Read Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us for Free Online

face, I think I’d require therapy for years. But if this identical event were to happen to my heterosexual brother or to one of my lesbian friends, I suspect their brains would process such a “tragic” experience very differently. (And that of my not-very-amused sister-in-law would see my brother’s encounter with said vagina differently still.)
    It’s not just overt sex acts that people experience differently in terms of harm but also sexual desires. For the religiously devout, this entire conversation is a lost cause. * But once one abandons the notion that one can “commit” a sin by thinking a thought, it becomes quite clear that sexual desires—no matter how deviant—are intrinsically harmless to the subject of a person’s lust, at least in the physical sense. Mental states are “mere breath on the air,” as the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote. Sexual desires can, of course, be thought bubbles with thorns and wreak havoc on a person’s own well-being (especially when they occur in the heads of those convinced such thoughts come from the Devil and yet they just can’t stop having them). Still, it’s only when this “mere breath on the air” is manifested in behavior that harm to another person may or may not occur.
    Treating an individual as a pervert in essence , and hence with a purposefully immoral mind, because his or her brain conjures up atypical erotic ideas or responds sexually to stimuli that others have deemed inappropriate objects of desire, is medieval in both its stupidity and its cruelty. It’s also entirely counterproductive. Research on the “white bear effect” by the social psychologist Daniel Wegner has shown, for instance, that forcing a person to suppress specific thoughts leads to those very thoughts invading the subject’s consciousness even more than they otherwise would. (Whatever you do, don’t —I repeat, do not —think about a white bear during the next thirty seconds.)
    Our moral evaluations should fall upon harmful sexual actions with the heaviest of thuds, but not upon a pituitary excretion that happens to morph into an ethereal image in the private movie theater of someone’s mind. * It’s easier to agree with that statement in principle than it is to put it into practice, however. Simply having knowledge of another person’s deviant desires can interfere with our ability to be so logical. If somehow you became aware that your friendly middle-aged neighbor, the one with the Honda Accord, the white picket fence, and the adoring golden retriever, derives intense sexual gratification by masturbating to violent rape fantasies, and that the mere sight of a horse’s penis in one of her many glossy copies of Equus can bring the cheery, rosy-cheeked woman who works at the bakery up the road to a mind-numbing climax, would this alter your perception of them as respectable members of your community? Neither one, to your knowledge, has ever harmed a living soul due to his or her deviant desires (nor is there any reason to think they’d ever act on them, since they seem to have successfully refrained from doing so up to this point), yet it’s still hard to keep from pulling out our moral yardstick and applying it to their “mere breath on the air.”
    In the real world, one reason we mistakenly conflate sexual desires and sexual behaviors in our moral evaluations of others is that the actual distance between the two can be measured by the neuron. That is to say, while it’s true that sexual desires don’t always turn into overt actions, it’s also the case that behaviors are strongly motivated by what’s on a person’s mind. Using our knowledge of a person’s sexual desires to morally judge him or her constitutes a philosophical error, but from an evolutionary perspective, it’s the sort of bad philosophy that often leads to adaptive social decision making. Even if his history is unimpeachable, declining an invitation from that neighbor of yours with the