Perv Quotes

“In adopting a patently false but stubbornly clung-to mythology of human sexuality that makes demons out of natural drives, we've entered a stage of moral sickness, not of moral health.”
― Jesse Bering, Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us

“The public debate plays out in an infinite regress of blame over who’s responsible for those who fail to fit the standard erotic mold. This is variously ascribed to the people choosing to be the deviants they are, porn, the Devil (always a shoo-in), bad parents, poor role models, our sexually repressed culture, or the psychiatrists who keep needling sexual minorities by branding them mentally ill. It’s a rabbit hole of endless (and usually endlessly bad) arguments. Morally, all that matters—and allow me to reiterate that because I feel it’s quite important, all that matters—is whether a person’s sexual deviancy is demonstrably harmful. If it’s not, and we reject the person anyway, then we’re not the good guys in this scenario; we’re the bad guys.”
― Jesse Bering, Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us

“Someone could be paraphilic in both his erotic target and his favorite sex act. I mean, really, any pellismophilic nebulophile (someone whose most passionate moments involve masturbating in the foggy mist while listening to a person stutter) can see that.”
― Jesse Bering, Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us

“The psychologist Charles Moser, for example, pointed out that those inclined to divide the "sane" from the "insane" in terms of frequency of sex and intensity of desires overlook the possibility that sex itself may be the most meaningful part of a person's life, "which appropriately can take precedence over other activities".”
― Jesse Bering, Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us

“We’ve become so focused as a society on the question of whether a given sexual behavior is evolutionarily “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 such direct analyses 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 not only is completely harmless to another but may even, believe it or not, be helpful or positive. If the supermodel Kate Upton were to walk into my office right now and tie me to my chair before doing a slow striptease and depositing her vagina in my 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.)”
― Jesse Bering, Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us

“For the longest time, in fact, to be a pervert wasn’t to be a sex deviant; it was to be an atheist.”
― Jesse Bering, Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us

“Yet some modern scientists believe that zoophilia is a genuine sexual orientation represented by as much as a full 1 percent of the human population.”
― Jesse Bering, Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us