What is perversity?

Dictionary definitions would say it is anything directed away from what is right or good.

Freud would say it is the ability to derive sexual pleasure from any part of the body. Freud believed that a young child is a pervert, because he would touch his body in a manner unacceptable to society. Only through education can a person constrain its sexual drives to socially accepted norms, thus becoming unperverted by suppressing his or her urges.

Necrophilia, pedophilia, bestiality, feederism, voyeurism, fetishism — how is it possible to abstract a single category of sexual behavior from so many unusual and often sordid proclivities? What does a flasher or a groper have in common with, say, the willing “victim” who undertook with a cannibal to cook and eat his own penis?   – Supervert

Supervert tried to answer one of post Freudian questions in a tiny book, inspired by the currently inactive PervScan blog (An Index to the Sordid and Depraved). In a strange layout, with pages divided in 2 regions and some randomly inserted empty black squares (printed version has surprised images instead), the author talks about perversity in the works of the inglorious Poe, Sade or Hemingway and makes a glorifying analyse of the human (darker) mind.

Strangely, I can accept and understand all sort of sexual games and I can strongly affirm that in sexuality and pleasure normality is not a thing to define, since we all have different thresholds of morality. Thogh, I believe that any act that attends ones moral and physical integrity has to take place with the consent of all parties involved. So, even after browsing through pages that explain the human sexual behaviour, I can’t accept pedophilia, incest or rape,  even if now I can now “understand” them better than before.

Evolutionary biologists have pointed out that natural selection provides an obvious impetus for it, insofar as rape improves the rapist’s 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 attackers.

You have to admit, the author also has a strange sense of humour.

The man behind the book was borne in 1967, in New York. He lived for a short period in Paris, moved back to attend graduate school at Yale, where he earned a master’s degree in the history of art before dropping out of his PhD program. More biography in his interview with Jessica Brown.

Breaking it down:

For example, I believe that perversity requires lucidity. If a person with severe brain damage molests an animal, it is an act of ignorance — mental disability failing to put the brakes on physical desperation.

From Stella Maris’s interview about Perversity Think Tank.

For more insight, you can download the books freely from the author’s website or buy the them via Amazon for a full printed experience. And stay tuned, he promised 6 of them, only 3 were published. So we will hear some more from Supervert.

Photos from Supervert