Adult Women: 10.6% had exposed themselves in public, 5.1% reported having urges to expose themselves in public, 5.9% had engaged in some sort of sex with underage males, & 2.4% reported they had sexual intercourse with underage males

Exhibitionism and Sex with Underage Males in Adult Women. Sandra S. Stroebel et al. Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity, https://doi.org/10.1080/10720162.2018.1476944

Abstract: Data from 2,607 female participants in an anonymous computerized study were entered by the participants themselves: 276 (10.6%) had exposed themselves in public, 134 (5.1%) reported having urges to expose themselves in public, 153 (5.9%) had engaged in some sort of sex with underage males, and 100 (2.4%) reported they had sexual intercourse with underage males. As predicted by conditioning, modeling, and critical period learning theories, exposure to nudity within the nuclear family and partnered early sexual experimentation involving breast or genital exposure significantly increased the likelihood of participants exposing themselves in public and having such urges.

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Women are less frequently apprehended by police for genital exposure than are men and, as a result, exhibitionism has been less studied in women (Fedoroff, Fishell, & Fedoroff, 1999). For example, Fedoroff, Fishell, and Fedoroff (1999) reported that 6 of 118 men (5%) referred for paraphilia assessment met criteria for exhibitionism. In contrast only 14 women had been referred for assessment; yet 4 (29%) were diagnosed with exhibitionism.  Similarly, there are fewer studies of the origins of exhibitionism in women than in men. There are several extensive reports of individual female patients in psychoanalysis that describe direct genital exhibitionism of women that resulted in their sexual arousal (e.g., Balsam, 2008; Grob, 1985).

Swindell et al. (2011) explored the early antecedents that predicted adult male exhibition-like behavior using epidemiological techniques and extensive information on the study participant’s experiences within and outside their nuclear families during childhood and adolescence. Exhibition-like experiences that had occurred prior to the age of 18 were statistically significant predictors of exhibitionistic behavior in the adult men studied.  Swindell et al. (2011) explained the relationship between the early exhibition- like events in leading to the adult male exhibitionism as mediated by Pavlovian (classical) and operant conditioning as well as modeling of exhibitionism by the children’s parents and their giving tacit approval through modeling (Bandura, 1986).

In her Master’s thesis on the early antecedents of female exhibition-like behavior, Fouch (2015) reported similar findings in preliminary data and attributed the influence of the early experiences to critical period learning, a phenomenon that has also been shown to have a very powerful influence on adult sexual behavior (Griffee et al., 2014a, 2014b). For reviews of conditioning studies in humans and animals see Hoffman (2012) and Pfaus et al. (2012), respectively. Conditioning to visual cues not available in partnered sex may explain the high level of sexual dysfunction during partnered sex found in those using internet pornography (Park et al., 2016), a conclusion also supported by results of Blais-Lecours, Vaillancourt-Morel, Sabourin, and Godbour (2016) and van Oosten and Vandenbosch (2017).

Serendipitously, the camera phones capable of taking pictures and transmitting them wirelessly were just becoming available the same year data collection for the present study began (2002) and their quality improved steadily during the entire interval of data collection (2002–2014, Hill, 2013). The internet (Corley & Hook, 2012, p. 59), web-cams, and smartphones (Drouin & Landgraff, 2012; Nielsen, Paasonen, & Spisak, 2015; Sevcikova, 2016; van Oosten & Vandenbosch, 2017) provided new ways for people to remotely expose their bodies and/or genitals to others digitally and electronically (Corley & Hook, 2012, p. 59). Sexting (transmitting cell-phone textual messages with sexual content with or without sexual photos) was the word coined to describe this new phenomenon. Female sex-offenders use the internet to groom victims, find supportive others, find co-offenders, and download and upload child pornography (Elliot & Ashfield, 2011).

These new electronic technologies also opened new routes that researchers could use to study the exhibitionists and that police could use to catch or entrap perpetrators of exhibitionism. For example, Hugh-Jones, Gough, and Littlewood (2005) reported on exhibitionists who agreed to provide interviews over the internet, and Elliot and Ashfield (2011) used the internet to find and evaluate websites catering to pedophilic sex-offenders.  Furthermore, a Google search by the present authors on November 22, 2017 found four news reports of unrelated events in four different U.S.  states between September 2, 2017 and November 22, 2017, in which adult female teachers between the ages of 22 and 27 years admitted to sending photos of their nude or scantily clad bodies to one or more underage male teenage student’s smartphones. Three of the four electronically exhibitionistic- perpetrator-teachers went on to have sex with their underage male students before being arrested (e.g., Farberov, 2017; Haxel & Palmer, 2017; McBride, 2017; Silverman, 2017). The arrest in the fourth case occurred shortly after the perpetrator-teacher sent her pictures to five different male students because a parent found the picture on a student’s phone (McBride, 2017). These four perpetrator teachers would have been 15 years younger when cell phones capable of taking and sending pictures first became available in the United States (approximately 7–12 years of age, Hill, 2013).

This set of four cases was not exhaustive. The 4-month interval that included the four cases indicates the high frequency of such cases. To illustrate that such behavior of female teachers with underage male students has been frequently reported in prior recent news sources and that they were titillating to a male audience, we cite a Caveman Circus (Caveman Circus, 2015) internet website post entitled “The 18 hottest teachers caught having sex with their students” which provided descriptions of the sexual behaviors of 18 female teachers who had been caught having sex with underage students—complete with pictures of the teachers (often taken on the courthouse steps) when accessed on November 25, 2017. However, by November 27, 2017 the pictures had been taken down. Given the laws against such activities, the frequent news reports detailing the arrests of teacher-perpetrators, and the length of their jail sentences, why would school teachers send inappropriate pictures to—or engage in sex with— underage students?

There is growing awareness that like men, women can also become sexually addicted, although there has been far less research on female sexual addiction than on sexual addiction in males (for review, see McKeague, 2014 and Rosenberg, Carnes, & O’Connor, 2014). Female sex addicts differ from male sex addicts in that acting-out in women tends to involve relationships (McKeague, 2014). Sexual addiction frequently develops in the teenage years or in the early twenties, and 6.7% of 209 female college students’ scores on the PATHOS screening questionnaire (a self-administered questionnaire for detecting sexual addiction) were consistent with sexual addiction (Cashwell, Giordano, Lewis, Wachtel, & Bartley, 2015). In the research and treatment literature, female sex addicts are framed as victims whose behaviors are passive (e.g., McKeague, 2014; Opitz, Tsytsarev & Froh, 2009), however exhibitionism is aggressive, not passive.

Additionally, there are fewer studies of female sexual predators who have male victims than studies of male sexual predators who have female victims.  Untested assumptions have been that minor males are not harmed when they believe that they participated voluntarily and that males are protected by impotence when they are coerced into sex (Sarrel & Masters, 1982; see Deering & Mellor, 2010; and Grayston & De Luca, 1999 for reviews). O’Keefe et al. (2014) found 27 victims of sister-brother incest (2.3%) and 119 victims of child sexual abuse (CSA, 10.1%) by adult women among 1,178 men who had provided data anonymously. The present study expands on Fouch (2015) by using a more recent database containing additional cases and by exploring the co-occurrence between female exhibitionism and adult women becoming sexual perpetrators by having sex with underage male victims.