- For the longest time, to be a pervert wasn’t to be a sex deviant; it was to be an atheist
- Almost overnight, “pervert” goes from “immoral religious heretic” to “immoral sexual deviant” because Havelock Ellis
- The naturalistic fallacy of polyamory, homosexuality, etc. (a rebuttal to Sex at Dawn)
- Instead of “natural” or “unnatural”: Is it harmful?
- The pig-man hunts of New Haven
- Even the term “bestiality” is religious, first appearing in the King James Version of the Bible in 1611 to falsely cleave apart human beings from all other animals
- Moral dumbfounding
- The symbolic disgust response is a culture-bound syndrome
- The concept of the “perversions” (or “going against what is right”) is entirely a phantom of the moralizing human mind.
- “Harm” must be understood as harm experienced by the parties involved, not by us as “disgusted” onlookers
- Morality isn’t “out there” in the world; it’s a way of seeing, and it’s constantly evolving
- One of the first uses of radiotherapy was the obliteration of teenage girls’ clitorises to discourage them from masturbating (not in backwater clinics, either, but in some of the most fashionable cities in the world, including London and Manhattan. And this was just in the twentieth century.) (!!!!)
- Kellogg: if his cereals didn’t work, you could always lock up the boy’s organ in one of the doctor’s patented genital cages (!!!)
- G. Stanley Hall, the father of the field of adolescent psychology and the first president of the American Psychological Association, called masturbation “the scourge of the human race.”
- The new-fashioned diagnosis of “nymphomania” for women with excessive desires (what constituted “excessive” was anyone’s guess, but it usually meant any woman with a pulse)
- Storer: virulently opposed to female masturbation; became president of the American Medical Association and one of this country’s first antiabortion crusaders (!!)
- Krafft-Ebing diagnosing “satyrisis”—basically, nymphomania’s male counterpart
- Rabies is just one of many distinct neurological conditions for which hypersexuality may appear as a rather jarring symptom
- Melissaphile (sounds like a cute moniker for someone who only wants to be with women named Melissa, but in fact it’s an erotic attraction to bees, with melissa being Greek for “honeybee”)
- Using the acronym PNOS, for “paraphilia not otherwise specified” 😂
- The first category of paraphilias involves an unusual subject of desire, whereas the second centers on an unusual activity. It’s a useful distinction in thinking about abnormal sexuality, but note that these categories aren’t mutually exclusive.
- Is bisexuality impacted by erotic plasticity?
- Abuse is best recognized by the effect it has on the abused—even tickling can be abuse (actually used as torture by Han dynasty!)
- There’s no “correct” way to experience a sex act, only individual differences in subjective realities
- 7,088,343,857 shared subjective realities do not add up to a single objective fact (or to rephrase: one person’s horror story is another’s erotica)
- Rousseau: children are intrinsically pure “blank slates,” social tabulae rasae, displacing the older idea that they are adults in miniature
- Just as when we’re assessing conflicting theologies—either some societies have the one true age of consent and every other has got it wrong, or any given society’s age of consent is based on what its citizens have chosen to believe about human sexuality and psychological development
- When society rejects the self, the self rejects the self.
- For any given person these three elements (biological sex, gender, and sexual orientation) can combine in any number of ways
- Blanchard’s theory of autogynephilia is one of the most battle scarred in all of modern sex research
- If a person’s sexual deviancy isn’t demonstrably harmful, and we reject them anyway, we’re not the good guys in this scenario; we’re the bad guys
- The modern onset of pedophilia panic and sexual predators have a meteoric rise in the 1990–2010s (the domestication of the internet; the Catholic church scandals, etc.) Reported child sex-abuse rates were noticeably declining just as the pedophilia panic was dramatically rising.
- The two constructs—how old one is (chronological age) versus how old one looks (biological age)—generally go hand in hand, but not a perfect fit
- Our earliest settlers were among Europe’s biggest prudes
- Humans aren’t the only sex deviants in the animal kingdom. But we are the only ones to stigmatize each other as disgusting perverts.
- Theory of mind produced sexual shame
- Nonsensical to use our terms, such as “rape” or “coercion”, to refer to behaviors in other species in which a male copulates with a female struggling to free herself—the male simply doesn’t have the evolved social cognitive equipment to think of the harm it’s causing. We do.
- This unique ability to ascertain the other individual’s psychological consent was the cognitive key needed for unlocking any coherent form of sexual morality in our species.
- Natural selection an incredibly sluggish business; until we evolve a totally new kind of brain, any moral progress re: sexual diversity hinges on the use of our acquired knowledge to defuse our crueler, instinctive biases
- Negative stereotypes develop immunity to moral logic because they have an undeniable adaptive currency—the unpleasant tidbits in our brains come from a very limited sample
- The better-safe-than-sorry stereotyping helped our ancestors to make the best split-second decision possible, but turned us into ready-made bigots
Pull Quotes ⚭
In the rush to redress the historical prejudice against gay people, we’re missing a key opportunity as a society to critically examine our uneasy relationship with sexual diversity as a whole.
The trouble with confusing morality with reproduction applies equally to any sex act that can’t produce offspring, but it’s most commonly seen, unsurprisingly, in arguments against homosexuality.
This French donkey-rape case may sound somewhat absurd to us today. But it was a small moment in history in which people stopped and questioned the punishment demanded by the Bible and instead chose their own more rational course of action, showing how even a society steeped in religion can move away from the irrelevant question of naturalness and onto the more meaningful and moral one of harmfulness in its consideration of sexual deviance.
Very little is universal when it comes to human sexuality. And once we acknowledge this lack of universality, the illusion that there’s anything like an objective right and wrong in the vast domain of our species’s libidinal relations shatters beyond repair.
The emotional atmosphere of our own culture has undergone such radical social climate changes that to assume we’re now finally glimpsing a clear moral reality that previous generations simply didn’t notice because of their ignorance and cloudy biases would be stupendously foolish of us.
In the days when there were still kings in France, there was King Louis XIII, or Louis the Chaste. On the throne from 1610 to 1643, the least erotically minded monarch in French history was, it turns out, a pretty active homosexual. I’m referring not to the curious detail of his setting an international fashion craze for men’s wigs that lasted centuries but to the fact that he spent much of his reign in bed with a crimson-headed marquis who’d been gifted to him as a sexual companion by his sensible first minister.
Peculiar as Rivière’s ideas sound today, the medicalization of female arousal has historically been more the norm than the exception. Such an approach to women’s lust certainly didn’t end with the Enlightenment. The feminist sociologist Carol Groneman has traced the long and depressingly misogynistic history of reproductive medicine, focusing most of her attention on those infamously rigid Victorian attitudes of the nineteenth century. During this period, women continued to be seen as either passive receptacles for men’s pleasures or chattel for the purposes of men’s breeding. (Either way, pathological modesty dictated their flesh be drowned in heavy garments.)
The variance of our natural libidos (even the points at the extreme ends) is the same as differences in our skin color, the shapes of our noses, or our tolerance for dairy products. Just as it’s illogical to judge a person for his or her unique expression of those traits, it makes little sense to ascribe moral significance to the way a person’s genes happen to be expressed on this particular spectrum of sexual diversity.
Here’s an exercise in the hypothetical that may be helpful for those of you who fall more along the far vanilla side of the Neapolitan ice cream erotic equation. Let’s say you’ve been placed in a witness protection program and you suddenly have to create a new identity of being gay, which is the most vital part of your cover. You must move all alone to a place where nobody knows you, and you must convince everyone you meet, for your own safety and for the safety of those you care most about, that you’re 100 percent homosexual. Now, don’t try too hard to appear gay, because you’ll give yourself away, so be stereotypical but not too stereotypical, yet don’t ever let your guard down either, since some people will try to trick you into revealing the truth by being “understanding,” and it’s hard to know if they actually do know, too, so err on the side of caution and assume they don’t. Watch what you say, where your eyes go, what you do in your spare time, whom you’re seen with, and careful, now, no matter how close you get to someone in this new life of yours, no one must ever discover that you’re really a heterosexual. All that you know and hold dear—and I can’t emphasize this part enough—hangs in the balance. Whatever you do, and in fact you better make this your mantra, don’t be yourself.
If living under such intense social conditions for the next twenty, forty, sixty, or even eighty years wouldn’t do a number on your nerves (and by that I mean cause “personal distress”), then you’re simply not human. Yet this is exactly how many people today live their entire lives.
In the history of our species, there have been far more babies born to ovulating thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls than there have to men who have sex with men. So for social conservatives to draw from that insipid old argument that homosexuality is “biologically unnatural” and therefore “morally wrong” is essentially for them to say that sex with pubescent girls is “biologically natural” and therefore “morally right.” And that’s rather ironic, isn’t it, given that so much of the fuel for today’s pedophilia panic and antigay mentality lies at the fiery heart of the right-wing community.
(And I hope you’re able to see clearly by now, by the way, why the issue of “normality” is so morally vacuous and why the question of harm must instead prevail before we can ever hope to make any real ethical progress in these debates.)
In adopting a patently false but stubbornly clung-to mythology of human sexuality that makes demons out of natural drives, we’ve entered a stage of moral sickness, not of moral health. The good news is that it’s just a stage, not a terminal illness. And as we’ve seen quite clearly throughout, when it comes to sex, we human beings are a work in progress.