Supervert - Perversity Think Tank

Pervers|ty Th|nk Tank
A Sem|nar on the Concept of Pervers|ty

by Supervert 32C Inc.
Perversity Think Tank
2010 Supervert 32C Inc.
ISBN 978-0-9704971-2-3
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DIGITAL EDITION
A Sem|nar on the Concept of Pervers|ty
by Supervert 32C Inc.
Let me take this opportunity of answering a question that has often
been asked me, how to pronounce slithy toves. The i in slithy
is long, as in writhe; and toves is pronounced so as to rhyme with
groves. Again, the rst o in borogoves is pronounced like the o
in borrow. I have heard people try to give it the sound of the o in
worry. Such is Human Perversity.
Lewis Carroll, Preface, The Hunting of the Snark
Perversity Think Tank \ 001 Digital Edition
When I created PervScan, I had the |dea to use the web
s|te as a chron|c|e and compend|um of perverse behav-
|or - a ||v|ng, breath|ng psychopaIh/a sexua//s. It wou|d
chart the v|ta||ty of fam|||ar acts of dev|ance, foot fet|sh-
es and pedoph|||a, and wou|d document the r|se of new
ones, ||ke feeder|sm. At the same t|me, though, I wanted
the s|te to be more than just a stat|c repos|tory of de-
praved acts. I thought of |t as a research |aboratory, a
fac|||ty for the study of pervers|on, and I thought of my-
se|f as a sc|ent|st - a one-man pervers|ty th|nk tank. I
wanted to understand.
But |t d|dn't take |ong before I fe|t that I understood
noth|ng at a||. Many of the acts I covered on PervScan
- ||ke the three m|dd|e-aged brothers who sexua||y as-
sau|ted the|r bedr|dden mother wh||e she |ay suffer|ng
am|d ||ce, roaches, and feca| matter - struck me |ess as
perverse than as |gnorant, heed|ess, crue|. There were
days when I thought my compend|um of dev|ant do|ngs
was noth|ng more than a cata|ogue of errors |n judge-
ment and |apses |n common sense. What can you make
of a judge who masturbates at the bench? Is h|s behav|or
rea||y perverse? Or |s |t just a gross |ack of profess|ona|-
|sm made poss|b|e by the ted|um of h|s job?
Iron|ca||y, the more I scanned the news for per-
verse acts, the |ess d|d any act seem genu|ne|y perverse.
On one hand, I thought that th|s was because I was |ook-
|ng c|ose|y at every act, see|ng past any surface perver-
s|ty to g||mpse the frustrat|on, reck|essness, and some-
t|mes |one||ness beh|nd |t. On the other hand, I worr|ed
that I was becom|ng jaded. I have now spent years s|ft|ng
through th|rty sex cr|mes a day. After you've read about a
guy who wants to eat h|s own pen|s, you fee| ||ke you've
pretty much heard |t a||. How cou|d some mere exh|b|t|on-
|st seem perverted |n compar|son to a man who wants to
002 / Supervert Digital Edition Perversity Think Tank \ 003 Digital Edition
I consciously chose not to write
PervScan in the rst person.
There were two reasons: one was
to repudiate the diaristic tone
then typical of blogs, another was
to emphasize that the site was not
about an individual but about per-
verse acts. On occasion, however,
avoiding the rst person felt like
being bound to a chair with a gag
in my mouth. There were times
when some experience of my own
seemed relevant and I had to nd
roundabout ways of communi-
cating this. It was frustrating. I
would say to myself, Shit, what
if Descartes had set himself some
arbitrary rule like this? Hed have
never come up with cogito ergo
sum. Deep down that is very
much what I wanted to do: de-
rive a basic truth about the nature
of perversion, something as self-
evident as the cogito. (I think too
much, therefore I am perverse.)
To this end I spit out
my gag. The point is not to wow
you with outrageous examples of
depravity. The point is not to pen
a memoir, The Life and Loves of
an Information Age Rakehell. After
all, to understand perversion is to
01. I||ustrat|on, AmpuIee T/mes, Excerpt from Fet|sh Magaz|ne, 1970s.
Punks and bums were se|||ng d|sjecta on card tab|es ||n|ng the s|dewa|k.
Out of the corner of my eye I g||mpsed a head||ne: AmpuIee T/mes. What
the fuck? I stopped, pa|d ve bucks, and wandered away turn|ng the
pages of th|s |nsane pub||cat|on that appeared to date from the 1970s.
It was ||ed w|th poor|y scanned snapshots of amputees, nude mode|s
|ean|ng on crutches and try|ng artfu||y to h|de a |eg, reader-contr|buted
draw|ngs featur|ng hot amputee ch|cks |n w||d sexua| pos|t|ons. To me,
a|ready |ong |nterested |n sexua| dev|ance, th|s magaz|ne was a reve|a-
t|on. Apotemnoph|||a - who had heard of |t before the |nternet trans-
formed the |ex|con of k|nkery |nto common par|ance? What d|d |t mean
to be aroused by amputees? I cou|d see that |t was a strange var|ant
of the pr|nc|p|e that /ess /s more - |ess ||mbs, more appea|. I was not
sexua||y but conceptua||y exc|ted by |t. Th|s cheap|y produced maga-
z|ne punctured a ho|e |n norma||ty, and through th|s ho|e I cou|d g||mpse
an ent|re|y new rea|m of dev|ant behav|or. My thoughts poured |nto a||
the spaces where ||mbs used to be, and I rea||zed that these deform|t|es
of the esh demanded a correspond|ng deform|ty of thought - a new
way of th|nk|ng about des|re, beauty, p|easure.
bear in mind that most perverse
acts are relatively trivial, private
affairs committed for personal
pleasure. Ask yourself: What is
the most perverse thing you have
ever done? Most people who an-
swer that question honestly will
realize that their greatest triumph
in depravity amounts to little a
mnage trois, a one-night stand,
a drunken misadventure. Those
who take it to the next level
the creeps, the animal fuckers, the
violators of corpses may be a
little heroic in their recklessness.
But still, a sodomized dog
whats it worth? Whats it mean?
Not much. The Marquis de Sade
spent his life in prison less because
of his relatively petty sex crimes
than because of the monumental
crimes of thought that he com-
mitted in his writings.
What, then, is the
point? The point is to think about
perversity. Know thyself? Pervert
thyself. (Perversionism.) To be
is to be perverted. I pervert
therefore what? Pursue the sordid
vectors.
02. Ju||an Wasser, Marce/ Duchamp P/ay/ng Chess w/Ih a Naked Mode/
/n Ihe Pasadena ArI Museum, Photograph, 1963.
Th|s |s what |t |s ||ke to be a ph||osopher of pervers|on. My opponent |s
naked but I have on a su|t. (How can I th|nk |f I'm busy fuck|ng? I have
to keep my c|othes on, I de||berate|y have to upho|d the very th|ng that
troub|es so many other ph||osophers - the separat|on between body
and bra|n...| It's a game, sexua||ty fac|ng off w|th an art|c|a| restra|nt.
W||| I craft some endgame of understand|ng? W||| sexua||ty assert |ts
fundamenta| |rrat|ona||ty and tr|umph over my best attempts to com-
prehend? On the surface, |t's a r|gged match. L|ke reason, chess has
|ts ru|es. "Gosh," says sexua||ty, "you're sure to w|n. You're Duchamp
and I'm just a set of t|ts." Meanwh||e sexua||ty works around the ru|es,
ra|ses a foot under the tab|e, pushes |t |nto my crotch, d|stracts me,
|nv|tes me to |ose, offers me a reward for |os|ng. "Beat me," sex seems
to say, "and there won't be anyth|ng |n |t for you but the ster||e abstract
joy of a menta| v|ctory. Why don't you cap|tu|ate a|ready, dar||ng. I can
be very n|ce, you know, and I wou|d |ove to show you other games that
two can p|ay when one |s dressed and one |s not."
fry h|s gen|ta||a |n a pan?
I began to wonder not about th|s or that behav|or
but about pervers|ty as such. I had some rece|ved |dea
about what |t was - dev|ant sexua||ty, voyeur|sm, necro-
ph|||a - and th|s was enough to ma|nta|n the focus of the
s|te. However, |t was not enough to sat|sfy my des|re for
a more prec|se den|t|on of the subject. In the trad|t|ona|
formu|at|on, sexua| pervers|ty |s character|zed by |ts |ack
of reproduct|v|ty - sp|||ed seed, sodomy, "unnatura|" re-
|at|ons. But not every form of non-reproduct|ve sexua||ty
|s perverse, otherw|se |t wou|d be dev|ant to have hetero-
sexua| |ntercourse w|th a woman who has had her tubes
t|ed. I cou|d a|so conce|ve of severa| forms of reproduc-
t|ve sexua||ty that c|ear|y were perverse.
These |ncons|stenc|es made me suspect the tra-
d|t|ona| concept|on of pervers|ty. What's more, the spe-
c|ca||y sexua| concept|on seemed |napp||cab|e to other
sorts of pervers|ty. For examp|e, I happened to read a
ph||osopher who cr|t|c|zed another for "pervert|ng the
sense" of Kant. What does |t mean to pervert an |dea, and
|n what sense does th|s pervers|on compare to that of a
fet|sh|st who takes p|easure |n co||ect|ng the ur|ne from
a|rport to||ets? Does pervers|ty a|ways express |tse|f |n
d|fferent doma|ns (sexua|, ph||osoph|ca|, ex|stent|a|, po-
||t|ca||? If so, cou|d I poss|b|y d|vest pervers|ty of these
trapp|ngs to catch s|ght of |t as |t rea||y |s? "It was most
|mperat|ve to nd and to enjoy the metaphys|ca| fuck."
That's what I wanted - the metaphys|ca| fuck, pervers|ty
as |t |s, the very Form of deprav|ty.
Of course, there are d|ct|onary den|t|ons. Pervers|ty |s a
"de||berate and obst|nate des|re to behave |n a way that
|s contrary to norm or reason, often |n sp|te of conse-
quences." Pervers|on |s an "a|terat|on of someth|ng from
|ts or|g|na| course, mean|ng, or state." It |s poss|b|e to
d|fferent|ate between pervers|ty and pervers|on but at
root the two converge. They stem from the Lat|n perver-
sus, wh|ch means Iurned around. It's easy to see how
a concept|on of sexua| dev|ance der|ves from th|s. You
cou|d say that a foot fet|sh |s contrary to reason (|sn't any
fet|sh?| and that |t d|verts sexua| des|re from |ts or|g|na|
course, wh|ch |s reproduct|on or, at |east, gen|ta| |nter-
course - but then you're r|ght back where you started:
the trad|t|ona| concept|on of sexua| pervers|ty.
When you |ook c|ose|y at the matter, |t's not even
c|ear how pervers|ty d|ffers from the other words that
stem from the Lat|n verIere, to turn. To pervert |s to turn
around. To avert |s to turn away. To revert |s to turn back.
To d|vert |s to turn as|de. A|| of these |mp|y a hydrau||cs,
a ow be|ng steered th|s way and that. To pervert Kant |s
to gu|de a ow of memes |n a d|rect|on that betrays Kant
h|mse|f, wh||st to pervert sex |s to po|nt a ow of des|re
|n the d|rect|on of ster|||ty. "Sex |s a creat|ve ow, the ex-
crementory ow |s towards d|sso|ut|on, decreat|on. |n
the degraded human be|ng the deep |nst|ncts have gone
dead, and then the two ows become |dent|ca|. Th|s |s
the secret of rea||y vu|gar and of pornograph|ca| peop|e:
the sex ow and the excrement ow |s the same th|ng to
them. Then sex |s d|rt and d|rt |s sex." (D.H. Lawrence|
But th|s doesn't make for a very sat|sfactory de-
n|t|on of pervers|ty. On one hand, |t |eads r|ght back to
that trad|t|ona| concept|on aga|n: "pervers|ty |s non-re-
03. Sa|vador Da|, Young V/rg/n AuIo-Sodom/zed by Ihe Horns of Her
Own ChasI/Iy, Pa|nt|ng, 1954.
The p|cture rem|nds me of g|r|s I've known who, |n order to ma|nta|n
the|r "techn|ca| v|rg|n|ty," have been a|| too w||||ng to offer the|r mouths
and asses. When someone offers her ass to preserve her hymen, |s she
not auto-sodom|zed by her own chast|ty? Of course, you'd never come
up w|th th|s |nterpretat|on |f |t weren't for the t|t|e, wh|ch |s a work of
gen|us unto |tse|f. The p|cture draws the eye to the rectum, but the t|t|e
endows the gure w|th an agency, a respons|b|||ty for her own ana||ty.
If a t|t|e can serve to s|tuate an |mage |n th|s way, does the name of a
pervers|on serve the same funct|on |n regard to a behav|or? Uro|agn|a,
uro|agn|a. Do I have |t? Do I want |t? Does |t descr|be the way I fee|? Or
|s |t rather too one-d|mens|ona| to descr|be the subt|e ways |n wh|ch
ur|ne can c|rcu|ate |n the perveme? And what about the more abstract
terms? Pervers|ty, pervers|on, dev|ance, deprav|ty - I see that they're
a|| re|at|ona|. Turned around - |n reference to what? Abnorma| - |n
reference to what? What wou|d they mean |f the reference po|nts were
dropped, the coord|nate system fucked, the gr|d abandoned?
A PervScan reader (thanks,
Zombie) sent me a link for a site
whose shtick is to feature men
ejaculating directly into the eyes
of women, pink eye sluts. Hey
Jasmine, hold still youve got
something in your eye oh wait
its a great big steamy load of man
sauce. Pictures and videos show
men holding open womens eyes
with their ngers and ejaculating
directly onto the eyeball. The im-
plied act of blinding someone for
a mere moments pleasure would
be unsettling if it werent such a
patently made-for-porn gimmick.
Its real value is not to impart a sa-
distic charge but to create a bizarre
image to sell on the internet.
As a bizarre image, how-
ever, it is every bit as impactful
as the famous eyeball sliced by
a razor in the surrealist lm Un
Chien Andalou. You nd it fails to
arouse so much as startle you. Its
pornography fades and suddenly
you see, in the conjunction of
eyeball and seminal uid, an un-
intended allegory a symbol of
the ever-increasing visual import
of ejaculate. Not to say that se-
men has never had a visual signif-
icance. Herodotus once asserted
that Ethiopians had black se-
men, and then Aristotle refuted
the claim in De Generatione
Animalium. (Were experiments
performed?) There are facials in
Sade. Pretty face, he gasped,
pretty little whores face, how
Ill soak it in my fuck, by sweet
Jesus! And therewith the sluices
opened, the sperm ew out, and
the entirety of my sisters face,
especially her nose and mouth,
were covered with evidence of our
visitors libertinage. In another
passage a libertine speaks of the
oods of semen which salute my
performance.
Such salutations have
been dramatically elevated by
modern pornography. Never in
the history of fucking have the
facial and the creampie held such
positions of prominence. It used to
be that spilled seed symbolized
coitus interruptus, an attempt to
avoid pregnancy by pulling out.
Accordingly, since you couldnt
ejaculate in a girls vagina, the ex-
citing thing was to do it in her ass
or get her to swallow to bury
it deep inside her. And now? The
04. P/nk Eye S/uIs, Screen Grab from P|nkEyeS|uts.com, 2008.
To n|sh |n the eye of a s|ut |s ||ke forc|ng her to s|t too c|ose to a mov|e
screen. It doesn't b||nd her so much as |t a|ters her percept|on, magn|-
es and d|storts the th|ng seen. If the fac|a| |s an onto|og|ca| dec|ara-
t|on of the orgasm, ejacu|at|ng |n a s|ut's eye |s ||ke shout|ng |n her ear.
HERE IS MY ORGASM, BITCH. And yet shout|ng de||vers what the ear
expects (sound| at an |ntens|ty |t doesn't expect. To do th|s to the eye
wou|d be to subject |t to a br|ght wh|te ||ght. That |s not the m.o. of the
p|nk eye s|utme|ster. He |s try|ng to make the eye |nto someth|ng that |t
|s not. It ceases to be a receptac|e for ||ght and becomes one for sperm.
You wou|d th|nk th|s m|ght have a comp|ementary effect on the vag|na
- |f the eye |s to rece|ve sperm, perhaps the vag|na shou|d rece|ve ||ght.
You want order and ba|ance |n the un|verse? Then |f you're go|ng to cum
|n a s|ut's eye, you shou|d masturbate her w|th a ash||ght or ||t cand|e.
product|ve sexua||ty," b|ah b|ah b|ah. On the other hand,
|t doesn't |nd|cate what |s un|que about pervers|ty. When
the sex ow |s rerouted to the anus, why |s that cons|d-
ered a pervers|on and not a d|vers|on? Why d|dn't that
ph||osopher accuse h|s peer of "d|vert|ng the sense" of
Kant? He m|ght have c|a|med that Kant had been sub-
verted - ev|dent|y there |s some re|at|onsh|p between
pervers|on and subvers|on. But what d|fferent|ates them?
You don't say that the rebe|s sought to pervert the re|gn-
|ng government. You say they subverted |t. What's the d|f-
ference? What's un|que about pervers|ty?
In h|s "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexua||ty,"
Freud wr|tes that pervers|ons "are sexua| act|v|t|es wh|ch
e|ther (a| extend, |n an anatom|ca| sense, beyond the re-
g|ons of the body that are des|gned for sexua| un|on, or (b|
||nger over the |ntermed|ate re|at|ons to the sexua| object
wh|ch shou|d norma||y be traversed rap|d|y on the path
towards the sexua| a|m." In the rst case, to rub aga|nst
a foot |s to extend des|re toward seem|ng|y non-sexua|
body parts. In the second case, |t may be common to be
st|mu|ated by your |over's ve|our sweater - "the soft and
the b|ack and the ve|vety up t|ght aga|nst the s|de of me"
- but |t |s unusua| to get stuck there when you shou|d be
hurt||ng "towards the sexua| a|m." In short, the Freud|an
formu|a reduces to someth|ng ||ke th|s: |f the object |sn't
gen|ta| or |f the subject xates on forep|ay, then the act
|sn't qu|te norma|.
But what sort of den|t|on |s that? What |s a|| th|s
ta|k of body parts "des|gned for sexua| un|on" and ac-
t|v|t|es geared "towards the sexua| a|m?" Ev|dent|y the
body parts to wh|ch Freud refers are the gen|ta||a. But |n
what sense are they "des|gned" for sex? After a||, they
thing is to see it. Spew on face,
tits, ass, cunt. Sex has gone from
the deep end to the shallow. Its
a game of surfaces. (Pedophilia
too: the child has no curves, the
pedophile contents himself with
her surfaces, murmuring enco-
mia to the at chest.) Wimps buy
placebos to increase the volume
of their ejaculate not because
they want to be more fertile but
because they want to wow their
partner, make a better presenta-
tion, sport a ashier orgasm. Why
so image-conscious?
In pornography the
cum shot has a basic function.
It is an ontological declaration:
there, the orgasm exists, see it?
The point of spilled seed is not to
avoid reproduction but to enable
replication to enable the view-
er to replicate the sex depicted,
coordinate his orgasm with the
facial or creampie that culminates
the video. It is a weird mutual cli-
max that occurs not only between
people the viewer and the
porn stars but across time, the
viewer in the present and the stars
in the past. Whats more, the cum
shot has the effect of reducing
sex to masturbation. In the facial
and the creampie, it is typically
the man who nishes himself off,
jerks off onto face, crotch, ass,
eyeball. This enhances the view-
ers ability to identify with the
porn star: theyre both wankers.
If you say, Can I come on your
face? or if you try to come on my
face, Ill assume youve watched
a great deal of porn in your life.
(debauchette.wordpress.com)
But what is the function
of the cum shot outside pornog-
raphy? A man ejaculating has no
need for the ontological declara-
tion. His physical pleasure her-
alds the existence of his climax.
So why does he want to spew
in some girls face? To humiliate
her? Perhaps, but it is difcult to
believe that every facial aims at
degradation. More likely it is a
matter of coordinating different
perceptual systems so that orgasm
occurs not just in the pelvis but
in the eyes, taking up a greater
proportion of the available per-
ception. You can easily imagine a
man trying to cum, see his cum,
eat his cum, smell his cum, and
hear himself cumming all at the
05. Hans Ba|dung Gr|en, Phy///s and Ar/sIoI/e, Woodcut, 1513.
Wh|p |n hand, the courtesan Phy|||s r|des on the back of the ph||osopher
Ar|stot|e, who craw|s naked on a|| fours. The |||ustrat|on |s based on a
med|eva| |egend. Ar|stot|e had tr|ed to end Phy|||s' re|at|onsh|p w|th A|-
exander the Great. In revenge, Phy|||s |nve|g|ed the ph||osopher and, as
proof of h|s |ove, demanded that she be a||owed to r|de h|m ||ke a horse.
The |egend came to be seen as an a||egory of woman's dom|nat|on of
man - but |sn't there another, more subterranean |nterpretat|on? The
ph||osopher, of a|| peop|e, shou|d not put h|mse|f above sex. To the con-
trary, he shou|d put h|mse|f beneath |t. Get off your ass, th|nker, |est |t
be wh|pped. Take off your c|othes, craw| ||ke a dog, set as|de d|scourse
for bark|ng. Why not? If you set up ||m|ts about what |s or |sn't worth
contemp|at|on, how w||| you ever tru|y understand?
are equa||y des|gned for defecat|on. (Is |t any wonder
that |t's so easy to confuse the sex ow and the excre-
mentory ow?| Or to |ook at |t another way, what part of
the body /sn'I des|gned for sexua| un|on? Peop|e make
use of mouth, ngers, ass, feet, armp|ts. Just because
the mouth eats doesn't mean that |t |s not a sexua| or-
gan. The pen|s ur|nates and that doesn't detract from |ts
seem|ng|y ascendant ro|e as a sex organ. Isn't the ent|re
body des|gned for sexua| un|on?
And what prec|se|y |s that "a|m" toward wh|ch
sex |s supposed to proceed? P|easure? Orgasm? Repro-
duct|on? Freud's den|t|on |s just a restatement of the
trad|t|ona| concept|on aga|n. Ev|dent|y the quest|on of
pervers|on has a profound and ab|d|ng connect|on w|th
procreat|on. Acts deemed perverse are non-reproduc-
t|ve, though not a|| non-reproduct|ve acts are therefore
same time. Polysatiation.
In sexual perversity, se-
men thus attains a heightened
visual signicance not because
spilled seed is a diversion from
baby-making but because it is an
attempt to saturate the senses.
What the ejaculator forces on the
pink eye slut lling her eld
of vision with his pleasure is a
distorted mirror of what he does
to himself, trying to stuff himself
with his own orgasm. (Semen
and synesthesia: an orgasm ex-
perienced by senses incapable of
climax.)
In The World as Will and Rep-
resentation, Schopenhauer argues
that the dependence of reproduc-
tion on sex implies a metaphys-
ics of sexuality. The purpose of
sex, he thinks, is the constitution
of a new generation of beings. Ev-
erything that seems instinctual is
a matter of duping the individual
into propagating his species. Con-
versely, non-reproductive acts and
proclivities have the purpose of
preventing the individual from
perpetuating his presumably de-
fective characteristics. Better to
make some people gay, nature
perverse. (When a man marr|ed th|rty years has re|at|ons
w|th h|s post-menopausa| w|fe, |t |s as "norma|" as can
be.| But what |f there are reproduct|ve pervers|ons? Per-
vers|ons whose very pervers|ty |s enhanced |f not dened
by the|r reproduct|v|ty? Wou|dn't th|s ca|| that o|d con-
nect|on |nto quest|on?
thinks, than to allow them to have
weak or malformed children.
No doubt to modern
ears this sounds less like metaphys-
ics than eugenics. It is difcult to
read Schopenhauers analysis of
homosexuality without think-
ing that it is naive, based less on
empirical experience than on an
astonishment that the authors of
antiquity could have espoused it.
Nevertheless, if perversity is char-
acterized by its lack of reproduc-
tivity, then Schopenhauers posi-
tion follows as a matter of course.
If the purpose of normal sex is
reproduction, then is perversity
natures way of preventing perver-
sities from propagating?
By way of answer, it
seems sufcient to mention that
the Marquis de Sade an author
Schopenhauer apparently never
studied had three children.
None of them were known to har-
bor the deviant impulses of their
father, which leads to a weird hy-
pothesis: is it precisely perversity
that gives birth to normality, and
vice versa?
Does "prego porn" s|gna| the ex|stence of reproduct|ve
pervers|ons? A fr|end once confessed that he had mas-
turbated to |mages of pregnant women |n order to ha-
b|tuate h|mse|f to the prospect of h|s w|fe conce|v|ng.
He wanted to be a father, but he needed to reconc||e h|s
||b|do to the |nev|tab|e a|terat|on |n h|s w|fe's body. Ev|-
dent|y th|s was |ess a pervers|on on h|s part than an ex-
per|ment |n behav|ora| mod|cat|on, and yet someth|ng
about |t rang fundamenta||y true to me. That |s, the |m-
portant th|ng about prego porn |s not the thought of re-
product|on but the s|ght of the woman's body. When you
|ook at th|s sort of pornography, you get the sense that |t
cou|d just as we|| take p|ace |n suspended an|mat|on. No
v|ewer wou|d care |f the process of b|rth were to be fore-
sta||ed forever. The foca| po|nt |s not the prospect of the
baby but the transformat|on - the deformat|on - of the
woman's body. It resemb|es pornography featur|ng the
morb|d|y obese, dwarves, amputees. The keynote |s the
unusua|, the defam|||ar|zat|on of the fema|e form.
In 2002 a New Zea|and producer announced that
he was go|ng to make a pornograph|c |m whose |ead
actress, a K|w| named N|kk|, wou|d g|ve b|rth on camera.
U|t|mate|y the |m crew m|ssed the n|ghtt|me de||very
and the |m, R/pe, ended up w|th a computer-generated
an|mat|on |nstead of a ||ve-act|on b|rth. Neverthe|ess,
the restorm of controversy that erupted over the mere
|dea of "ch||db|rth porn" |mp||es that th|s was someth|ng
of a d|fferent order than prego porn. Fuck|ng a pregnant
woman |s ||ke fuck|ng a ster||e one: there |s no poss|b|||ty
of concept|on, and |n that sense the |ust for a pregnant
woman actua||y be|ongs to the trad|t|ona| concept|on of
sexua| pervers|ty. That's why prego porn |nsp|res ||tt|e
controversy. But to |ntroduce ch||db|rth |nto the p|cture
changes |t ent|re|y. Ch||db|rth porn not on|y dees nor-
06. R/pe, F||m St|||, 2002.
R/pe |s d|fcu|t to see - not because |t |s so graph|c but because |t |s
||tera||y nowhere to be found. The concept generated a p|ethora of con-
troversy but the |m |tse|f has gone m|ss|ng. Iron|ca||y, th|s m|rrors the
absence of the |m's centra| event: the b|rth of a ch||d, wh|ch ended up
e|ud|ng the camera crew. If you were myst|ca||y |nc||ned, you'd a|most
th|nk the |m was |||-fated. It wasn't meant to be. To keep ch||db|rth out
of pornography, God h|mse|f |ntervened. It's the |ast taboo... Or maybe
|t's just not that erot|c. In an age when peop|e eat sh|t and masturbate
w|th |nsects (|t's a|| on||ne, be||eve me, I've seen |t|, ch||db|rth may be
the one th|ng that ceases to get a r|se out of jaded ||b|dos. I wonder
|f there |sn't a deep-seated reason for th|s. The act of b|rth comp|etes
the evo|ut|onary |og|c of sexua||ty. It br|ngs sex to an end, so to speak.
To nd |t erot|c wou|d be ||ke deve|op|ng an appet|te for the food that
someone chews and sp|ts back out on a p|ate. It's de Irop. And yet
|n sp|te of th|s under|y|ng |og|c - or prec|se|y to sp|te th|s under|y|ng
|og|c - |t wou|dn't be surpr|s|ng |f, somewhere out |n the dev|ant w||ds,
a freak be||eves |n the aphrod|s|ac propert|es of pred|gested food and
p|easures h|mse|f to OB-GYN manua|s.
ma||ty, |t ca||s |nto quest|on the rece|ved |dea of perver-
s|ty by |nsert|ng reproduct|on |nto a p|ace where |t had
seemed |nconce|vab|e.
However |nconce|vab|e th|s may be to you or me,
|t was read||y |mag|nab|e to the Marqu|s de Sade. In 120
Days of Sodom, he descr|bes "a man whose man|a was
stra|ght|y connected w|th observ|ng a woman g|ve b|rth,
he wou|d fr|g h|mse|f when see|ng her |abor pa|ns beg|n,
and used to d|scharge square|y upon the |nfant's head
d|rect|y |t hove |nto v|ew." Now IhaI, w|th some conces-
s|on to the sad|st|c enjoyment the man exper|ences at
the woman's |abor pa|ns, |s a reproduct|ve pervers|on. It
depends on no exh|b|t|on of the fema|e form. It |s not a
var|ant of pedoph|||a, s|nce the foca| po|nt |s not the new-
born but the act|v|ty of ch||db|rth |tse|f. The key th|ng |s
the coord|nat|on of two s|mu|taneous processes: her pa|n
and h|s p|easure, her partur|t|on and h|s ejacu|at|on. You
can |mag|ne how d|sappo|nted th|s pervert wou|d be |f he
were unab|e to spew on the baby's head r|ght as |t ap-
peared. It wou|dn't sufce to jerk off on |t |n the |ncubator.
The |mportant th|ng |s the conjunct|on of b|rth and cum
shot, a we|rd mutua| c||max whose mutua||ty cons|sts not
|n a rec|proc|ty of parenta| joy but |n a synchron|c|ty of
norma||y unconnected events.
The synthet|c qua||ty of th|s "man|a" - |ts cou-
p||ng of p|easure and partur|t|on - ca||s |nto quest|on
that trad|t|ona| not|on of pervers|ty. How cou|d sexua|
pervers|ty be dened as non-procreat|ve screw|ng when
th|s part|cu|ar pervers|on takes ch||db|rth as |ts very de-
s|deratum? Reproduct|on |s |ts s|ne qua non. To remove
reproduct|on wou|d detach th|s Sadean k|nk from any ob-
ject whatsoever, ||ke remov|ng food from the act of eat-
In Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze
and Flix Guattari assert that in-
cest is impossible. Their idea is
that, in familial relationships, you
possess the appellations (mommy,
daddy, brother, daughter) but not
the corresponding bodies. Con-
versely, once you possess the bod-
ies, you no longer have the appel-
lations you look at the person
before you and rather than think
sister you think girl. The sociolog-
ical afliation disappears in favor
of a more fundamental rapport
between bodies. Consequently,
incest is impossible because its
excluded on both sides: there is
no sex in the familial relationship,
there is no family in the sexual
relationship. You can oscillate
between the two, ip from one
pole to the other like a whacked
compass, but you never really
conjoin them. A truly incestuous
desire would have to combine the
appellation and the body. I want
you not because youre a girl but
because youre my sister.
This is a provocative ar-
gument and may well character-
ize the mindset of many of those
who commit incest. A hillbilly
fucks his daughter for the same
reason he fucks a cow because
she happens to be there and the
other choices are few. In the hill-
billys own mind, there was no
incest because he did not fuck
his daughter in her capacity as
daughter. He simply availed him-
self of the only hot young body
in the neighborhood. However,
the daughter may not agree that
incest is so impossible. Was she
molested by an older man? Or by
her daddy?
I once had a girlfriend
who refused to let me give her
head. (I hope this does not upset
you. No one will know its you.)
Finally she consented and I found
myself between her legs. Her body
thrashed and twisted, but there
was something ambiguous, even
disturbing about her convulsions.
Were they pleasure? Or anguish?
I stopped and crawled up beside
her, only to see she was crying so
furiously that she was biting her
st in an effort to stie her sobs.
After a while she explained to me
that she had never allowed anyone
to do this because her father had
done it to her. In her mind, her
07. Serge & Char|otte Ga|nsbourg, Lemon lncesI, Mus|c V|deo St|||,
1984.
Arthur R|mbaud assoc|ated a co|or w|th every vowe|. What |f co|ors
were ass|gned to every sexua| pervers|on? Incest wou|d be a |emony
ye||ow |n honor of Ga|nsbourg [/e pre verI}. Pedoph|||a wou|d be a ||ght
p|nk, ||ke a ||tt|e g|r|'s pant|es, and pederasty per|w|nk|e. Coproph|||a
wou|d be brown, earthy, raw umber or thereabouts. Necroph|||a wou|d
be b|ack, the absence of co|or m|rror|ng the absence of ||fe. Pervers|on
|tse|f wou|d be the comb|nat|on of a|| these: a new wh|te that |s no |on-
ger a symbo| of pur|ty ||ke the br|da| gown but the most corrupt of co|-
ors, Supremat|st but dev|ant, wh|te on wh|te ||ke semen on pa|e sk|n.
father was tied to that particular
act. You know the old song My
Heart Belongs to Daddy? Here
it was not her heart but her cunt.
She had very much attached the
appellation to her body. For her
incest was not only possible, it
was possible even in the absence
of her father. (You fuck like my
dad.)
(Nobody may know its
me, but I resent it just the same.
When I told you about my father,
it was in a moment of intimacy.
I really liked you and I wanted
to explain why I was upset. Ive
spent most of my life trying not
let it affect me, but for you I made
myself talk about it. Do you think
that was easy for me? Youre a jerk.
But Id forgive you if you helped
me to understand. I really would
like to know why my father did
this to me, but I dont see how
this bullshit about appellations
helps me to understand. If what
you say cant help me understand
my father I dont think of him
as a pervert, but I guess incest is
perverted then how is it going
to help anyone understand per-
version?)
|ng. You'd end up w|th a mouth chew|ng a|r, a ||bert|ne try-
|ng to work up an erect|on over the prospect of noth|ng.
True, you cou|d make the argument that th|s act
rema|ns we|| w|th|n the trad|t|ona| concept|on of perver-
s|ty. The ejacu|ate that |ands on a newborn's head fa||s to
|mpregnate anyone. In that sense, th|s |s not a reproduc-
t|ve pervers|on, s|nce |ts pervers|ty may requ|re reproduc-
t|on but |t does not |tse|f resu|t |n reproduct|on. But Sade
has an answer for that too. He descr|bes a man who "has
four daughters, |eg|t|mate and wedded, he w|shes to fuck
a|| four: he makes a|| four of them conce|ve and bear ch||-
dren so as someday to have the p|easure of depuce|at|ng
the ch||dren he has had by h|s daughters and whom the|r
husbands suppose to be the|r own." Or there |s the man
"who fucked three ch||dren he had by h|s mother, amongst
whom there was a daughter whom he had marry h|s son,
so that |n fuck|ng her he fucked h|s s|ster, h|s daughter
and h|s daughter-|n-|aw, and thus he a|so constra|ned h|s
son to fuck h|s own s|ster and mother-|n-|aw." S|m||ar ex-
amp|es abound.
If a reproduct|ve pervers|on requ|res that seed not
be sp|||ed |n va|n - that a perverse act actua||y |ead to
generat|on - then th|s wou|d do the tr|ck. Not a|| |ncest
wou|d qua||fy, s|nce much of |t |s cond|t|oned by opportu-
n|ty. A man sees a young g|r|. He doesn't th|nk, DaughIer.
He th|nks, PreIIy. The sex cr|me that ensues has noth|ng
to do w|th reproduct|on and everyth|ng to do w|th the sat-
|sfact|on of a momentary urge. Sade, converse|y, ra|ses
|ncest to a h|gher power. It ceases to be the thought|ess
|nbreed|ng of h|||b||||es and becomes a de||berate perver-
s|on. A ||bert|ne doesn't mo|est h|s daughter because she
just happens to be there. A ||bert|ne mo|ests h|s daugh-
If you were to pen a treatise on
the literature of perversity, there
are obvious writers you would
discuss: Sade, Poe, Baudelaire,
Lautramont. And while all of
these writers deserve a place in the
canon of depravity, I think that
the most perverse book I have
ever read must be Ernest Hem-
ingways Islands in the Stream. It
contains no sexual deviance, un-
like another posthumously pub-
lished work, The Garden of Eden,
which explores an erotic triangle.
It contains no crazy catalogue of
bestial lusts such as you can nd
in the Marquis de Sade. Nominal-
ly it is just the story of a painter
who loses his children to random
accident and war.
However, if you look at
the book from the vantage point
of the creator, you cannot help
but think there is something sick
about it. The story amounts to a
literary licide in which Heming-
way envisions the death of each of
his sons. (Shades of Abraham and
Isaac?) Why any parent would
put himself through such an ex-
ercise is difcult to conceive. Did
it express some latent resentment
ter because he consc|ous|y wants to create a be|ng who
|s both h|s ch||d and h|s grandch||d - and st||| a future
sex object |tse|f. Then he mo|ests that daughter / grand-
daughter hybr|d to obta|n another new be|ng who |s ch||d,
grandch||d, great grandch||d - and st||| sex object. It's
|ncest |n the form of nested boxes, feedback, recurs|on.
And no doubt Sade wou|d a|so have der|ved a per-
verse p|easure from the thought that th|s conjunct|on of
reproduct|on and pervers|ty wou|d defy not on|y norma|-
|ty but norma||ty's concept|on of pervers|ty - for that |s
a|| the trad|t|ona| formu|at|on amounts to: pervers|ty seen
from the outs|de.
toward the boys? Did it represent
a resigned, melancholy attitude
toward the world, like a me-
mento mori reminding us that all
things, even the most cherished,
must die? Was it a bizarre exercise
in courage? You can imagine the
writer saying to himself: What is
the most awful thing in the world
that I can imagine? The death
of my children. Let me explore
this, then, like a man probing a
wound
There may be perver-
sions that take reproduction as
their object, but Islands in the
Stream describes an even weirder
conjunction of deviance and
breeding: it perverts the feelings
that reproduction engenders in
the reproducer. Parental solici-
tude turns against itself. A man
who is both father and writer uses
the one to present the other with
its worst nightmare. It must have
been terrifying to write. In a way
it even dwarfs the encyclopedia of
horrors that is 120 Days of Sodom.
After all, Sade had kids but only
imagined killing other peoples.
08. Recurs/ve lncesI, F|owchart.
Suppose a ch||d |s 50% daddy and 50% mommy. If daddy reproduces
w|th th|s ch||d A and produces another, then ch||d B |s 75% daddy and
25% grandma. If daddy reproduces w|th that ch||d, then ch||d C |s 87.5%
daddy and 12.5% great-grandma. And so on. It reca||s Zeno's famous
paradoxes of mot|on. The |ncestuous ||bert|ne approaches ever c|oser
to a reproduct|ve act whose resu|t |s a ch||d 100% h|mse|f, and yet that
u|t|mate po|nt |s a|ways deferred by |ncreas|ng|y sma|| percentages.
The ||bert|ne can never qu|te d|spense w|th the shred of genet|c mate-
r|a| that be|ongs to the materna| ||ne, and yet the fact rema|ns that, by
fuck|ng the offspr|ng of h|s own offspr|ng, he |s |nev|tab|y fuck|ng more
and more of h|mse|f. (So||ps|sm.|
Anyone read|ng Sade for the rst t|me m|ght be struck by
the juxtapos|t|on of ph||osophy and carna||ty. It seems |n-
congruous at rst: abstract d|scourse g|v|ng way to we|rd
fuck|ng, orgasm|c cr|es prepar|ng the way for specu|at|ve
argument. But Sade had a very good reason for juxta-
pos|ng the two. H|s ||bert|nes are not automata dr|ven by
abnorma| |usts that they scarce|y comprehend, ||ke dogs
hump|ng tab|e |egs. To the contrary, |t |s the |nte||ectua|-
|ty of these ||bert|nes that denes the|r |usts as perverse.
Sadean |ncest d|ffers from h|||b|||y |nbreed|ng because |t
|s ca|cu|ated, thought out, p|anned so far |n advance that
|t prepares today for a p|easure - depuce|at|ng a daugh-
ter / granddaughter hybr|d - that m|ght not occur unt||
fteen years hence.
And that, as Sade recogn|zed, |s one of the most
str|k|ng character|st|cs of pervers|ty: |t |s de||berate, se|f-
consc|ous, pe||uc|d. Its ha||mark |s |ess |ts ster|||ty than
|ts |ntent|ona||ty. L|bert|nes have to be smart, otherw|se
they're just "fuckers" ||ke the we||-endowed farm boys
that the ||bert|nes emp|oy at the|r org|es. Though these
s|mp|etons are usefu| for the|r brute phys|ca| qua||t|es,
they cannot part|c|pate |n ||bert|nage proper because
they aren't cerebra| enough. The ||bert|ne |s ab|e to reect
on h|s unwho|esome act|v|t|es. Se|f-awareness makes
h|s p|easures a|| the greater. "In order to comb|ne |ncest,
adu|tery, sodomy and sacr||ege, he embuggers h|s mar-
r|ed daughter w|th a Host." It's on|y one act - there |s not
even an orgasm, just a wafer stuck |nto an ass - but oh
how |t mu|t|p||es |n consc|ousness.
It |s the ev|dent |ack of such se|f-awareness that
underm|nes so many of the cases to appear on PervScan.
The brothers who raped the|r |nva||d mother on a bed
09. Nan Go|d|n, Nan and Br/an /n Bed, NYC, Photograph, 1983.
When |t |s a|| sa|d and done, |t's over. Out of m|nd. A part|cu|ar|y de||-
c|ous event m|ght ||nger, |eav|ng a sort of p|easantness, a t|ng|e, ||ke the
taste of ||pst|ck on the ||ps. But whatever |mage was |n my m|nd deates
||ke a burst ba||oon. Other th|ngs || |t up, take over the space. It's re-
a||y ||ke that. One m|nute, I ||tera||y have noth|ng |n m|nd but the |mage
that accompan|es me a|| the way to orgasm. The next m|nute, that |m-
age |s gone. The channe| has been changed. In |ts p|ace there are new
thoughts, perhaps new obsess|ons, rare|y sexua|, often ph||osoph|ca|.
That h|nts at the truth of Sade's a|ternat|ng moans and med|tat|ons:
when sex ceases to overcrowd the bra|n, |t has the room for specu|a-
t|on. (Burroughs: "Lee had d|scovered that he got h|s best |deas wh||e
|y|ng |n bed w|th a young boy after the fact. At rst he thought th|s was
co|nc|dence. God damn /I, every I/me l geI /deas for wr/I/ng, l am oc-
cup/ed w/Ih a boy. Or maybe /I's Ihe oIher way around... hmm. Wee/, l'm
/n Ihe r/ghI p/ace."}
covered w|th bugs and caca were found |ncompetent
to stand tr|a|. How cou|d they be capab|e of a tru|y per-
verse dec|s|on |f they cou|dn't even be he|d respons|b|e
for the|r act|ons? I cou|d not |mag|ne these c|ods theo-
r|z|ng about the nove| conjunct|on - an ug|y ama|gam
of |ncest, homosexua||ty, gerontoph|||a, and coproph|||a
- to be found |n the|r e|der abuse. Frank|y these guys
sounded ||ke menta| defects, and therefore the|r act|ons
seemed |ess perverse than |gnorant, |nfant||e, retarded,
someth|ng a|ong the ||nes of pub||c nose-p|ck|ng. When
the ||bert|nes |n Sade want to ph||osoph|ze, they tend to
d|sm|ss the fuckers from the room, and I wondered |f I
shou|dn't om|t such dopes from PervScan too.
But then how can you know what peop|e are
th|nk|ng? It |s except|ona| when a sex cr|me revea|s the
se|f-awareness that d|st|ngu|shes pervers|ty from reck-
|ess |mpu|se and an|ma| |nst|nct. For examp|e, the no-
tor|ous German cann|ba| Arm|n M|ewes s||ced off h|s
|over's pen|s, fr|ed |t, and shared |t w|th the v|ct|m. "We
had agreed to eat |t ha|f and ha|f," M|ewes to|d po||ce,
"but he was gett|ng fa|nt and cou|dn't wa|t for h|s ha|f
to be cooked through. So he tr|ed to eat |t more or |ess
raw and of course, |t was too tough. He was fur|ous." The
rea||y shock|ng th|ng was not th|s v|o|ent act per se -
sex cr|mes |nvo|v|ng cann|ba||sm are not espec|a||y rare
- but the cop|ous v|deo ev|dence that estab||shed the
v|ct|m's des|re for |t. "If I surv|ve unt|| the morn|ng," the
v|ct|m sa|d, "|et's have my test|c|es for breakfast."
Grok that. You can |mag|ne a few other scenar|os
|n wh|ch th|s cr|me cou|d have been comm|tted. The can-
n|ba| m|ght have k|dnapped the v|ct|m. Both guys m|ght
have been whacked out on drugs. They m|ght have been
You can translate Romans 7:15
a few different ways. New Inter-
national Version: I do not un-
derstand what I do. For what I
want to do I do not do, but what
I hate I do. King James Version:
For that which I do I allow not:
for what I would, that do I not;
but what I hate, that do I. New
Living Translation: I dont un-
derstand myself at all, for I really
want to do what is right, but I
dont do it. Instead, I do the very
thing I hate. Holman Christian
Standard Bible: For I do not
understand what I am doing, (A)
because I do not practice what I
want to do, (B) but I do what I
hate. You get the idea.
When I stumbled on the
verse, I thought it might present a
formula for perversity. It points to
that antagonism inherent in the
concept desiring something
that ought not be desired. If you
interpret this in the conventional
way, it is a conict between the
esh and the spirit. For the sin-
ful nature desires what is contrary
to the spirit, and the spirit what
is contrary to the sinful nature.
They are in conict with each
other, so that you do not do what
you want. (Galatians 5:17) If
you dont interpret it that way,
you end up with a self-referential
statement, one part of you oppos-
ing another. It verges on a para-
dox, a moral bastardization of
the Liar Paradox (I am lying)
I know better or I know
I shouldnt but I do it anyway.
In the Liar Paradox it is impos-
sible to say what is true and false,
and in this moral variant it is im-
possible to say what is good and
bad. You think you know what
they are, but your actions refute
your intentions, thus what you
thought was bad might really be
good, and yet if its good how can
you feel bad about it?
At the same time, though
Romans 7:15 does suggest the
antagonism interior to perversity,
something about it prevented me
from utilizing the verse as a for-
mula. For a while I couldnt quite
gure out what was wrong, what
was ill-suited to the concept, but
then nally I realized that its the
rst part of the verse the part
pointing not to antagonism but to
understanding. In the bible verse
perversity is uncomprehending,
unintentional, unaware. It fails
to grok itself. It follows a blind
impulse, the esh. You get the
impression the pervert is a driver
trapped in a runaway car, aware
that he is racing out of control
but unable to do anything about
it. Thats not really perverse. Per-
versity is conscious. The pervert is
a driver who, in full control of his
vehicle, decides to go the wrong
way down a one-way street. His
formula would remove the ne-
gations from the rst part of the
verse: I do not understand what I
do... For that which I do I allow
not... I dont understand myself...
I do not understand what I am
doing...
But I do it anyway.
Psychopathia Sexualis 2.0.
PervScan collects and categorizes
examples of deviant sexual behav-
ior. Most stories fall under head-
ings that would have been known
to Krafft-Ebing himself, but there
have been new phenomena, inno-
vations in depravity such as feed-
erism (in which a person fetishiz-
es and therefore encourages the
cert|ab|y |nsane. In rea||ty a computer programmer re-
sponded to cann|ba| persona|s that M|ewes - a gen|a|
guy, accord|ng to h|s ne|ghbors - had posted on the
|nternet. "I hope you'|| nd me tasty," the programmer
dec|ared. He knew exact|y what he was do|ng and that,
h|s |oquac|ty, |s the s|gn|cant th|ng. Cann|ba|s are not
unknown to psychopatho|ogy but peop|e who genu|ne|y
want to be eaten have never before announced them-
se|ves w|th such premed|tat|on and |ntent. The aston|sh-
|ng th|ng was not the v|o|ent act but the man|fest d|sp|ay
of se|f-awareness, the reve|at|on of a consc|ousness.
Here |s the very essence of pervers|ty - an |ncompre-
hens|b|e des|re, a des|re wrong by a thousand d|fferent
standards, c|ear|y art|cu|ated and fu||y rea||zed.
Th|s |s the paradox of pervers|ty, that |t |s |rra-
t|ona| but aware. "I dreamed my dream w|th open eyes,"
V|ncent Pr|ce, Edgar A//an Poe. The lmp of Ihe Perverse and OIher
Ta/es, A|bum Cover, 1974.
One n|ght I was on a date. It seemed to be |ead|ng |nev|tab|y toward a
bar. I had the |mpress|on that there was a|most an unspoken agreement,
a compact to get drunk - not because we wanted to besot ourse|ves,
exact|y, but because gett|ng drunk wou|d ensure that we wou|d ho|d
hands, k|ss, qu|te poss|b|y fuck. But why, I wondered, d|d th|s compact
have to beg|n w|th dr|nk? Cou|dn't we have agreed to bypass the bar,
acknow|edge our mutua| attract|on, proceed stra|ght to the good part?
Why d|d we need a|coho| to abso|ve us of respos|b|||ty for our des|res?
Why d|d we have to get out of our m|nds |n order to get |nto our bod|es?
Pervers|ty, I th|nk, |s the oppos|te. It beg|ns w|th |uc|d|ty. It doesn't act
on a des|re w|thout adm|tt|ng the des|re to |tse|f - and not just the de-
s|re, but the thousand reasons the des|re |s undes|rab|e. (It's wrong, |t's
bad, I shou|dn't do th|s...| Poe: "Exam|ne these and s|m||ar act|ons as we
w|||, we sha|| nd them resu|t|ng so|e|y from the sp|r|t of the Perverse.
We perpetrate them mere|y because we fee| that we shou|d not."
says Sever|n, the protagon|st of Venus /n Furs. However,
pervers|ty |s not |rrat|ona| |n an an|ma| sense. It |s not
|ncapab|e of reason, ||ke a bra|n that has not evo|ved far
enough to undertake the abstract|ons of mathemat|cs. It
|s not pre-rat|ona| but post-rat|ona|. Pervers|ty |s when
you understand the reasons for not do|ng a th|ng, then
you do |t anyway. In "The Imp of the Perverse," Edgar
A||an Poe wr|tes that through pervers|ty's "prompt|ngs
we act w|thout comprehens|b|e object, or, |f th|s sha|| be
understood as a contrad|ct|on |n terms, we may so far
mod|fy the propos|t|on as to say, that through |ts prompt-
|ngs we act, for the reason that we shou|d not." It fo||ows
that pervers|ty cannot occur |n |gnorance. It |s, we|rd|y, a
by-product of the |nte||ect. It happens not when you do
wrong, but when you do wrong know|ng fu|| we|| that |t's
wrong.
morbid obesity of his partner).
Technology has given rise to psy-
chopathic variations such as video
voyeurism and ash mob rape. In
fact, the wild proliferation of in-
ternet pornography has resulted
in a market-driven taxonomy of
sexual desires. Look at the menu
of any porn search engine. Every-
thing is neatly codied: Amateur,
Anal, Asian...
This is where feedback
occurs, where the perv and per-
vologist join hands in a dance
around the re. The perv does
stuff, the pervologist categorizes
it, and then the categories become
temptations, lifestyle choices,
possibilities for pleasure. This is
where behavior ceases to be igno-
rant opportunism and becomes
conscious decision-making, i.e.
perversion good and proper.
Rather than screw a dog because
it happens to be there, the perv
reasons that bestiality might pro-
vide a frisson he is no longer able
to obtain in coprophilia or incest.
Bored at home? Crack open your
Krafft-Ebing (K-E deliberately
tried to lock out the curious perv:
A scientic title has been cho-
(Th|s perta|ns not just to sexua| pervers|ty but to
pervers|ty as such. Remember the ph||osopher who "per-
verted the sense" of Kant? To corrupt Kant requ|res on|y
that you m|sconstrue h|m, but to pervert Kant requ|res
that you m|sconstrue h|m on purpose.|
The m|croana|ys|s of a perverse dec|s|on wou|d
thus revea| a certa|n pattern. A perverse dec|s|on beg|ns
as a reasoned one. Some c|rcumstance or cho|ce pres-
ents |tse|f. You do not greet |t w|th a knee-jerk react|on.
You do not |eap before you |ook. You do not dec|de w|th
your heart. Pervers|ty can never be |mpu|s|ve. Instead,
you cons|der. You reect. You th|nk. You str|ve to under-
stand the pro and the con, the for and aga|nst. Menta||y
you compose a ||st of reasons, and h|therto your behav-
|or has been |nd|st|ngu|shab|e from rat|ona| behav|or. But
then someth|ng happens. A mutat|on occurs |n the pro-
sen, and technical terms are used
throughout the book in order to
exclude the lay reader. For the
same reason certain portions are
written in Latin.) or browse
the fetish category at PervScan.
Maybe youll nd a way to amuse
yourself that is not just depraved
but new.
Everyone had left their coats in
a bedroom. I went to get mine
with a girl I did not yet know
very well. Finding ourselves
alone, we joked about what oth-
ers must have thought we were
doing in the bedroom. Some-
how this led me to ask her how
she had lost her virginity. I was
raped in Central Park, she said,
simultaneously meaning what she
said but self-conscious about not
wanting to destroy the otherwise
lighthearted tone of the conver-
sation. Oh shit, I said, Im
sorry. Later, as I got to know
her better, she recounted the ugly
details. When she made it home,
her mother found autumn leaves
in her underwear.
Eight or ten times in my
life girls have told me about being
11. Chr|st|an Schad, AI Pre Lacha/se, Draw|ng, 1930.
The |ntent|ona||ty of the pervert |s nowhere more apparent than |n per-
vers|ons where the des|deratum |acks consc|ousness. The somnoph||e
|s drawn to the d|m|n|shed awareness of the s|eeper. The necroph||e |s
drawn not just to the death but to the bra|n death of the corpse. Objec-
t|on: what |f the necroph||e ta|ks to the body wh||e he mo|ests |t? If he
says "you're beaut|fu|" or "sweetheart, you st|nk" to the cadaver, does
that |mp|y a repud|at|on of the very th|ng to wh|ch he |s seem|ng|y at-
tracted - |.e. |ts deadness? Perhaps, and yet |t cou|d a|so re|nforce th|s
deadness by emphas|z|ng the th|ng's |nab|||ty to respond. Or then aga|n
the pervert m|ght just ||ke to hear h|mse|f ta|k. Why not? In consc|ous-
ness, the necroph||e |s a r|ch man wast|ng a few do||ars he can eas||y
afford to |ose. When he says "sweetheart, you st|nk," he rea||y means,
"Yes, my k|nk |s not just to be w|th a dead body but to enjoy an exc|us|v-
|ty of |ntent|on. Consc|ousness here |s m|ne or |t |s not at a||..."
cess. Th|s |s the p|vota| moment where rat|ona||ty meta-
morphoses |nto pervers|ty. Your m|nd has ascerta|ned
the r|ght course of act|on, but your w||| refuses to g|ve |ts
assent.
Why?
It |s a tru|sm of ph||osophy that the w||| fo||ows the
reason. You see what's r|ght and you do |t. Th|s |s P|ato's
theory that goodness |s truth, and v|rtue w|sdom. A man
wou|d not know|ng|y choose what's wrong, the theory
goes, un|ess he |s |gnorant of the reasons that make |t
wrong. Immora| behav|or |s rea||y |gnorant behav|or, and
therefore mora||ty |s reduc|b|e to ep|stemo|ogy, to know|-
edge. But |n pervers|ty, |t's the oppos|te. Know|edge |s re-
duced to |mmora||ty. You know what's wrong and you do
|t. The w||| no |onger tags a|ong beh|nd the understand|ng
||ke a good puppy. In pervers|ty, a stubborn w||| drags an
aston|shed |nte||ect on a quest |t rea||zes |t shou|d not
undertake.
Baude|a|re had a formu|a for th|s: /a consc/ence
dans /e ma/. You can trans|ate |t ha|f a dozen ways: con-
sc|ousness |n ev||, consc|ence |n error, cogn|zance |n
s|ckness or even s|n. It |mp||es a reect|ve approach to-
ward tw|sted |mpu|ses, a |uc|d b|ackness, the se|f-scrut|-
ny of the damned (or rather, of those determ|ned to damn
themse|ves|. And that, better than any |ack of reproduc-
t|v|ty, |s what I cons|der to be a ne work|ng den|t|on of
pervers|ty.
raped, molested, abused. It always
puts me into a psychologically
difcult position. I dont con-
done rape. When someone tells
you about it, you feel protective.
Youd gladly kick somebodys ass
on her behalf. At the same time,
though, in the back of your mind
you know that you feel more than
a little empathy for the rapist.
Youre a man. You comprehend
the urge. (Using a power drill is
so macho that I can almost un-
derstand how psychopaths end
up killing chicks that way. It
combines the machismo of tools
with the joy of rape.) Frankly it
seems rather natural. Animals do
it. Evolutionary biologists have
pointed out that natural selection
provides an obvious impetus for
it, insofar as rape improves the
rapists chances for reproductive
success. That my friend was raped
in Central Park was symbolic: in
the greatest swath of grass and
trees in New York, she was subject
to the Darwinism of her attack-
ers.
A rapist is someone who
reverts to animal behavior. With-
out consciousness, men would
rape all the time. (Without con-
sciousness, women might not be
so shattered by it.) This is where
consciousness becomes con-
science. When men dont commit
rape, its not because they dont
want to. Its because they recog-
nize what an awful thing it is to
do to somebody. There were the
two teenagers who sexually as-
saulted a mentally challenged
neighbor. One of the assailants
gave as his excuse, I wasnt think-
ing. Exactly. Their thoughtless-
ness mirrored the retardation of
the victim.
In rape, consciousness is
not what foments but what pre-
vents. For this reason, it is rarely
perverse. Rape may parallel per-
versity in certain qualities so-
lipsism, gratuitousness but it is
not sufciently intentional. (You
can practically make a syllogism
out of it: if rape is a natural be-
havior, and if perversity is against
nature, then perversity is against
rape.) The complication, howev-
er, is that perversion may utilize
rape to achieve its nefarious aims.
The pervert does not set out to
rape but to commit a perverse act.
12. ChaIeau of Ihe Marqu/s de Sade aI La CosIe, Photograph, 1987.
La Coste |s on|y a short dr|ve from Ar|es. (Imag|ne Sade sta|k|ng through
Van Gogh's |andscapes.| Today the chateau |s a ru|n, a few e|dstone
wa||s and ramparts that test|fy to the destruct|ve forces of nature Sade
knew how to apprec|ate. "Nature needs v|rtuous acts, and v|c|ous ones
too, I serve Nature as we|| by perform|ng the one as when I comm|t
the other." For Sade, the pervert was not "aga|nst nature" but rather
an extens|on of naIura naIurans. "Th|s ||bert|ne wou|d prev|ous|y a||ow
a cand|e to burn out |n a woman's anus, today, he attaches her to a
||ghtn|ng rod dur|ng a thunderstorm and awa|ts a fortu|tous stroke." Far
from sett|ng up the typ|ca| ana|ogy - norma| |s to natura| as perverse |s
to unnatura| - Sade's |nterest was to ann|h||ate the d|st|nct|on between
the norma| and the perverse, and "nature" |s what he ca||ed th|s state
of unregu|ated behav|or.
If the world were as pliant as the
characters in his conceptualiza-
tion of the act if the stranger
wanted her foot licked, or if the
little girl wanted to go for a ride
in his car rape would be su-
peruous and the pervert would
busy himself with the satisfaction
of his distorted lusts. But if he en-
counters unexpected resistance,
force becomes a necessary means
to an end. Its not that the pervert
particularly wants to rape some-
one, its just that he needs rape to
eliminate the inconsistencies in
his perveme.
In his essay Sexual Perver-
sion, Thomas Nagel drawing
on Jean-Paul Sartres discussion
of sadism and masochism in Be-
ing and Nothingness proposes
a model of normal sexuality
that depends on a reciprocity of
perceptions and mutuality of
sexual feelings. Sex, he writes,
involves a desire that ones part-
ner be aroused by the recognition
of ones desire that he or she be
aroused. Essentially it is a phe-
nomenological formulation of the
common belief that a relationship
requires good communication,
La consc/ence dans /e ma/ - |f a we|rd |uc|d|ty makes
up the rst ha|f of the formu|a, then what makes up the
second? Qu'esI-ce que c'esI, ce ma/? Why |s pervers|ty
ma|evo|ent? Bad? S|ck? Wrong? Immora|? Th|s |s a very
comp||cated quest|on. Set |t as|de for a m|nute and rec-
ogn|ze one th|ng: there |s a|ways an adversar|a| aspect to
pervers|ty. In th|s |t |s not a|one. To rebe| |s to go aga|nst
author|ty. To b|aspheme |s to take a|m at the sacred. To
pervert |s to p|t onese|f aga|nst - we||, aga|nst what?
Norma||ty? Trad|t|on? Expectat|on? Aga|nst nature, ||ke
the trans|ated t|t|e of the Huysmans book? Sufce to say
for the moment that pervers|ty a|ways |es |n the face
of someth|ng - someth|ng that, |n react|on, attr|butes a
negat|ve va|ue to |t. Pervers|ty knows |n advance that |t
w||| rece|ve th|s |nfamy for |ts efforts, and that |s how |t
conjo|ns awareness w|th ev||.
And yet th|s po|nts to another paradox. Con-
sc|ousness |s |nd|v|dua|. Ev||, however, |mp||es standards,
pr|nc|p|es, codes of behav|or - and therefore ev|| po|nts
to an outs|de, to other peop|e, to the wor|d. La consc/ence
dans /e ma/ |s another way of say|ng the |nd|v|dua| |n so-
c|ety. In pervers|ty the |nd|v|dua| |s aware that soc|ety
th|nks he's |n the wrong. But he doesn't care or, more
probab|y, he ||kes the fact that he's |n the wrong. Why?
Because be|ng |n the wrong does not prevent h|m from
do|ng what he does. To the contrary, |t enab|es h|m to
assert h|mse|f at the expense of everyth|ng and everyone
who wou|d deny h|m. It adds a power rush to the other
|ntens|t|es of h|s pervers|on. The pervert |ns|sts that the
sat|sfact|on of h|s des|re supersedes a|| soc|ety's ru|es
and regu|at|ons. The war cry of pervers|ty |s my k/nk ber
a//es.
more signal than noise.
If that is the case, then
relations in which there are noise,
interference, and distorting
inuences are defective and
perverse. Nagel: if humans will
tend to develop some version of
reciprocal interpersonal sexual
awareness unless prevented, then
cases of blockage can be called
unnatural or perverted. Follow-
ing Sartre, Nagel gives sadism and
masochism as examples of block-
age. Consider the old joke: a mas-
ochist says hurt me and the sa-
dist replies no. The sadist does
not want the masochist to agree
with him. He recognizes that
reciprocity would undermine his
kick. Bondage, blindfolds, and
masks are a practical analogue
of a conceptual requirement.
Without blockage sadism is no
longer sadistic, its just S&M, a
parlor game played by consenting
adults.
There are obvious ob-
jections to Nagels model of sex-
ual perversity. It acknowledges
clogged relations a bored cou-
ple, only able to fuck while they
dream of other people, things,
Cons|der the narrow|ng of perspect|ve that oc-
curs |n a "norma|" sexua| act. Des|re gets sucked |nto a
wh|r|poo|. It focuses more and more |ntent|y on |ts object.
F|esh |ooms |arge |n consc|ousness, ||ke the screen of
a mov|e theater when you s|t too c|ose. As c||max ap-
proaches, the wor|d drops away, d|sappears, ceases to
ex|st. A nuc|ear ho|ocaust wou|d fa|| to d|srupt the growth
of a t|ny po|nt of hot hot heat |ns|de you. And then boomI
your head exp|odes, your consc|ousness d|sappears
a|ong w|th the wor|d, there |s no more subject than there
|s object, waves of |ntens|ty wash over you and through
you, p|easure reduces you to qu|ver|ng je||y. And then
|t subs|des, your bra|n boots back up, the wor|d starts
to reappear - you not|ce the curta|ns sway|ng, you hear
sounds |n another room, you th|nk of some mundane task
or appo|ntment, you rea||ze you have to pee.
stimulants that are defective
but not perverse, but fails to ex-
plain just what distinguishes the
two. It also founders on homosex-
uality, which Nagel feels obliged
to consider normal. In homosex-
uality, he writes, nothing rules
out the full range of interpersonal
perceptions between persons of
the same sex For these reasons
it seems to be doubtful that ho-
mosexuality must be a perversion,
though like heterosexuality it has
perverted forms. If a good sig-
nal can normalize a homosexual
relationship, it is difcult to see
how it fails to normalize other re-
lationships traditionally dubbed
perverse. Is it really impossible
for an eleven-year-old girl and a
forty-year-old man to develop a
full range of interpersonal per-
ceptions?
If anything prevents
reciprocity, it is a more funda-
mental lack of parity. Homosexu-
ality is not perverse because two
adults have the equality to engage
in a reciprocal relation. But what
parity can exist between an adult
pedophile and a child? Children
may have sexual curiosity and
13. POV Porn, Screen Grab from POVPorn.com, 2007.
POV porn offers c|nemat|c ana|ogues of the narrow|ng of perspect|ve
that occurs |n sex. The c|ose-up s|mu|ates the way that esh |ooms
|arge |n consc|ousness, ||ke the screen of a mov|e theater when you s|t
too c|ose. The focus on the cum shot causes the wor|d to drop away,
d|sappear, cease to ex|st, and thus POV porn a|so h|nts at the so||ps|sm
that |s |nherent |n the perverse act. For the perverse act |s a|ways POV
pervers|on - w|th the qua||cat|on that the |mportant th|ng |s a|ways
the po|nt of v|ew of me, not you. (For a|| the exp||c|tness of deta|| - the
||ps spread, the ass opened, the semen exh|b|ted - the one th|ng the
cameraman never shows |s h|s own countenance. L|ke God, he turns
h|s face away.|
they may play games that mim-
ic the erotic behavior of adults.
But these games are just that
games. Like toys, they serve
to initiate the child in the prac-
tices of the world that awaits him.
Plastic tools teach a boy how to
wield a hammer, dolls teach a girl
how to hold a baby, and playing
doctor teaches them both how
to touch each other. (And thats
inter pares, among equals.) But
when an adult takes advantage of
the sexual curiosity of children,
it violates the principle of parity.
Its as though a child offers you a
pretend dessert, an empty plastic
plate that he says is full of cake,
and you go after it with a real
fork. Such is pedophilia: to a toy
curiosity you bring a real hunger.
Consequently, there is
an inverse ratio between the dirty
old man and innocent young girl:
the younger the girl, the dirtier
the man. As the girl regresses in
her ability to communicate, the
sexual interest of the man increas-
es in perversity. It is dirty to lust
after an adolescent, unconscio-
nable to have the hots for a ve-
year-old, unspeakable to fantasize
about babies. And if this is true, if
a desire increases in perversity as
it decreases in commensurability,
then perversity is mathematically
correlated to solipsism. To say
that it is a defective relationship
with another person is to say that,
even in the presence of others,
perversity is above all a relation-
ship with oneself.
Sex often implies a strong sense
of place: the bedroom, the home,
the back seat of a car. People like to
repudiate this to spice things up,
take their desires somewhere new,
do it in a park or a movie theater.
A girlfriend once had a contest
with her gal pals. They wanted
to see who could have sex in the
weirdest place. My girlfriend won
when she managed to do it in a
hearse. Personally I thought it was
silly same act, different place.
More interesting is to perform a
different act in the same place.
This requires creativity, innova-
tion, a mental exertion on be-
half of a libidinal excitement. Its
what Sades libertines do. They
conne themselves to physical
strongholds remote chateaux,
14. Ren Magr|tte, Les AmanIs, Pa|nt|ng, 1928.
A man |n a su|t k|sses a n|ce|y dressed woman. It wou|d be the very |m-
age of norma||ty |f the|r heads weren't wrapped |n sheets. Superc|a||y
the pa|nt|ng neat|y |||ustrates Thomas Nage|'s not|on of the b|ockage
that occurs |n both defect|ve and perverse re|at|onsh|ps. But wh|ch |s
th|s hooded k|ss - mere|y defect|ve or fu||y perverse? It |s d|fcu|t to
say. I once was |nvo|ved w|th a g|r| who wou|d s|eep w|th me but not
k|ss me. In the m|dst of that re|at|onsh|p, I s|ept w|th someone e|se.
Pro|ong|ng the rst g|r|'s qu|rk, I s|ept w|th the |atter but, on a wh|m,
refused to |et her k|ss me. (Yes, now you know why.| What the rst d|d
to me was, |n Nage|'s terms, mere|y defect|ve. It was not perverse but
rather expressed a certa|n |ssue that she had. (Don't worry, I won't te||
what.| What I d|d to the second was perverse. I had no part|cu|ar reason
for do|ng |t. It was |ntent|ona|, gratu|tous, crue|, p|easurab|e for me but
not for her, a de||berate |nsert|on of b|ockage |nto the act, ||ke wrapp|ng
her head |n a sheet.
Now trans|ate th|s |nto pervers|ty. The process
of |ntens|cat|on |s the same but th|s t|me w|th an edge.
Every |ncrease |n focus |s a new fuck you to the rest of
the wor|d. The pervert wou|d mortgage humank|nd for h|s
k|nk. He wou|d cause unto|d gr|ef to parents, to fam||y,
to fr|ends, |n order to spend ten m|nutes mo|est|ng an
ado|escent. Why? Not because he wants to subvert the
nuc|ear fam||y or underm|ne the status quo. Rather, he
has a thought |n h|s head, an |de xe: I w||| be happy |n
th|s forb|dden embrace. He does not rape or seduce so
much as he pursues th|s menta| |mage. H|s |nteract|ons
w|th the wor|d are the by-products of a se|f-|nvo|vement.
"Lo||ta had been safe|y so||ps|zed."
There was the man who ||ked to h|de |n pub||c
restrooms. He wou|d shut off the water to the ch||d-|ev-
e| ur|na| and p|ace a cup |n |ts dra|n. After a young boy
secured villas, dungeons, crypts
in order to pressure-cook their
imaginations.
Roland Barthes wrote
that the obvious function of these
strongholds is to isolate, to shel-
ter vice from the worlds punitive
attempts. If you were to write
an architectural survey of sexual
perversity, you would nd a pre-
ponderance of such spaces: the al-
leys, backstreets and empty park-
ing lots haunted by rapists; the
cellars and basements in which
children are molested (sometimes
the abuser even digs a dungeon);
the barns and pastures of bestial-
ists; the graveyards and mortuar-
ies of necrophiles; cheap hotel
rooms, where anonymity creates
isolation; the bathroom, whose
isolation is a function not of re-
moteness or anonymity but of a
perceived impurity odor and
lth.
These spaces puncture
little holes in normality, they
create vacuums in which the
pervert is free to act out his im-
pulses. They are physical spaces
that open up conceptual possi-
bilities. Sade: Ah, it is not read-
15. Man Ray, lmag/nary PorIra/I of Ihe Marqu/s de Sade, Pa|nt|ng, 1938.
Man Ray dep|cts a Sade who |s made of masonry. H|s esh has been
rep|aced by b|ocks of stone, and he xes a stony gaze on the cast|e |n
the d|stance. Man Ray knows what Sade |s th|nk|ng: a concrete zone
of pervers|ty |s the rea||zat|on of a conceptua| one. The cast|e w||| be
subject to a becom|ng-Sade that popu|ates |t w|th ||||c|t p|easures, but
on|y because Sade h|mse|f |s a|ready caught up |n a becom|ng-cast|e
that |nsu|ates h|s des|res (and thereby a||ows them to mutate |n the dark
|so|at|on of h|s |mag|nat|on|.
wou|d ur|nate, the man wou|d emerge from h|d|ng and
dr|nk the boy's ur|ne from the cup. "I ||ke |t," he exp|a|ned,
"because |t makes me c|oser to them, ||ke I'm dr|nk|ng
the|r youth." The d|sconnect between menta| |mage (get-
t|ng c|oser to boys| and rea||ty (d|stance from those same
boys| cou|d not be more pronounced. There are obv|ous
ways to commune w|th ch||dren: be a cub scout |eader,
coach a ||tt|e |eague team, have some k|ds of your own.
To dr|nk the|r excreta cou|d on|y repu|se the very boys
the man wou|d ||ke to get c|ose to. It's a v|c|ous c|rc|e,
a recurs|ve k|nk: the man |ngests waste products, th|s
phys|ca| prox|m|ty creates a persona| d|stance, the d|s-
tance feeds the des|re for prox|m|ty, the man |ngests
more waste products. The more he dr|nks, the further
away he gets. He |mp|odes |n h|s pervers|on, fa||s through
a trap door |n h|s own m|nd, nds h|mse|f try|ng to get
c|oser to peop|e by h|d|ng |n a to||et sta||.
(I'm not sure you understand. I do not want the
fratern|ty w|th these boys that one can obta|n from sw|m-
m|ng |essons or church groups. I do not want to mentor
youths. I don't want to he|p them become ||tt|e adu|ts.
I don't want to change them, I want to cher|sh them as
they are. When I dr|nk boys' ur|ne, when I take th|s |nto
myse|f and make |t a part of me, |t's ||ke an embrace. I
so revere these boys that the|r very waste |s dear to me
and, |n dr|nk|ng |t, I exper|ence a profound, encompass-
|ng fee||ng, a rea| |ove.|
The |rony |s that the pervert |eaves the wor|d un-
touched, unharmed. Usua||y nobody |s even aware of h|s
act of k|nkery. The pervert tends to p|ay out h|s drama
|n pr|vate or |n secret - |n a to||et sta||. The rebe| tr|es
to change soc|ety, the heret|c wants to dethrone God,
ily to be imagined how much
voluptuousness, lust, erce joy
are attered by those sureties, or
what is meant when one is able to
say to oneself: I am alone here, I
am at the worlds end, withheld
from every gaze, here no one can
reach me, there is no creature that
can come nigh where I am; no
limits, hence, no barriers; I am
free. Physical barriers remove
psychological inhibitions. A con-
crete zone of perversity is the re-
alization of a conceptual one. The
castles and dungeons of Sade are
idealized places, the dream hous-
es of solipsism, and the dening
thing for the pervert is the space
he carries around inside him, the
concentration camp of his own
pleasures.
(The girlfriend replies:
No, no, you just dont under-
stand. Thats what it is like for you
you with your love of interior
spaces, your distaste for plein air
fucking. For me, the hearse was
something else. It was a matter of
expanding and conquering space,
like a colonist. When I think of
a few drops of cum, the wetness
from my vagina, the imprint of
sweat that my ass left on the oor,
I think of a dog marking his ter-
ritory with piss. I occupied the
hearse the way an army occupies
a village. I transformed a death
place into a sex place. Now are
you going to tell me that that is
just another form of solipsism?)
You know how the Bible has
those weird chapters listing gen-
erations, so-and-so begat so-and-
so and so on? One day some devi-
ant genealogist will chronicle the
generations of porn too. Ancient
Greek vase painters begat Victo-
rian postcard photographers, and
these begat Hugh Hefner, and
Hugh Hefner begat net porn,
amen. Somewhere in there it was
a golden age of pornography that
begat me too. One of my earli-
est memories is the Watergate
scandal. Another is Penthouse
magazine. Thanks to the former,
I possess a complete cynicism as
regards politics. Thanks to the
latter, I have never not known
what a vagina looks like.
For this reason, I was
always fascinated by the way that
the previous generations pornog-
but the pervert mere|y wants to except h|mse|f from the
norm. To subvert an author|ty |s to do |t for everybody,
but to pervert a norm |s to do |t just for yourse|f. An act
of b|zarro sex affects ||tt|e, |eaves the norm unchanged.
In fact, norma||ty - whatever |t |s - has a tremendous
to|erance for |nd|v|dua| acts of pervers|ty. It |s the pervert
who |s |nto|erant of norma||ty.
16. Chr|stopher Woo|, Ho/e /n Your Fuck/n Head [W31}, Pa|nt|ng, 1992.
I was read|ng about a neuro|og|ca| d|sorder ca||ed s/mu/Ianagnos/a.
Those af|cted can recogn|ze objects |n the|r v|sua| e|d but on|y one at
a t|me - ||tera||y they can make out th|s or that tree but not the forest.
It struck me that a perverse des|re causes a s|m||ar |mpa|rment. When I
exper|ence a strange |ust, |t's ||ke bra|n damage. My head |sn't work|ng
r|ght. Some |dea has swo||en up |ns|de |t ||ke a tumor. Any other |nput
- a d|stract|on, an |nterrupt|on, a phone ca|| - on|y |rr|tates the tumor.
I cou|d |ash out, hurt someone, because my so|e des|re |s to be a|one
w|th th|s cancer. Even |f other peop|e are necessary to sat|sfy whatever
my urge |s, I'm st||| a|one w|th the th|ng |n my head. Others are just frag-
ments of a perveme, actors |n my drama. They may be work|ng |ns|de
my th|ng but the th|ng |tse|f |s |ns|de me. I've got to get |t out, |ance |t
||ke a bo||. And once I do, there |s a ho|e |n my head, an empt|ness. The
wor|d dra|ns back |n - a bott|e of water, a car a|arm, a fa|nt sme|| of
dead owers. These are s|gns of recuperat|on, a new|y ach|eved ho-
meostas|s, and I regard them w|th a modest |nterest, ||ke a man try|ng
out cornea |mp|ants.
raphy mens mags, lurid detec-
tive stories with buxom damsels
in distress, swimsuit pictorials,
Marilyn Monroes calendar
would obscure the good parts.
An arm would be in the way of
a nipple, a sheet would artfully
conceal any suggestion of pubic
hair, little black bars would block
out obvious erogenous zones. Be-
hold a full-frontal nude but
shes been vandalized by some Su-
prematist painter wannabe who
superimposed a black square over
her mons veneris. It must have
been very frustrating for 1950s
boys, who no doubt gured that
the vagina was an abstraction, like
a bar chart.
In my case, the black bars
did not hide something I wanted
to know about but something I
already knew about. Because sex
had never been a mystery for me,
I was almost bored of it by the
time I was old enough to have it.
Consequently, I saw something
different in black bars. Far from
hiding genitalia, they opened
up new possibilities. They were
nillustrations, small blocks of
nothingness, nihil + illustration,
and I liked the way that they in-
troduced negative space into pre-
cisely the most important parts
of the picture. They freed the
mind from the tyranny exerted
over it by the compelling sight of
something desirable. In place of
the vagina, my imagination lled
in wild new anatomies cunts
with holes like Swiss cheese, clito-
rises that hung like grapes from a
vine.
This free play of the
imagination is too often under-
valued in the analysis of perver-
sion. Past denitions work by
negation: perversion is not repro-
ductive, not genital, not consen-
sual, etc. But what is the pleni-
tude of perversion, the fecundity?
Perversion is sex mixed up with
vision and invention. Perversion
is creative, which is perhaps why
artists are often as avant-garde in
their behavior as in their work.
Perversion can also be destruc-
tive, soul-killing, homicidal, evil
but even in the most hideous
examples of perversion, is there
not a spark of creativity, a sort of
art, a vision of how sex could be?
It is as though perver-
sion inserts those little black bars
into the sex act itself: let me block
out your cunt, free myself from
its despotic grip on my libido,
explore, innovate, lets try some-
thing new...
A girlfriend once worked in a
massage parlor in a small city lo-
cated near Amish country. Some-
times Amish men would visit her.
I used to tease her a lot about it,
joking that the guys must have
paid her with fresh baked goods
and handmade quilts. Did you
ever go parking in a buggy? Id
ask. Or Id say, Do you know
that Amish guys make their own
condoms? They just go out to the
barn and disembowel a sheep.
To her these Amish men were no
different than any other client, a
slab of esh. But to me they rep-
resented a conceptual difculty.
Is it perverse, I wondered, for an
Amish man to tell his wife he is
going into town to sell some vege-
tables but then take the money to
a massage parlor? You must have
to unload a lot of cabbage to pay
for a happy ending.
Is it perverse? It is dif-
17. Joe|-Peter W|tk|n, Journ/es of Ihe Mask. The H/sIory of Commerc/a/
PhoIography /n Juarez, Photograph, 1984.
When I |ook at th|s |mage, wh|ch |s one I |ove very much, I cannot ac-
cept that the trad|t|ona| concept|on accounts for the pervers|ty of the
act that |t dep|cts. A foot |n the ass - yes, |t |s non-reproduct|ve, but
|t |s a|so a thousand other nons: nona|coho||c, nonconform|st, nonde-
nom|nat|ona|, nonammab|e, nonproduct|ve, nonverba|, perhaps even
nonsens|ca|. So what? Is dev|ance just an agg|omerat|on of s|ns of
om|ss|on? I hard|y th|nk so. When I |ook at th|s |mage, I wonder what
|ts pos|t|v|ty |s. Forget the nons. What are the pros? For examp|e, |t |s
very stagey. Pervers|ty |s often ||ke that: staged, mean|ng part|y that |t
|s de||berate and part|y that |t |s theatr|ca|. Psychodrama - the m|nd
scr|pt|ng an |mmora||ty p|ay for the body.
Ev|| |mp||es standards - but are standards necessar||y
co||ect|ve? Must codes of behav|or po|nt to other peo-
p|e, to soc|ety? Is |t not poss|b|e to s|n aga|nst onese|f?
Here's a thought exper|ment: cou|d Rob|nson Crusoe
comm|t a perverse act? Certa|n|y he cou|d engage |n ac-
t|v|t|es that are usua||y categor|zed as sexua||y perverse.
He cou|d groom a monkey to serve as h|s butt buddy. But
then the quest|on ar|ses whether Rob|nson Crusoe wou|d
ever engage |n such an act|v|ty |f he weren't stranded on
a remote |s|and. H|s best|a||ty, ||ke the homosexua||ty of
pr|soners and sa||ors, wou|d appear to be cond|t|oned by
c|rcumstance. Is |t perverse |f |t's not a thorough|y free
cho|ce?
Cons|der a hermaphrod|te or, to use the more
modern term, an |ntersexua| person. Th|s |nd|v|dua| may
have both ma|e and fema|e gen|ta||a or he may have ne|-
ther |n any d|st|nct way. A number of b|o|og|ca| causes,
most|y chromosoma| qu|rks, g|ves r|se to the cond|t|on.
Such a person |s abnorma| but no one wou|d cons|der
h|m perverse, or at |east not perverse v|s--v|s h|s her-
maphrod|t|sm. It's as sense|ess as say|ng that someone
|s perverse for hav|ng haze| eyes. Whatever the exact
cause, a hermaphrod|te |s subject to a phys|o|og|ca| de-
term|nat|on. He does not choose to be |ntersexua|. At
best he can e|ect to suppress h|s |ntersexua||ty through
surgery or drugs. But that's on|y a negat|ve cho|ce, and
often the dec|s|on |s made for h|m. (Intersex bab|es are
typ|ca||y nudged |n the d|rect|on of one gender.|
Converse|y, cons|der peop|e who de||berate|y
attempt to change the|r gender. They cross-dress, take
hormones, get |mp|ants, undergo transformat|ve surg|ca|
procedures. These peop|e are frequent|y cons|dered per-
verse, dev|ant, even monstrous. Why? Because they re-
pud|ate the|r g|ven "norma||ty" to opt for a state of be|ng
18. Lucas Cranach the E|der, l//-MaIched Lovers, Pa|nt|ng, c|rca 1530.
Andy Warho|: "It's the |ong ||fe-spans that are throw|ng a|| the o|d va|ues
and the|r app||cat|ons out of whack. When peop|e used to |earn about
sex at fteen and d|e at th|rty-ve, they obv|ous|y were go|ng to have
fewer prob|ems than peop|e today who |earn about sex at e|ght or so, I
guess, and ||ve to be e|ghty. That's a |ong t|me to p|ay around w|th the
same concept. The same bor|ng concept." Fo||ow|ng that |og|c, mod-
ern sc|ence and med|c|ne w||| ensure a ||ve|y future for pervers|ty. Our
phys|ca| |ongev|ty w||| serve as the breed|ng ground for our psycho-
patho|og|es, the hea|th of our bod|es w||| be respons|b|e for the d|sease
of our m|nds. The D|rty O|d Man w||| be no rar|ty. Rather, d|rt|ness w|||
be|ong to the very concept of ag|ng, such that |t w||| be |mposs|b|e to
grow o|d w|thout deve|op|ng we|rd and d|storted not|ons of sexua| sat-
|sfact|on. Converse|y, ch||dren and young peop|e rea||y w||| be |nnocent,
not because they |ack sexua| des|re but because they haven't yet put |n
the t|me to corrupt |t.
that the born hermaphrod|te |s ashamed to suffer. The|r
pervers|ty |s dened not by what they choose but by the
fact that they choose |t. Pervers|ty |s never compu|sory
but |s, to the contrary, |ndependent and free. It |s the ||b-
erty |n the ||bert|ne. "I was carr|ed by the conv|ct|on that
I rejo|ced |n extraord|nary freedom. To fuck above and
beyond any sense of d|sgust was not just a way of |ow-
er|ng yourse|f, |t was, |n a d|ametr|ca||y oppos|te move,
to ra|se yourse|f above a|| prejud|ce." [The Sexua/ L/fe of
CaIher/ne M.}
There was the husband who had been try|ng to
conv|nce h|s w|fe to act as h|s |nter|oper w|th a th|rteen-
year-o|d g|r|. He wanted the w|fe to ask the g|r| to s|eep
w|th h|m. F|na||y the w|fe must have snapped. "She armed
herse|f w|th a kn|fe and 2m sh|ng spear and ye||ed that
she wanted to k||| them both. She poked her husband
cult to think your way into the
mind of a Pennsylvania Dutch
farmer (or any radical other), to
guess what strange twists of logic
he might use to reconcile his de-
sires with his religious precepts.
For example, he might tell him-
self that it is better to alleviate
his lust outside the house than
to molest one of his daughters.
(PervScan has covered a few sto-
ries claiming that incest and
abuse run rampant in Amish
communities. One Amish boy
thought it was normal to have
sex with his sister. Perhaps it was
normal insofar as there were no
other outlets for his desires.) Or
the Amish john may have no ra-
tionale at all. He may simply be
suffering from unbearable urges.
If these drive him to the massage
parlor, mental anguish accompa-
nying him all the way, then they
condition and determine his ac-
tions. His decision to seek relief
may not be entirely compulsory,
but neither is it entirely free or,
more to the point, gratuitous.
Hes like a starving man who eats
a bug it may repel him but hes
driven to it. Thats not perverse.
w|th the spear and forced her husband to ||e on top of
the cry|ng teenager and have sex w|th her." The act re-
ta|ns the outward form of an ||||c|t coup||ng - man rapes
teen - but rea||y |t |s not the husband who v|o|ates the
g|r|. Rather, the w|fe rapes her us|ng the husband |n the
same sense that somebody e|se m|ght rape a g|r| us|ng
a screwdr|ver. It |s no |onger the man's k|nk to crave the
teen but the w|fe's jea|ousy to arrange th|s tab|eau, wh|ch
|s des|gned to g|ve the husband what he wants |n a way
that ensures he cannot enjoy |t. In freedom the man's
|ust may have been perverse, but coerc|on dra|ns |t of |ts
dev|ance. The man |s |eft w|th the travesty of h|s des|re
rather than the fu|||ment of |t.
The mora| of the story |s that you can't be forced
to do someth|ng perverse w|thout thereby negat|ng the
pervers|ty of the th|ng you're do|ng. Pervers|ty |s a|ways
Perverse is when you push aside
a bowl of fresh fruit to fondle a
monogrammed napkin.
What if the tables are
turned? Instead of a desperate
farmer patronizing a sex worker,
what if an English person con-
ceives a strange lust for Amish
girls? He imagines the ivory thighs
concealed beneath white aprons,
or he fantasizes about undoing all
the hooks (some sects dont per-
mit buttons) that hide a Menno-
nite bosom. If it just falls in your
lap somehow, its not perverse. Its
opportunism. (Man, you wont
believe it, I screwed this Amish
chick.) But if you nurture a lust
that has few chances for success,
or whose success can only come
at the price of a concentrated ef-
fort to break into a closed com-
munity that wants nothing to do
with you, its probably not quite
normal. To go from a repressed
community to a freer one is natu-
ral. To reverse that, to seek the
delights of a free world in an op-
pressive one, is not. Its like want-
ing to go to prison just to get your
rocks off. True, there are unique
pleasures that belong precisely
to this reversal the sense of
triumph that ensues from trans-
gressing a rigid social boundary;
the fun of sullying someone, pull-
ing an innocent person into the
dirt of perversion; the masochism
of voluntarily submitting to rules
and frustration; the secret-agent
thrill of subverting these; etc. But
still, to make things difcult for
yourself only makes sense to a
logic of perversity.
Hypothesis: the perver-
sity of a desire is proportional to
the resistance and impedance it
offers to the pervert. A rational
sexual choice is to maximize plea-
sure and minimize pain. But what
does a pervert do? The opposite.
The masochist chooses pain. The
foot fetishist chooses a lowly part
of the body that often stinks. The
coprophile chooses excrement
and therefore makes himself pay
for ecstasy with disgust. In all
these cases, the pervert is like a
weightlifter who works against
mass and gravity to make him-
self stronger. The pervert works
against pleasure in order to make
himself all the more capable of
it. (Nietzsche: what is a pleasure
free - too free, de Irop, a superu|ty that occurs where
the oppos|te of compu|s|on |s not just ||berty but gratu-
|tousness. The perverse act need not have happened.
That |s what the v|ct|ms a|ways say: Why me? What d|d
I do to deserve th|s? We||, you d|d noth|ng to deserve |t,
and that's prec|se|y the po|nt. It shou|dn't have happened
but |t d|d. Pervers|ty sp|||s out of the frame, ||ke a baroque
pa|nt|ng. A g|r|fr|end once to|d me that she fucked a com-
p|ete stranger, an o|d man, |n a McDona|d's bathroom
as a form of performance art. I gured |t was a ||e but I
thought |t was a wonderfu| one, a marve|ous |nvent|on, a
fabu|ous story. Why? Because |t confused the gratu|tous-
ness of a perverse gesture w|th the gratu|tousness of an
artwork - one, moreover, that nobody wou|d ever see.
19. Nobuyosh| Arak|, From Ihe Ser/es "A Wor/d of G/r/s," Photograph,
1983.
Pervers|on often has a |ud|c character. It can be ||ke dress|ng up or |n-
vent|ng a game, |n wh|ch case the perveme resemb|es noth|ng so much
as a p|aygroup. Peop|e come together, suspend d|sbe||ef, engage |n
some |mag|nat|ve set of ru|es or c|rcumstances. Ch||dren p|ay doctor
to |earn about sex, but adu|ts engage |n pervers|on to un|earn about
|t - to free sex up so that |t's not just baby-mak|ng or b|owjobs or a
hundred pos|t|ons you can nd |n a book. To put |t more ph||osoph|ca||y,
pervers|on resemb|es p|ay under the |dea of freedom. A sma|| part of
the |ust for schoo|g|r|s cons|sts of th|s - a des|re to emanc|pate sex
from the c|utter that exper|ence and adu|thood |mpose on |t, a des|re to
reassoc|ate sex not just w|th nub||e bod|es but uncond|t|oned m|nds, a
des|re to rega|n "|nnocence" dened not as ce||bacy or |gnorance but
as a e|d of poss|b|||t|es.
other than a stimulation of the
feeling of power by an obstacle?)
Conversely, there is
something easy about normality.
It may seem restrictive, but at the
same time it is the path of least
resistance. Maybe its boring, but
its safe. No one objects to the
missionary position. This is the
low-hanging-fruit version of the
pursuit of pleasure. The value of
a weak pleasure is proportional
to the ease with which it can be
obtained. And vice versa: if its
difcult to obtain, the pleasure
is greater... Why would I bother
to climb a mountain for a weak
pleasure?
In the Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality, Freud notes
that the extraordinarily wide
dissemination of the perversions
forces us to suppose that the dis-
position to perversions is itself of
no great rarity but must form a
part of what passes as the normal
constitution. Paradoxical as it
may sound, perversion requires
rarity but perverse tendencies are
themselves normal. Perversity al-
ready exists in normality, latent,
20. Yayo| Kusama, Grand Orgy Io Awaken Ihe Dead aI MoMA, Per-
formance Photograph (from front cover of the New York Da//y News},
1969.
The orgy sets up a new reg|me. Ind|v|dua| |ntent|on counts for ||tt|e.
Someth|ng e|se takes over, an emergent property, group psycho|ogy.
Th|s |s the p|ace where anyth|ng goes. You can have ana|, ora|, gen|ta|
- |t's norma|. You can have sex w|th strangers - |t's norma|. You can
a|ternate between homo and hetero - |t's norma|. You can touch your-
se|f, stuff every or|ce, stand on your head - |t's norma|. You can prob-
ab|y |ntroduce a pony |nto the m|x w|thout caus|ng much of an uproar.
L|ke a nude beach, the orgy sets up a new norma|. Iron|ca||y, that wa-
ters down |ts pervers|ty. As the orgy expands, |ts pervers|ty contracts.
Its |ntent|ona||ty d|sso|ves |n open-m|ndedness. Its s|ngu|ar|ty recedes
before the mu|t|p||c|ty of partners. Its gratu|tousness d|ss|pates |n the
|mp||c|t mandate to fuck. It no |onger faces any res|stance or |mped-
ance. The perveme decompresses |n the quant|tat|ve extens|on of the
orgy. There |s so much fuck|ng that the pervers|ty factor (pervens|ty|
d|sappears ||ke a cum drop |n a bukkake fac|a|.
lurking, a potential energy cir-
culating in ordinary behavior. It
erupts, appears, does its thing,
then dissipates, sinks back down
into the normal deates like
an erection.
Consequently, perver-
sity and normality are not oppo-
sites in the same way as black and
white, hot and cold, a and not-
a. They are more like gure and
ground a silhouette against a
landscape, a deliberately discor-
dant note in a melodic progres-
sion. A perverse act is a singular-
ity; normality is repetition, form;
and underneath them both is a
great formlessness, a chaos of un-
regulated behavior, drives and de-
sires that cannot be perverse be-
cause they are pre-normal, wild,
inchoate. (One of Sades favorite
strategies is to hint at this under-
lying formlessness by opposing
incompatible normalities. Whats
customary here, he likes to say, is
an abomination somewhere else.
Philosophy in the Bedroom: All
is relative to our manners and
the climate we inhabit; what is a
crime here is often a virtue sev-
eral hundred leagues hence, and
She had had sex w|th a ||ama, she swore. It was obv|ous|y
a ||e. I cou|dn't |mag|ne how she, a c|ty g|r|, wou|d have
had the opportun|ty to exper|ment sexua||y w|th a pack
an|ma| norma||y found |n the Andes. It was a wonderfu|
||e, though, and ||ke the McDona|d's story |t expressed a
keen |ntu|t|on about the nature of a perverse act. A ||ama
- what cou|d be more nove|? Somehow |t seemed more
perverse to |mag|ne her |n the heat of pass|on w|th th|s
exot|c came|-||ke creature than w|th, say, a |ap dog. But
why? D|d the pecu||ar|ty of th|s an|ma| enhance the per-
vers|ty of th|s fantasy act? Wou|d the act have seemed
|ess perverse |n an Andean v|||age where ||amas are com-
mon? In Manhattan you don't even see ||amas, |et a|one
screw them.
P|a|n|y there |s a quant|tat|ve aspect to perver-
s|ty. The d|fference between the ||amas per cap|ta |n New
York and Peru affects the perce|ved deprav|ty of fuck|ng
one of these "||tt|e came|s." Rar|ty cond|t|ons pervers|ty.
On PervScan I posted a po|| ask|ng peop|e to rank the
pervers|ty of var|ous k|nks. By a |arge marg|n, necroph|||a
was voted most perverse. Best|a||ty came |n second. One
commenter made the case that pedoph|||a |s more per-
verse than these because |t's more damag|ng. That's a
commendab|y rat|ona| way of |ook|ng at |t, but popu|ar
op|n|on c|ear|y cons|dered sex w|th cadavers more far
out. Why? Harmfu|ness wou|d be a qua||tat|ve measure
of pervers|ty, but voters veered toward the quant|tat|ve.
The percept|on of a behav|or's pervers|ty corre|ated to |ts
frequency |n the w||d. Pedoph|||a seemed |ess perverse
than necroph|||a s|mp|y because more peop|e mo|est ||t-
t|e g|r|s than dead bod|es.
Thus there |s a grad|ent of pervers|ons that be-
the virtues of another hemisphere
might well reverse themselves into
crimes in our own.)
This three-tiered struc-
ture formlessness; form; de-
viation / randomness; repetition;
singularity always retains the
possibility that congurations can
shift, new structures arise, perver-
sions can become normal, norms
can become perverse. If some-
thing has to be rare to be perverse,
what happens when it becomes
common? Look at homosexuality
or the increasing rates of oral sex
among teenagers these have
lost the perversity that they had
a generation ago. On PervScan
I joked that although it might
not be exactly surprising to say
that norms evolve, it does open
up some interesting possibili-
ties. Imagine, for instance, what
sex would look like if the norms
and perversions you know today
completely switched places. You
might come to PervScan, for ex-
ample, and rather than nd sto-
ries of bestiality or pedophilia,
you might be reading about mar-
ried couples utilizing the mission-
ary position to get pregnant.
It was a joke but there
was a lot of truth to it. Population
researchers have remarked that the
birth rate in developed countries
has declined to the point where
parents do not have enough chil-
dren to replace them. (If parents
on average have 1.5 children, the
children do not replace the 2 par-
ents when they die.) If the birth
rate really is declining, it implies
that reproductivity should no
longer qualify as the standard for
normal sex. The imperative to
reproduce would no longer be the
norm. Consequently, extrapolat-
ing from birth-rate trends, there
should be an increase in forms
of sexuality that do not have re-
production as their goal an
increase in precisely the forms of
sexuality hitherto deemed per-
verse. And isnt this what can be
seen in the pornography now ex-
ploding across the internet? Every
porn video ends with cum on the
face, ass, or breasts.
Nowadays everybody wants to
be a little bit different, a touch
radical, slightly perverted. Too
many of us would rather be in-
g|ns w|th the norma| (everybody does |t|, s||ps |nto the
perverse (not everybody does th|s|, |ntens|es (few do
th|s|, and na||y arr|ves at some extreme outpost of per-
vers|on (nobody but me ever d|d th|s|. The norma|, the
quas|-perverse, the perverse, and the superverse. At that
na| stat|on you're ||ke the exp|orer |n the med|eva| |||us-
trat|on who d|scovers, ||tera||y, the edge of the wor|d and
tr|es to poke a nger through |t. You can't go any further.
You've done someth|ng nove| |n the str|ctest sense of the
term - someth|ng un|que, w|thout precedent or category,
someth|ng poss|b|y even |ncomprehens|b|e s|nce there |s
no temp|ate for |t.
If pervers|ty requ|res nove|ty, norma||ty requ|res
someth|ng e|se: repet|t|on. Norma||ty |s a frequency of
acts, codes, behav|ors. It |s not |dent|ca| to mora||ty or
|ega||ty. It m|ght be norma| but |mmora| to cheat on your
spouse or norma| but |||ega| to cheat on your taxes. Rath-
er, norma||ty |s very much ||ke a "norma|" or Gauss|an
d|str|but|on |n stat|st|cs, where some th|ngs (norms| oc-
cur w|th a h|gh probab|||ty dens|ty and other th|ngs (per-
vers|ons| occur w|th a |ow probab|||ty dens|ty. In other
words, a norm |s someth|ng that repeats and a pervers|on
|s someth|ng that does not, or tends not to, or does but
rare|y. Remember the trad|t|ona| formu|at|on? What per-
vers|ty rea||y opposes |s not reproduct|on but repet|t|on.
It |s more perverse to have re|at|ons w|th a ||ama than a
|ap dog s|mp|y because |t's more s|ngu|ar.
But how can th|s be? Perverse acts repeat over
t|me. Burgo Partr|dge wrote a H/sIory of Org/es, and cer-
ta|n|y you cou|d wr|te a h|story of any pervers|on, Dog Sex
Ihrough Ihe Ages. Perverse acts are a|so repeated over
the course of a ||fet|me - wh|ch |s prec|se|y the prob|em
21. Zak Sm|th, 100 G/r/s and 100 OcIopuses [DeIa//}, Pa|nt|ng, 2005.
Each of the 98 canvasses |n th|s mosa|c dep|cts a g|r| hav|ng some
unnatura| congress w|th an octopus. (Burroughs: "My dear, I |ove the
octopus."| Here |n New York the octopus |s rare and octopus sex even
rarer. But |n art there |s a|ready a trad|t|on of erot|c|zed cepha|opods:
|t beg|ns w|th Hokusa|'s famous woodcut of 1820, traverses the Jur/s-
prudence pane| of Gustav K||mt's Un|vers|ty of V|enna ce|||ng pa|nt|ngs,
and cu|m|nates w|th Japanese manga art|sts work|ng today. When you
see Sm|th's mosa|c, th|s |s what you th|nk of - a mu|t|tude of other
pa|nt|ngs - not the actua| rar|ty of tentac|e sex, and for th|s reason the
perce|ved deprav|ty of the work |s very |ow.
volved in a sex crime than in
sex. (J.G. Ballard) There are still
plenty of norms but normality
is not chic. It raises the question
of whether there comes a point
at which perversity might form
its own weird sort of institution.
Look what happened to youth
culture, rock and roll, bohemi-
anism, tattoos. Could the same
thing ever happen to depravity?
I used to know a girl
who lived right in the center of
Greenwich Village, a place long
known for its appeal to the self-
consciously eccentric. In this
Land of the Mist Toys she was
the exception. She emitted no
signs of deliberate weirdness. She
never hinted at secret sorrows. She
offered no claims to heresy or pre-
tensions to kink. A Midwestern
girl, she came from a comfortable
but not opulent background and
spoke fondly of horseback riding.
She was a decent student and af-
ter college obtained a good job.
She was even-tempered, upbeat,
fun but not wild. She seemed
dare I say it? the most nor-
mal person I ever met.
But I could never trust
of rec|d|v|sm among sex offenders. Once a dog fucker,
a|ways a dog fucker. How, then, can a pervers|on be d|s-
|nc||ned to repeat?
Repet|t|on poses two dangers to pervers|on. On
one hand, there |s the r|sk of apathy. The rst t|me you do
someth|ng outr, |t's st|mu|at|ng. The second t|me |t |ess-
ens |n |mpact and the th|rd t|me |t edges toward boredom.
Th|s |s when the Law of D|m|n|sh|ng K|cks exerts |tse|f.
You conquer one pervers|ty, you need more - faster, bet-
ter, harder, further, more extreme. You want to d|scover
new v|rg|n|t|es |n yourse|f |n order to have the p|easure of
v|o|at|ng them. And |f you reach your own persona| ||m|t,
the ne p|us u|tra of your sexua||ty, then you turn around
and survey beh|nd you the waste|and of k|nk. What's |eft
to you? Leftovers? S|oppy seconds? At that po|nt you
m|ght even return to "norma||ty" out of sheer pervers|ty.
On the other hand, repet|t|on poses another dan-
ger to pervers|on. Suppose you do someth|ng once. It's
perverse. You ||ke |t. You do |t |ots of t|mes. You st||| ||ke
|t. You get the same k|ck every t|me. At th|s po|nt the per-
vers|on congea|s, so||d|es, crysta|||zes. It becomes an
obsess|on. It |oses the exper|menta| character of the per-
verse and becomes programmat|c, an a|gor|thm for p|ea-
sure. Pervers|ty d|es a s|ow death |n the gr|p of obses-
s|on. The perverse |s |ntent|ona| and se|f-consc|ous, but
becomes automat|c and therefore unth|nk|ng |n obses-
s|on. The perverse |s free to the po|nt of gratu|tousness,
but |t acqu|res a compu|s|veness - I can't stop myse|f
- |n obsess|on. The perverse |s powered by var|at|on,
d|fference, s|ngu|ar|ty, but |s constra|ned to repeat |n ob-
sess|on.
(Cou|d an amnes|ac comm|t a perverse act? On
my own perception of her nor-
mality. I operated on the as-
sumption that everyone has his
or her psychopathologies, kinks,
tragedies. If youre patient, or if
you know what to look for, or if
you make yourself easy to talk to,
these invariably come out. But
not with this girl. Over the course
of three or four years of relatively
close friendship, there was nary a
glimpse of anything untoward in
her soul. She hadnt been abused,
she didnt have bulimia, she didnt
hate anybody, she didnt appear
to have any sexual desires that
you could nd outside a romance
novel. One time she persisted in a
crush on a guy who, friends told
her, was secretly gay, but I think
this was no perversity on her part.
She really just happened to like
him.
How could she be so
normal?
(If you thought I was
so normal, you can only imagine
what I thought of you. I operated
on the assumption that people
couldnt be all psychopathology,
kink, and tragedy. In spite of your
lurid interests, youve very sane
22. Joseph Kosuth, ArI as ldea as ldea [Mean/ng}, Pa|nt|ng, 1967.
In sp|te of my ph||osoph|ca| |nterests, I have never g|ven much thought
to the "mean|ng of ||fe." It has a|ways struck me as a pseudo-prob|em,
the app||cat|on of a semant|c concept to an un-semant|c th|ng. It's ||ke
ask|ng about the mean|ng of a vase or a c|rrus c|oud. These may have
great beauty, or great ut|||ty, or persona| va|ue ("That vase be|onged
to my grandmother"|, but mean|ng? Nada. I wou|d rather ph||osoph|ze
about a fuck do||, say, or a brass|ere. A bra can engage |n you |n thoughts
about the nature of qua||t|es (hard/soft| and therefore of percept|on and
therefore of be|ng |tse|f (to be |s to be perce|ved|. There |s a great an-
ecdote about the ph||osopher Theodor Adorno. He was g|v|ng a speech
somet|me |n the |ate 1960s. A women's ||bber ran up to the front of the
aud|ence and pu||ed off her sh|rt. He stood there speech|ess. Now I un-
derstand why. It was a reve|at|on of the nature of be|ng.
somehow. I think this might even
chagrin you, since you make up
for it with that Flaubert dictum
about how a writer has to be calm
and orderly in his life in order to
be disorderly and violent in his
work. Then again, youre also cra-
zier than you think or I should
say, crazy in ways you dont think
you are. What youre most self-
conscious about the perv thing
is nothing. Its the things you
take for granted, the things you
dont even realize, that freak peo-
ple out. The very fact that youre
so clueless about them is exactly
why theyre so disturbing. Theyre
the real you.)
Sometimes I suspected
that she must be masterful at
concealing her kinks. Sometimes
I thought I was simply failing to
read the signs of her secret vices.
Then I came to realize that, in the
context of Greenwich Village, her
patent normality was her best bid
for originality. She was like the
rst uninteresting number para-
dox in mathematics. (Go through
numbers listing their interesting
qualities: 1 is the rst positive
integer, 2 is the only even prime,
etc. If you arrive at a number that
has no interesting qualities 39,
according to one mathematician
then that is the rst uninter-
esting one, and paradoxically that
makes it interesting.) This girl
was a conundrum on the order
of 39. Her lack of distinction was
precisely what distinguished her.
Was this deliberate?
Was it a strategy? Did she real-
ize how interesting it made her?
Was her apparent normality the
result of a profound perversity
that had turned on all the exhi-
bitions of perversity around her?
Frankly Im not sure. Her nor-
mality was so astonishing that it
was ambiguous, like the dialogue
in Sade that would be prudery in
a different context. (Conceal
your cunts, ladies, an indignant
Gernande says to Juliette and
Dorothe about which Ro-
land Barthes observes: the same
sentence serves both libertine and
puritan.) Whatever she was in
the past, though, I think she may
well point to a ratio that will be
increasingly pertinent to the fu-
ture: the pervier the masses, the
normaler the perv.
one hand, h|s af|ct|on wou|d not prevent h|m from be-
|ng fu||y aware of a|| the reasons for not do|ng a th|ng
and then do|ng |t anyway. On the other hand, someth|ng
doesn't seem r|ght about |t. An amnes|ac cou|d comm|t a
perverse act, forget |t, and then comm|t the same exact
act the next day - w|thout h|s pervers|ty thereby degrad-
|ng |nto obsess|on. Amnes|a wou|d remove the Law of
D|m|n|sh|ng K|cks from pervers|on. The amnes|ac wou|d
fee| no need to outdo h|mse|f. He wou|d be runn|ng |n
p|ace, ||ke the obsess|ve, whereas the pervert |s usua||y
c||mb|ng a |adder, ascend|ng from k|ck to k|ck. The obses-
s|ve repeats. The pervert |ntens|es. The amnes|ac wou|d
repeat w|thout obsess|on a pervers|on that he does not
know enough to |ntens|fy.|
A pervers|on can harden |nto a fet|sh, but a fet|sh
cannot erupt |nto pervers|on. Someth|ng you do a thou-
sand t|mes cannot sudden|y acqu|re the nove|ty of a per-
vers|on. In fact, the on|y perverse th|ng you can do w|th an
obsess|on |s to deny |t - not because you want to reform
but because you want to deform, to ||berate energ|es, see
what new th|ngs m|ght emerge. You pract|ca||y s||p over
|nto meta-pervers|ty, wh|ch |s the po|nt at wh|ch you take
a perverse att|tude toward your own pervers|ons.
Sickness is a powerful stimu-
lant, wrote Nietzsche, but one
has to be healthy enough for it.
So too with perversion: you have
to be normal enough for it. Ironi-
cally, repression is a great ally of
the pervert. It makes things for-
bidden, wrong, taboo, and there-
fore desirable. The pervert needs
normality the same way that the
rebel needs authority. It is the
source from which he draws his
raison dtre. Without authority,
the rebel is an absurd, superuous
being a rebel without a cause,
pointless disruption, pent-up hos-
tility taking aim at the wind. And
without normality, the pervert is
also superuous and absurd a
pervert without a kink, a lust for
weirdness in a world where noth-
ing is weird.
Thus the enemy of the
pervert is not repression but liber-
ality, sexual liberation, social tol-
erance. Whereas the rebel wants
to see the world adopt his ideol-
ogy, the pervert wants nothing
less than to see the world indulge
in his kink. In an environment
where anything goes, nothing
is perverse. Even worse is when
kinks are not only tolerated but
canonized, popularized. Things
formerly delicious become com-
mon, platitudinous. If everybodys
doing it, the pervert wants no part
of it. Normality invigorates him,
gives him options for depravity,
but normalization the process
by which the taboo becomes the
norm deprives him of oppor-
tunities for outrage.
For this reason the per-
vert typically abhors those pro-
pagandists who try to convince
people that sexuality is healthy
and natural. The pervert does
not want his sexuality to be an
aerobic exercise, a breath of fresh
air, a balanced diet. He does not
want it to be healthy or natural.
He wants it to be sick and un-
natural. He does not want it to
be salutary or hygienic, like a bar
of soap. He wants it to be dirty
and lthy. (Hence the privileged
position of the anus in perverse
sexuality.) The pervert does not
want his sexuality to be open,
like a town hall meeting. He
wants it to be closed, secret, self-
contained. D.H. Lawrence: The
whole question of pornography
seems to me a question of secrecy.
Without secrecy there would be
no pornography.
To the pervert, normal-
ity is therefore a cover story. He
is a secret agent representing the
powers of deviance in the realm
of the straight. He seems normal
because he tends to hide his sex
quirks, and he hides his sex quirks
because his agenda is not social
action but personal pleasure. If
somebody marches with a sign
blaring Were here, were queer,
get used to it, his goal is to be
normal. The person whose goal
is perversion doesnt make such
a spectacle of himself. He plays it
cool, lies low, looks for opportuni-
ties to get in, get off, get out. Fou-
cault: The pleasure that comes of
exercising a power that questions,
monitors, watches, spies, searches
out, palpates, brings to light; and
on the other hand, the pleasure
that kindles at having to evade
this power, ee from it, fool it, or
travesty it. Get it? Perversion is
inltration, the pervert is covert,
the perveme a black op.
23. A|fred H|tchcock (D|rector|, Rope (1948| and VerI/go (1958|, F||m
St|||s.
F||m|c |||ustrat|on of the d|fference between pervers|on and obsess|on.
In Rope p|easure ||es |n the atta|nment of a nove|ty - a murder, how
|nterest|ng. In VerI/go p|easure ||es |n repet|t|on, |n the effort to resur-
rect the dead. Rope portrays a cr|me that |s s|ngu|ar, exper|menta|,
se|f-consc|ous, gratu|tous, perverse. VerI/go equates obsess|on w|th
|||ness, acrophob|a, as though to underscore that |t ||es beyond |nd|-
v|dua| contro|. (The obsess|ve acts as though t|me does not ex|st. When
the perveme decays, he recreates |t. VerI/go. J|mmy Stewart resurrects
a dead woman by compe|||ng a ||ve one to s|mu|ate her. Converse|y, for
the pervert the decay of the perveme |s a matter of |nd|fference. Why
shou|d he care about the perveme? He's t|red of |t anyway. He wants to
organ|ze a new one - and therefore h|s prob|em |s that |t has a|| been
done before. The |ong cont|nuous take of Rope |s the |m|c ana|ogue
of the pervert's exper|ence of t|me: he can't escape from |t. To h|s every
attempt at nove|ty t|me ho|ds up a b||||on prev|ous examp|es. The Law
of D|m|n|sh|ng K|cks crushes the pervert w|th h|story.|
The danger that repet|t|on poses to pervers|ty |s an |nd|-
v|dua| one (boredom, obsess|on| because, from a morpho-
|og|ca| perspect|ve, pervers|ons obv|ous|y repeat. In fact,
|t |s aston|sh|ng just how much structure and regu|ar|ty
there can be to perverse acts. (A des|re for a part|cu|ar
person |s |ove, but a des|re for a part|cu|ar arrangement
|s perverse.| You can p|ck a|most any un||ke|y conjunc-
t|on of bod|es and trace |ts trajectory as |t |s passed from
perv to perv, ||ke the s|ut at a b|ker party.
The pervert does not ||ke to repeat h|mse|f but
pervers|ons themse|ves become memes, autonomous
structures taken up and repeated from |nd|v|dua| to |n-
d|v|dua|. L|ke phonemes or morphemes, there are un|ts
of pervers|ty, pervemes. These are suprapersona| forms
w|th both an extens|ve and an |ntens|ve d|mens|on. The
extens|ve d|mens|on |s a heterogeneous set: a man, a
woman, her daughter, a dog. (You'd be surpr|sed how of-
ten th|s perveme recurs |n the news, not to ment|on |n
rea||ty.| The |ntens|ve d|mens|on |s the ow of affects -
ant|c|pat|on, awkwardness, focus, p|easure - |ns|de the
perveme. There |s a|so a spec|a| |ntens|ty that der|ves
prec|se|y from the se|f-consc|ous contemp|at|on of the
members of the set. It just wou|dn't be the same w|thout
the dog.
Just as there are endur|ng works of art or ||ter-
ature, so too are there endur|ng forms of pervers|ty -
c|ass|cs of k|nk. (S|eep|ng Beauty, the necroph|||ac k|ss.|
However, any g|ven |ncarnat|on of a perveme |s tempo-
rary, evanescent, even de||cate. The heterogene|ty of |ts
e|ements can pose a threat to |ts very ex|stence. In any
perveme there are part|c|pants who don't rea||y want to
be there, whose th|ng |s someth|ng e|se ent|re|y, whose
The rst piece of performance
art I ever saw was at a nightclub
on the Lower East Side. At about
two or three in the morning, half
a dozen naked men and women
entered the small crowded room
and danced joyously in a circle. It
resembled the famous canvas by
Matisse, Dance (I), that hangs in
the Museum of Modern Art
except for the carrot. While they
were dancing, one person pulled
a carrot from the ass of the person
in front of him. He took a bite
and stuck it in his own ass. The
person behind him withdrew it,
took a bite, and stuck it in her ass.
The person behind her withdrew
it, took a bite, and stuck it in his
ass. This continued the carrot
going from ass to mouth to ass
until it was eaten up, and then the
dance was over.
I had no idea what it
was supposed to mean. Probably
the performers intended simply
to shock. At the time AIDS was
still relatively recent, and in the
hysteria about safe sex and disease
it was indeed surprising to see
people eating from each others
rectums. In retrospect it also oc-
curs to me that, in addition to
its art historical precedents, the
dance formed an odd perveme. It
conjoined several other pervemes
group sex, circle jerk, mastur-
bating with a vegetable, felching
(which is when a man ejaculates
into somebodys anus and then
sucks out the sperm, sometimes
with a straw) in a memorable
image, and it also lent to the per-
veme some of the gratuitousness
of art, like the girl who claimed
that it could be an aesthetic state-
ment to have sex with a stranger
in the bathroom of a fast-food
restaurant.
Now when I think of
the perveme as a concept, I of-
ten associate this image with it
bodies spinning in a circle,
forming a unit. (Echoes: the cir-
cular formation of the orgy in
Eyes Wide Shut and the ring of
sexual exchange in Arthur Schnit-
zlers play La Ronde.) Any body
could replace any other body, any
group of bodies could reconsti-
tute the circle on their own, the
perveme would remain intact,
a novel structure whirling like a
dervish. It could expand in size,
p|easure ||es |n someth|ng outs|de the perveme, whose
part|c|pat|on |s on|y the resu|t of coerc|on or to|erance
or humor|ng. (Does the woman rea||y want the dog |n-
vo|ved?| And |f these heterogeneous e|ements aren't
peop|e, consc|ous ent|t|es of some sort, then there are
other e|ements that don't be|ong, objects that aren't used
r|ght, a cucumber |n somebody's ass. These th|ngs po|nt
outs|de the perveme to an externa| rea||ty, and the per-
vert must |gnore them - deny h|s partner's boredom,
repud|ate the rea| use va|ue of objects, create b|ocks of
w|||fu| |gnorance |n h|s menta| |mage of exc|tement - or
h|s p|easure w||| threaten to fa|| apart, ||ke an unstab|e
scaffo|d.
There |s a|so an |nter|or tempora||ty to the per-
veme, d|fferent from the |ongev|ty of |ts structure and the
ephemera||ty of |ts |ncarnat|on. Ins|de the perveme there
|s narrat|ve, psychodrama, a process|on of events. The
pervert has a p|an wh|ch he sets |n mot|on w|th the hope
of bu||d|ng toward c||max and p|easure - the happy end-
|ng. However, there a|ways rema|ns the poss|b|||ty that the
p|an can abort, s|nk |nto frustrat|on and d|sappo|ntment,
co|tus |nterruptus. At that po|nt a pervers|on can change,
compensatory mechan|sms ar|se, dev|ance turns to p|an
b, I take p|easure |n hurt|ng you because you fa||ed to
g|ve me p|easure |n the rst p|ace. B|ow me or d|e.
On a phenomeno|og|ca| |eve|, pervers|ty |s |nten-
t|ona|, so||ps|st|c, excess|ve, s|ngu|ar, but on a morpho-
|og|ca| |eve| the |ssues for the pervert are more pract|ca|.
How do you organ|ze the perveme? How do you ma|nta|n
|ts |nner cons|stency? How do you gu|de |t to |ts end? And
once you do, how do you steer between boredom and ob-
sess|on - how do you |ntens|fy the perveme, up the ante,
24. Serge Ga|nsbourg (D|rector|, SIan Ihe F/asher (1990|, VHS Cover.
Stan the F|asher |s not frank about h|s sexua||ty. Paradox|ca||y, he d|s-
p|ays but does not revea| h|mse|f. L|ke a ||ghtn|ng bo|t he str|kes but
then d|sappears beneath h|s trench coat. (That's h|s cover story, the
man |n the street, " po|| sous un ra|ncoat."| Thus the exh|b|t|on|st |s not
he who pub||c|zes h|s sexua||ty but rather he who pr|vat|zes a fragment
of the pub||c by draw|ng an unw|tt|ng c|t|zen |nto h|s perveme.
include a thousand bodies gyrat-
ing in a eld, or it could contract
until only one dancer remained,
a person spinning like a top and
moving a carrot from his ass to his
mouth and back again.
The perveme does not require
other people. It is possible to
cobble together a perveme of
one, like the Vaseline Vandal who
liked to check into a motel and
smear every surface television,
furniture, carpet, alarm clock
with petroleum jelly. Evidently
he was trying to experience in an
erotic way what Sartre called the
great ontological region of slimi-
ness. His fetish was to organize a
perveme on the model not of the
group (woman, daughter, dog)
but of the monad. For him the
perveme was a structure closed in
on itself like a jelly donut.
Perhaps Vaseline even
served to eliminate the nal ves-
tige of multiplicity in the per-
veme, the separation between the
individual and his environment.
Sartre: That sucking of the slimy
which I feel on my hands outlines
a kind of continuity of the slimy
substance in myself. These long
soft strings of substance which fall
from me to the slimy body (when,
for example, I plunge my hand
into it and then pull it out again)
symbolize a rolling off of myself
in the slime To touch the slimy
is to risk being dissolved in slimi-
ness. This feeling may even be
more acute when you elicit slimy
substances from your own body,
so that the goo coating the room
and your skin is paralleled by the
goo you bring up from your own
depths, the jelly on the walls and
the sperm in your body perform-
ing a viscous fusion of outside
and inside.
This changes the prob-
lem of the pervemes internal con-
sistency. No longer is it a matter
of aligning the psychologies of
the participants, fomenting a de-
viant esprit de corps, but rather of
creating an environment in which
everything partially deliquesces.
Here consistency is glutinous,
gloppy, gelatinous a physi-
cal embodiment of the mental
state that the pervert seeks when
he wants the participants in his
perveme to stick together. And
25. Andres Serrano, A H/sIory of Sex [AuIoeroI/c}, C|bachrome, 1996.
You m|ght th|nk that th|s wou|d form a perveme of one: |ts re|at|ve rar|ty
and |ts d|sregard for other peop|e (turn|ng |n on |tse|f ||ke a snake eat-
|ng |ts own ta||| suggest the so||ps|sm of a perverse act. S|nce |t's non-
reproduct|ve |t wou|d certa|n|y be perverse accord|ng to the trad|t|ona|
concept|on. However, |t does not tru|y form a monado|og|ca| perveme.
Any guy who cou|d do th|s probab|y wou|d do |t - thus |ts rar|ty |s
cond|t|oned by the ||m|ts of phys|ca| poss|b|||ty. It |s not rare because
peop|e refra|n from do|ng |t but because they cannot anatom|ca||y man-
age |t. Suck|ng your own pen|s thus |acks the gratu|tousness of a free
cho|ce. It |s rare but not perverse, a sex act but not a perveme.
take |t to the next |eve|, stave off the Law of D|m|n|sh|ng
K|cks? Somet|mes th|s |s easy, there's a great opportu-
n|ty, the perveme just fa||s |nto your |ap. Other t|mes |t
takes a concerted effort, the perveme has to be assem-
b|ed, worked up, cobb|ed together, part|c|pants have to
be conv|nced or coerced, exot|c objects have to be pro-
cured, pecu||ar cond|t|ons have to be met (there was the
guy who found |t "sexua||y exc|t|ng" to cause women to
dr|nk caust|c u|ds - c|ean|ng supp||es, w|ndsh|e|d w|p-
er, Nyqu|| - and to ||sten to them descr|be the pa|n they
exper|enced subject|ng the|r d|gest|ve tracts to chem|ca|
burns|.
Th|s |s what denes the pervert: not a psycho|og|-
ca| cond|t|on or a tw|sted state of be|ng but the fact that
he organ|zes pervemes. Usua||y he reconst|tutes them,
does the two-g|r| th|ng or the w|fe/daughter/dog th|ng.
But somet|mes there are a|so great art|sts |n the rea|m of
the perverse, peop|e who make the |eap from repet|t|on
to product|on, who cease recreat|ng and beg|n creat|ng
pervemes, nove| patho|og|es that e|ther fade away or g|ve
r|se to ent|re|y new categor|es of pervers|on: feeder|sm,
squ|sh v|deos, exoph|||a..
He may have been depraved, but the caust|c u|d
perv was an art|st of th|s sort, an |nnovator |n the rea|m of
the dev|ant. H|s fet|sh had few peers outs|de Sade - but
then aga|n, Sade rea||y d|d seem to env|s|on pract|ca||y
every poss|b|||ty. The pervers|ons actua||y known to be
comm|tted by Sade were |aughab|e, even tr|v|a|. But has
anyone |n h|story created such an aston|sh|ng arsena| of
pervemes? A m||||on years of fuck|ng have bare|y carr|ed
the spec|es past the m|ss|onary pos|t|on, and |t's hard to
|mag|ne that another m||||on wou|d exhaust the poss|b|||-
26. Bukkake Face, Web Image, 2008.
The perveme's cons|stency |s determ|ned not just by the var|egated psy-
cho|og|es of |ts part|c|pants but by the number of pervers|ons packed
|nto a g|ven act. Much as a z|pped |e conta|ns more |nformat|on |n |ess
space, so too does a compressed perveme g|ve more bang for the buck.
For examp|e, |n a regu|ar fac|a|, there |s a 1:1 correspondence between
ejacu|ator and face, |n bukkake the rat|o |s n:1, mu|t|p|e ejacu|ators and
one face, therefore bukkake const|tutes a compressed fac|a|. Another
examp|e occurs |n 120 Days of Sodom. "A notor|ous sodom|st, |n order
to comb|ne that cr|me w|th those of |ncest, murder, rape, sacr||ege, and
adu|tery, rst |nserts a Host |n h|s ass, then has h|mse|f embuggered by
h|s own son, rapes h|s marr|ed daughter, and k|||s h|s n|ece." The con-
s|stency of th|s perveme |s threatened by obv|ous gaps |n rec|proc|ty:
the n|ece doesn't want to d|e, the daughter doesn't want to be raped,
etc. But on the other hand the sodom|st |s ab|e to compress the perver-
s|ons |ns|de |t, make one act serve ha|f a dozen ||||c|t urges. (It's on|y one
act but oh how |t mu|t|p||es |n consc|ousness.|
t|es |a|d out |n 120 Days of Sodom. You cou|d pract|ca||y
dene pervers|on as the recreat|on of scenes from Sade
- the eterna| return of the Sadean perveme.
when this occurs, when all the
elements of the perveme fuse, it
achieves a new kind of internal
consistency. In the monad, the
perveme becomes self-consistent.
One night I was lying in bed
and reading a new edition of Ni-
etzsches late notebooks. Every-
thing, Nietzsche scribbled, de-
famed as immoral is, viewed in
economic terms, the higher and
more essential and how develop-
ment towards a greater fulllment
of life necessarily also implies the
progress of immorality. Somehow
the thought struck me. Wanting
to let it reverberate in my head, I
closed the book, put out the light,
and lay there turning it over in
my mind. I stared into the black-
ness and asked myself whether
Nietzsches insight could hold
up against particular examples of
immorality. I thought of half a
dozen recent stories I had read for
PervScan. Pedophilia is defamed
as immoral. Is there any way in
which pedophilia could be con-
ceived as the higher and more
essential?
First I had to remind
27. Jean-Jacques Lebe|, 120 M/nuIes Ded/caIed Io Ihe D/v/ne Marqu/s,
Photograph of Performance, Par|s, 4 Apr|| 1966.
In h|s performance, Lebe| requ|red v|s|tors to enter between two s|abs
of meat "||ke the ||ps of a vag|na." Once |ns|de the performance space,
they were treated to var|ous pornograph|c spectac|es that |nc|uded a
transsexua| nun sodom|z|ng herse|f w|th vegetab|es, a woman ur|nat|ng
on the aud|ence, and another |nv|t|ng spectators to ||ck off the cream
that covered her naked body. If you can dene pervers|on as the rec-
reat|on of scenes from Sade, then every b|t of deprav|ty |s pretty much
a performance on the order of th|s - a few m|nutes ded|cated to the
D|v|ne Marqu|s.
The pervert appears to be on the s|de of |mmora||ty. The
news re|nforces th|s |mpress|on, s|nce |t exh|b|ts the per-
vert when he has been exposed, arrested, conv|cted. And
yet pervers|ty |s not |nherent|y bad or ev||. The other day
I overheard a guy te|||ng h|s fr|end how he had angered a
g|r| by s|eep|ng w|th her and then refus|ng to engage |n
any further "mean|ngfu|" re|at|onsh|p. "I may have com-
m|tment |ssues," he sa|d, "but that doesn't mean I'm a
bad person." So too w|th the pervert. He |sn't necessar||y
a bad person. He just has dev|ance |ssues.
Pervers|ty cannot be a mere synonym for wrong-
do|ng. Somet|mes a perverse act |s perfect|y mora| - not
out of v|rtue but out of pervers|ty, even meta-pervers|ty,
pervers|ty turn|ng aga|nst |tse|f |n order not to co||apse
|nto the ax|omat|c. Pervers|ty doesn't str|ve to be good
but m|ght happen to s|mu|ate goodness wh||e sat|sfy|ng
|ts own we|rd |mperat|ves. For examp|e, just as "good"
monogamy |s based on de||ty and |ove, so too are there
other monogam|es, "bad" ones based on obsess|on, fe-
t|sh|sm, contracts, s|avery, k|nk. From externa| appear-
ances, you m|ght not be ab|e to te|| whether the most
monogamous coup|e |s |n |ove or |n contract - or both.
(Sexua| monogamy |s rare |n the an|ma| k|ngdom. Hy-
pothes|s: monogamy |s unnatura|, what |s "aga|nst na-
ture" |s perverse, ergo monogamy |s perverse. Quest|on:
how does th|s pervers|ty become a purported v|rtue?|
What |s mora||ty? When you th|nk about be|ng
subject to |t, you have a sense of be|ng pushed and pu||ed
by |nv|s|b|e forces, ||ke a man |n a w|ndstorm. Somet|mes
you're |n the r|ght, the w|nd |s at your back. Somet|mes
you're |n the wrong, you have a sense of exert|on |n the
face of res|stance, the w|nd |s |n your face. Other t|mes
you're not sure wh|ch way the w|nd |s b|ow|ng, you s|mp|y
fee| the effects of mora| w|nd shear. Ph||osophers have
28. P|erre K|ossowsk|, RoberIe and Ihe Para//e/ Bars, Draw|ng, 1967.
Just as |t |s poss|b|e for there to be "bad" monogam|es based on ob-
sess|on, fet|sh|sm, contracts, s|avery, k|nk, so too can there be "good"
|nde||t|es. In the nove|s of K|ossowsk|, for examp|e, there |s the "|aw of
hosp|ta||ty" that ob||ges Octave to offer h|s w|fe Roberte to the|r guests.
Octave furn|shes a ph||osoph|ca| just|cat|on for th|s hosp|ta||ty: he be-
||eves that these observed |nde||t|es revea| new aspects of Roberte's
persona||ty for h|m to understand and |ove. Certa|n|y app|y|ng th|s |aw
to marr|age perverts |t - not by break|ng up a re|at|onsh|p but by trans-
form|ng the supposed ant|thes|s of marr|age, cheat|ng, |nto the very
th|ng that dr|ves and perpetuates |t. Not on|y that, |t a|so sets up a tan-
ta||z|ng ana|ogy: |nde||ty |s to monogamy as pervers|ty |s to norma||ty.
myself that I was reading a note-
book, not a developed argu-
ment. It would be unfair to pin
Nietzsche against the wall for an
insight he had yet to return to,
review, elaborate. Second I had
to remind myself of Nietzsches
tendency for overstatement, for
bombast, and I had to situate his
insight in the context of his an-
tipathy for Christianity. Surely
what he really meant was that
everything Christians defame as
immoral is higher and more es-
sential. Still, setting aside certain
cult leaders, Christians do not
look approvingly on pedophilia. I
thought of a particularly heinous
example I had read. Is there any
way in which the rape of a very
young girl could be considered
essential for the development
towards a greater fulllment of
life?
Once I had framed the
question in this way, I could not
help but think of Nietzsche as a
naf. He was not the most worldly
or experienced of men. He had
not, as I had, fed his gray matter
a regular diet of depravity. When
he thought of immorality, he had
his religious education in mind.
When I thought of it, I had a
gallery of sex crimes before me.
I could see how his insight func-
tioned within the terms of his
thinking, but I could not trans-
plant it so easily into mine. Once
youve read about a guy forcing
himself on a six-year-old with
their disparity in sizes causing
such an injury that her intestines
were left hanging between her legs
it is not so easy to proclaim the
higher value of immorality.
I probably would have
left the matter at that but for a
chance encounter with another
book. Survival of the Sickest ar-
gues that what is lethal for the
individual often turns out to be
benecial for the species: from an
evolutionary standpoint, many
diseases are really complicated
blessings, not simple curses.
Given the obvious parallel be-
tween sickness and perversion,
I wondered whether the same
might hold true for sexual devi-
ance. Could it be that individual
examples of deviance serve more
universal purposes of existence?
Perhaps that is what Nietzsche
|ong debated the nature of eth|ca| |mpu|ses - do they
der|ve from sent|ment? reason? duty? - but perhaps mo-
ra||ty |s s|mp|y a e|d. L|ke a magnet|c e|d, mora||ty has
po|es (good and bad| and forces (pr|nc|p|es, |njunct|ons|
that are |ntersected at ang|es by rea| human behav|or (d|-
|emmas|. You can map the e|ds |n d|fferent ways. For
examp|e, there |s a re||g|ous mora||ty whose coord|nates
are dened by the Ten Commandments, or there |s a so-
c|a| mora||ty: "An enormous bu|k of soc|a| phenomena
- schoo|s, the st||ng of sex |n ch||dhood, the m|sery of
the puberty years, the oppress|on wh|ch was sex w|th|n
marr|age - brought repress|on to |nd|v|dua|s... We must
speak of an economy of sexua||ty: the form |n wh|ch so-
c|ety regu|ates, encourages, or |nh|b|ts the grat|cat|ons
of the sexua| dr|ve." (W||he|m Re|ch, "The Impos|t|on of
Sexua| Mora||ty"|
If mora||ty |s a e|d, the perveme ||es w|th|n |t
||ke a bubb|e. The vo|ume and dens|ty of eva|uat|ons |n
the mora| e|d are perforated by a ho||ow, a gap |n the
mora| coverage. Anyth|ng can happen |n the perveme.
Pr|nc|p|es suffer the fate of weak ce||phone s|gna|s. Sus-
pens|on of judgement ceases to be an ep|stemo|og|ca|
gu|de||ne and becomes a just|cat|on of p|easure - epo-
ch perverted. Mora| |njunct|ons are rep|aced by hedon|c
d|rect|ves. Thou Sha/I and Thou Sha/I NoI g|ve way to puI
/I here, Iouch me Ihere, b/ow me, fuck me. The pervert
does not oppose mora||ty so much as he abandons |t |n
pursu|t of a tw|sted persona| fu|||ment. H|s goa| |s not to
effectuate change - to want to change mora||ty |s to be
a rebe|, not a pervert - but to ach|eve a pr|vate sat|sfac-
t|on. Shouts, commands, threats, and gestures are how
parents force mora|s down the|r ch||dren's throats. In the
was getting at how develop-
ment towards a greater fulll-
ment of life, i.e. evolution, could
require the progress of immoral-
ity. Survival of the perversest.
If you were to take the
traditional conception of perver-
sity at its face value, there could
indeed be a latent value to de-
viance. Scientists today worry
about whether the planet can
continue to sustain life. As popu-
lation increases, it destroys the
very resources for which it makes
greater demands. As a result there
is a vicious circle between over-
population and global warming,
pollution, food and water short-
ages, loss of natural habitat, and
so on. Malthus thought that these
could be checked by death, dis-
ease, famine, and, on a more per-
sonal level, sexual abstinence. But
is there not another way in which
reproduction can be reigned in?
The sterile forms of
sexual depravity also help to pro-
tect the planet from the ravages
of overpopulation. Their non-re-
productivity is eco-friendly. Save
a Tree, Eat a Beaver: cunnilingus
ghts deforestation, the cum shot
is good for the ice caps, you can
imagine someone who molests
little girls for the sake of the polar
bears. If everyone were a pedo-
phile, there would be no popula-
tion crisis and thus no environ-
mental one either. A kink may
often have hideous consequences
for an individual dont mini-
mize the suffering of the disem-
boweled six-year-old but it can
have unintentionally good conse-
quences for the species. In this
very weird sense, Nietzsche was
right: the progress of immorality
serves the development of life.
(But if sexual immoral-
ity is good for the planet, is it im-
moral? It may be wrong to com-
mit gratuitous violence against
a six-year-old, but what if this is
just an epiphenomenal form of
an otherwise green perversion?
Which is more important the
individual or the species? It could
well be that, in the future, many
perversions will become norms
thanks to their ecological correct-
ness. At that point the real perver-
sions will be consciously un-green
ones repropaths having dozens
of babies, or freaks who exacer-
29. Ana Mend|eta, S//ueIa Ser/es, Mex|co, C Pr|nt, 1973-1978.
Perhaps there are na||y enough peop|e. The earth |s swo||en w|th hu-
man|ty, stuffed w|th esh, burst|ng at the seams w|th human an|ma|s.
Evo|ut|on |s n|shed. DNA ceases to terror|ze us w|th |ts desperate
need to ex|st. Throw|ng off the burden of reproduct|on |s ||ke emerg|ng
from the Dark Ages. We are no |onger serfs to|||ng to make human esh
grow. It's a new dawn, natura| g|ves way to unnatura| se|ect|on, He-
don|c Darw|n|sm, the weed|ng out of p|easures that have become o|d,
weak, or sta|e. (A thousand years from now an anthropo|og|st d|scovers
the bones of the m/ss/onary pos/I/on d|s|ntegrat|ng |n d|rt...| Evo|ut|on
spawned new spec|es of be|ng. Are we not now see|ng new spec|es of
behav|or? Pervo|ut|on.
perveme, shouts, commands, threats, and gestures are
how those ch||dren sp|t them back out.
Or somet|mes the perveme |s |ess a ho||ow than
a ma||gnant growth, a tumor |n the mora| e|d, a mor-
a/oma ||ke a carc|noma |n a t|ssue samp|e. Mora||ty seeps
through the wa||s of the perveme but nds |tse|f cut off,
|so|ated. It |oses |ts or|entat|on to the po|es of good and
bad, |t sets up new goods and bads, d|storted ones, cor-
rupt, pathogen|c. Cons|der the Gent|e Pedo: he w||| te||
you how k|nd he'|| be to your ||tt|e g|r| wh||e he mo|ests
her. (Oh thanks, you mean you'|| rape her |n such a way
that the surgeon won't have to repa|r her rectum? That's
rea||y k|nd of you.| Or there |s the masoch|st who under-
m|nes the most bas|c prem|se of mora||ty, wh|ch |s that |t's
wrong to hurt somebody. In masoch|sm, the Go|den Ru|e
becomes a b|ack |nv|tat|on: do unIo me as l wou/d never
do unIo oIhers. How can mora||ty endure where there are
|nd|v|dua|s who covet such reversa|s? In a sense, |t |s not
the masoch|st but mora||ty that suffers |n the perveme.
It undergoes an ex|stent|a| cr|s|s, a bout of uncerta|nty,
doubt about |ts own prem|ses and pr|nc|p|es.
The perveme's eco|ogy |s ||ke the pervert's so-
||ps|sm, an |nter|or wor|d w|th |ts own strange |aws. A
pr|nc|p|e may sound r|ghteous |ns|de the perveme (I |ove
an|ma|s|. But then |t |eaks |nto the mora| e|d and sounds
absurd (so you sneak |nto my barn to fuck my goats?|.
Meanwh||e the judgements that the mora| e|d offers on
the perveme are ||ke those that the patr|ot offers on the
defector or the xenophobe on the outs|der. They're harsh,
unsympathet|c, crue|. The perveme, they dec|are, |s |m-
mora|. What happens |f the pervert hears th|s scorn and
outrage? Maybe |t str|kes a chord w|th h|m. Maybe he
bate the hole in the ozone layer
because it excites them to think of
a great orice in the sky.)
One commenter (HorseHelper)
knew the man who had been
fucked to death by a horse. An-
other posted a link to a video pur-
porting to show the unfortunate
act. This remained in the moder-
ation queue while I decided what
to do about it. The video made
me queasy. It did not show any-
one dying and was lmed, accord-
ing to HorseHelper, on a different
occasion. However, it did show a
man being sodomized by a horse.
It didnt look or sound pleasur-
able. In fact, the sight of it was
less disturbing than the sound of
it, though HorseHelper insisted
that the man was groaning with
pleasure it felt rather good to
him, or else, he wont have kept
going back, over and over again.
Those are also the same noises, he
makes, when hes getting sted or
playing with any one of his dildos
one, which is actually longer
and thicker, than the horse, you
saw in that video clip.
I debated with myself
whether to publish the comment
containing the video link. It is
the only thing in the years Ive
run PervScan that made me step
away from the computer, take a
walk, try to clear my head. I sat
in a courtyard beside a black glass
skyscraper. It was a bright sum-
mer day. Doctors were having
their lunch beside me. People in
business suits hurried by, and I
wondered what kinks their suits
concealed. Should I approve that
link? As a site owner I had con-
cerns about liability, but rationally
I could see that these were mini-
mal. I wasnt hosting or distribut-
ing bestiality. As an individual I
had concerns about the morality
of the whole thing. Is it wrong to
offer your ass to a horse? What, I
wondered, would Kant think? Is
it possible to apply the categorical
imperative to equestrian sodomy?
The video made me
uneasy, but the prospect of cen-
soring it made me uneasy too. I
dont endorse what the guy did
after all, it killed him but, at
the same time, in the state where
it occurred bestiality wasnt tech-
nically illegal. Was it immoral?
reor|ents h|mse|f to the e|d's po|es of good and bad, he
agrees w|th |ts condemnat|on of h|m. Or maybe he d|s-
agrees, h|s perveme |s so freaky and comp|ete that he
can't see anyth|ng wrong w|th |t, a pr|nc|p|e that sound-
ed r|ghteous to the e|d sounds absurd |n the perveme.
Some perverts w||| react w|th the |nd|gnat|on of wrong|y
pun|shed ch||dren. (It's not my fau|tI A sheep-fucker: "If I
d|d do |t, wh|ch I'm say|ng I'm not, that |s a s|ck person,
and |f I d|d do |t, I'm s|ck."| Others w||| re||sh the outrage
of the mora| e|d. For them, as for those who ||ke to be
cursed and |nsu|ted dur|ng sex, v|||cat|on on|y |ntens|-
es the|r p|easure.
30. Man and Horse, V|deo St|||, 2005.
The s|ght |s noth|ng next to the sound. You shou|d have heard |t. We a||
know that cr|es of p|easure can dup||cate the sounds of other extreme
human emot|ons. There are c||maxes that sound ||ke somebody be|ng
stabbed to death, or strugg||ng w|th const|pat|on, or rece|v|ng rea||y
bad news. There are cr|es, wh|mpers, grunts, shouts, groans, best|a|
sounds for wh|ch there are no words - to descr|be these you wou|d
have to resort to onomatopoe|a. Such was the man be|ng fucked by
a horse. In my memory I reca|| |t as someth|ng an|ma| - I mean, the
man reduced to an an|ma| - and yet suct|ony. You ever hear someone
p|unger a to||et? It was ||ke that but more fundamenta|, as though the
guy had been fucked back |nto some preverba| evo|ut|onary state, Ne-
andertha| pass|on. Afterward, I reca||ed read|ng the c|a|m |n a book on
the ph||osophy of d|sgust that there |s no such th|ng as a d|sgust|ng
sound, a sound that cou|d make you nauseous, a sound that cou|d ||ter-
a||y |nduce vom|t|ng. Ev|dent|y, I thought, the author had never heard a
man fucked by a horse.
Maybe yes, maybe no. Was it im-
moral to contemplate it, watch
the video, analyze it? No. Finally
I released the link from the mod-
eration queue. A lively debate
ensued. Some commenters were
appalled and talked about ani-
mal cruelty. Zoerasts responded
that the animal was being dealt
pleasure, not cruelty. Privately I
thought the morality of the thing
had less to do with the animal
than the man. He was engaging
in a risky behavior. It stopped
short of being suicide by horse
cock, but death by peritonitis was
not an inconceivable outcome.
Is it ok to fuck your way
right up to the edge? Is it ok to
pursue pleasure to the very point
where it nally separates from the
duty (tendency? instinct? moral
obligation?) to preserve your own
life? I dont know. Thats murky.
Youd have to answer that ques-
tion for yourself. I do know,
however, that everything changes
when your pursuit of pleasure
threatens somebody else. There
are ways you can justify assault
or even murder as hedonic side
effects, collateral damage in the
campaign for jollies: the indi-
vidual is everything, its a Raskol-
nikov trip, dog eat dog, my kink
ber alles. But that justication
belongs to tunnel vision. If you
can extract yourself from your
own solipsism, youll see that the
moral boundary of your perveme
coincides with the faces, arms,
crotches of other people.
The relations between perver-
sity and morality are very compli-
cated. I do not want you to think
that, in trying to analyze perver-
sity, I condone the actions of Jo-
seph Duncan. I dont. I feel very
clear in my own mind that what
he did was wrong and yet this
puts me into a difcult psycho-
logical position, because the way
he hung a young boy reminds me
of the erotic hangings in Naked
Lunch and other works of Wil-
liam S. Burroughs. How can I
repudiate this act in reality when
I derive a certain stimulation or
pleasure from experiencing it in a
work of literature? Is this not the
worst form of dilettantism?
On one hand, it most
certainly is. Look, youd go watch
31. Joseph Duncan, V|deo St|||, Cr|m|na| Ev|dence, 2005.
"Joseph Duncan made mov|es of h|mse|f sexua||y mo|est|ng and rap-
|ng these ch||dren, start|ng very soon after he s|aughtered the|r o|der
brother, the|r mother and the|r mother's boyfr|end. Joseph Duncan
made mov|es of Dy|an hang|ng by h|s neck from a rope or cord, from a
crossbeam |n that cab|n |n Lo|o Nat|ona| forest. Joseph Duncan |med
the ongo|ng hang|ng of ||tt|e Dy|an, the v|deo shows Duncan br|ng|ng
h|m to the br|nk of death - on|y to ||ft h|m up to rega|n consc|ous-
ness and |et h|m hang once more. Duncan gett|ng off on th|s scene
the who|e t|me. Joseph Duncan then choreographed a scene |n wh|ch
he forced the traumat|zed Shasta to further degrade and harm her
ha|f-dead brother by mak|ng her drag h|m by the rope around h|s neck
- through the campre. Joseph Duncan then murdered Dy|an w|th a
shotgun, and used h|s hatchet on h|s ||tt|e body. Joseph Duncan |med
h|mse|f forc|ng Shasta to p|ace her be|oved brother's body parts |n a
campre. Later, Joseph Duncan |med Shasta be|ng forced to p|ck her
brother's charred body parts out of the coo|ed ashes of the campre.
They were then p|aced |n a cu|vert, to be washed out - or so Duncan
thought - w|th the ra|n." (Excerpted from a cr|me b|og.|
a horror movie with delight but
then shudder if you saw those
cinematic acts transposed to real-
ity. Who wouldnt? On the other
hand, I wonder if this isnt dilet-
tantism exactly but something
else. To read the erotic hangings
in Naked Lunch might be shock-
ing. It might subject you to a new
perspective of some sort. But then
you know and accept beforehand
that one of the functions of litera-
ture is to do this to you: open up
new perspectives. An author who
genuinely shocks is merely ful-
lling the mandate of literature.
Conversely, a criminal act might
shock, but that is not part of its
mandate. To follow a murderer
in his awful lust might open up
a new perspective, but only at
the cost of trapping you in the
narrowest of personal pursuits,
a twisted image of fulllment
through sociopathic behavior
my kink ber alles. To contemplate
this is not to feel an opening up of
perspectives, as in literature, but a
closing in, a narrowing, a suffoca-
tion. (Which suggests a corollary:
to enter into the perversion of
others is claustrophobic.)
To a philosopher the masoch-
ist is a paradox who upholds two
contradictory theses about sex.
One concedes that sexuality is a
pursuit of pleasure. The other as-
serts that sexuality is a pursuit of
pain. Imagine a syllogism ending
ergo pain is pleasure... Its enough
to make a logician despair, and
yet this very riddle appears un-
der another guise in the canon
of philosophy. For example, an
entire chapter of Edmund Burkes
famous treatise is titled How
Pain Can Be a Cause of Delight.
Was he writing a monograph on
masochism? No, his concern was
something else sublimity.
In philosophy there is a
substantial literature on the sub-
lime extending from Longinus to
Lyotard. But what does sublimity
have to do with masochism? My
thought is this. Part of the pleasure
in perversity consists in stepping
outside the norm in eluding or
exceeding limits. Coincidentally,
this is how philosophy speaks of
sublimity. Kant says that sublime
feelings are aroused by an object
so far as it immediately involves,
or else by its presence provokes a
32. Laure| Nakadate, Love HoIe/, V|deo St|||, 2004.
"What e|se |s there to say?" the art|st to|d an |nterv|ewer. "I went to
Japan, I pretended to get fucked |n rooms I d|dn't be|ong |n, and I came
home." In a sense th|s |s what we a|| do. Rather than rea||y have sex
we on|y s|mu|ate |t w|th|n our cocoons. Somet|mes we rub up aga|nst
another cocoon, and because that other |s s|mu|at|ng sex too, we at
|east share |n a mutua| str|v|ng. But afterward we ||e s|de by s|de |n our
cocoons aga|n, res|gned to the |mposs|b|||ty of any rea| commun|ca-
t|on. We utter commonp|aces (was |t good for you?| because at |east
those are common, |.e. shared. Love |s an effort to break through the
s|mu|acra, and I wonder |f pervers|ty |sn't the oppos|te: a comp|ete ac-
ceptance of ex|stent|a| |so|at|on, a recogn|t|on of the fut|||ty of Tota|
Commun|on, a sord|d cyn|c|sm that says, "A|| r|ght, we'|| never be two
hearts as one, so fuck |t, I m|ght as we|| exp|ore my own we|rd |nd|v|du-
a||ty, e|aborate the thread of my des|res, undo the knots, see where |t
|eads, why not? You'|| never understand me so I may as we|| have a go
at understand|ng myse|f." Thus pervers|ty |s an express|on of |ust that
approaches ph||osophy, know Ihyse/f w|th the presumpt|on that your
obsess|ons w||| br|ng you c|oser to truth and rea||ty than |mmers|on |n
another w||| ever.
representation of limitlessness.
Such is not to say that any given
desideratum (armpit, amputee,
animal) is sublime. Rather, it is
the act of organizing the perveme
that opens up a perspective, a vista
on formlessness. Its like standing
on a precipice. Youre at the edge
of normality looking out over a
vast terrain of unregulated behav-
ior, Kink Land. In her diary Anas
Nin reports that Henry Miller
tells her: The rst day I saw you,
I felt and believed you perverse,
decadent. And apart from our
personal experience, which is nei-
ther perverse nor decadent, I still
feel in you an immense yielding,
so that one feels there is no limit
with you, to what you might be
or do that is decadence an
absence of boundary a perverse
yielding, limitless in experience.
In this regard sublimity
stands in stark contrast to beauty.
The beautiful in nature, writes
Kant in the Critique of Judgement,
is a question of the form of ob-
ject, and this consists in limita-
tion. In other words, there is a
profound connection between
beauty and boundary. The beau-
tiful reinforces the limits of nor-
mal sexual behavior by enticing
you to reproduce. (Hence also
the relevance of scientic studies
showing that the perception of
beauty has a biological basis. You
look at a woman and say, Shes so
hot. But what youre really say-
ing is that deep down, almost
subliminally you recognize
the proportion between her hips
and breasts to be a good indica-
tor of her fertility.) Conversely, to
transgress the limits of normality
is to practice a sexuality that may
no longer have as its object some-
thing beautiful but something
ugly or low a foot, a mutt, a
corpse. While it may be that we
derive pleasure from these, we
also derive it from the very fact
that choosing them is transgres-
sive. Negatively put, perversity
leads desire to the unlovely. Posi-
tively put, it carries desire beyond
all limits.
There is something very
exciting about this. Any pervy
little thing you want to do is pos-
sible in Kink Land. There is also
something scary about it. You
dont quite know what youre
capable of, where things could
lead, how desires could turn sour.
(Sometimes they ricochet back
on you. Autoerotic electrocution:
guys get their jollies with surge
protectors and homemade climax
circuits but end up ofng them-
selves.) Such negative potential,
such foreboding, is an important
part of sublimity. Burke: the feel-
ing of the sublime is grounded on
the impulse towards self-preserva-
tion and on fear, i.e., on a pain
[...] capable of producing delight;
not pleasure but a sort of delight-
ful horror. A delightful horror
this is the paradoxical affect
that stimulates a person who says
to himself, I know its wrong but
Ill do it anyway. Horror comes
from the cognizance of wrongdo-
ing, delight from transgression of
the same. Voluptuous Panic.
(The rapist also attains a
sort of sublimity, a limitlessness in
his choice of sex objects Why,
theyre there for the plucking, like
low-hanging fruit. However, the
rapist arrives at sublimity in a dif-
ferent way than the pervert. The
pervert achieves limitlessness in
his desires, but the rapist achieves
The |mage that comes to m|nd when you contemp|ate
pervers|ty requ|res p|easure - a creep ut|||z|ng some
dev|ant means to get off, a man throw|ng h|mse|f to the
ground to ||ck the toes of a sanda|-wear|ng stranger. If
you remove p|easure from the |mage, |f you |mag|ne the
man perform|ng the same act w|thout gett|ng off, then |t
no |onger seems perverse but rather odd, perhaps mad.
Obv|ous|y p|easure |s essent|a| to pervers|ty -
and yet th|s |s not a s|mp|e phys|o|og|ca| phenomenon.
Peop|e get off ||ck|ng feet, be|ng gagged, caus|ng oth-
ers to dr|nk caust|c u|ds. None of these need cu|m|nate
|n orgasm. P|easure a|ways accompan|es pervers|on but
c||max comes and goes. It's ep|phenomena|, a s|de ef-
fect more than a goa|. After a||, an orgasm |s an orgasm
|s an orgasm. The phys|o|ogy rema|ns the same whether
you're fuck|ng the m|ssus or a dog. What changes |s cog-
n|t|ve. You Ih/nk your p|easure depends not on orgasm
but on the conjunct|on of orgasm and dog - or, to re-
move orgasm a|together, on the conjunct|on of foot and
tongue, or on the |mmob|||zat|on of the arms, or on the |n-
ducement of nausea. The pervert str|ves for an arrange-
ment, a perveme, a conceptua| mode| of a phys|ca| act,
and therefore p|easure |n pervers|ty |s the way |n wh|ch a
menta| |mage cond|t|ons a esh|y affect.
Natura||y, p|easure |s not equa||y d|str|buted across
the perveme. Take the man/woman/daughter/dog th|ng.
You can't speak (||ke a ut|||tar|an| of the greatest p|easure
for the greatest number of perverts. The man (organ|zer
of the perveme| |s pursu|ng h|s p|easure. The woman |s
to|erat|ng |t. The daughter |s hat|ng |t. The dog - |s |t
even capab|e of an affect that |sn't mere|y phys|o|og|ca|?
You cou|d create a heat map of the p|easures that cross
the perveme |n extens|ty. It wou|d show so||ds and vo|ds,
po|nts of great |ntens|ty and po|nts of zero |ntens|ty, ||tt|e
p|easure vo|ds, hedon|c ho||ows. The ho||ows wou|d cor-
respond to heterogene|t|es |n the perveme. The |ntens|-
t|es wou|d be|ong to the perverts. That's the way the per-
veme works. It |s a stage product|on choreographed by a
degenerate whose on|y concern |s to max|m|ze h|s grat|-
cat|on. What does he care |f a ||tt|e g|r| cr|es? What does
he care |f h|s des|re to ejacu|ate |n her armp|t breaks her
parents' hearts? The |mportant th|ng here |s h|s p|easure.
My k/nk ber a//es.
Does the |ntens|ty of p|easure |n the perveme cor-
re|ate to the perveme's pervers|ty? Certa|n|y there |s a
perv|ness factor that can |ncrease or decrease. Take a
woman - that's not too perverse. Add her daughter -
the pervers|ty |ncreases. Add her dog - the pervers|ty
it in his desiderata. The pervert is
unconventional in his urges he
yearns to wear angora sweaters or
to watch strangers fuck his wife.
Conversely, the rapist is conven-
tional in his wants just gimme
a woman but unconventional
in his methods. For the one, plea-
sure lies in the liberation of ab-
normal urges. For the other, in
the appropriation of normal ob-
jects.)
Boring fucks come in a variety
of forms. You sleep with someone
not out of lust but out of pity
or duty. Or you start with ex-
citement but then, in mid-fuck,
tire of your partner and feel too
embarrassed to leave off. Or you
have fucked your partner for so
long that it has become rote, like
brushing your teeth before bed.
Or you have done so much fuck-
ing in your life that its hard to
imagine a fuck exciting you much.
Call that Sex Machine Syndrome:
maybe you can really crank it out,
but you also bring the emotions
of a machine to the act.
Ironically, nothing re-
veals the nature of pleasure quite
34. BeauI/fu/ Agony, Screen Grab from Beaut|fu|Agony.com, 2008.
The fasc|nat|ng and very e|egant s|te beaut|fu|agony.com features v|deo
c|ose-ups of faces |n orgasm. Many peop|e nd |t exc|t|ng to watch the
fac|a| express|ons that the|r |overs make dur|ng orgasm. Superc|a||y,
th|s p|easure |n faces |s s|m||ar to the p|easure |n fac|a|s. In each case,
when you scrunch your eyes and b|te your ||ps or when I ejacu|ate on
your face, I am ab|e to see v|s|b|e express|ons of my sexua| efforts.
It's ||ke be|ng confronted w|th my heartbeat on an e|ectrocard|ogram:
someth|ng I had on|y known through the murk|ness of |nterna| sensa-
t|on |s sudden|y externa||zed, object|ed, brought back to me through
the eyeba||s. However, there |s a key d|fference between "beaut|fu| ago-
ny" and cum shot. In a fac|a| express|on, |t |s your p|easure on your face.
In the fac|a|, |t |s my p|easure on your face.
like a boring fuck. On the sur-
face, it seems like a contradiction:
there you are, disinterested in the
act, and yet your body undergoes
the same old climax. You could
not care less but your genitalia
are pushing euphoric shock waves
into your body. This is pleasure
reduced to its physiological basis:
stimulation, blood ow, rhythmic
contractions, relaxation. Whats
missing? The mental quotient, the
enthusiasm for a person (love), a
thing (fetishism), an arrange-
ment (perversion). In all of these,
the mental quotient is greater in
importance than the physical.
You can love without orgasm, fe-
tishize without climax, indulge in
perversion without tripping the
switch on your built-in titillation
kit. Fondle the monogrammed
napkin: the pleasure is not in
your ngers but in your mind.
The boring fuck is
therefore the polar opposite of the
extreme perversion. The one is all
body, the other all brain. What
would be interesting would be
to see some deviant innovator try
to conjoin the two. Nobody fan-
tasizes about boring fucks so
wouldnt it be perverse to pursue?
Or perhaps it would just be para-
doxical, since if you desire a bor-
ing fuck it cant really be boring
or else you wouldnt desire it.
Does language have a specic
role inside the perveme? If repro-
duction is the natural goal of
sexuality, the analogous goal for
language is reproduction of mean-
ing to reproduce my thoughts
in your brain. To pervert language
would be to undermine this act of
reproduction. In Sade, perversion
transforms words into commands,
so that it is less a matter of repro-
ducing my meaning in your head
than in your body, your posture.
You dont need to understand.
You need to submit. Words are
nothing we share. They belong to
me, theyre my words. The sadist
perverts language by taking own-
ership of it and thereby render-
ing communication meaningless.
For example, there is the Sadean
libertine who obliges a woman
to pronounce blasphemies: if she
refuses, he blows her brains out
and says, Theres one for God;
if she blasphemes, he blows out
|ncreases. In th|s case, an |ncrease |n extens|ty (more
e|ements |n the perveme| corre|ates w|th an |ncrease
|n perverse |ntens|ty [pervens/Iy}. That's not a|ways the
case, though. Somet|mes |t takes a decrease |n extens|ty
to push pervens|ty to a h|gher magn|tude. Take a hetero-
sexua| coup|e. Both want to fuck. Then the woman w|th-
draws |nto herse|f, p|easures herse|f |n front of the man,
not because he asks for |t but because she has every
|ntent|on of deny|ng h|m h|s grat|cat|on. She does |t to
torture h|m. Ergo the pervens|ty |ncreases but the exten-
s|ty decreases, the two e|ements rema|n |n the perveme
but the bonds are broken, the perveme condenses on the
woman and |eaves the man dr|ft|ng at the per|phery.
On the surface a perveme m|ght appear to be an
ent|re|y unp|easurab|e arrangement - n|pp|e torture -
and yet somehow transports of joy compete w|th zones
of boredom and anx|ety, m|cro-ecstas|es emerge from re-
pu|s|on and |rr|tat|on. P|easure |s essent|a| to pervers|ty,
so why does the pervert so often seek pa|n? Is he a para-
dox|ca| be|ng? A synthes|zer of contrad|ct|ons? P|easure
and pa|n seem to ex|st on a cont|nuum. P|easure |s at one
end, pa|n at the other - thus a great p|easure |nvo|ves
no pa|n and a horr|b|e pa|n |nvo|ves no p|easure. It's the
popu|ar (|.e. unperverted| concept|on, and you can nd |t
|n ph||osophy too. Ep|curus asserted that a state of pa|n-
|essness |s equ|va|ent to the h|ghest poss|b|e p|easure.
P|a|n|y the ph||osopher knew no masoch|sts.
Pervers|on can requ|re the most sk|||fu| coord|na-
t|on of pa|ns and p|easures. Th|s has the effect of e|ther
bend|ng the pa|n/p|easure cont|nuum |nto an |mposs|b|e
shape, ||ke a Mb|us str|p, or of sunder|ng the two a|to-
gether. And wou|dn't that rea||y make the most sense?
35. Meghan Boody, Psyche Adorned [From Ihe Ser/es Pysche and SmuI},
L|ghtjet Pr|nt, 2000.
For years a postcard of Psyche Adorned served as the bookmark |n
my beaten paperback of Lo//Ia. A ga||ery had ma||ed |t to me and I had
tucked |t |nto Nabokov's book. "I am not concerned w|th so-ca||ed 'sex'
at a||," Nabokov made Humbert Humbert say. "Anybody can |mag|ne
those e|ements of an|ma||ty. A greater endeavor |ures me on: to x once
for a|| the per||ous mag|c of nymphets." The pervert, paradox|ca||y, |s
not obsessed w|th sex. Obsess|on |mp||es an acceptance of the th|ng as
|t |s. "I'm obsessed w|th x" |s to say that x |s, to me, perfect. The pervert,
to the contrary, |nhab|ts a wor|d of |mperfect|on. Sex can a|ways be d|f-
ferent or better. H|s concern |s not x but x+n (what |f we add a dog to
the m|x?|, x*n (tw|nsI|, x-n (what |f I gag you and therefore subtract from
the fu||ness of the sensor|um? Or what |f we remove orgasm a|together?
Not to say that we won't orgasm but that, as perverts, we refuse to th|nk
of orgasm as the "natura|" term|nus of sexua||ty|. Pervers|on |s permu-
tat|on, and the pervert |s |ess a sexua| be|ng than a sexua| becom|ng
- he who subjects sex to a var|ety of becom|ngs.
Instead of a cont|nuum anchored by p|easure at one po|e
and pa|n at the other, there are two cont|nuums: one
ranges from p|easure to d|sp|easure, the other, separate,
ranges from pa|n to "d|spa|n." In the hedon|c cont|nuum
d|sp|easure |s not a pa|n but a negat|ve va|ue proper to
p|easure as such. Have you ever had someone keep b|ow-
|ng you after you've ejacu|ated? There |s a moment there
where the joy of orgasm g|ves way to a we|rd sensat|on
that's not rea||y pa|nfu| and m|ght become p|easurefu|
aga|n. But meanwh||e |t's someth|ng e|se - d|sp|easure,
a negat|ve va|ue on the p|easure cont|nuum. S|m||ar|y d|s-
pa|n |s an agreeab|e sensat|on |nter|or to the a|ges|c con-
t|nuum. There are "good pa|ns," ||ke the p|nch of a n|pp|e.
These are not p|easures because, after a||, they hurt, and
yet they occupy pos|t|ve pos|t|ons on the cont|nuum of
pa|n. (I no |onger th|nk of p|easure and pa|n as be|ng at
oppos|te ends of a seesaw. They are more ||ke |eve|s on
an equa||zer.|
Thus sexua| pervers|ty - w|th |ts seem|ng|y para-
dox|ca| fus|ons of p|easure and pa|n - |nd|cates the non-
cont|nu|ty of p|easure and pa|n. As a resu|t, |t a|so shows
the non-comp|ementar|ty of sad|sm and masoch|sm.
These are not the two ha|ves of a c||n|ca| ent|ty, no more
than p|easure and pa|n are the two ha|ves of a sensory
cont|nuum. "The sad|st and the masoch|st m|ght we|| be
enact|ng separate dramas, each comp|ete |n |tse|f, w|th
d|fferent sets of characters and no poss|b|||ty of commu-
n|cat|on between them, e|ther from |ns|de or outs|de."
(De|euze| For examp|e, there |s a sad|st|c re||sh |n pa|n
that |s qu|te d|fferent than the masoch|st|c enjoyment of
|t. The sad|st we|comes pa|n because he |s ab|e to r|se
above |t. Pa|n enab|es h|m to express h|s apathy toward
36. Raymond Pett|bon, The Observab/e Wor/d, Draw|ng, 1985.
"Sex |s everywhere a|| the t|me and you can't escape," the capt|on says.
"Shower w|th a fr|end." The woman attempts to cover herse|f. Her face
seems to shout, "Get awayI" The capt|on rep||es by say|ng that sex |s
ub|qu|tous, |nev|tab|e, you m|ght as we|| g|ve |n to |t, have casua| sex |n
the bathroom. But |f th|s |s a re|evant thes|s - sex |s everywhere a|| the
t|me, and "we don't stop ta|k|ng about sex" e|ther - there rema|ns an
a|ternat|ve other than res|gnat|on. There are ||tt|e punctures |n sexua|-
|ty, b|ack ho|es, and |t |s poss|b|e to venture |nto these. You can escape
from sexua||ty by p|ung|ng |nto pervers|on. (Sexua||ty has two edges: on
one s|de, there |s the v|rg|na|, where the asexua| becomes sexua|, on the
other s|de, the perverse, where the sexua| touches once aga|n on the
asexua| but |n a new way - hence fet|shes, deorgasm|cat|on, etc.|
pa|n. The sad|st says, "I am a cont|nuum of p|easure. For
me, the cont|nuum of pa|n does not ex|st as an affect but
as someth|ng more ||ke a spec|a| effect - I do not fee| |t
but I see |t |n your wr|th|ng and I hear |t |n your screams."
Converse|y, the "woman torturer of masoch|sm cannot
be sad|st|c prec|se|y because she |s /n the masoch|s-
t|c s|tuat|on, she |s an |ntegra| part of |t, a rea||zat|on of
the masoch|st|c fantasy. She be|ongs |n the masoch|st|c
wor|d, not |n the sense that she has the same tastes as
her v|ct|m, but because her 'sad|sm' |s of a k|nd never
found |n the sad|st, |t |s as |t were the doub|e or the re-
ect|on of masoch|sm." (De|euze|
her brains and says, Theres one
for the devil.
Or in Nabokov, per-
version transforms words into a
kind of stuttering. Maneuvering
Lolitas legs across his lap, Hum-
bert Humbert stammers out a
mangled ditty: O my Carmen,
my little Carmen, something,
something, those something
nights, and the stars, and the cars,
and the bars, and the barmen...
The stars that sparkled, and the
cars that parkled, and the bars,
and the barmen... If perversion
interrupts the ow from foreplay
to orgasm by inserting an armpit,
a leather mask, or a spanking,
it also interrupts the discursive
ow, chops it into discrete units
like a cut-up the something,
something nights, or the Sadean
cut-up consisting of commands,
syllogisms, and moans placed side
by side. And of course there are
gaps between these units, silences
in which perversion swallows up
language altogether, A fustiga-
tor quietly and slowly saws off all
four limbs, one after the other.
(120 Days of Sodom)
One day I was wa|k|ng through Centra| Park and passed
by a g|r| speak|ng on her ce|| phone. I overheard her say
that she was th|nk|ng about gett|ng a job |n Lat|n Amer-
|ca, perhaps teach|ng Eng||sh. Meanwh||e, she sa|d, she
had been enjoy|ng her t|me |n New York because |t was
enab||ng her to |earn a |ot about herse|f.
I wa|ked away w|th th|s sn|ppet of random |nfor-
mat|on reverberat|ng |n my ear. The g|r|'s |dent|ty quest
had struck me as qua|nt, ||ke a ch||d's enthus|asm for a
mag|c tr|ck whose secret |s obv|ous to an adu|t. That o|d
ph||osoph|ca| |mperat|ve to know thyse|f - sudden|y I
fe|t as though I'd ach|eved |t. I was sober and co|d, ||ke
an assass|n enact|ng a we||-rehearsed p|an for murder. I
can't say that I have ach|eved perfect se|f-know|edge. I'm
not a ph||osopher or a Buddh|st monk. But at the same
t|me, I do th|nk I've arr|ved at a ut|||tar|an approx|mat|on
of se|f-understand|ng. I'm not seek|ng myse|f or try|ng to
gure out who I am. I know, more or |ess, who I am. (Th|s
|s not se|f-congratu|atory, s|nce se|f-know|edge |mp||es
that you know your warts as we|| as your beauty marks.|
At th|s juncture |t seems |ess |mportant to |earn about
myse|f than to take what I have and do what I can w|th
|t.
At the same t|me, a certa|n ph||osoph|ca||ty of
temperament makes |t |mposs|b|e for me to accept the
comp|acence |mp||ed by th|s funct|ona| se|f-understand-
|ng. My skept|c|sm trumps my ut|||tar|an|sm. Isn't there
a|ways someth|ng to |earn about onese|f? As|de from the
fact that ||fe presents cha||enges wh|ch e||c|t strengths
and weaknesses you never knew you had, I nd myse|f
re|ntroduc|ng opac|ty |nto my se|f-understand|ng by
means of perverse acts. It |s as though I say to myse|f,
When I was about nine years
old I read a story in the newspa-
per. A man, a professional wres-
tler, smashed his wife in the head
with a frying pan. Loud screams
caused neighbors to call 911.
When police arrived, they found
the man sitting on the ground
behind his house trailer. He was
eating a portion of his wifes intes-
tine. The article did not say how
he extracted it from her body, but
since he was a wrestler I imagined
that he had simply punched a st
into her stomach, reached right
into her guts, gripped the intes-
tine in his powerful hand, and
yanked it out.
The story made an in-
credible impression on me. It
opened a wormhole between
the world of my childhood and
another world of inscrutable im-
pulses madness, violence, and
cannibalism. I couldnt compre-
hend the story and yet, at the
same time, I liked to think about
it. I cut it out of the newspaper,
folded it up, and kept it in a little
wallet that I carried around, much
the same as other boys carried
around baseball cards. Sometimes
I would take it out and re-read it.
I could understand the argument
and the ght. Boys ght too. But
the grisly image of the man sitting
in some grass chewing his wifes
intestine? I had no template for
this. Even the violence of animals
failed to compare. There was
something weirdly intimate about
it, the man literally ingesting his
wife, but at the same time it was
brutal, extreme, beyond the pale.
I doubted that any of the adults
around me could say, as they did
of sex, Ill explain when youre
old enough to understand. How
old would you have to be, I won-
dered, to understand something
like this? A thousand or a million
years old?
One day at school the
teacher gathered us together for
show and tell. Other kids hauled
out their bric-a-brac. Probably I
forgot to bring something, so I
reached for the article in my wal-
let. I handed it to the teacher. She
began to read the rst sentence or
two to the class I think it was
standard newspaper fare, Police
were called today to investigate
a domestic dispute Then her
voice trailed off. She got very
quiet. She read ahead. Children
shifted in their seats. A clock
ticked. She folded the article back
into its well-worn creases, care-
fully, as though she hoped to put
back the horror that unfolding it
had released. I dont think we
should share that today, she said,
returning it to me.
This censorship made
me popular in the hallways after-
ward. Little boys and girls clam-
ored to read and then giggle about
this loathsome event. Probably I
enjoyed the attention, but deep
down inside I had been struck
by a disparity. The gruesome im-
age had inspired much thought
and reection in me. But in this
teacher whom I took to be world-
ly and wise, it inspired silence,
unease, uncertainty, an abdication
of authority. It exposed a pocket
of incomprehension, a lacuna in
understanding, a puncture where
the fathomable drained off into
the unfathomable. I was fasci-
nated. This awful thing in reality
somehow corresponded to a black
hole in the brain. I felt like a child
I was a child who discovers
the mouth to a cave. I wanted to
climb right in and explore.
Which is to say that de-
pravity was, to me, the entrance
to philosophy. On the gates to his
academy Plato had inscribed Let
no one who is ignorant of geome-
try enter here. In my mind those
same gates were inscribed with sex
crimes and psychopathologies. I
felt as though I had discovered,
in this quotidian bit of journal-
ism, the portal to a new kind of
thought. Perversionism. It would
use the abhorrent and the abnor-
mal as points of departure for ab-
straction. It would also perform
the reverse operation carry
abstraction into the abhorrent
and abnormal, into a nighttime
of concepts, the sleep of reason.
Kant had studied the bounds of
proper reason from the inside,
from within a pocket of light, the
lumen naturale, but I would move
beyond those bounds, probe the
shadows and the low-rent districts
where the brain goes slumming,
where the intellect ends up in the
arms of a whore improvising an
ontology of perversion, the meta-
physical fuck.
37. Andy Warho|, B/ow Job, F||m St|||, 1963.
The |m beg|ns abrupt|y, w|thout t|t|es. For s||ght|y more than ha|f an
hour the |mmob||e camera shows a young man's face. You become
aware of |ts s||ghtest uctuat|ons |n express|on: a tw|tch, a g|ance, the
scratch of a nose, a |ook of p|easure (or |s that boredom?|. L|t from
above, somet|mes the face moves |nto deep shadow, the eyes become
b|ack ho|es. Sudden|y the young man ||ghts a c|garette and you rea||ze
he must have c||maxed. But what |s |t exact|y that you have just w|t-
nessed? A m|croana|ys|s of p|easure? We|rd|y, |t |s a|most d|fcu|t to
process what you have actua||y seen because your m|nd |s busy |||ng
|n everyth|ng that the |m exc|udes. It has no sound, co|or, or cred|ts.
You have not seen another person, a mouth, a pen|s, semen. "There |s
both a m|ssed space |n the |m (the space of the supposed fe||at|o| and
a m|ssed t|me (by the t|me the c|garette |s ||t, '|t' |s a|ready over|." (L|nda
W||||ams, Porn SIud/es} And yet these vo|ds are prec|se|y what d|st|n-
gu|sh the |m. Whereas pornography g|ves you p|easure by over|oad|ng
your eyeba||s w|th gen|ta| c|ose-ups and cum shots, B/ow Job does the
oppos|te: |t w|thho|ds and thereby causes you not to enjoy but to th|nk.
"I know what I am. But what |f I prec|p|tate a de||berate
change |nto the cond|t|ons and c|rcumstances that make
me what I am? What w||| I be |f I consc|ous|y do some-
th|ng that's, we||, not me?"
Pervers|ty can be an |nstrument |n the quest for
se|f-know|edge, a protoco| for perform|ng exper|ments
|n se|fhood. However, rather than a||ow you to wa||ow |n
qu|et se|f-contemp|at|on, pervers|ty hur|s you |nto the un-
known, takes you somewhere new, puts you to the test.
It can be a ph||osophy, a we|rd ex|stent|a||sm that, |n con-
trast to Sartre's emphas|s on tak|ng respons|b|||ty for your
||fe, pos|ts the |rrespons|b|e act as a venue of se|f-know|-
edge. Pervers|on|sm. If you're an unth|nk|ng brute who
s|mu|ates a perverse act |n a paroxysm of mad |ust, you
won't grok th|s. But |f you br|ng a m|nd and a sens|b|||ty to
your endeavors, then you recogn|ze that the |ntent|ona|-
|ty of the perveme |s comp|eted by the opportun|t|es for
en||ghtenment that |t |eaves |n |ts wake. Th|s |s as true of
non-sexua| pervers|ty - dev|ant ||fe cho|ces, de||berate
pursu|ts of fa||ure, stubborn refusa|s of happ|ness - as
|t |s of sexua| pervers|ty. They end |n |||um|nat|on, a ||ght
bu|b hang|ng over a bed sta|ned w|th body u|ds.
Of course, that may be an |dea| that pervers|ty
often fa||s to atta|n. In the stead of |ns|ght there are ra-
t|ona||zat|ons deformed by |mpromptu |usts, crue|t|es
comm|tted by ha|f-|uc|d zomb|es, atroc|t|es |n eterna|
n|ght. Somet|mes exper|ments |n se|fhood go desperate-
|y wrong. The cond|t|ons were |||-conce|ved, the contro|s
went hayw|re, you end up br|ng|ng back the dead - Fran-
kenste|nI - but then the dead go on a rampage and k|ck
your pretent|ous ass a|| over the |ab. It happens. You want
to break new ground |n the ep|stemo|ogy of |ncest but
Maybe its all wrong to try to
take a philosophical approach to
perversion. Philosophy is love
love of wisdom, as the etymology
has it. The history of philosophy
is populated with lovers, thou-
sands of years of them, wannabe
wise men bringing chocolates and
owers to truth. Its wonderful
and its grand, really it is, but is it
appropriate to the understanding
of the subterranean and the smut-
ty? Romeo is out of place in the
perveme, just as the pervert is out
of place in the romance. (What a
comedy. The pervert could con-
ceal himself in the romance, no-
body would nd him out until
he asks his sweetheart to swaddle
him in an adult diaper. Con-
versely, Romeo would stand out
like a sore thumb in the perveme.
Jesus, the pervert would think,
what is this sap doing in my fe-
tish? I want to palpate him with
surgical gloves and hes prattling
on about the moon and the stars
and rainbows and unicorns...)
A philosopher who sets
himself the task of understanding
perversion may well be putting
himself into a position of danger.
Lovers become perverts but per-
verts rarely become lovers. Its a
weird asymmetry, just as it is easy
to fall off a cliff but difcult to
climb back up. The philosopher
begins nobly enough but out
of love nds himself identify-
ing with his subject matter. Its
like a bad joke. What do you get
when you cross a philosopher and
a pervert? One hybrid will be-
tray love, become a pervosopher,
a corrupter of wisdom, the sort
who perverts the sense of Kant.
Another will retain love but be-
tray wisdom, become a philovert,
besot himself with the deviation.
Imagine Kant as a compulsive
masturbator.
These are not puns but
dangers for thinking. How can a
thinker elude them? I really dont
know. I wish I had the answer but
I dont. Its the sort of thing you
have to gure out for yourself.
But I do know that a philosophy
will only be worth what you risk
for it. What you have achieved
cannot mean more to others
than it does to you. Whatever it
has cost you, thats what theyll
pay. (Wittgenstein) It makes for
on|y manage to hurt someone you |ove. It's a b|tch and
the on|y se|f-know|edge you ga|n |s b|tter as hem|ock.
Those are the r|sks you take, and those are the per||s that
|end both terror and sub||m|ty to the perverse.
G|ven that exper|ments |n pervers|ty often fa||
spectacu|ar|y, g|ven the fact that pervers|ty accounts for
some tru|y abhorrent human behav|or, |t may be wh|te-
wash|ng to ennob|e dev|ance w|th shades of en||ghten-
ment. It may be wrong-m|nded to th|nk that, when per-
vers|ty |s usua||y portrayed as an express|on of the body
(an|ma| |usts unrestra|ned by c|v|||ty| or the unconsc|ous
(we|rd urges ma|formed |n the b|ack box of the psyche|, |t
|s poss|b|e to e|evate |t |nto a ph||osoph|ca| doctr|ne, the
ca|cu|ated use of deprav|ty |n the pursu|t of se|f-know|-
edge. It may we|| be that th|s |s not a proper concept -
pervers|on|sm = pervers|ty + |||um|nat|on - but an aber-
rant conjunct|on of otherw|se |ncompat|b|e tendenc|es |n
the m|nd of a s|ng|e |nd|v|dua|, a one-man pervers|ty th|nk
tank.
38. Joe|-Peter W|tk|n, TesI/c/e SIreIch w/Ih Ihe Poss/b///Iy of a Crushed
Face, Photograph, 1982.
I try not to |ook at th|s |mage w|th my own eyes. My eyes react to the
s|ght of pa|n, danger, se|f-|njury. But my bra|n med|ates th|s response,
g|ves me another set of eyes that enab|es me to see someth|ng e|se.
After a||, why wou|d someone put h|mse|f |n th|s baroque setup |f there
weren't some freak|sh p|easure |n |t? "The test|c|e-stretch-man wasn't
|n great pa|n," sa|d W|tk|n to an |nterv|ewer, "he was |n a very erot|c,
sensuous cond|t|on." Indeed. We th|nk |t |s perfect|y natura| when a
|over does some crazy th|ng out of pass|on. Why, I wonder, must b|zarre
behav|or be conned to |ove? Why can |t not extend to sex too? When I
|ook at the test|c|e-stretch man w|th my |nner eye, I see that pervers|ty
|s much more than just a ster||e act. L|ke the |over's |mpu|s|veness, |t |s
a|so a ||tt|e mad. It's ||ke a man accost|ng you to say, "He||o, I'm Napo-
|eon." Hmm, yes you are, and |n sex, |t's ||ke someone accost|ng you to
say, "He||o, rather than fuck you, I'd ||ke to r|g a pu||ey to my ba||s and
stretch them out w|th we|ghts that hang precar|ous|y over my face."
Thus pervers|on |s the sensua||st's |rtat|on w|th madness.
a dangerous game. If you really
want to understand, you have to
play chicken with derangement.
You dont have to fuck yourself
with a lizard in order to formu-
late a philosophy of perversion.
The danger is interior to thought
itself. You can begin with the
noblest of intentions, a desire to
shed light where there is darkness,
but then your torch goes out and
you nd yourself lost in the very
darkness you hoped to dispel. In
a psychiatry journal I wish Id
photocopied it I once read the
case history of a philosopher who
went insane. He was working on a
metaphysical system in which the
existence of the world depended
on his left testicle. Clearly he was
the type for whom the sordid vec-
tor becomes a downward spiral.
All we have are the denitions
of normal men, or men posing
as normal. What is the madmans
denition of madness? What is
the perverts denition of perver-
sion? If you hear the normal de-
nition of perversion, you can ob-
ject, Well, the dener is normal,
how can he possibly understand
the perverse? If you hear the
perverse denition of perversion,
you can object, Well, thats self-
referential, like the Liar Paradox.
The normal denition of perver-
sion is typically non-reproductive
sexuality. But the pervert, out
of perversity, might dene it as
something else entirely pink
owers arranged in a black leath-
er boot, the smell of axle grease,
just a thing I do, a hobby, co-
prophagia. And how would the
pervert dene normality? Could
he understand it? Maybe he would
dene normality as a brick, or as
a milk truck, or as a single note
that everybody sings in unison,
aaaaahhhhhh. Well, what good
is that? Does that help me to un-
derstand? I have the normal mans
denition of the pervert, why not
the perverts denition of the nor-
mal man?
These are the sort of
methodological difculties you
run into. Do I dene myself as
one or the other? If I declare my
perversity, do you dismiss every-
thing I say as propaganda? If I ad-
mit my normality Im a regu-
lar guy, you know, I shop at The
I wanted to wr|te a work of ph||osophy about sexua| per-
vers|on, but th|s ra|sed an obv|ous prob|em. What const|-
tutes a ph||osoph|ca| as opposed to, say, a psycho|og|ca|
or anthropo|og|ca| ana|ys|s? I wanted to dene perver-
s|on but th|s seemed to requ|re that I rst dene ph||oso-
phy. Fuck. Th|s was go|ng to be a b|g job. I d|dn't want to
fa|| |nto an |nn|te regress. I d|dn't want to para|yze my-
se|f. I set as|de every den|t|on of ph||osophy that I'd ever
encountered. I gured the smart th|ng wou|d be to start
w|th a sort of art|c|a| |gnorance, ||ke Descartes. Keep |t
s|mp|e, stup|d. I asked myse|f how the man |n the street
wou|d dene ph||osophy. "It's a pursu|t of truth," he sa|d
|n my head.
It's not a bad den|t|on. Some em|nent ph||oso-
phers have made s|m||ar proposa|s. But as |t turns out,
th|s was a rotten p|ace for me to beg|n. Whenever some-
body offers me a truth, I have a gut |mpu|se to reject |t.
The moment you say "|t |s true that..." |s the moment I
want to sock you |n the mouth. Fuck you and your truths.
It may be a consequence of hav|ng ||ved |n a cyn|ca| age,
but the on|y ver|t|es I can trust are the ones at wh|ch I ar-
r|ve myse|f. Any others m|ght just be a covert attempt to
se|| hemorrho|d cream.
Th|s poses a terr|b|e d|fcu|ty for a ph||osopher.
Presum|ng that others are ||ke me - that others have
knee-jerk react|ons aga|nst |mpartat|ons of truth - how
cou|d I poss|b|y compose a cred|b|e work of ph||osophy?
I cou|d construct an argument as t|ght as a sp|nster's
th|ghs and you'd reject |t prec|se|y because |t's t|ght.
Success on a |og|ca| p|ane wou|d |ead to fa||ure on an-
other. Hmm... I wondered |f I shou|dn't reverse the who|e
process. If I were to fa|| de||berate|y on the |og|ca| p|ane,
wou|d I succeed on another? He||, |t works for re||g|ons.
The worse the|r |og|c, the greater the|r adherents.
At the same t|me, I cou|dn't just d|spense w|th
truth. It's not |mposs|b|e for fa|s|ty to |ead to truth - a
||e can speak vo|umes - but I wanted to say someth|ng
true about pervers|on, someth|ng that hadn't been sa|d
before, someth|ng that wou|d |||um|nate pervers|on |n a
ph||osoph|ca| way. To th|s end, my approach had to be
dev|ous. I d|d not want to conv|nce you of any truth. That
|s the job of propaganda. What I wanted was to tempt you
w|th the poss|b|||ty of a truth. Th|s wou|d set you th|nk|ng,
and perhaps you wou|d arr|ve at truths para||e| (on your
s|de of the reef of so||ps|sm| to m|ne.
But how can a ph||osophy be made over |nto a
temptat|on? How does the th|nker's demonstrat|on be-
come the seducer's d|ary? Iron|ca||y, th|s |s a quest|on of
art|ce - of sty|e. Truth may be thought |n the depths but
|t |s dep|oyed on the surface. Recogn|z|ng th|s, I wanted
to ach|eve two th|ngs: rst was to exc|te, to ag|tate, to
|nsp|re, second was to do th|s w|thout rema|n|ng who||y
on the surface, among the throngs of words. I wanted
to return you to the depths somehow, your depths, shut
off the ow of my own bu||sh|t |nto your ear. Perhaps I
wou|d |eave echoes - perveme, pervens/Iy, pervers/on-
/sm - but at |east you'd have a ||tt|e so||tude to th|nk
them over.
To th|s end, I tr|ed to make a ph||osoph|ca| use of
prec|p|tous var|at|ons |n dens|ty - so||ds and vo|ds.
The so||ds are agg|omerat|ons of concepts, per-
spect|ves, |ns|ghts. They push co||age from sty|e down
|nto thought |tse|f. I am not Hege|. You won't proceed from
thes|s to ant|thes|s and then on to synthes|s. Nobody |s
39. Francesca Woodman, Some D/sordered lnIer/or GeomeIr/es (Deta|||,
Art|st's Book, 1981.
Is there a ||ne separat|ng norma||ty from abnorma||ty? Or a ||ne |ead|ng
from pervers|on to madness? (Lunat|cs do ostens|b|y pervy th|ngs -
take off the|r c|othes |n pub||c, masturbate ||ke |d|ots, make advances
on fam||y members and hea|thcare personne| - and perverts often do
|nsane th|ngs, r|sk everyth|ng for a ten-second spurt of u|d.| D|agram
the perveme. Psych|atry speaks of the Oed|pa| tr|ang|e. What about the
necroph|||ac ||ne segment (extend|ng from perv to corpse|? The zoo-
ph|||c square (man, woman, daughter, dog|? Pervem|c pentagrams, or-
g|ast|c octagons, fuckgr|ds, n-d|mens|ona| matr|ces of the obscene...
"Whether as a mora| k|nk or a crooked tw|st g|ven to the w|||, v|ce has
often the appearance of a curvature of the sou|." (Bergson| Pervers|on
|s a curve, a sord|d vector, and you can trace |ts arc down |ns|de your-
se|f. The d|fcu|ty |s not to get caught |n your own |nter|or geometr|es,
not to suffocate |n so||ps|sm but to nd a ||ne back to the outs|de - not
to norma||ty, exact|y, but to funct|ona||ty, |.e. more ||fe.
genu|ne|y conv|nced by the synthes|s anyway. Here the
argument takes a structure more ||ke thes|s, ant|thes|s,
we||, fuck knows, |et's try another thes|s, or |et's see what
happens when two syntheses are juxtaposed ||ke frag-
ments of newspr|nt. Maybe you won't end up |n a qu|et
state of conv|ct|on. ("You're r|ght, that's pervers|on, now I
understand."| Maybe you run the r|sk of end|ng |n confu-
s|on. ("I just don't get |t. What |s pervers|on exact|y?"| But
hopefu||y you w||| exper|ence a state of turbu|ence, ex-
c|tement, st|mu|at|on, hyperst|mu|at|on, concepts ro|||ng
|n the bra|n, terms co|||d|ng |nto each other ||ke part|c|es
|n a so|ut|on - Brown|an mot|on |n the gray matter - and
these w||| |ead you to conce|ve for yourse|f the not|ons I
wou|d otherw|se have hoped to |mpart.
(Some techn|ques I used and perhaps you can
use too. For examp|e, severa| t|mes I read through th|s
wh||e pretend|ng that I was no |onger myse|f but one of
the peop|e ment|oned |n the text. It's ||ke method act|ng
except that |t's proofread|ng, and |t enab|ed me to step
outs|de the ||near ow of my own out|ook - to extend
co||age |nto the process of conceptua||zat|on. Another
techn|que was de||berate|y to wr|te somet|mes when I
was t|red or s|eepy. Often wr|ters are |ook|ng for a vo|ce,
but what I wanted was to |ose m|ne a ||tt|e, get under-
neath |t, get c|oser to the d|scourse that occurs |n my
bra|n when |n anart|st|c moments. I thought I m|ght get
c|oser to truth by snatch|ng |deas from the c|utches of
dream.|
Wh||e theor|sts of co||age often focus on the v|-
brat|ons and resonances that occur between e|ements
p|aced |n prox|m|ty, I th|nk that someth|ng very |mportant
a|so happens |n the gaps between juxtapos|t|ons. To read
Gap just like you then what
are my credentials for speaking
of perversion? Am I not doomed
to misunderstand? Or maybe its
not so black and white. Maybe
Im a pervert sometimes and a
normal guy other times. Maybe I
oscillate like a anger between the
two. But then how do you know
which one is writing? Some of
this could be a perverts denition
of perversion, some of it a normal
mans denition and, hell, why
not, maybe some of this really is
a perverts denition of normal-
ity, which he perversely causes to
resemble perversity. How can you
know?
Ideally I wish I could oc-
cupy a negative space between the
two. I wish I were ignorant. Then
I could learn about perversion and
perhaps learn the truth. Instead
Im full of shards. I have been
bombed by pornography and the
shrapnel has stuck in my esh. I
am full of vaginas and other mens
sperm. Ive been strafed by Sade,
carpet-bombed by literature, a
bullet is lodged in my skull and
its leaking particles from the his-
tory of philosophy. The only way
I can approach perversion is by
vivisection, dismantling myself,
pulling bits of sex and thought
from my esh, letting them drop,
plop plop plop, then what do you
get?
If Im not able to begin
with a tabula rasa, perhaps Im
able to end there. The pervert
aims not just at pleasure but at
satiation, which is to say a state
of exhaustion, emptiness, and I
think that thinking about a prob-
lem is sort of the same. What I
arrive at is not an understand-
ing of the problem but rather a
state where the problem no lon-
ger troubles me. I may even be
dumber at the nish than I was
at the beginning because Ive lost
the drive to nail it down. The per-
verts conception of perversity?
The normal mans conception?
I dont know, perversity is what
it is, or since its perverse maybe
perversity is what it isnt. All I can
tell you is that Ive gotten it out
of my system, poured it all out,
emptied my brain. I have a new
hole there now, its dark and its
quiet and I very much look for-
ward to poking around in it.
118 / Supervert Digital Edition Digital Edition
|s to subord|nate yourse|f, at |east temporar||y, to the
thoughts of another. So what happens when the wr|ter
de||berate|y |ntroduces a gap or a vo|d? Your thoughts
break free for a space. That's rea||y where ph||osophy
happens. Read|ng Sp|noza |s good for your bra|n - |t's
exerc|se, strengthen|ng, cond|t|on|ng. But you're not do-
|ng ph||osophy unt|| you're |n the gap, on your own, try|ng
out your w|ngs, th|nk|ng for yourse|f. It's a |eap |nto the
vo|d, ||ke the Yves K|e|n photograph.
Th|s he|ps to exp|a|n why I have worked so hard
not just to compose a text but to puncture |t w|th ho|es.
For examp|e, |||ustrat|ons wou|d have added to the book.
I hope you goog|e some of the |mages to see them for
yourse|f. Know|ng fu|| we|| that I wasn't go|ng to repro-
duce a s|ng|e one, I put a |ot of effort |nto th|nk|ng about
them, se|ect|ng them, creat|ng b|anks to s|gn|fy the|r ab-
sence. My goa| was to endow them w|th a certa|n |nten-
s|ty - can a vo|d have an |ntens|ty? ho|es g|eam|ng w|th
the|r noth|ngness, absences spark||ng w|th non-be|ng -
so you wou|d rea||ze, consc|ous|y or not, that you rea||y
were m|ss|ng someth|ng.
Iron|ca||y, the text has a v|sua| organ|zat|on, |t
threatens to become a sort of |magery, and yet |mages
|n the book edge toward noth|ngness. It's a vortex. Sex
dra|ns off |n asexua| ho|es, breaches |n understand|ng
become open|ngs for thought, the sord|d vector sp|ra|s
down |nto an abyss. I may not have conv|nced you of any-
th|ng, but I don't th|nk that's my job anyway. The task of a
ph||osopher |s not to persuade. The task of a ph||osopher
|s ||ke that of a hom|c|da| |over. He shou|d take you r|ght
up to the edge, charm|ng you the who|e wh||e w|th h|s
observat|ons - Pervers|ty? Why, |t's just the other s|de of
th|s here chasm - then g|ve you a |ast sudden shove.

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