Are we all sexual deviants at heart?

Why it is that we are so intolerant of the sexual preferences of others, and why are people marginalised for their desires, wonders British historian and author Julie Peakman.

You are a sexual deviant, a pervert, says American psychologist, Jesse Bering, in his new book, Perv: The Sexual Deviant In All Of Us.

If you doubt this, try his test: imagine the government can detect and document secret sexual preferences. This they do daily by recording your every erotic response.

How would you feel if the content of that dossier were made public. You’d be devastated, because you prefer to keep secret your turn-ons, private fascinations and covert fantasies in all their embarrassing glory.

Because we don’t reveal what turns us on, the global perception of what is normal is skewed. It’s also subjective: while some people would be perturbed by anything more adventurous than the missionary position, objectophiles have relationships with things.

In a 2010 study, a woman whose sexual partner was a flag said: “Libby (the flag) is always telling me that I am funny. We make each other laugh so hard.” She’s not unique.

Speaking about the musical soundboards that are the focus of his desires, one man said: “I’m kind of a heavyset person and they kind of like that about me.”

If that seems unusual, then consider the acrotmophiles whose fantasy lovers are good-looking amputees.

One such fetishist told a German psychiatrist that his wife would, on seeing him approach with a glint in his eye, obligingly hide part of one leg.

In writing about sexual preference, Bering reveals his own. He humorously describes his surprise at discovering that his first lover was a podophile (foot fetishist), whose prime objective was to deflower his virgin toes. Elsewhere, he plunges in with the wonderfully frank and quirky: “I don’t know about you, but I’d certainly be lying if I said I’d never been intensely aroused by a can of Diet Coke.”

He’s not the only one with a penchant for metal objects. In 2007, a 37-year-old woman, Erika Eiffel, lifted her skirts and got friendly with the tower that bears her name. For her, it was more an act of entitlement than of brazen exhibitionism, as, having ‘married’ the Parisian landmark, it was, in her mind, an act of consummation.

Why it is that we are so intolerant of the sexual preferences of others, and why are people marginalised for their desires?

These are questions asked by British historian, Julie Peakman, in her beautifully illustrated and hugely informative book, The Pleasure’s All Mine: A History of Perverse Sex. Along with being meticulously researched and immensely interesting, both Perv and The Pleasure’s All Mine are superbly intriguing in a delightfully wicked way. With humour, wit and a huge pinch of humanity, the authors lift the veil on the history of perversion and the biological reasons behind our distaste for unusual sexual antics.

They examine prejudice and hypocrisy with refreshing open-mindedness and explore the dense, complex subject that is our relationship with our erotic desires, and our propensity to deny and conceal the sexual deviant within.

While asking that we try to understand deviance, Bering reminds us that this is not the same as condoning, and he urges us to consider the people who live in constant fear for being themselves. “Apologies should be applied only to the things we have done wrong, not for who we unalterably are,” he writes.

Both authors ask their readers to differentiate between those who act out their fantasies and those who don’t, and to shift the focus, from whether the perceived deviance is evolutionarily natural or unnatural to whether it’s harmful or not.

While that’s reasonable in theory, the reality is that there are good reasons why we fear and avoid those whose sexual preference repels us. Those fear responses are innate, gut reactions to that which we feel to be inherently repugnant. For me, anyway, no amount of rational argument could sway that response.

But lest we linger on the high moral ground, Bering insists that we’re all sexually deviant at heart: “With the exception of those spared by certain chromosomal disorders, we are all innately lewd organisms,” he writes.

* Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us, by Jesse Bering (Doubleday)

The Pleasure’s All Mine: A History of Perverse Sex, by Julie Peakman, (Reaktion Books).