Introduction
You likely harbor private sexual fantasies that you would never dare confess to anyone. Society demands strict conformity to standard erotic norms, leaving you to suffer in silence with intense shame and fear of discovery.
Unconventional sexual desires are a universal human trait shaped by biology and evolution, requiring an ethical framework based on demonstrable harm rather than cultural disgust.
Jesse Bering tackles this hidden burden by examining the science behind non-normative sexual behavior. The book traces the historical pathologizing of desire, the brain mechanisms of lust and disgust, and the developmental roots of unusual attractions. You will explore these questions throughout the text:
- Why do normal and abnormal desires exist on a continuous spectrum?
- How do ancient emotional systems control your sexual arousal?
- What distinguishes harmless private deviations from genuinely harmful acts?
1. We Are All Perverts
Society maintains a dangerous lie by hiding its true desires behind a facade of normalcy. This false consensus makes you feel isolated and immoral when your internal erotic experiences diverge from accepted norms.
Every human being possesses private, unconventional sexual desires that, if exposed, would instantly cause social shame.
The author shares his own adolescent masturbatory fantasies centered on a lifelike Neanderthal illustration from a textbook.
History of the Term
Originally, the term pervert did not refer to sexual deviance but to religious heresy and turning away from church morality. Lexicographers like Thomas Blount and writers like Boethius historically defined perverts as apostates who rejected religious doctrines. The term only migrated into psychiatric discourse in the late nineteenth century.
Thomas Blount's 1656 Glossographia defined the verb pervert as turning upside down, debauching, or seducing. Boethius used related concepts in his 524 work Consolation of Philosophy. Havelock Ellis popularized the term pervert in 1897, shifting its application toward psychological deviations.
Pioneering sexologists categorized homosexuality as a psychological orientation rather than merely a criminal act, inadvertently medicalizing it. Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds popularized terms like sexual inversion, separating homosexual behavior from innate orientation. While this reduced criminal blame, it framed homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder.
Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor for sodomy following his 1895 gross indecency trials.
Ethics of Harm and Disgust
Using the behavior of other species to validate human sexual practices commits the logical error known as the naturalistic fallacy. Observers frequently cherry-pick examples of same-sex behavior or nonmonogamy in animals like bonobos to prove human behaviors are natural and therefore good. However, nature also contains behaviors like infanticide and forced copulation that humans rightfully reject.
Bonobos use genito-genital friction and sociosexual behaviors to regulate social tension, despite humans and bonobos sharing 98.6 percent of DNA.
Modern moral and legal evaluations of sexuality should prioritize the presence of actual harm rather than naturalness or religious dogma. Because nature is amoral, using reproductive biology or religious edicts to dictate sexual morality is invalid. A rational approach requires evaluating whether a sexual desire or act inflicts measurable physical or psychological damage on a consenting or non-consenting subject.
Jacques Ferron was tried for bestiality with a donkey, but the local community acquitted the animal, recognizing it as a victim of rape rather than a participant, while scientists estimate that 1 percent of the human population consists of true zoophiles.
People frequently struggle to provide logical reasons for condemning certain sexual acts, falling back on emotional tautologies and the presumption of harm. Coined by Jonathan Haidt in 2001, moral dumbfounding describes how individuals insist certain harmless private acts are wrong while being unable to articulate why, relying instead on feelings of disgust.
Study participants presented with a hypothetical consensual necrophilia club insisted someone must be harmed despite explicit rules ensuring zero living victims or distress.
Visceral feelings of disgust act as the primary emotional engine of prejudice against sexual minorities. Because atypical or deviant sex naturally triggers strong feelings of disgust in outsiders, people mistakenly treat internal sexual desires as equivalent to harmful actions. This emotional reaction overrides rational ethical analysis.
The Peters twins, identical brothers in Prague, maintain a romantic, monogamous relationship and work in pornographic films, highlighting how incest without procreation challenges intuitive disgust.
2. Neurobiology of Lust and Disgust
Lust and disgust act as ancient antagonistic emotions that balance each other to either propel humans toward orgasm or turn them away from dangerous biological contaminants.
DNA sequencing shows that our murid rodent ancestor lived around 87 million years ago. Yet the subjective experience of disgust remains a powerful carnal deterrent across species. Male rats allowed to mate in heat and immediately injected with lithium chloride to induce nausea acquire a total aversion to sex. Physical pain and shocks do not diminish their sexual appetite.
Sexual arousal acts as a local anesthetic, temporarily numbing gut-level aversion specifically to sexual unpleasantries. Richard Stevenson demonstrated this with aroused male subjects exposed to various sensory stimuli. Aroused male subjects dipped their hands into lubricated condoms for sexual disgust or cold pea-and-ham soup for general disgust. This revealed that sexual arousal specifically lowers the guard against sexual cues rather than rendering you desensitized to general grossness.
Parental investment theory explains that because the biological costs of casual sex are vastly unequal for males and females, men evolved a propensity for casual mating. Women are born with an average finite number of 1 to 2 million eggs and invest heavily through gestation and lactation. This makes women choosy and sensitive to sexual disgust. Men produce 85 million sperm cells daily, making sex low-cost and favoring an adaptation to lower their disgust thresholds. With an average latency of 3 minutes for a man to ejaculate into a vagina, male arousal quickly overrides caution.
Hart Blanton and Meg Gerrard found that straight male undergraduates who viewed attractive female models and fantasized about them almost completely ignored past sexual history and poor condom use when assessing HIV risks. High sexual arousal creates a mental fog that temporarily lowers both moral standards and risk assessment. Dan Ariely and George Loewenstein confirmed in a 2006 controlled experiment that men who masturbated to a high state of arousal without climaxing reported significantly higher willingness to engage in taboo or deviant sexual acts. UC Berkeley male undergraduates who were sexually aroused reported vastly higher openness to sadomasochism, fetishism, rape, and pedophilia than unaroused control subjects.
The Local Anesthetic of Arousal
Symbolic disgust and the feeling of moral contamination are socially acquired constructs defined by cultural scripts. Among the Sambia of Papua New Guinea, boys aged 8 or 9 are traditionally banished to a bachelor's hut. By age 11 to 12, they become aggressive fellators who actively ingest semen to gain strength and become warriors.
Inducing incidental feelings of disgust can significantly heighten social intolerance and prompt bigoted views. Cornell University students in a stink condition using a foul novelty spray expressed increased disapproval toward gay men on a survey. Their attitudes toward other minority groups like the elderly and black people remained unaffected.
Behavioral Modification
Podophilia, or foot fetishism, is the most common sexual partialism. James Giannini put forward an evolutionary hypothesis in 1998 that cultural eroticization of the female foot peaked during epidemics of venereal diseases such as gonorrhea and syphilis. Foot love blossomed during the thirteenth-century gonorrhea epidemic, syphilis epidemics in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the AIDS epidemic in the late twentieth century. Arousal focused on nonreproductive body parts could reduce contact with infectious genitalia, lowering the risk of infertility or death alongside 400 different species that can inhabit the bacterial substrate of the human vagina.
When the brain receives vital information about potential contaminants, it activates an emergency kill switch leading to a conditioned carnal aversion. Psychiatrist Barry Maletzky used covert sensitization in 1973 by having homosexual male patients visualize undesirable scenarios to suppress unwanted desires. You can apply this behavioral modification technique through specific visualization steps:
- Visualize a highly unpleasant scenario involving a strange odor and small white worms crawling in hair around the penis during an embrace.
- Imagine touching the worms with your mouth until your stomach churns and food particles catch in your throat.
- Envision big chunks of vomit coming into your mouth and dribbling down your chin while worms crawl in the puke.
3. Normal versus Hypersexual Drives
Medical and psychiatric institutions have historically pathologized both normal and excessive sexual expressions through extreme interventions.
You can trace this history through generations of desperate remedies. Physicians like Lazare Rivière argued that unspent female seed generated noxious vapors that rose to the brain, disturbing rational faculties and causing madness.
Physician Lazare Rivière prescribed treatments ranging from cold lettuce baths and bland meats to manual evisceration of seed by a cunning midwife for women suffering from female lust.
Victorian-era gynecologists performed surgical clitoridectomies and used radiotherapy to eliminate female masturbation and sexual pleasure. Practitioners like Isaac Baker Brown blamed self-pleasuring for epilepsy, mania, and catalepsy, performing clitoridectomies without patient consent.
New Orleans physician A. junction Block performed an emergency clitoridectomy on a nine-year-old girl after observing her physical reactions while touching her clitoris.
Inventors of health products and early psychologists viewed male masturbation as a severe moral and physical scourge, proposing extreme physical interventions. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg warned boys of dire health consequences from masturbation and recommended non-anesthetized circumcisions, stitching the foreskin shut over the glans, or locking the organ in genital cages.
Dr. John Harvey Kellogg advocated for non-anesthetized circumcisions to punish boys for masturbation and invented cornflakes as part of an anti-masturbatory lifestyle. You should apply these historical measures according to the exact clinical protocol:
- Circumcision should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind.
- The soreness which continues for several weeks interrupts the practice of masturbation.
- The foreskin should be stretched as tightly as possible over the glans of his penis and sutured shut with a needle and wire to keep him from getting an erection.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing introduced satyriasis as the male counterpart to nymphomania, attributing extreme male carnality to a hereditary neurological disorder. While female lust was diagnosed easily through masturbation, male satyriasis required extreme behavior reminiscent of the Marquis de Sade.
Engineer Clemence abandoned his train due to extreme heat and agitation, attempting to find a canine or a human female to relieve his arousal before being arrested for attempted rape and excused by Krafft-Ebing's medical theory in the 1886 publication year of Psychopathia Sexualis ninety-three miles southwest of Vienna where Brück is located.
Modern Clinical Diagnostics
Alfred Kinsey established the total sexual outlet metric, showing that average male orgasms per week remained stable despite cultural shifts. Kinsey defined TSO as a man's cumulative weekly orgasms from any combination of sex acts. Across large samples, the average male TSO was found to be 2.5 in a sample of fifty-three hundred males of reproductive age, with about 8 percent of sampled men having a mean TSO of 7 or more for five consecutive years during the 1948 publication year of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.
Alfred Kinsey and his coauthors surveyed thousands of randomly sampled participants to establish objective baseline data on human sexual behavior in 1948.
The Internet created the Triple-A Engine effect for pornography, characterized by affordability, access, and anonymity, leading to massive consumption statistics. Digital technology drastically altered the landscape of sexual consumption, enabling billions of searches, emails, and downloads while maintaining remarkably stable underlying human orgasm frequencies.
Statistics from 2010 showed 40 million Americans are regular consumers of porn, with porn accounting for 35 percent of all Internet downloads, 2.5 billion e-mails containing porn are sent and received each day, 68 million search engine requests are for porn daily, 12 percent of all websites are pornographic, 90 percent of children aged 8 to 16 have viewed adult porn online, and 11 is the average age of first exposure to online porn.
Cultural mandates and beliefs can produce extremely high sexual frequencies that far exceed Western population averages. Anthropologists discovered that Aka foragers in central Africa engage in sex multiple times a night, driven by the cultural view of sex as labor to find children and the belief in seminal nurture for fetal development.
Anthropologists Barry and Bonnie Hewlett discovered that married Aka couples have sex four or five times in a single night as a culturally mandated practice in the 2010 year anthropologists discovered Aka sexual frequency.
Modern psychiatric attempts to classify hypersexual disorder often conflate statistical rarity and social tolerance with objective mental illness. Proposals to add hypersexual disorder to diagnostic manuals rely heavily on the patient's subjective personal distress.
Psychiatrist Martin Kafka led a 2012 push to recognize hypersexual disorder in the DSM-5 based on excessive expressions of culturally tolerated behaviors causing personal distress, reporting five male hypersexuals for every one female, while a 2006 survey labeled 7 percent of 1,171 Swedish women and 12 percent of 1,244 Swedish men hypersexual.
Sudden onset hypersexuality can be a symptom of acute neurological damage, infections, or specific brain syndromes. Physical injury to specific brain regions, drug use, or infections like rabies can dramatically alter personality and cause an abrupt spike in libido, demonstrating that extreme sexual desire is sometimes rooted in brain pathology.
An Indian housewife experienced sudden hypersexuality and multiple orgasms due to a prior rabies infection from a puppy bite, expiring on the fourth day, mirroring the medial temporal lobes and Klüver-Bucy syndrome discovered in 1939 by Klüver and Bucy in rhesus monkeys.
4. The Roots of Paraphilias
The original mythological depiction of Cupid reflects the random and capricious nature of paraphilias. Unlike the modern cheerful cherub, the Cupid of ancient Roman literature by Lucius Apuleius was an impulsive god who brought toxic and blinding lust to mortals. This allegory mirrors how individuals with deviant desires find themselves at the mercy of terrible randomness.
Lucius Apuleius describes in The Golden Ass how Venus sends Cupid to punish Psyche with an unwanted attraction to a wretched creature, but Cupid accidentally pricks himself with his own poisoned arrow.
Research into the roots of paraphilias is constrained by ethical barriers against controlled experiments on children. Because researchers cannot ethically assign children to experimental conditions to test the causes of paraphilias, scientific understanding relies on qualitative studies like interviews and case histories, which are prone to human error and bias. Melissaphilia, an erotic attraction to honeybees, cannot be studied by experimentally exposing children to bees to track outcomes.
Animal Imprinting
Animal cross-rearing experiments demonstrate that early developmental experiences can permanently imprint sexual arousal patterns. Exposing newborn animals to abnormal rearing conditions or surrogate characteristics wires their adult sexual preferences exclusively toward those early exposures, a process known as sexual imprinting.
Newborn male rat pups nursed by a mother coated in a lemony scent grew up to require citrus-scented females to ejaculate, and baby goats raised by sheep exclusively sought sheep mates.
Paraphilias are overwhelmingly a male phenomenon due to differences in early developmental imprinting and erotic plasticity. Experts report a vast gender gap in paraphilias, with men outnumbering women significantly. This reflects a broader psychological difference where female sexuality exhibits greater erotic plasticity and fluidity.
Studies by Meredith Chivers using penile plethysmographs and vaginal vasocongestion show that women's bodies react physiologically to a wide variety of sexual stimuli, including nonpreferred genders and animals.
Cognitive Theories
John Money argued that paraphilias stem from disruptive social environments and sexual restrictiveness that distort the development of the erotic love map. Money theorized that children are born with default navigational instructions for standard sexuality, but puritanical and repressive societal conditions choke normal development and force sexual energy into paraphilic substitutes.
Money observed that paraphilias are entirely unheard of in certain permissive tribal societies, such as the Ila-speaking people of Africa.
The Zeigarnik effect may drive the formation of paraphilias when a child's natural curiosity about enshrouded sexual mysteries remains unresolved. When society treats sex with a conspiracy of silence, an inquisitive child's brain enters an intense problem-solving mode over the hidden enigma. This cognitive persistence can permanently imprint sexual arousal onto unrelated environmental cues.
Bright and naturally inquisitive children are noted by early sexologists like Havelock Ellis as being most susceptible to developing paraphilias due to their persistent problem-solving drives.
Long-term developmental tracking can occasionally verify neo-Freudian theories of early childhood imprinting for paraphilias. Longitudinal studies tracking children from birth into adulthood allow researchers to match adult paraphilic preferences with specific traumatic or striking visual events from the individual's preschool years.
Psychologists tracked a subject who developed acrotomophilia after observing a visiting neighbor with a leg cast resting on her husband's lap at age five, misinterpreting a remark about removing the cast as a castration threat.
5. The Ethics of Deviance and Consent
Evaluating sexual deviance requires separating subjective moral panic and personal distress from actual measurable harm.
Severe non-consensual violence is clearly harmful. Consensual sadomasochism instead involves participants who transform pain into pleasure. Psychiatrists look for real, non-playful pain inflicted on a non-consenting person to diagnose true sexual sadism.
11 percent of people have had an experience with sadomasochism. 5 percent of men and 7 percent of women regularly include verbal humiliation in their erotic repertoire.
Armin Meiwes advertised online for a consenting victim to be slaughtered and eaten. Bernd Jürgen Brandes willingly agreed to be devoured.
Non-consensual tickling can act as a severe form of torture because it leaves no visible physical marks. Elites historically used this method to abuse victims without public evidence.
Emil Gutheil described a 39-year-old New York lawyer with an ineradicable urge to tickle people to the point of unconsciousness. He forced his wife and paid prostitutes or young boys.
Age and Consent
Bruce Rind and his coauthors analyzed data from over 35,000 college students. They concluded that the best predictor of subjective harm is the minor's lack of psychological consent. This meta-analysis sparked intense political condemnation despite replicating previous scientific findings.
The U.S. House of Representatives passed Resolution 107 in 1999 condemning Rind's empirical work by a vote of 355 to 0. The Senate followed with a unanimous 100 to 0 vote. 35,303 college students were evaluated in the meta-analysis.
Legal frameworks treat minors inconsistently by ignoring their mental states when they cause adults sexual pleasure. They simultaneously prosecute minors as adults in other legal domains. Consenting sex with disabled adults having the mental age of a child remains legal if they are over eighteen.
An adult with Down syndrome who has an average mental age of eight can legally consent to sex if they are eighteen or older. The Westminster I statute dates back to 1275, and historical ages of consent range from 7 to 21 internationally.
Paraphilic orientations are deeply etched into neural pathways and are nearly impossible to alter. The psychological suffering experienced by individuals with atypical desires is heavily correlated with how much society demonizes and isolates them.
Ratnin Dewaraja published a 1987 case study of an introverted young man suffering from formicophilia. He sought treatment for his disgusting habit of using insects for sexual arousal.
Transgender Identity
Autogynephilia posits that some heterosexual male-to-female transsexuals are aroused by the thought or image of themselves as women. Ray Blanchard suggested that certain individuals transition to incarnate their erotic target rather than solely experiencing gender dysphoria. This proposition has caused intense controversy and fierce debate within the transgender community.
75 percent of male-to-female transsexuals in the West are classified as heterosexual. Blanchard conducted a 1986 laboratory experiment where he hooked pre-op heterosexual male-to-female transsexuals to a penile plethysmograph while they imagined putting on women's clothes, registering significant erections.
Forensic sexological evaluations using penile plethysmography can be manipulated by subjects employing physiological countermeasures to mask their true sexual preferences. Pedophiles and test subjects have attempted to deceive forensic technicians through specific behaviors:
- Perform voluntary contraction of abdominal and perineal muscles to momentarily inflate the flaccid penis.
- Prick oneself with a hidden pin when inappropriate images appear to kill arousal with pain.
Vernon Quinsey and Sidney Bergersen discovered in 1976 that certain pedophiles used pumping or hidden pins to distort penile circumference measurements during sexual preference assessments.
10 Key Ideas
- Every human being possesses private, unconventional sexual desires that, if exposed, would instantly cause social shame.
- Lust and disgust act as ancient antagonistic emotions that balance each other to either propel humans toward orgasm or turn them away from dangerous biological contaminants.
- Modern moral and legal evaluations of sexuality should prioritize the presence of actual harm rather than naturalness or religious dogma.
- Medical and psychiatric institutions have historically pathologized both normal and excessive sexual expressions through extreme interventions.
- Alfred Kinsey and his coauthors surveyed thousands of randomly sampled participants to establish objective baseline data on human sexual behavior in 1948.
- Lucius Apuleius describes in The Golden Ass how Venus sends Cupid to punish Psyche with an unwanted attraction to a wretched creature, but Cupid accidentally pricks himself with his own poisoned arrow.
- Exposing newborn animals to abnormal rearing conditions or surrogate characteristics wires their adult sexual preferences exclusively toward those early exposures, a process known as sexual imprinting.
- Evaluating sexual deviance requires separating subjective moral panic and personal distress from actual measurable harm.
- Bruce Rind and his coauthors analyzed data from over 35,000 college students to conclude that the best predictor of subjective harm is the minor's lack of psychological consent.
- Ray Blanchard suggested that certain individuals transition to incarnate their erotic target rather than solely experiencing gender dysphoria, a proposition that has caused intense controversy within the transgender community.