Are you a pervert? Psychologist Jesse Bering says you are! In his new book, Perv: The Sexual Deviant In All Of Us, Bering claims that we all have deviant carnal urges; we just keep our masturbatory mental aids to ourselves. That said, it turns out that some of us are more deviant than others.
Those with more exotic kinks are considered to have a condition called paraphilia, and sometimes these are thought to be mental disorders. Transvestic fetishism, masochism, exhibitionism, frotteurism (rubbing your own genitals or touching strangers in public), sadism and voyeurism are all considered to be mental disorders of some kind, but there are hundreds more innocuous paraphilias that, while unusual, aren’t harmful. Bering argues that, instead of judging people about their sexual preferences, we should instead judge how harmful that deviance is. Bering has come to this conclusion following 18 months of research, and he admits even he wasn’t expecting to come to such a moral perception of sexual deviance or perversion.
‘We’ve all spent far too long dawdling over the irrelevant questions of what’s “normal” and “natural”,’ says Bering. ‘We must abandon the rhetoric of righteousness and instead turn our efforts to clarifying – using science rather than scripture, laws or even (and especially) our own gut feelings – how a sexual act or orientation is harmful to those involved. In my book, at least, doing harm is the only thing that makes a person a pervert. We do a lot of harm just by judging others’ sexuality.’ For Bering, this means that with, say, homosexuality, the homophobe – rather than the gay person who has consensual sex with a person of their own sex – is actually the pervert.
So could it one day be perfectly acceptable to be a sexual deviant? According to Bering, it’s all down to a matter of education. ‘Wouldn’t it be a shame if, after all our laughing and pointing at others due to their sexuality, it turns out that people have as much say over what arouses them as they do over the colour of their skin?’ he asks. ‘One day we’ll all be embarrassed for having waged so cruel a campaign against the erotic outliers among us.’ So what perceptions about perversion might you one day be embarrassed that you had? In the name of learning more about sexual deviance, your questions were put to Bering, and we rounded up the best of his responses:
1. @Trackercat: How much of sexuality is fixed? ‘The answer is different for men and women,’ notes Bering. ‘The best evidence suggests that male sexuality is largely a “done deal” by the time a boy reaches puberty. Even fetishes in men are thought to have their origins in childhood experiences. Women, by contrast, are said to have more “erotic plasticity” and are able to lose and acquire kinks more easily throughout the life course.’
2. @d79Jones: Do particular forms of deviancy arise in particular societies or cultures? Bering comments, ‘If a deviancy is common enough in a particular culture, it’s not, by definition, deviant in that society. But the major clinical types – exhibitionism, fetishism, sadomasochism, frotteurism and so on – are found the world over, regardless of a society’s attitudes about sex.’
3. @elasticbishop: Do you think homosexuality will ever be completely normalised, akin to different hair colour or different tastes in ice cream? ‘Only if people make the effort to educate themselves about human sexuality,’ Bering asserts. ‘Encouraging people to think objectively – and humanely – about human sexual variation is an uphill battle, as I learned while writing Perv.’
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