With the exception of perhaps incest
and bestiality and of course non-consensual
sex our culture has never been more tolerant
of sex in just about every permutation.
Teen sex isn’t excluded from this.
Adolescent girls are now demanding
more satisfying sex.
Polyamory is a household word.
Shame-laden terms like perversion
have given way to cheerful-sounding
ones like kink.
Anal sex has gone from final taboo to “fifth base”.
Teen Vogue even ran a guide to it.
A staple of most
modern porn is
the money shot.
Considered the giant payoff end of most mainstream
scenes when someone is drenched in jizz.
The main selling point for these clips are photos
of that sticky moment. Many of the loads appear so
massive they seem unreal. That’s because they are.
Every weekend (and many weeknights), Berlin’s clubs
open up as spaces where anything goes. Fetish wear,
nudity and sex? No big deal. Closing times,
sometimes days after the party started, are determined
by how many records the D.J. has in his bag.
Many of the biggest and best-known clubs have
no-photo policies, and some even place stickers
over mobile cameras on the way in. The idea:
Party-goers unrecorded by social media can
are free of society’s expectations.
I’m a Slut
Liberate Your Sexual Self
There are still taboos surrounding women
who express their sexuality and negative
attitudes towards certain sexual practices.
But there is more acceptance of sexual deviance.
Are You a Sexual Deviant?
The Pervert in All of Us
Jesse Bering’s book, Perv: “The Sexual Deviant in All of Us” is a humane flirtation with the often-strange intimacies that drive people’s lives.
Bering, a psychologist and contributor to publications like Scientific American, details the kaleidoscope of human sexuality, including paraphilias — unconventional sexual attractions.
Bering ranges from rather pedestrian fetishes like casual S&M to exceedingly unexpected interests like tertophilia (the congenitally deformed), psychrophilia (watching others be cold), and melissaphilia (bees! wasps!).
He explores what that old pervert Freud called humanity’s polymorphous perversity in a series of chapters that focus on unfortunate key episodes in the history of sexual politics or on the contemporary sciences of sexuality.
Fascinating stuff, ripe for lampooning. But Bering does an admirable job avoiding a sideshow freakout. In essence, Bering argues that anything a person can encounter or experience can be eroticized — statues, fog, falling down steps.
For Bering, humans are all deviant but the vast majority within a relatively narrow, socially acceptable range. The biggest problems for most originate in the ‘moralizing human mind’.
“When unburdened of its massive emotional weight, sexual deviance is no more and no less than a statistical concept that signifies being off course from our societal norms.
“Normal is just a statistical red herring. The notion of abnormal sexuality is as much a matter of straying from our culture’s sexual scripts as it is one of violating the laws of reproductive biology.”
We don’t choose how we stray from the cultural mean. People get saddled with kinks during the formative years, and they are not consciously chosen.
“Perv” is most challenging when focused on “erotic age orientation.” Sexuality exists on a continuum including pedophilia — yes, that one.
Bering does not condone sex with minors, in fact just the opposite. The key to resolving the problem, he argues, involves understanding it.
He views the stigmatization of true pedophiles (those truly attracted to children as opposed to “opportunistic offenders” who prey on them because they are available at the time) as misguided.
“A good first step “is acknowledging that pedophilia is indeed a sexual orientation. Its causal antecedents lie in early development, not in the adult’s perverted, against-what-is-right choice to ‘become’ a pedophile.”
Pedophiles will have an easier time keeping their desires in check if they admit them and deal with them openly. As it stands, the social shame attached to pedophilia keeps pedophiles from self-identifying.
This is a difficult point. Pedophilia is an extreme case, of course, so Bering chooses to include it because it tests his argument that people don’t choose to be deviant.
The book’s power force us to rethink knee-jerk bafflement at niche sexual activity. Yet no matter how deviant your desires, if you’re not hurting anyone (or anything), and if your sexuality isn’t causing you personal distress you should be free to let your freak flag fly.
