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Are You a Pervert?


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I dont have the ultra conservative morals of the Victorians. I'm sure the Puritans would have me horse whipped and burnt at the stake for my private sexual thoughts. Does that make me a pervert?

 

Some people are such hypocrites when it comes to calling a pervert out. It's not "natural" to do someone up the bum, but it's a common thing these days. Then someone does something like pee up a wall, gets called a pervert. i think the person who took it up the wrong'un is more of a pervert

Maybe its a privacy thing. someone who whips it out in public is a pervert for potentially showing their genitalia to children. 

I think as with all things the meaning of the word has been corrupted and is just a convenient way to call someone a sexual deviant. 

No wonder psychiatrists are so rich, the mess thats inside a human head. And if Freud is to be believed its all about sex.

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1 hour ago, greedyneedygirl said:

. Our knee-jerk perception of individuals who similarly have no choice whatsoever over what arouses them sexually (be they paedophiles, exhibitionists, transvestites, or fetishists, to name but a few)... 
As a society we’ve become so focused on the question of whether a given sexual behaviour is ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’ that we’ve lost sight of the more important question: Is it harmful? In many ways, it’s an even more challenging question, because although naturalness can be assessed by relatively straightforward queries about statistical averages — for example, ‘How frequently does it appear in other species?’ and ‘In what percentage of the human population does it occur?’ — the experience of harm is largely subjective. As such, it defies direct analysis and requires definitions that resonate with people in vastly different ways.
When it comes to sexual harm in particular, what’s harmful to one person could be not only completely harmless to another but might even, believe it or not, be helpful or positive.

I do think people worry about harm, though, and also about consent. A voyeur - classically - looks without asking permission, an exhibitionists exposes himself without permission. The idea that sex workers have consented to doing sex work may be undermined by addiction or trafficking.

The oddity with all this is that vanilla penis-in-vagina sex is a good way to end up pregnant, and also quite a good way to spread diseases, and most kinks present neither of those hazards

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The word "pervert" has long since become a pejorative word meant to label those into sexual things the accuser finds distasteful. It has become an inherently judgemental word. Thank you, @greedyneedygirl for your detailed and interesting opening post. Seems that the word "pervert" has been around as a pejorative for a long time, but it's use as a term exclusively for supposed sexual perversion is much more recent, within the last 120-130 years or so, and seemingly has something to do with early psychiatrists and psychologists referring to sexual deviancies as perversions. In doing this they seized upon a word that was already used to refer to the abnormal more generally and sexualised it. 

To be a sexual pervert is to be abnormal so to label someone such involves making arbitrary moral judgements about their sexual activities. It is inherently judgemental. Because of the association of the word "pervert" with the abnormal, in more recent decades psychologists have almost wholly abandoned the use of the word. Today they prefer the more clinical and less pejorative "paraphiliac" to describe people with minority sexual interests. And they tend to make two broad distinctions.

The first is between whether the paraphilia is harmful to oneself or others, which might make it a problem, or whether it is a relatively harmless thing indulged in by consenting adults. If it's the latter most practicing psychiatrists and psychologists today see it as none of their business unless the patient themself regards it as a problem.

The second distinction they make is whether or not the paraphiliac needs their paraphilia to get off, or whether they can take it or leave it and get off perfectly well without it. The latter is generally regarded as entirely harmless. The former is seen as a potential problem if it results in issues or hang ups for the patient, or if the patient feels compelled to act out their fetish in inappropriate situations. The key is generally consenting adults. If an adult has no problem with their fetish and only indulges with other consenting adults, psychiatrists mostly take the enlightened view today that whilst it might technically be abnormal in the sense that it is not a procreational activity, it is essentially harmless and not something to interest themselves in. Unless that is it is causing debilitating hang ups - for example based around feelings of shame - for a patient, which is hindering their ability to function as well as they would like in society.

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