All but two of the incest offenders vs. adults had had premarital petting experience with companions. The median individual first petted at 16.7 years of age—later than the median individuals of any other group. This is largely because he reached puberty later than other sex offenders. Nevertheless, this cannot be the sole explanation, since the incest offenders vs. minors, who did not reach puberty at an unduly late age, also display a late beginning age for petting (16.1 years). It may be that the factors that caused the incest offenders vs. adults to have had a minimal amount of prepubescent sex play were still operative and delayed the postpubescent heterosexual activity.
Prior to age twenty small proportions of these offenders had had experience in petting: only 36 per cent by age fourteen (the smallest proportion recorded), 61 per cent by age sixteen (again the smallest), and 80 per cent (a low figure) by age eighteen.
This same delay is also reflected in the age-specific incidence of petting. In the age-period puberty-15 only 35 per cent (the lowest percentage of any group) petted; in the age-period 16-20 they are also relatively low in rank-order, being above only the homosexual offenders and exhibitionists. A similar picture is seen in the age-specific incidence of petting to orgasm. Up to age twenty fewer of these offenders than any others were reaching orgasm in petting: 4 per cent in the puberty-15 age-period (the control group had almost four times that figure) and 8 per cent in age-period 16-20. In the following period, however, the figure increases to a moderate level (20 per cent), which appears to forecast impending marriage. So many of these offenders married in the 21-25 age-period that calculations for the unmarried cannot be carried beyond those years. Since, as we shall see, the incest offenders vs. adults were restrained in their premarital coitus, one has the impression that this increase in petting to orgasm in age-period 21-25 is in large part a substitute for the coitus they would not permit themselves.
The increase in age-specific incidence is related to a similar sudden and marked increase in the accumulative incidence of petting to orgasm. By age twenty the accumulative incidence was 10 per cent, by far the smallest percentage on record, but by age twenty-three (which is as far as calculations can be made) the figure nearly doubled.
It is not worth calculating frequency of petting to orgasm, since so few incest offenders vs. adults had this experience prior to marriage. Indeed, in any five-year age-period (e.g., puberty-15, 16-20, etc.) it is impossible to find in our sample more than three individuals thus experienced.
Their sexual restraint is also evident in a study of the number of females with whom the incest offenders vs. adults petted. Eight per cent had no premarital petting, an extraordinary omission in a group all of whom, by definition, ultimately married. Nine per cent had only one petting partner. The average offender had petted with 12 companions, the third smallest number recorded.
The paucity of petting partners is in keeping with their quite limited social relations with girls at ages sixteen to seventeen, when 28 per cent (the largest percentage) had no female companions whatever.
Their petting techniques were similarly restrained. Only 64 per cent, the lowest percentage and one surpassed even by the homosexual offenders, had engaged in genital manipulation prior to marriage. Consequently it is no surprise to find that they also rank last in premarital cunnilingus with companions (4 per cent) and fellation (8 per cent). The tendency seen among other incest offenders to rank high in mouth-genital contact with their wives is not evident. Like the incest offenders vs. children, they rank high in mouth-genital contact with extramarital and postmarital partners (second in fellation to fourth in cunnilingus— 24 per cent for each).
Restraint is to be seen in yet another oral technique. A fairly large proportion (75 per cent) had never nibbled or bitten their sexual partners in loveplay or in the abandon of extreme arousal; some reticence about biting is clearly demonstrated in a rank-order of those who frequently employed this technique: the incest offenders vs. adults are at the bottom of the list with only one of their members having reported frequent activity. The other incest offenders also rank low in this list.
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