The Hedonist’s
Guide to Sex
Momentary pleasure trumps all other forms, whether those
are intellectual or psychological, such as memory.
Subjective knowledge is immediate, collected through
our immediate and present experience of a circumstance.
Immediate pleasure is the greatest sense of subjective enlightenment.
A hedonist strives to maximize pleasure
The hedonist defines happiness as the experience
of pleasure and the absence of pain.
A meaningful life, then, is one filled
with the sensual pleasures of the body.
Thus, tasty food and drink are an important
component of the good life. But so are bodily
activities, such as playing sports and games,
dancing, and enjoying music.
And don’t forget the greatest bodily experience
of all — sex. According to the hedonist, a life
of frequent, high-quality sex is one that’s well lived.
Amen!
Between the Sheets
Hey girl what’s your fantasy
I’ll take you there to that ecstasy
Oh girl you blow my mind
I’ll always be your freak
Let’s make sweet love between the sheets
We Spent The Night Together
When We Get up in the Morning
Enjoyable Perversions
So Many Paraphilias
According to Jesse Bering, author of Perv there are 500 identified “paraphilias” and all of us, whether we like it or not, fit into the spectrum at some point.
A paraphilia is defined as “a way of seeing the world through a singular sexual lens”, which cannot be repaired or, in the absence of a lobotomy, easily removed. It’s a genetic and not a moral failing.
The cheery chap who does your dry-cleaning might be a plushophile who lusts after stuffed animal toys and spends his weekends looking for sex at “ConFurences” while dressed as a Disney creature.
Or he could be a formicophile, who gets his pleasure from the feeling of ants and snails crawling over his erotic zones. But so long as he’s not harming anyone, and does your dry-cleaning on time, why does it matter how he reaches his peak?
Both Bering and the British historian Julie Peakman, in The Pleasure’s All Mine, argue that the concepts of “normal” and “perverse” are meaningless to begin with.
“One person’s perversion is another’s normality,” writes Peakman, whose book is grounded in a critique of the work of the hugely influential 19th-century sexologists Richard von Krafft-Ebing who popularised the terms “sadism” and “masochism” in an 1886 book, and Havelock Ellis, who in 1897 co-authored the first medical textbook on homosexuality, entitledSexual Inversion.
The term “pervert” originally referred to an atheist, which means that strictly speaking the world’s biggest perv is currently Richard Dawkins.
Today we take heterosexuality to be synonymous with “normal” sex but when the term was first used, in 1892 by Dr James G Kierman, it was linked to “abnormal manifestations of the sexual appetite” in both sexes.
In Dorland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary in 1901, “heterosexual sex” was defined as “an abnormal or perverted appetite towards the opposite sex”.
Until recently, masturbation and oral sex were considered shameful perversions and if a woman experienced desire at all in the 19th century, she was seen as a nymphomaniac.
Bering suggests we’re so focused on weighing up which desires can be seen as “natural” and which are “unnatural” we’ve lost sight of the real question: is the expression of the desire harmful, to yourself or anyone else?
Both authors are probably the most tolerant people who have ever lived, next to the Greeks who inhabited a libertine utopia where every philia, from bird sex to incest, was given the green light.
The obstacles to their arguments lie, obviously, in the abuse of children by paedophiles and animals by zoophiles.
As far as the latter is concerned, Bering suggests that the same people who are exercised about whether a sheep has given its consent to sexual congress with a farmhand are less bothered about whether the sheep has signed a form saying it would like to be served up with mint sauce on a Sunday.
With children he is less flippant, and the most challenging chapter in Perv is on the varying age of consent (14 in Chile, 13 in Argentina, 12 in Mexico, 18 in Turkey, 15 in Sweden, and so on).
Peakman adds that much of our treasured children’s literature, from Peter Pan to Alice in Wonderland, might be said to come from paedophilic imaginations.