WHAT IS PERVERSION?
The word perversion should only be used, if at all, where heterosexual intercourse is consistently bypassed in favour of other sexual activities. Perversions can, rarely, be the result of a personality disorder, mental illness or disease of the brain but apart from these causes, perversions are in theory caused by one of two things.
First, the person’s psychosexual development may have gone ahead more or less normally but, because of previous experience or suppressive rearing with regard to intercourse, intercourse causes too much anxiety for it to be really pleasurable. This can result in sexual dysfunctions of various kinds or a tendency to go off at a tangent from intercourse into activities which approach it, purely for pleasure. In this way, a man may be willing to have intercourse but in fact enjoys orgasms more when mutual masturbation or oral sex is involved. Many cases of
non-consummation of marriage fall into this category. ‘Deviation’ seems an appropriate word because the aim is right yet it slightly misses or deviates from its target.
The other basic cause of perversions or deviations are distortions in psychosexual development. In these types of perversion the person grows up fixed at a certain stage of childhood sexual development or returns to it because progress to a later stage involves too much fear, guilt, anxiety or pain. After a difficult time with a member of the opposite sex an individual may return to an earlier stage. Usually, he or she recovers rapidly but the examples show how we can move up and down the ladder of psychosexual development. When psychosexual development goes awry like this the individual is a good distance away from heterosexual intercourse and the term perversion is probably more appropriate. We think that it is important to point out that the word applies to a perversion of development rather than the actual practice involved.
Apart from the most commonplace deviations or perversions there are several real disadvantages to being locked into non-intercourse sex as your main or only means of sexual release. First, many of the opposite sex will find you strange or unacceptable; second, you will have difficulty finding suitable sex partners; and last, you could get drawn into all kinds of
subcultures in society, many members of which are unusual or unacceptable in other ways.
Deviations and perversions are usually thought of as being the almost exclusive preserve of men but the causes from which they spring apply to both sexes and, in our culture, even more to women. Women may, because of their nature, be less prone to respond to the damage inflicted on them during rearing by becoming deviant. They simple become less sexually efficient. Alternatively, they may be more ashamed of the need and so repress it more, or they may be better able than men to meet the need in fantasy during intercourse and masturbation. Men also have more to learn about sex than do women and as a result are more vulnerable to mislearning.
One theory of perversions in men attributes it to repeated masturbation while fantasising perversely during adolescence; the resulting orgasm acts as a reward and reinforces the tendency to enjoy the thought of the perversion. Because perverse fantasies are common in adolescence but perversions in adults are comparatively rare the theory is unlikely to hold true for the majority, but it can be applied in reverse when treating deviants. In this technique, which is applied to both men and women, the individual is advised to masturbate frequently to their usual perverse fantasy but to change it at the last moment to a fantasy of normal intercourse. By association with orgasm the heterosexual fantasy increases in strength and erotic power. Gradually it is extended backwards in masturbation so that, eventually, the whole of the associated fantasy is of intercourse and the interest in the perverse activity fades.
The characteristics of a full-blown perversion are its compulsiveness and its fixity. The person has to do it and cannot easily stop doing it. He cannot overcome it by reason, fear, shame, threat of punishment, or even exposure. Lesser degrees, which can be described as borderline cases of perversion, exist, particularly in women.
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