contexts. Second, Money criticises
the logic of corruption or contagion that often sits (contradictorily, as I have already suggested) alongside degeneracy in nineteenth-century sexological works, and that famously
persuaded Krafft-Ebing to render obscene and explicit details in Latin, to avoid moral corruption of the weak minded and uneducated. On Krafft-Ebings assumption of the role of
degeneration in explaining the perceived explosion of perversion in fin-de-sicle Europe,
Money writes: His theory is built on an a priori assumption, namely, the existence of a
sexual instinct, to which is added another a priori assumption, namely, the principle of
degeneracy, to which is added, in turn, the principle of hereditary or constitutional taint
(Money & Lamacz, 1989, pp. 2021). He goes on: Krafft-Ebings theoretical formulations and their shortcomings set the agenda that his successors are still working on, more
than a century later [. . .] The items on the agenda [. . .] are the principles of hereditary,
phylogenetic, neuropathological, associative, intrapsychic, and biographical determinism
(1989, pp. 2122). This sounds like a thorough diagnosis of sexologys intellectual derivation, allowing Moneys work to be clearly distinguished from what has gone before. But in
what follows, I shall question the extent to which Money is in fact able to distance his own
sexological precepts from these historically inherited deterministic factors.
On the question of contagion or corruption, Money writes in a spirited defence of
anti-censorship, with specific regard to pornography, that [the idea of contagion] is the
phobia that has/paralyzed society into a state of obsessional indecision regarding the
sort of material that is acceptable or safe, and the kind that is not. He goes on: A
rational way for society to deal with pornography is the antithesis of phobia and criminalization, and also the antithesis of unsupervised laissez faire. [. . .] It would require
a new generation of society emancipated from the contagion and degeneracy theory of
sex and eroticism, and capable of transmitting to youth the moral principles that differentiates [sic] paraphilic and nonparaphilic lovemaps (1986, p. 169). Here then, we
are to understand that Moneys progressive social agenda is in contradistinction to
Krafft-Ebings unenlightened attitude to censorship, which led him to write of the licentious works of the Marquis de Sade that fortunately it is difficult to-day to obtain copies
(Krafft-Ebing, 1886/1901, p. 203).

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Money argues that he rejects both postulations (degeneracy and contagion) as falsehoods on two grounds. First, the notion of a genetic, degenerate predisposition to paraphilia
does not account for the very different forms and contents that paraphilia takes. Second,
an understanding of paraphilia as contagious fails to account for the fact that a nonparaphile watching a specific kind of paraphilic pornography will not be turned on, but
bored, disgusted or merely intellectually curious. If paraphilia were contagious, Money
argues, doctors, judges and those who censor violent and sexual films would catch it.
While Moneys reasoning here allows him to mark a clear distance in relation to his historical forefathers, there are many other points on which the difference is far from explicit.
First, one of the precepts of the notion of degenerate perversion was that sexual degeneracy
would be matched by other forms of physical or moral so-called abnormality. This obtained
both in Krafft-Ebings nosography, in which patients and their families would be examined
for nervous, physiological and developmental disorders and illnesses, and in Lombrosos
criminal anthropology, in which the body could be measured to reveal the concomitant
moral, sexual, criminal taint. Sigmund Freud, writing in 1905 in a spirited rejection of the
argument for the link between perversion even in its most extreme forms and other types
of disease or degeneration stated: It is natural that medical men, who first studied perversions in outstanding examples and under special conditions, should have been inclined to
regard them as indications of degeneracy or disease. Nevertheless, it is even easier to dispose of that view in this case than in that of inversion (Freud, 1905/1991, p. 74). And even
that arch demystifier of psychoanalytic method, Michel Foucault, commented in 1976 that
psychoanalysis, unlike sexology, rigorously opposed the political and institutional effects
of the perversion-heredity-degeneration system (Foucault, 1976/1990, p. 119).
In Vandalized Lovemaps, however, alongside Moneys nominally constructionist theory that paraphilias are acquired as a result of traumatisation or vandalisation of a childs
lovemap, we see an entirely different and contradictory discourse about the link between
physiology and psychology; one that would make Freud turn in his grave. In Moneys
system, the idea of the sexually normal body goes hand-in-hand with normal desires
and behaviours. Conversely, for Money, paraphilia almost always accompanies what he
would term chromosomal and physiological abnormalities, conditions of intersex or neurological damage. Not a single case study discussed in Vandalized Lovemaps is simply a
case study of a paraphiliac. A glance at the contents page reveals that the cases discussed
include: Sadomasochism in a male with congenital micropenis, Pedophilia in a male
with a history of hypothyroidism, and Bondage and discipline in a female with congenital vaginal atresia. Similarly, on the link between paraphilia and neurological abnormality,
Money writes: [i]n the clinic, it is not uncommon for a patient to have a dual diagnosis
of epilepsy and paraphilia, and to have a history of epileptic attacks separate from paraphilic fugue states. Likewise, it is not uncommon for a paraphilic diagnosis to coexist with
a history of traumatic head injury or with a history of manifest neurological dysfunction
(1989, p. 3031). The reference to the proximity of paraphilic fugue states and epilepsy
resembles nothing so much as Cesare Lombrosos studies of so-called inborn criminals, in
which epilepsy was often diagnosed, or Emile Zolas case study in novel form of degenerate
killer Jacques Lantier in La Bte humaine (1890). Moreover, Money misses the rather obvious fact that the people seen in a neurological clinic would tend, by necessity, to be those
with neurological damage/disorders, some of whom might also have a non-normative sexuality. The idea that there may also be large swathes of the population not seeking help
for neurological dysfunctions, who are happily pursuing sexual fantasies and practices that
Money would term paraphilias, is simply not countenanced. For all his rejection of what
Foucault called the perversion-heredity-degeneration system, Money determinedly links

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paraphilia the other to normal sexual desire to other(ed), non-normative bodies and
states of health throughout Vandalized Lovemaps. Moreover, while rejecting the hysteria
surrounding the fin-de-sicle fantasies of ever-increasing numbers and degrees of perversity owing to degeneration, Money states that we live in a sex negative society, in which
childrens lovemap development is not rigorously policed. Because of this, we are set to
see ever-increasing numbers of paraphiliacs:
In each generation of population increase there are more children than parents who are
exposed to sex negation. Consequently, with each succeeding generation, there is an exponential increase in the prevalence of dysfunctions contingent on ideological sex negation. In
public health, the short-term defense against an epidemic is containment, but the long-term
defense is prevention. Short-term containment of paraphilias in the population may possibly
be achieved, at least in part, by criminalizing them, and incarcerating and executing offenders
in a Hitler-type holocaust. By contrast, long-term prevention of paraphilias will be achieved
only by biomedicalizing them (1989, p. 16).

In terms of the logic and lexical field employed, Moneys statement perfectly echoes the
nineteenth-century degeneration theory he seeks to repudiate. We stand now in the midst
of a severe mental epidemic, Max Nordau wrote in 1892 about the perceived moral and
sexual perversity of his age (Nordau, 1892/1895, p. 537). Despite his best intentions,
Moneys attempts to distance his progressive science from nineteenth-century ideology
only serves to reveal his disavowed debt to it. It is precisely by paying close attention to
his use of language in describing and theorizing normal and paraphilic sexualities that the
extent of that debt becomes clear.

Normophilia
A consideration of Moneys strange concept of normophilia, first introduced in Lovemaps,
will assist us in understanding the implications of the sexologists position regarding the
workings, and social consequences, of the paraphilias. Following the traditional method
of constructing the names of perversions, whereby one takes a Greek or Latinate prefix
indicating the thing loved, and adds on the suffix -philia to imply compulsory dependence on that stimulation, normophilia should properly mean being obsessively in love
with, and aroused by, an ideal of the norm. It would thereby describe very accurately
the condition from which many sexologists may be said to suffer. Instead, however, it
is designated as being the condition of being able to desire normally, and is defined by
Money as follows: Normophilia (adjective, normophilic): a condition of being erotosexually in conformity with the standard as dictated by customary, religious or legal authority
(Money, 1986, p. 266). However, if normophilia is not a kinky obsession with the norm,
as I playfully suggested, one might be forgiven for asking why this definition is found in
the first of Lovemapss two appendices, the Vocabulary of the Paraphilias, A-Z, between
nepiophilia and olfactophilia, rather than in the second appendix Glossary of terms,
which includes the like of heterosexuality and homosexuality. What Money does here is
to order desire into a normophilia/paraphilia binary, where the norm is obviously given
the weight of rectitude rather than just statistical frequency (the typical binaristic othering
that Derrideans would term violence and Foucaldians normalisation), while also placing
normophilia as one in a list of perverse desire types.
Moneys descriptions of normophilia throughout Lovemaps set it up as the pre-cursor
of perversion, the state we would remain in if we could avoid the vandalisation of our

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lovemap. Money writes: On the criterion of its mental imagery, a paraphilia is a mental template or lovemap that, in response to the neglect, suppression or traumatisation of
its normophilic formation has developed with distortions, namely, omissions, displacements, and inclusions that would otherwise have no place in it (1986, p. 39). He goes
on adhering to a strikingly binary gendered logic, despite the progressive nod towards
the acceptance of healthy homosexuality: a paraphilia is a substitute for normophilia
heterosexual or homosexual, according to the sex of the partner (1986, p. 39).
Money has turned the elusive norm of sexology into a proto-paraphilia here, even as it is
an anti-paraphilia. He posits the norm as primary; as the default setting that everyone would
retain were something not to go awry. In paraphilia, then, says Money, the norm gets turned
aside perverted highlighting the nonsense of insisting on paraphilia as a less judgmental or moralistic term than perversion since, according to this definition, its meaning is
identical with the older term. Moneys model of the chronological relation between normophilia and paraphilia is the opposite of the Freudian model in which polymorphous
perversion is our primary state, and normal genitality is only achieved via a process of
acculturation to which the child submits, leading Jonathan Dollimore to remind us that, for
Freud, one does not become a pervert, but remains one (Dollimore, 1991, p. 176).
The concept of normophilia works in several key ways in the logic of Moneys system. First, it shores up some of the well-worn ideas, one might almost say clichs, about
perverts: their troublesome and irrational fixation on their preferred practice and their incapacity for true intimacy or love, for example. These ideas abound in early sexology and
even in much recent psychoanalytic literature on perversion, as exemplified in the title and
content of Robert Stollers Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred (1975). In a similar vein,
Money writes: [it] is possible that the resistance of paraphiliac addiction to change lies in
the fact that a paraphiliac attraction is the equivalent of the normophiliac attraction of
falling in love (1986, p. 38). This implies, then, that paraphiliacs experience difficulty
falling in love with another person, as they are primarily enamoured of their fetish or
practice, which is independent of the individuality of the other person (their desire runs
alongside love: paraphilia). It furthermore implies that in normophilia, what one does,
ones sexual practice (i.e. being in conformity with social and religious standards) is secondary to ones attraction to, and intimate engagement with, another person. This shores
up the notion of normal sex or normophilic sex as intimate and humane (the individual partner being more essential to desire than what you do with them) and paraphilia
as intimacy-inhibited, selfish and inhuman; focused on an act, not on a relationship. Yet,
the inbuilt tension here is that Money, as we have seen, includes normophilia among the
paraphilias as the desirable absence of what is not orthodox. In this way, the efforts of
maintaining a desire that is sanctioned by the religious and moral codes of a given society
would seem to require a considerable amount of work, and one might assume that the effort
of making sure ones actions or fantasy does not stray even slightly from conformity with
the standard might distract the subject, at least temporarily, from their attentive respectful
intimacy with the other person.
Second, as already stated, Money demonstrates a zeal for taxonomy, for the naming of
conditions, often using ugly graeco-latinate hybrid neologisms. He names scores of paraphilias as well as their impossible single antithesis normophilia. When writing of the
beneficial effects for sufferers of the adoption by psychiatry of the label of paraphilia
and the coining of specific paraphilic types, Money writes that to be without a name is
to be without an existence, almost, or to be unrecognized, unidentified, and never spoken
of (1989, p. 17). Money seems to be arguing here that being given a diagnostic label
is empowering, that naming is liberating. He celebrates and advocates the inscription of

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types of individuals into discourse, according to the nature of their desire. This is exactly
the problematic process famously described by Foucault in 1976 as the achievement of
nineteenth-century sexologys creation of the invert and the pervert, its specification of
individuals (italics in original; Foucault, 1976/1990, pp. 4243). And, indeed, if we look
what happens to the labels Money invents, we see that there occurs a process very similar to
the one Foucault describes, in conformity with the principle that where there is the operation of institutional knowledge, there will be the counteracting force of reverse discourse, or
language turned to improper or dissident use (Foucault, 1976/1990, pp. 100101). A casual
glance at the World Wide Web reveals that numerous websites and chatrooms devoted to
sexual subcultures reproduce word for word the Vocabulary of the Paraphilias, AZ from
Lovemaps and offer it as a helpful menu to people seeking out particular sexual services
and partners. Moreover, even Moneys bizarre diagnosis of normophilia is subjected to
this reverse-discursive treatment. On a Web blog called Down on my knees: Tentative
Speculations on Power Exchange and Sadomasochism by a pansexual polyfetishist, the
following tongue-in-cheek definition occurs:
Normophilia
(Fetish)
No special objects, clothing, acts that fire up your erotic imagination?
Is your idea of sexual bliss man on top of woman in missionary position?
Never thought about the same sex, multiple partners?
Would all the members of the local Baptist think your sex life exemplary?
Then you suffer from normophilia.
The kink of having no fetishes and only being able to enjoy the most pedestrian sort of
sexuality.

Just as in Moneys AZ, in which normophilia is listed as a paraphilia, it appears here as

one item in a list of fetishes, but is given the satirical countertreatment of being a nondesire, rather than the norm or ideal of desire, and is dressed as an affliction you suffer
from normophilia (the very language to which non-normative desires are usually subject).
Rather than being viewed as the source of social and personal fulfilment, normophilia
appears here as the epitome of dullness.
Third, Money uses the ideal of normophilia to make it very clear in both Lovemaps
and Vandalized Lovemaps what outcome he hopes his writing on paraphilia will have. In
Lovemaps, he writes that:
The goal is to discover the extent to which sex offenders may have an option to self-govern
their sexual behavior, and thus to retrieve their human sexual rights to the fullest possible
extent. The benefits of sexual research success will be not restricted, however. They will be
extended to others with a kinky sexual fixation or paraphilia that does not offend the law, but
offends only themselves or their partners. On the basis of their informed consent, they will be
entitled to receive help toward attaining an alternative to paraphilia (1986, p. 6).

This entire book constitutes a plea for support for Moneys research into, and development
of treatment for, paraphiliacs. However, as we see here, Money warns against not only
the most extreme and illegal forms of sexuality such as murderous paraphilia (or erotophonophilia in the colourful Money idiom), that violate others and offend society, but all

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non-normative behaviours, that may simply offend another person whose tastes are normal. Money wishes effectively to produce a normophilic, paraphilia-free society, and he
expresses this under the guise of seeking to restore human sexual rights to the fullest extent
possible. The dedication of Vandalized Lovemaps makes this aim explicit. The book is: For
those whose lovemaps will be paraphilia-free in the 21st century if this book promotes the
founding of pediatric sexology clinics and research centers, worldwide, as we hope (1989).
And in the conclusion of Vandalized Lovemaps, Money returns to pediatric medicine, stating that currently, to his dismay: There is no agreed-upon body of scientific and medical
knowledge by which to gauge whether a childs lovemap is developing normophilically
or paraphilically. Correspondingly, there is no agreed upon method of effective corrective intervention in the developmental years of childhood (1989, p. 196). Money hopes to
have access to budding paraphiliacs early, to stem the development of deviation from the
socially prescribed norm. Why, we might wonder, is Money so keen to rid the world of
paraphilias of all types, not only the dangerous or violent forms? This seems a strange aim
for someone whose surface rhetoric is thoroughgoingly one of human rights and liberal
freedom.
Indeed, Money claims that he seeks a pluralistic democracy of sexualism as the
antithesis of a dictatorship of antisexualism (1986, p. 4). What Money is utopically hankering after here is a society in which appropriate expressions of sexual behaviour are
encouraged by parents and teachers in children, rather than what he sees as a punitive,
religion-driven fear of sexuality tout court that he exemplifies by reference to the rather
extreme paradigm of the Inquisition. This is a wholly repressive-hypothesis-led argument
that accepts unquestioningly the notion that abnormal sexual desire is something from
which individuals and society can be freed. Money also cautions us that we must beware
of the idea of the normal when it is ideological rather than statistical. However, the ascription of ideological here (where ideology means repressive ideology) is limited to religion,
not to medicine or sexology, as the following long citation reveals:
The secular law, following the precedent of the medieval canonical law, has a long history
of equating what it permits, sexually, with what it defines as natural. Natural means being in
conformity with so-called natural law, and being, therefore, normal (Boswell, 1980).
Normal has two meanings. There is statistical or mathematical normality, and ideological normality. Statistical normality means what average people do or are like. In adulthood, average
people are not giants over 7 feet tall; nor are they dwarves under 4 feet tall. They are somewhere in between. People of average height consider it ideal to be average. Thus their ideal or
ideological definition of normality agrees with their statistical definition.
When the law defines normal sex on the basis of natural law, the definition is ideological, not
statistical. In other words, normal does not mean what people do, on the average, but what
they ought to do. Natural law is not statistically or mathematically based. It is theologically
based. It is what the Church, and in particular St. Thomas Aquinas, declared as its ideological
standard of normality. (1989, p. 4)

Moneys notion that the statistical idea of norm is neutral, ahistorical and free of any
ideological overtones is problematic in itself. Following Foucaults notion that types of
personage, as well as types of thinking, come into being at certain historical epochs as the
result of the confluence of forms of knowledge and power, Ian Hacking has complexified
and relativised the emergence of statistical norms as distinct from ideological norms to
which Money alludes. Hacking describes how, in the nineteenth century, statistical thinking
took hold and superseded the commonplace understanding of the natural order, such that

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a new type of law came into being, analogous to the laws of nature, but pertaining to people.
These new laws were expressed in terms of probability. They carried with them the connotations of normalcy and of deviations from the norm. The cardinal concept of the psychology
of the Enlightenment had been, simply, human nature. By the end of the nineteenth century, it
was being replaced by something different: normal people (Hacking, 1990, p. 1).

The concept of the statistically normal or average person is as much a historically specific
ideological construct, then, as the earlier idea of the natural man.
Money attempts to make clear that his projected pluralistic democracy of sexualism
is an ethical utopia, a state in which freedom for all is paramount, but with the values held
by the statistical norm predominating (for the statistical norm is, contrary to what Money
wishes to claim, value-laden). This is not a libertarian ideal, synonymous with sexual
licentiousness, whereby anything goes (1986, p. 4). Rather, Money states that sexual
democracy, just like political democracy, always confronts the inherent quandary of pluralism the quandary of whether your sexual emancipation is gained at the cost of my sexual
enslavement. It is the quandary of how to tolerate the maximal amount of social diversity
and individual eccentricity, while guaranteeing sexual rights equally to all (1986, p. 5).
This is an appeal to a principle Money has termed, in a paper from 1979 published in
the International Journal of Science, Medicine and the Law, personal sexual inviolacy.
According to this ethical code, no one has the right to infringe upon someone elses personal sexual inviolacy by imposing his/her own version of what is or is not erotic and
sexual, without the other persons informed consent (1986, p. 5). If we consider this ethical
proposal against Moneys definition of normophilia a condition of being erotosexually
in conformity with the standard as dictated by customary, religious or legal authority, the
irony is striking. On the one hand, religious authority is entirely dismissed in Moneys secular democratic rhetoric. On the other hand, normophilia that which he wishes all citizens
from the earliest age to attain is in part defined by the religious authority he decries. Most
striking of all, I would contend, the ideal of normophilia itself proves to be the exception
to the principle of personal sexual inviolacy within Moneys logic. As is made clear in
the dedication of Vandalized Lovemaps, Moneys lifes work is an attempt to obliterate the
paraphilias. That is, to impose his idea the normophilic idea of what is erotic or sexual
on individuals who are aroused by something else.
While, as already stated, David Reimers case has been widely commented upon, there
has been very little critical attention paid to the case studies of Moneys paraphiliac
patients.6 This is perhaps surprising when we consider that these include two published
book-length works: The breathless orgasm: A lovemap autobiography of asphyxiophilia
(Money, Wainwright & Hingsburger, 1991) and The armed robbery orgasm: A lovemap
autobiography of masochism (Keyes & Money, 1993). These case studies are generically
hybrid texts, co-authored by the patients and Money. A brief consideration of the rhetorical
strategies of The Breathless Orgasm can serve as an illustration of the ways in which, and
the extent to which, the imposition of normophilia onto Moneys paraphilacs operates. This
work, written in the first person by the patient who adopts the pseudonym Nelson Cooper,
describes the young mans discovery of the pleasures of self-strangulation, his increasing
dependency on the practice and the fantasies of death by asphyxiation (others and his own)
that he would use as mental accompaniment to his frequent masturbation. Nelsons detailed
confessions of his masturbatory practices and accompanying fantasies are extremely similar in kind to those found in Krafft-Ebings Psychopathia sexualis, one hundred years
earlier. Indeed, Money states in the books prologue that the rarity of information about

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paraphiliacs experience justifies restoration of the tradition, widely accepted a century

ago, of publishing long and thorough case studies (Money et al., 1991, p. 15).
The Breathless Orgasm also describes the treatment Nelson receives, including the prescription of the anti-androgen drug Depo-Provera, a treatment that Money pioneered for
sex offenders at his clinic, and a course of talking therapy. In the latter, patients such as
Nelson were instructed to change the content of their masturbatory fantasies from paraphilic to normophilic subject matter. Not content with regulating the behaviour of sexual
social subjects, Money attempted to remodel their inner worlds, their lovemaps, their
native language, translating them into his normophilic idiom. This text closes with a letter from Nelson Cooper to the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and
Therapists extolling the benefits of John Moneys method, of which this is an extract:
I have not strangled myself for over a year because, of course, of Depo-Provera. My dosage
started at 500 mg every 7 days. However, I did have some trouble a couple of months ago, and
so then my injection went up to 600 mg every 7 days. I have remained unstrangled since then.
The fantasies have been changing also, I assume from the therapy sessions I have been getting
from Dr Money. I have been told by him the ways that people have sex and that women like
to have sex too. He has been giving me a sex education course of sorts which has fed into my
brain and my lovemap seems to be straightening out and becoming more normalized as the
weeks go by (1991, pp. 171172).

The letter is signed the asphyxiophiliac still living. It is clear that what the text insists
was an unsolicited letter adopts Moneys vocabulary and ideology wholesale. We see this
in Nelsons self-naming as an asphyxiophiliac, where he appears to have entirely internalised the specification of individuals discourse (without the ironic reverse-discursive
valency that we noted on the blog of the pansexual polyfetishist). We see it in the assimilation of the technical language of lovemaps, the hallmark of Moneys contribution to
twentieth-century sexual psychology. And we see it in the total acceptance of the idea that
sexual normalisation is the appropriate cure for the patients dysphoria at finding his desires
out of keeping with social norms.
Ultimately, when Money places normophilia in the Vocabulary of the Paraphilias,
AZ, it may be in unconscious recognition of the fact that it functions within his corpus
in exactly the way that he claims the paraphilias themselves operate: as an imposition
placed by the one upon the other to accept a behaviour or ideology that the other finds
unacceptable. The paraphilia of normophilia constitutes a violation of Moneys vaunted
policy of personal sexual inviolacy that outstrips the behaviour of the paraphiles whose
biographies are charted in Vandalized Lovemaps.
It may be tempting at first glance simply to dismiss the social significance of John
Moneys texts. They are strangely written, and full of odd neologisms and contradictory
logic. Nevertheless, the lack of attention paid to Moneys work on paraphilia means that
the liberalism he claims for the diagnosis has seldom been challenged or unmasked as
a reactionary, historically located ideology about normality. His diagnostic criteria for
recognising, and proposed treatments for dealing with, paraphilias are entrenched in the
current DSM as psychiatric orthodoxy. Given that preparations for the publication of the
next edition of the DSM are well underway as we go to press with this Special Issue,
the urgency of paying attention to the tacit ideologies and often unacknowledged historical influences that underlie recent psychological and psychiatric ideas about paraphilia
cannot be overstated.

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Notes
1.

2.

3.
4.

5.

6.

Moneys constructionist theories of gender identity were (in)famously tested in the so-called
John/Joan case. Following Moneys recommendations, a male child, whose penis was destroyed
during a botched circumcision, was raised as a girl, using a mixture of hormone treatment,
counselling with Money, and the encouragement of appropriate gender role behaviour. The
adult patient, David Reimer, suffered depression, sought sex reassignment surgery, and finally
committed suicide in 2004. The case has been commented on by a range of prominent sexuality
scholars in the medical sciences and the humanities alike, including endocrinologists (e.g. Milton
Diamond) and queer theorists (e.g. Judith Butler), as well as in the popular journalistic study by
John Colapinto (2000).
Interim reports from the DSM-V Subworkgroup on Paraphilia, led by Ray Blanchard, have
recently appeared in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. They include reports on
Transvestic Fetishism (September 2009), Pedophilia (September 2009), Paraphilia not otherwise specified (September 2009), Fetishism (October 2009), Exhibitionism, voyeurism
and fetishism (November 2009) and the new proposed paraphilia diagnosis of Hypersexual
Disorder (November 2009).
For a contemporaneous critique of the Kinsey report along the lines that Kinsey can be seen to be
valorising more types of sex, and more frequent sex, as good, see Lionel Trillings oft-quoted
1948 essay (Trilling, 2008).
Although Lovemaps does not return the highest number of hits in a web search of John Moneys
book titles, this work and its eponymous concept have infiltrated pervasively the popular imagination in the Anglo-American world, for example via the writing and broadcasting of UK
psychologist Oliver James.
Apotemnophilia is a paraphilia [. . .] in which sexuoerotic arousal and facilitation or
attainment of orgasm are responsive to and dependent upon being oneself an amputee
(Money, 1986, p. 258). Autassassinophilia is a paraphilia [. . .] in which sexuoerotic arousal
and facilitation or attainment of orgasm are responsive to, and dependent upon stage-managing
the possibility of ones own masochistic death by murder (1986 p. 258).
Notable exceptions are publications by the present author (e.g. Downing, 2004; Downing &
Nobus, 2004) and by Dany Nobus (e.g. Nobus, 1995). See also Daniel C. Tsangs critique of
Moneys advocacy of the use of the drug Depo-Provera for incarcerated paraphilic sex offenders
(Tsang, 1995).

Notes on contributor
Lisa Downing is Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality and founding Director of the Centre
for the Interdisciplinary Study of Sexuality and Gender in Europe (CISSGE) at the University of
Exeter. She has written widely on discourses of sexuality and modern critical theory. Her publications
include Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and Nineteenth-Century French Literature (Legenda, 2003)
and The Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault (CUP, 2008). She is currently working on two
book projects: an intellectual history of the figure of the murderer and a study of John Moneys
contribution to the paraphilia diagnosis. Lisa Downing is also editor, with Peter Cryle, of a Special
Issue of the Journal of the History of Sexuality on Feminine Sexual Pathologies in Nineteenth- and
Early-Twentieth-Century Europe (2009).

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