Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Psycho-dermatology, female gorillas, and why women love to pick their boyfriends' zits.
Aug 11, 2003 | "One of the signs that a female gorilla is in love is that she can be seen picking nits off her male companion." So said "Sex and the City's" Carrie Bradshaw in a recent episode of the hit HBO series. Although these words of wisdom -- written by SATC staff writers Julie Rottenberg and Elisa Zuritsky -- were being used as a metaphor for overly critical women, they nonetheless touched on an issue I've been wondering about for a while. Namely, why exactly women love to pick at their partners. And I mean picking, in the literal -- not metaphorical -- sense. As in: skin, hair and nails. As in: popping, squeezing, sloughing, scraping, trimming. No one admits to it (unless, well, pressed) but almost everyone does it.
Julia M., a 25-year-old architectural designer in southern Connecticut (who, like most of the women interviewed for this article, asked that her full name not be used) has been involved in a serious relationship with her computer-programmer boyfriend, Dave, 23, for the past two years, a union that includes cooking, cats, and lots of picking. Although Julia also directs her picking behaviors at her own skin (particularly her face), she finds going after her boyfriend's blemishes, facial hair and yes, even toenails, supremely satisfying. "It's difficult to explain, but picking at Dave and removing his blackheads or ingrown hairs makes me feel like I've done something useful ... something good." Other women concur. "It's like you're fixing something, getting some sort of closure," says Gail (not her real name), 32, a fiction writer living with her boyfriend Peter in Brooklyn. Adds Rebecca D., 32, the general manager of an upscale sex-toy retailer in the Pacific Northwest: "I feel that by squeezing his blemishes I'm eradicating some sort of fault, cleaning him up, fixing him and making him more perfect."
To the uninitiated (and even many of the initiated themselves), inclinations such as Julia's, Gail's and Rebecca's might sound like grotesque, obsessive fetishes, but such behavior is in reality perfectly normal, say cultural anthropologists and primate specialists. Helen Fisher, author of the bestselling "Anatomy of Love: Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray" explains that, among hunter-gatherer societies, the brains and physiques of females are simply better at the fine motor-coordination necessary for good grooming (and other skills such as berry-picking and textile-making). "In primate societies, females groom more than males: their children, their relatives and individuals that they are going to copulate with," she says. "And they'll do it for hours." Fisher speculates that, in addition to promoting cleanliness, grooming serves as a way for women to connect to a man and keep him, because touch involves increased levels of oxytocin, a hormone long associated with attachment (it goes into overdrive after a woman gives birth, for example, the better to bond with her baby).
Dr. Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Liverpool and the author of "Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language," says that the chief manner in which primates regulate their relationships with one another is through grooming, whereas we more evolved humans rely on verbal and written language. "Relationships are negotiations and we use many devious ways and wiles to get close to members of the opposite sex," he laughs. "At the end of the day, grooming and language are part and parcel of the armory we have to facilitate and build relationships." Language, he says, is "a very inefficient mechanism in terms of making the social wheel go 'round. Grooming is a much more powerful way of conveying a sort of emotional state; nothing you can say verbally can compare with what you say through touch."
What exactly, though, are we trying to "say" when we engage in blemish picking and hair pulling of others? Experts in the fields of psychiatry and psychology (who refer to such behavior as "psychogenic" or "neurotic excoriation") differ on this issue. "At the most superficial level, all of us have a fantasy that if we pick these things off, we are improving ourselves and others," says one prominent Philadelphia-based dermatologist/psychoanalyst who asked not to be named. "And I think it's part of the care-taking aspect of women's personalities: It's like how people are fussy about putting their children in nice clothes; picking at others to make them blemish-free is a sort of narcissistic extension of the self." This same doctor also wonders whether there isn't some sort of ritualistic/purification element at play, and hints at issues of sadomasochism. Just as obsessive-compulsives engage in rituals such as hand washing in order to master their anxiety, picking may be a "rather soothing thing in a frenetic life." In addition, she adds, "Although there are no studies behind this sort of behavior that I'm aware of, I do wonder if these sorts of pickers aren't just transferring the pleasure of picking at themselves to some other person in a sort of sadistic fondling."
Dr. Fred Penzel, a psychologist and expert on dermatological obsessive-compulsive disorders such as trichotillomania (compulsive hair-pulling), laughs off psychoanalytic theories and the experts who espouse them. "The field of psycho-dermatology has gone nowhere," he scoffs. "It's just a bunch of people trying to come up with psycho-sexual interpretations of why people do this sort of stuff. It's all symbolism with them, like interpreting poems and literature. In psychology we sort of look at the whole picture, both behavioral and biological, and believe that these compulsive behaviors are neurobiological and maybe even genetic." One theory that Penzel is pushing lately is that people use certain grooming behaviors as means to calm themselves during times of stress or anxiety or to provide focus while feeling bored or sedentary. Although these behaviors are most often self-directed, they are sometimes also performed on other people, even animals and objects. "Of course I've had patients who mention that they pick at their spouses. I also know people who pull threads out of clothing and furniture, or whiskers and fur out of their pets," says Penzel. He adds that there is scant research on such other-directed groomers. "People don't talk about these sorts of things."
What is known, even without reams of research, is that imperfections and blemishes on the skin are highly fascinating. Dunbar, the evolutionary psychologist, says that most primate species are "absolutely enthralled by" blemishes, moles, and other flaws on the skin. Dr. Frans de Waal, a primatologist with Emory University's Yerkes Primate Center, likens a primate's desire to pick at the skin as just as instinctual as his appetite for food and sex. "If I have a scab on my hand, for example, I have to keep it out of the reach of the chimps because they will start smacking their lips and focusing their attention on it because they want to get at it," he says. Our human counterparts can get just as excited, he adds. "I've heard of women talk about [picking at others] as an almost orgasmic experience," he says. Indeed, one woman writing in New York-based Vice magazine's January 2002 issue (in an article titled the "ABC's of Guilty Pleasures") explained that she had to promise sexual favors to her boyfriend in order to get access to his blemished back, then went on to say that the practice of squeezing his blemishes was "one step lower than an orgasm."
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