Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hello. Good afternoon.
I hope you're enjoying the Festival of Dangerous Ideas.
It's my great pleasure to introduce Jesse to you.
Now, the other great pleasure that I have
is that I'm the producer of this festival,
so last year we had a terrific talk in this very room with Chris Ryan,
who did If You Want Fidelity, Get a Dog.
-(LAUGHTER) -It was great.
It was great.
After the festival, Chris was like, "You know who you have to have?
"You have to have Jesse Bering."
So, Dr Jesse Bering is a research psychologist
and former director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture
at Queen's University, Belfast.
He's a columnist for 'Slate' and 'Scientific American',
and author of 'The God Belief'... 'God Instinct',
where he proposes the belief in God was an evolutionary advantage
which is now unnecessary,
and, most recently, the book 'Why is the *** Shaped Like That?'
Which is a collection of his essays on being human
and it's awesome.
Like, go and get this
because you will be really popular at dinner parties.
-(LAUGHTER) -Seriously.
It talks about acne, it talks about suicide,
it talks about paedophilia, it talks about ***,
it talks about rubber fetishes - you can't go wrong.
(LAUGHTER)
He's currently working on a new book which is tentatively titled 'Perve'
and today he's going to see what you think, so we'll see.
And he's also a number six on the Kinsey scale,
so that means he's pretty gay.
(LAUGHTER)
So Jesse's here to tell us all about why we are all *** perverts.
(APPLAUSE)
Thank you for that interesting introduction.
(LAUGHTER)
Yeah, I actually am a '6' on the Kinsey scale.
I really have absolutely no attraction to women whatsoever,
although I am mildly attracted to you, I think.
(LAUGHTER)
We'll address that maybe later tonight.
No, I'm very pleased to be here.
This is a really interesting opportunity for me
to explore these particular questions about *** deviance and perversion.
And I would imagine that most people here are perverts,
and in fact that's the argument that I'm going to try to make
and try to convince you of at some point during the talk.
And also addressing some of the deeper
sort of moral and philosophical questions
about what it means to be a pervert
and to be classified as a *** deviant.
So, with that in mind, let me try to lay out for you
sort of what I mean when I say that you are a *** deviant.
And I do think you are probably a pervert through and through
if you look closely enough.
And I don't want you to get too defensive here.
Imagine, for example, if some infinitely obtrusive
and omniscient, bureaucratic arm of the government existed
solely to document every *** response of every citizen,
from the most tempestuous, *** excesses
to the slightest twinges of genitalia,
to unseen hormonal cascades and sub-cranial machinations.
Filed under YOUR name - your name in particular -
in this fictional scientific universe
would be your very own scandalous dossier,
intricate and exhaustive in its every embarrassing measurement
of your self-lubricating loins.
(LAUGHTER)
And remember, this goes all the way back to your earliest adolescence.
And buried somewhere in this secret biography, I would imagine,
is a cold, hard, undeniable fact of your *** response
that would probably hobble you instantaneously with shame
should anyone ever find out.
(AUDIENCE TITTERS)
Now, perhaps it was just a fleeting, long-forgotten secretion.
A lingering gaze misplaced.
A furtive whiff of some object redolent with another person.
A wayward click of the mouse.
(LAUGHTER)
A hypothalamic effervescence that made you tingle down below.
But, nevertheless, this is also a corporeal reality
that is specific to you as an individual.
It's a shocking, incontrovertible deed of your body
or an outright commission of ***
that you've probably never shared with a single soul.
You've probably never even dared whisper it to yourself, in fact.
Now, if taken in isolation, perhaps even in context,
this unblinking fact, this unique venereal data point,
would probably register in the consciousness
of someone somewhere else in this very audience today
as evidence of your *** deviance
or even potentially your criminality.
So, in the unforgiving glare of another's critical eyes,
I would say you are, and many other people here would say,
you are a filthy loathsome pervert because of it.
In other words, you're human just like the rest of us.
And that's true for anybody,
I mean, for blue-haired grandmothers, of somnambulant schoolteachers
of faultless nuns,
and of us - of you - under all skins
once roamed the concupiscent beast.
But the best-kept secret
is bigger than the universality of these sordid turn-ons.
Rather, it's this -
and this is why I'm interested in this topic as a psychologist...
..exploring these perversions is moral progress.
The illumination of any corner
of the vast psychological cosmos that makes us human,
even the very darkest corners, is a moral accomplishment
by virtue of its ability to outshine our ignorance, our fear
and our denial of reality.
For those who are willing to tether themselves mercilessly
to these twin pillars of science and rationalism,
it's well worth getting one's thoughts a little dirty,
even a lot dirty perhaps,
while excavating our species' lascivious soul,
the rats therein will flee at the daylight falling at their feet.
There's only so far that our sympathies can take us, of course,
and entering other minds is neither pleasant, it's not pretty
when it comes to certain categories of sex offenders.
But even the worst of them are human.
And so, in effect, they are we.
That is to say they are our species
and not some other animal.
"I consider nothing that is human alien to me."
This is what the Roman philosopher Terence once said.
Terence, of course, didn't know
of the hundreds of paraphilias and fetishes
that researchers would come to discover...
..including, well...
Let's see here.
I'll get to those in just a second. Ooh!
These are just the 'A's in terms of the paraphilias...
(AUDIENCE TITTERS)
..which are quite interesting.
You can ask me about any others in particular, if you'd like, later on.
So he didn't know anything in particular about these paraphilias.
You know, we would eventually come to discover them.
But he, you know... he voiced that argument
at least a century before Christ was even born,
so I think it's possible
that Terence would have trouble finding common psychological ground
with, say, teratophiles -
here's a picture of the Elephant Man, Joseph Merrick.
Teratophiles are those who are attracted
to the congenitally deformed.
This is their primary *** target.
Or autoplushophile, which you saw a picture of that earlier,
these are individuals who *** to their own image
as anthropomorphised stuffed animals.
-Not... -(LAUGHTER)
You've probably heard about furries before,
and I should point out that not all furries
actually have this *** orientation,
but there is a small percentage of furries
that actually are attracted to themselves erotically
as the image of a stuffed animal.
So...
When we have such knowledge, however,
we can, I think, at this point try our best
to really sort of fulfil Terence's legacy today,
really try to understand what makes them human
and what we have in common with them.
Now, before we go much further,
I think a brief etymology lesson is probably in order here.
Perverts weren't always the libidinous bogeymen
that we know and loathe them as today.
And I don't simply mean this to imply the obvious fact
that *** mores have shifted dramatically
over the course of history and across societies -
that's certainly true of course -
rather, throughout our past, the very word 'pervert'
literally meant something else entirely than what it does today.
Although it probably wouldn't have helped his case, for example,
the peculiar discovery that some peasant,
during the reign of, say, Charles II,
used conch shells for *** gratification
or that he inhaled deeply a stolen batch of ladies' corsets
would have been merely coincidental
to any accusations of his being perverted.
In 1646, the British lexicographer Thomas Blount
included the following brief entry
for the verb pervert in this book 'Glossographia',
which was a book also known by its more cumbersome title
'A Dictionary Interpreting the Hard Words
'of Whatsoever Language Now Used in Our Refined English Tongue'.
(LAUGHTER)
And here was his definition -
to turn upside down,
to debauch or seduce.
Now, it's true that all these activities
do occur with some regularity
in your typical suburban bedroom.
But, in fact, we only perceive these lewd winks,
in Blount's definition
of a term that was floating around the old English countryside,
"Through the warped lenses of our own modern minds."
The word seems to fit so perfectly, I think,
with the subject of *** deviance today.
The very ring of it - pervert -
is at once melodious and cloying.
It's producing a noticeable snarl on the speaker's face.
Pervert - it's so rich.
You know, so the image of a lecherous child molester
or a trench-coated flasher in a park,
a pornographer or a serial ***
is conjured up in our heads.
Yet despite this impression of some deeper semantic reality,
the real lexical heart of a pervert
was something altogether different for most of its existence.
For hundreds of years, your average pervert
was simply an apostate who had wilfully turned his back
on the Draconian morality of the medieval church.
Its first written appearance
was in the pages of the Catholic mystic Boethius's treatise
'Consolation of Philosophy',
which was composed in Latin around the year 524 AD.
And it was translated into Old English by Chaucer
only in the 14th century.
So Boethius's 'pervertere',
from which Blount's definition certainly originates,
was a bland 'turning away from what is right'.
And that meant much the same as it does for God-fearing people today,
which is to say - somehow against what is biblical.
If we borrow this definition
for the present iconoclastic world of science
and perhaps the best, you know, example of a pervert
might be somebody like this.
(LAUGHTER)
The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.
(LAUGHTER)
In this context, Dawkins,
who is, of course, the author of 'The God Delusion'
and a well-known atheistic proselytiser, many would say,
has long been wantonly seducing individuals
to turn away from canonical teachings.
He was a pervert in the truest sense of the term.
And of course there are others as well,
you might recognise some of these faces here.
These would all be perverts in the classical sense of the word,
without anything to do with sexuality.
Well, perhaps *** too but that's a different question.
(LAUGHTER)
So, it was only at the tail end of the 19th century
that the label 'pervert'
leapt from the histrionic sermons of fiery Christian preachers
and into the heady clinical discourses
of stuffy European sexologists.
And it would be sometime after that still
before the term would be applied colloquially
to, you know, the image of the creepy bespectacled man up the road
who likes to watch the schoolgirls at the bus stop
while sipping tea on his porch.
Now, having said all this, however, it would be a mistake to think
that the gradual semantic migration of perverts
didn't occur without the clattering bones of medieval morality
dragging behind.
Notice the sophics 'vert',
generally 'to turn',
hence 'convert' means to turn to another,
'revert' means to turn to a previous state,
'invert' means to turn inside out
and 'pervert' means to turn away from the right course.
But pervert alone has that sort of devilishly malicious core to it.
It's got this distinctive quality of obstinacy,
notes one psychoanalyst,
"Petulance, peevishness,
"self-willed in a way that distinguishes it
"from more common deviations."
We still hear occasionally this term 'pervert' or 'perverting' being used
in tune with its more archaic origins.
Judges and lawyers might, for example,
speak of 'perverting the course of justice',
which is to say thwarting social fairness.
In everyday parlance, however, this term is now reserved
mainly for *** deviants
or else used jokingly, and in some cases even claimed proudly, I think,
for that sole purpose.
Clearly, however, the word itself
still possesses more than a little air from its moralising past.
So how did this sudden etymological transformation
from religious heretic in 524 AD
to disgusting *** deviant only in the past century or so
come to pass?
Word meanings are so ingrained in our shared vernacular,
they're so communal in abstraction
that we often fail to appreciate
that they are rooted not in divine decree
but in a solitary forebrain.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,
Shakespeare reminds us.
Likewise, a pervert by any other name would smell as foul
or at least make us bristle.
Now, the first buds leading to the present-day pervert's horns
is probably connected to the work of this person,
the Victorian-era scholar Havelock Ellis from South London.
He's often credited with being the first to use the word 'pervert'
in the sense of *** deviant in the 1890s.
Now, oddly enough, Ellis wasn't using the word 'pervert'
in a pejorative sense,
quite the opposite in fact
since he was actually among the very first
to take a non-judgemental approach
to understanding the natural variety of human *** expression.
He was also a vehement supporter of eugenics
and he even held court for a while
as the president of the Galton Institute,
an organisation that sought to improve
the fitness of the human race's genetic stock
through carefully regimented breeding.
The heritability of kinkiness didn't seem to worry him however.
In fact, it would be an affront to the very idea of irony
to overlook how the scientist
who first innocently referred to *** deviants as perverts
had his own unusual predilections.
Ellis's urophilia,
which is a paraphilia involving a primary *** attraction to urine,
has been well documented.
"I was completely normal," he wrote of his own sexuality
in an otherwise lacklustre autobiography,
but, "Oh, yes," he said, "before I forget,"
he reflects on his fondness for urine,
then kind of defensively, "It's not extremely uncommon
"and it has been noted of men of high intellectual distinction."
(LAUGHTER)
In his senior years, this divine stream, as he called it...
(LAUGHTER)
..proved the cure for Ellis's longstanding impotence.
He gave in to these wet desires
and he even began to fancy himself quite openly
a "connoisseur of pisseuses".
He wrote, "I may be regarded as a pioneer
"in the recognition of the beauty of the natural act in women
"when carried out in the erect attitude."
In one letter to a female acquaintance,
he chided her for forgetting her purse at his house,
adding this quotation,
"I have no objection to your leaving liquid gold behind."
(LAUGHTER)
Now, you laugh,
but Ellis steadfastly refused to regard his urophilia as shameful.
"It was never to me vulgar," he wrote,
"but, rather, an ideal interest,
"a part of the yet unrecognised loveliness of the world."
Yet where Ellis really made his mark, so to speak,
was his landmark treatise on homosexuality.
And this is where the term 'pervert' first appears
in the pages of his classic 1897 text '*** Inversion',
one of the first psychosexual investigations
into the nature of same-sex desires.
In this book, co-authored by the erudite
and actually gay literary critic John Addington Symonds,
the author has used the term 'pervert' interchangeably
with the more neutral term 'invert'.
Inversion in their view reflected homosexuality
as being a sort of flipped-around form
of the standard heterosexual pattern of attraction,
which was a clear enough use of the term.
So the authors adopted 'perversion' as a related but wider term,
applying it to a range of socially prohibited *** behaviours.
And their turn-of-the-century view,
which is actually quite progressive at that point,
inverts, or homosexuals, were fairly normal
as far as expected variance over the course of human history
and within the natural world actually goes.
So the semantic seams of the word 'perversion'
thread back to its original religious usage
in Ellis and Symonds' understanding
that homosexuals were just one of many different kinds
of *** minorities seen as sinful
by that era's equivalent of the moral majority.
Homosexuals were first labelled as perverts
to reflect a questionable moral subjectivity,
not to capture some deeper truth about their desires being wrong.
Now, these authors were among a handful of pioneering sexologists
that were finally beginning to carefully tease apart
the complicated strands of human sexuality.
Or at least they were using
as rigorously objective an approach as could be mustered
given the negligible amount of knowledge
that was available to them at the time.
Other scholars,
such as the Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing,
regarded by many as the father of abnormal sexuality studies,
as well as the German psychiatrist Wilhelm Stekel,
who coined the term 'paraphilia', were similarly committed
to this newly objective, amoral scientific approach to deviants.
Their writings may seem tainted with bias to us today,
and of course they really are,
but they also display a humanitarian concern
for those who found themselves through no doing
or choice of their own
aroused in ways that society demonised them for.
And it's worth bearing in mind, for instance,
that, you know, '*** Inversion' was penned on the heels
of Oscar Wilde's sensationalised 1895 trial,
in which this great Dubliner wit, of course,
famously lamented, "The love that dare not speak its name."
"The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it,"
reflected Wilde before a London jury sentenced him
to two years of hard labour for the crime of sodomy,
as it was at the time.
But these early sexologists also found themselves confronted
by angry social purists who feared that such novel scientific endeavours
would simply open the door for this inevitable collapse of morality.
Such anxieties over the slippery-slope effect
have actually been around for a very long time.
More socially conservative scholars
saw these researchers' scientifically neutral approach to *** deviants
as a dangerous stirring of the pot,
legitimising wicked things as natural,
variants of behaviour seducing normal people
into the unethical lifestyles of the degenerate.
Merely giving horrific conditions, such as homosexuality,
their own proper scientific names,
many of these early critics felt,
made them that much more real and that much more threatening.
Now, the distinction between homosexual behaviour
and homosexual orientation was actually groundbreaking
and it was arguably the first and most important step, I think,
in the history of gay rights.
It's also one, I think, that's gone almost entirely unrecognised
by most contemporary gays and lesbians.
The early sexologists regarded homosexuality
as a clear psychosexual trait or orientation,
not just something one did with members of the same sex.
This may seem like common sense to us today, but it was vital.
Although most of the early sexologists,
with perhaps the exception of Ellis,
still considered homoerotic attraction to be a mental illness
that wasn't to be indulged in of course,
their distinction between same-sex behaviour
and homosexuality as an orientation
was a watershed moment.
For the first time in modern history,
inverts that acted on their same-sex desires
were treated not as fallen people who were so licentious
that they'd even resort to that,
but as being true to their biological natures,
flawed as these natures were then believed to be.
It would take many decades for homosexuality to be decriminalised
throughout the United States, Europe and Australia as well,
nearly a century before it was declassified formally
as a mental illness,
but this new medicalisation of inversion
was, at least by contrast with an earlier state of affairs,
progressive in that it offered some degree of protection
against over-zealous prosecutors
who sought to jail anyone who is caught in a same-sex tryst.
Yet the die had been cast for this disparaging term 'pervert'
and its accidental association with gays and lesbians.
This connection actually lived quite long
even in the clinical literature.
This was especially true within psychoanalytic circles,
Neo-Freudian circles in particular.
Not so long ago, some scholars
were still interpreting *** intercourse among gay men
as an unconscious desire among the recipient
to nip off the other's *** with his tightened sphincter.
(LAUGHTER)
It never consciously occurred to me
as I was engaging in that behaviour actually.
(LAUGHTER)
But who knows?
"In this way, which is so characteristic of the pervert,"
argued the psychiatrist Mervin Glasser in 1986,
not terribly long ago,
"he is trying to establish his father
"as an internal object with whom to identify,
"as an inner ally and bulwark against his powerful mother."
Now, that may sound as scientific to us today as astrology
or etchings on a tarot card,
but, all the same, it's the type of thing
that so many gay men would have expected to hear
if they ever sought counselling for their inevitable woes
in a world that saw them as mentally ill.
Today the word 'pervert' sounds just silly,
or at least provincial, when it's used to refer to gays and lesbians.
Even such minor accomplishments, however,
are the result of hard-won civil rights battles.
And campaigning for full equality
is still critically important for most same-sex couples.
But the term pervert is still used freely
and without any consideration, really,
in the disparaging of other human beings
who similarly have no say whatsoever over their *** desires.
It's as though despite our humane and increasing appeals
to science and the natural world in defending gays and lesbians,
deep down we still suffer from the illusion
that there's some sort of God who set the limits
on the acceptable forms of sexuality
and from which all actual perverts deliberately and arrogantly stray.
Even evolutionary biologists tend to frame their gay-friendly arguments
on the sole fact that same-sex behaviours occur
in other species too,
which is seemingly to say, "Oh, relax, these people are fine
"because, you know, they really aren't that weird
"in the grand scheme of things."
You know, there's good emotional currency in animal comparisons
and I like this tact very much for its rhetorical value.
But it's also deeply problematic from a philosophical perspective
because it simultaneously invokes a moral judgement
against those people whose *** orientations
are NOT found in other species.
When thinking about sex and morality,
it's all too easy to fall prey to this philosophical error
called the naturalistic fallacy,
which I would imagine some of you have heard of.
In effect, the fallacy assumes that that which is natural
is therefore OK, good or socially acceptable.
But nature is two things and two things only,
it's mechanistic and its amoral.
so, for example, heterosexual sex can produce offspring,
homosexual intercourse cannot produce offspring.
Yet, to extrapolate from these mechanistic facts of procreation
some moral directive
about what we should and should not do with our genitalia
is to assume an intelligent creator
that designed our reproductive anatomies.
And that pre-Darwinian view,
that there is some intelligent mind needed to account for the human form
and that this preconceived design
should, in turn, somehow dictate our social behaviours,
lies at the flawed heart of the unnaturalness argument
against homosexuality.
This is usually manifested in some God-awful rendition
of the 'Adam and Steve' fundamentalists refrain.
But it also applies to the other paraphilias just as well,
which, lest we forget,
homosexuality was also considered to be for a very long time.
Now, treating another person as being immoral in essence,
simply because their brains and their genitals
respond to non-traditional stimuli
in a way that places them in the minority of the population,
is really quite strange when you stop to think about it.
And this is true
no matter what form of *** deviance we're referring to.
Paedophiles are, of course, today's most wicked moral monsters.
Yet even in the case of paedophilia,
behaviours and desires are often conflated
as equivalent social tragedies.
*** actions upon children
or other vulnerable classes, such as the elderly or animals,
may be harmful, and tremendously so, in fact,
but it's clear that our moral judgements
are not reserved to actions alone.
Paedophiles are shunned whether or not they ever *** a child
because they are essentialised as evil -
they're disgusting and wrong, they're true perverts,
in other words, in line with the term's original religious origins.
Likewise, knowing that your neighbour can obtain *** gratification
only by *** to violent *** fantasies
or being aware that horses titillate your local Liberal MP...
..would also probably cast them
in a permanently unflattering light to you.
Even though these people have not, to the best of your knowledge,
ever harmed any child, any woman, any animal,
it's all but impossible
not to attribute to their ethereal *** desires
a significant moral weight.
So how can sexually deviant thought,
"Mere breath on the air,"
as the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once called the human mind,
possess such a palpable presence?
In fact, there's a revealing contradiction here, I think.
On the one hand, society tends to believe
that paedophiles, for instance, have actively chosen evil.
"What's next?" we hear social conservatives say
in response to many gay rights issues,
"The right to be a paedophile or to be a ***?"
But to BE a paedophile
or a *** or a teratophile
or a autoplushophile or a whatever-ophile
has really never been illegal
because what these people have in common
is the nature of their *** desires,
not actions arising from these desires.
Just as a homosexual who has never had sex
or has only been with the opposite sex
is still a homosexual,
a paedophile who's never molested a child is still a paedophile,
a *** who has never been with a non-human animal is still a ***,
and so on.
So, to say that one doesn't have the right to be
of these particular derogated classes
is rather nonsensical,
or at least it's fairly Dark Ages in its insinuation.
It's equivalent to saying
that a person does not have the right to exist
not because they've committed some terrible crime against another
but instead because they are rotten at their biological core.
Yet note that if one accepts the view that nature is amoral,
there can simply be no such thing as a rotten biological core.
Still, many people today would no doubt endorse
a pre-emptive extermination of social classes,
such as paedophiles,
arguing that such measures are harsh
but ultimately worth it since they protect children.
We tend to have short memories for past actions of hasty extremism,
however.
And for many Americans at least,
navel gazing, at a similar better-safe-than-sorry approach
to *** deviance in 17th-century New England,
is a useful exercise.
Now, the moral monsters of those days,
17th-century America New England,
were not paedophiles,
but, instead, these were men who were in league with the devil
to impregnate barnyard animals
so that evil prodigies would quickly overrun
this fledgling nation of theirs.
This was a concept prodigy
that was originated by this stridently prude medieval scholar,
Thomas Aquinas.
(AUDIENCE TITTERS)
Oh, that's not him actually, that's a different picture.
There we go, Thomas Aquinas,
who coined the term 'prodigy' to refer to those hybrid creatures
sprung from the loins of another species but borne of human seed.
They can also be conceived through having sex with atheists,
according to Aquinas,
but it seems there were far fewer of those milling about the colonies
than solicitous swine.
Now, it's unclear if any of the early Americans
that I'm about to tell you about
were certifiable zoophiles,
who are individuals genuinely attracted more to animals
than they are other human beings.
They may have used the animals as surrogates for human partners
in obtaining *** gratification
or, more likely, they were falsely accused of such acts altogether,
but researchers today at least know
that zoophilia is a genuine paraphilia.
Just as it's impossible for non-zoophiles,
I would imagine maybe not necessarily but the majority of this audience
to, say, become passionately aroused
by the steaming modelled member of a Clydesdale
or by a panting German shepherd.
Zoophiles cannot be easily aroused by other human beings.
One such man, he emailed me, unfort...
Well, he emailed me. (CHUCKLES)
(LAUGHTER)
He was actually a highly intelligent physician from suburbia.
He told me he could only consummate his marriage
by closing his eyes and imagining his new bride as a horse.
Needless to say that marriage didn't last very long.
Now, centuries ago, in the new-found colony of Plymouth,
zoophilia was obviously not a known *** orientation.
Again, the construct of orientation simply doesn't appear anywhere
until the late 19th century or so.
They were only behaviours - *** behaviours.
But the hysteria over Satan's prodigal litters
reached dramatic heights
with the 1642 trial of a 16-year-old boy named Thomas Granger.
This randy adolescent had been indicted
for taking indecent liberties
with what seems an entire stable of animals,
including, quote, a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep,
two calves and a turkey.
(LAUGHTER)
Now, I realise the turkey part is probably a bit distracting
and how one goes about having sex with a large-clawed bird
is perhaps better left to the imagination.
But even more remarkable
is the legal diligence and sobriety with which this case was prosecuted.
There was little question in these righteous minds trying him
that the boy should be dispatched to the flames
for his egregious violations of natural law,
but there was a lot of head-scratching on the bench
over which sheep exactly he'd been defiling
and, therefore, which of them should be killed
and which of them spared.
We heard from Sam Harris the other night
about some of these trials attributing blame and responsibility
for animals accused of committing crimes.
This was crucial to sort out in this case
because if they executed the wrong sheep,
they risk the unthinkable happening,
a monstrously bleeding hoofed prodigy might drop undetected onto Plymouth.
So, naturally, there was a line-up of busily masticating victims
that were staged for Granger.
With one trembling finger, the boy pointed out
there was five naive, amber-eyed ruminants
that had been targets of his secret woolly ***.
Court records, if you look at them,
indicate that the animals were then, quote, killed before his face,
according to the law of Leviticus,
and then he himself was executed.
16-year-old boy, remember.
Similar to how we might seek to detect covert paedophiles today
by some fallible laboratory techniques
and measurements of arousal,
moral arbiters of the past often relied on flimsy evidence
to support their claims of suspected buggers,
which was Old English slang for he who has sex with pigs, dogs, donkeys
and all and other sundry critters.
In New Haven in 1646, for example, not far from the Yale campus
and just a few years after this Granger affair,
a servant by the name of George Spencer,
who was notorious for having, quote,
a profane lying, scoffing and lewd spirit,
was executed for making love to his master's pig.
He swore that he didn't do it,
but unfortunately for Spencer the sow happened to give birth
to a deformed foetus - a 'prodigious monster', it was written -
that resembled George a bit too closely for most people's comfort.
(LAUGHTER)
The pig foetus had - this is written in the records -
"butt one eye for use,
"the other hath, as itt is called,
"a pearle in itt, is whitish and deformed."
And this embryological mishap was actually George's death sentence.
His own ocular deformity bore an uncanny resemblance
to that of the stillborn pig
and this was the critical piece of evidence
that was held against him.
Now, if anyone could commiserate with George Spencer and his troubles,
it was a fellow citizen
with the ridiculously unfortunate name of Thomas Hogg.
Like Spencer, Hogg found himself
at the centre of an intense buggery investigation
when a neighbourhood sow bore another deformed foetus
with, quote, "a faire and white skinne and head, as Thomas Hogg is."
And as an aside, perhaps,
it's hard not to help but pity the women of old New Haven
with so many of its male residents
being reminiscent of aborted pig foetuses.
(LAUGHTER)
But back to Thomas Hogg and his hogs,
the allegations made against the former by the townsfolk
were so serious, in fact, that the governor and the deputy governor
personally frogmarched him out to the barnyard toward the sow in question,
ordered him to 'scratt', or to ***, the animal before their eyes.
This was done to gauge just how intimately familiar they might be.
And the records say, "Immedyatly there appeared
"a working of *** in the sow..."
(LAUGHTER)
"..insomuch that she powred out seede before them."
When Hogg reluctantly titillated the teats of a different sow,
that animal didn't return his affections.
So he, like Thomas Granger and George Spencer before him,
was executed.
Now, these zero-tolerance laws against ***
had been imported from Christian Europe,
the stomping grounds of zealots like Aquinas,
but an interesting development emerged on that side of the Atlantic
in the 18th century,
that was highlighted by the case of a ragged French peasant
named Jacques Ferron,
who was tried for having sex with a female donkey.
As described by Edward Payson Evans in a classic book
called 'The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals',
Ferron would clearly be killed
since he was, quote, taken in the act of coition with the animal.
He'd be shoved along in shackles to the public square,
where an already smouldering stake was waiting to consume him in flames
as he pleaded for mercy in front of a sea of scornful faces.
Curiously, though, the locals chose not to slay the jenny along with him.
She was so beloved by the community
that she was given her own separate trial,
with witnesses to testify
that not once had they ever seen her exhibit
even the slightest sign of promiscuity.
(AUDIENCE TITTERS)
Before her proceedings,
a certificate was drawn up affirming her virtuous reputation
and this impassioned plea was signed by the parish priest
and was enough to persuade the court officials to acquit the animal
on the grounds that she'd been ***.
(LAUGHTER)
Now, if you think about it, the donkey case may sound absurd,
but there was also a small moment in history
in which people stopped and questioned
religious ideas of punishment
and chose their own more humane, rational course instead.
Since God clearly prescribes death to any creature, willing or unwilling,
tainted by human ***,
the sparing of this she-*** might be seen as a graduation of sorts
to the all-important principle of *** consent,
which is the defining feature of our own modern justice system.
Fortunately, perhaps as the result
of getting a little basic biology under our belts,
along with that knowledge,
a cure for the trembling over Aquinas's ridiculous 'prodigies',
Americans, and Europeans alike, eventually abandoned this practice
of immolating those who were suspected of inter-species sex.
And, you know, since we now know that many European - many Europeans -
possess Neanderthal DNA,
it's quite tempting to speculate
on how many of those fuelling the *** fires of yore
were actually flesh and blood prodigies themselves.
Yet, in many ways, we're still, I think, grappling
with this all-important consent issue.
Now, in terms of human-animal sex,
*** is expressly illegal in the majority of US states today
and most developed countries around the world.
In many places where *** is not listed formally
as a codified crime,
those who engage in *** activities with animals
are still occasionally prosecuted under animal cruelty laws.
This is good and just overall,
and I say this as a platonic animal lover myself.
But some zoophilia cases are quite clearly in the grey zone, I think.
So which is worse, as a hypothetical here,
a stud manager, somebody who works in a horse facility,
that forcefully collects the *** of a prized racehorse
by manually *** the stallion for her own commercial gain
or a woman who masturbates her companion horse
in her own private stable to bring pleasure to both she and the animal?
For zoophiles that prefer to be the recipients of *** penetration -
in fact, this happens to be the majority of zoophiles -
rather than those who do the actual penetrating
of another species' orifices themselves,
it's also rather odd to argue that the creature has not consented
to its own act of insertion.
And when penetration of other animals does occur,
harm is still occasionally unclear.
With equines at least, anyone who has ever seen a horse ***,
approximately the size of a small motorcycle...
(LAUGHTER)
..knows that it's, you know, it's probably unlikely
that even the largest human phallus
would cause anything approaching harm.
(LAUGHTER)
Finally, while the thought of ***
elicits significant moral outrage,
most people in our society, strangely enough,
have no such concern for the equally thorny problem
of how to gain an animal's consent for eating it.
Now, even when *** consent can be linguistically gauged
with members of our own species,
it's not always so straightforward.
In most cultures, for example,
prevailing social forces determine the age
at which people can legally participate
in *** activity with others,
or at least others who are more than a certain number of years
older than they are.
Any given legal age of consent
may sound to members of that society perfectly reasonable
and they might even be based themselves
on some principle of human development,
but that there are wild fluctuations
in what constitutes a minor, over both space and time,
also reveals whatever age selected to be an arbitrary set point.
Until close to the 20th century, in fact,
Delaware's legal age of consent was a mind-boggling seven years old.
And in most other states, it was around 12.
Still, like anti-*** laws,
such age restrictions on sexuality, whatever they are,
are good and just overall
in that they are designed to keep children safe
and adolescents from being harmed by sexually exploitative adults.
More interesting to me than this,
the cultural arbitrariness of particular age restrictions on sex,
is the philosophical problem.
The very notion of a legal age of consent
is like saying that a person cannot legally feel as he or she does.
Throughout much of the world,
any person under the age of 18 who agrees to some *** action,
or who even pursues this action of their own volition,
is vetoed by a government that renders their psychology irrelevant
in any consideration of harm posed to them as individuals.
And unlike the case
of the man who *** the donkey in 18th-century France,
consent in most criminal cases today
involving adults accused of having sex with under-aged partners
does not refer to the latter's mental state of willingness.
Instead, the *** feelings of anyone under the legal age of consent
are held as the property of the state in which the minor subsides.
So, to have sex with a consenting minor,
which is an oxymoron in legalistic terms,
is to steal from the state.
People do not inherit full rights to their own body
nor can they claim their private *** desires as their own
until some executively mandated calendar day.
And only on that day does consent transform abruptly,
and literally at the stroke of midnight,
from a chronological state into a mental state,
with the state relinquishing its power over the individual's genitals.
There are many other examples of conceptual tensions
in our thinking about the legal issue of consent.
One would probably be stigmatised for doing so, for example,
but it's perfectly lawful to have *** intercourse
with someone who is over the age of 18
but who has the mind of a child.
(LAUGHTER)
The average mental age of a person with Down's syndrome, for example,
is that of an eight-year-old.
Yet, unlike *** high-school seniors
brandishing average or even genius-level IQs,
Down's syndrome adults can legally consent to sex.
Now, this is not to say
that anomalous cases render broader protective laws illogical,
but sometimes even our most passionate intuitions of wrongfulness
aren't always as logical as we'd like to believe.
Years ago, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt
coined the term 'moral dumbfounding'
to refer to the phenomenon in which people struggle to elaborate
on the precise reasons for why they believe some acts are immoral.
Tautologies such as, "It's disgusting because it's gross,"
or, "It's wrong because it's evil."
These echo intense social disapproval for certain crimes
that, emotions aside,
arguably shouldn't be considered crimes at all.
Now, consider this consent that I'm about to read -
this vignette that I'm about to read to you -
it's from a published study in this area.
And here's what participants who were in this study heard.
This was one of the examples of the stories that they read
and they were asked questions about it.
A man belongs to a necrophilia club
and this necrophilia club has devised a way
to satisfy the desire to have sex with dead people.
Each member donates his or her body to the club after death
so that the other members can have sex with the corpse.
And the man has sex with the dead woman who gave her body to the club.
So, think about that for a little bit.
(AUDIENCE TITTERS)
When asked whether or not it was wrong for this man to do what he did
and, more importantly, to articulate and to justify their responses,
many participants defaulted to a presumption of harm
in their moral reasoning.
Even when they were told explicitly
that the woman did not have any family members who might get upset
if they found out what happened to her corpse,
that the club isn't interested in recruiting or harming living people,
that neither the man nor any of the other club members
suffer any regrets or personal anguish about their sexuality,
that the group's activities are kept private and consensual,
that the man used protection to prevent the spread of disease
and, per her instructions, that the club cremated the woman's body
after the man was done,
most people still insisted that somehow or another
someone somewhere must be getting harmed.
(LAUGHTER)
For social conservatives,
the harm might even be seen as inflicted on symbolic entities -
America, for example...
(LAUGHTER)
..the church, society,
or even the sanctity of marriage.
And it's not just necrophilic sex, of course.
Researchers find presumption-of-harm reasoning
among participants contemplating other verboten sex acts
with similarly clear caveats about harmlessness,
one of them including ***.
So, this is an image of the Peters twins
who are pornographic actors...
..that happen to be identical twins
and it's very controversial
that they actually engage in full *** penetration
in their scenes.
They are in love with each other,
this is what they tell reporters in the media
that actually engages in some type of discourse with them.
I was never familiar with them before this... No, I'm just kidding.
(LAUGHTER)
But I think it's a very interesting sort of hypothetical example here
because when we try to articulate
why we all have this sort of intuition that it's wrong
or some aversive response to seeing
identical twins like this actually engaging in intercourse,
we have a difficult time, I think, unpacking why it's wrong exactly.
There's no possibility of procreation in the sense
and genital...
Sorry, genetic damages that are associated
with their *** activity.
Now, that's all well and good, I think,
for these abstract hypothetical examples,
but for ***, child abuse and ***,
it's hard to see how such a powerfully negative response
could ever be a bad thing, really.
Even in evolutionary terms,
moral outrage is a smart system
in that it helps to drive out malignant social elements
that cripple the cohesive functioning of the group.
Hatred of those who endanger
the most cherished or vulnerable members of society
is rational if not always logical.
The downside of having evolved to become so easily swept up
by moral flash flooding in the sexuality domain
is that these unyielding currents
tend to drown out meaningful vicissitudes.
Relatively harmless cases,
harmless, anyway, when you accept
that harm is something that can really only occur
at the level of a subjectively experiencing organism,
human or animal,
that actually possesses pain receptors
and neural systems that are able to register emotional trauma,
not at the level of a mindless, symbolic entity, such as society,
these harmless cases rattle in the emotional deluge
against the most violent, unspeakable crimes.
And as this colonial-era hunt for prodigies that we went over
and they're suspected of conspiring with the devil
to produce these hybrids, showed,
any social system that operates on a better-safe-than-sorry principle
is prone to moral panics and false positives.
Whenever evil is perceived to be an essential trait
rather than reserved for harmful actions
that are committed against actual others,
human nature is going to become furtive
and people are going to cling to facades.
So is it any wonder then
that you blanched when I called you a pervert earlier on?
(APPLAUSE)
This is for you.
Your mic's not working.
-Your mic's not working. -Do I need the headset on?
No, so just use that.
-Do I take this off? -If you want.
Wow. (LAUGHS)
So, there's mics either side.
If you've got questions, start to head down there
'cause we've only got 10 minutes.
And I'm sure some of you might even have statements
that you'd like to share about who you are.
-(LAUGHTER) -Come on, you perverts.
Yeah, all you perverts out there.
Look, how many...
We talk about paraphilias,
is it that prevalent that we need to be worried about it?
Is it something to be worried about?
Well, I suppose it depends on what you mean by 'worry about'.
I mean, there are 547 distinct paraphilias.
And some of those paraphilias
are reserved to just two or three people in the entire world
and they're incredibly rare.
There are certain category... sub-category of paraphilias,
including paedophilia, sadomasochism,
exhibitionism, voyeurism,
frotteurism, which is touching people in public,
that I think are inherently, or at least potentially, dangerous
and that's why they are diagnosed as mental illnesses,
psychiatric disturbances,
whether or not the person is comfortable with them.
All the other paraphilias require the person
actually to be experiencing some type of subjective distress...
..to be labelled a true mental disorder.
And do paraphilias have a sort of a gender bias?
-Are there... -Oh, it's a male phenomenon, yes.
-Right. There you go. (LAUGHS) -(LAUGHTER)
Yeah, that's one of the really fascinating things
about this literature,
that the paraphilias seem to be disproportionately male...
..and it's not entirely clear why that's the case.
Researchers are still trying to unpack, or examine,
that particular gender distortion.
There are some paraphilias where we do find women represented,
including sadomasochism.
'Fifty Shades of Grey' is probably a good example
of where that would be manifested.
But for the vast majority of all the other ***,
whether you want to call it, orientations or paraphilias,
it's really a male phenomenon.
And, you know, the interesting thing about paraphilias
is what doesn't turn these people on.
People that have these paraphilias
are limited in their *** response -
what can deliver an *** for them -
in terms of the circumscribed set of *** stimuli
that bring them to ***,
whereas you might find people without paraphilias
that are aroused by a vast array of things,
including things that would be classified
under the paraphilia domain but not just that.
And women are much turned on by a much broader array...
..variety of things as well.
So, we'll take a question over here.
-Hi, Danielle. -Oh, hi, Marcus.
-How are you? -(LAUGHS)
Thanks so much for this great talk. I'm a Kinsey six.
The only woman I've been in since childbirth is the Statue of Liberty.
-JESSE: Awesome. -(LAUGHTER)
I was really pleased to hear you say...
JESSE: Not your mother?
..that the fact that we talk about *** perversion
is moral progress
and I have a question for you about gay marriage.
Mmm.
In the rush... And I agree with equal rights,
but in the rush to get equal rights,
the gay lobby is leaving behind 'deviants'.
Senator Bernardi, a Liberal staffer, was forced to resign
for saying, "After we have gay marriage, what's next?
"***? Polygamy?"
I know people in polyamorous relationships.
The gay marriage lobby ignores intersex.
So am I saying, when we talk about *** perversion,
is the official 'gay marriage lobby' -
is it taking a morally backward step...
-Yeah. -..by leaving parts of it behind?
I mean, it's a really good question.
I mean, as a gay writer writing about *** deviants
and also somebody who is legitimately concerned about gay rights,
and, you know, from my own sort of personal biases with my partner
and so on,
it's very easy, I think, to sever yourself
from all these other *** orientations and minority categories.
And I think that's a mistake -
it's a mistake in philosophical terms,
from a scientific analysis,
and it's also potentially a mistake in this more humanitarian sense
I think that you're referring to
whereby, you know, taking a stand about the gays and lesbians are OK
but all these other people are, you know, kind of crazy and weird
and they should be the foils for what we shouldn't be.
And, yeah, so I think that the gay and lesbian community by and large,
and, of course, there are people like us
that don't necessarily identify terribly strongly
with any type of socio-political gay orientation in that sense...
..are overzealous in their efforts
to distinguish their orientations from anything else.
That's quite a dangerous statement from a gay man.
You know, we were talking the other night,
only, you know, homosexuality was a recognised paraphilia
until not that long ago
and paedophilia is a recognised paraphilia, so...
Yeah, I mean, I don't think we want to necessarily go as far as saying
we should accept *** diversity with all its glorious manifestations.
I mean, I think that might be going a little bit far.
There's certainly paraphilias that are inherently dangerous
and I think that we need to be aware of that.
But from a definitional perspective...
..whether somebody is attracted to the opposite sex
or to animals or to certain age profiles,
whether we want to call it a *** orientation or not,
it exists and it's the same phenomenon
in the sense that one has absolutely no choice
over what they are attracted to -
you can't change it once it's locked into place.
Whether that happens prenatally
or aetiologically as a consequence of early childhood experiences...
..it's an orientation.
It might not be a politically correct term but that's really what it is
and you can't change it.
So, with hebephiles
potentially being considered to be in the new DSM, is that...?
Right, so there are...
Researchers now are teasing apart
these *** age-orientation constructs
so that it's not just simply
anybody who's attracted to anybody under the age of 18 is a paedophile,
but, in fact, there are these shades of orientations
in terms of the particular physical characteristics related to age.
So a paedophile is sort of classically attracted
to somebody that's a prepubescent
without any secondary *** characteristics.
A hebephile is more your traditional Lolita -
and I live in Ithaca, New York now where Nabokov wrote 'Lolita'
so it's really interesting to me -
but the hebephile is somebody
who's attracted to a child sort of on the brink of adolescence,
the pubescent state.
An ephebophile is somebody who's attracted to older adolescents,
older teenagers.
A teleiophile is a reproductively mature,
legally aged adult typically
and a gerontophile is somebody attracted to the elderly,
so there's a whole range of *** age-orientations
that researchers are discovering exist,
and, you know, they know it exists
because they put them in laboratory conditions
where they look at their erections to pictures
of, you know, different images of differently aged targets and so on.
And there are these, you know...
These are clear patterns.
MAN: I've got two questions.
Is it ever morally acceptable
for children to have sex with other children?
JESSE: Mmm.
And are there instances when paedophilia can be harmless?
That's not a dangerous question at all.
-DANIELLE: No. (LAUGHS) -(LAUGHTER)
Well, I've got two responses to that, I guess.
One interesting set of findings that I recently came across
was that children that engage...
We were talking about this earlier actually.
..children that play doctor with other kids
in their early childhood,
as adults are actually more likely to be attracted to minors
than those who didn't have those early play experiences
with other children.
So that's interesting,
so whether we want to say it's OK or not is kind of irrelevant
to the fact that this is a phenomenon.
I don't see any...
I don't see any harm per se in similarly aged children,
you know, playing doctor or just sex play
or something along those lines,
in terms of the sort of the innocence and exploration
of each other's bodies and learning about other people.
But what is relevant, I think, with that question
and the science that I just mentioned
is the fact that it happens in a society where it is so shameful
for any child to have any *** encounter
that that experience might be seen as so atypical by the child
or so salient in their early autobiography
that somehow it actually, you know,
causes these deviant patterns in later adulthood.
And the reason I think that might be the case
is that in other societies you find lots of *** play activity.
In, you know, Central Africa, for example,
there are communities where it's natural for prepubescent boy and girl
to play husband and wife, including simulating *** intercourse.
And there are virtually no paraphilias
in hunter-gatherer societies.
And so part of the problem
could be the social ambience by which these activities occur
and them somehow, you know, registering
or making a dent in consciousness that actually cause these problems
in terms of adult sexuality.
Your other question about whether it is always harmful for a child
to have, what is it, to have sex with...
..to have some *** experience with an adult...
Um...
I don't know the answer to that question.
I mean, I think that right now the literature is so occluded
by this very strong opinion
that it is inherently bad
and there's absolutely nothing that could possibly be good about it.
There were some studies that came out in developmental psychology
about a decade or so ago
where the researcher was basically trying to make the argument
that in fact that it's not always intrinsically bad,
especially for adolescents that have *** encounters with adults,
in terms of their retrospective analysis
and how much, you know, trauma they experienced emotionally.
Many of them say that it really didn't impact them
in any sort of significant way
and some of them actually said it was positive.
So I think, you know, it's potentially...
..it's a very inflammatory topic obviously,
but it depends on the individual.
And I think that the...
When we're talking about extremely young kids, you know,
prepubescent children, I can't imagine any benefits
of an adult sort of taking advantage of a child in that fashion
because the child is so naive and their *** desires
are qualitatively different at a subjective, phenomelogical level
that their analysis of the situation will be warped, I think.
But when we're talking about a 16- or 17-year-old
having sex with a 20-year-old or 21-year-old,
I think that's an entirely different question.
So, we're out of time
and there's a page of questions I have,
you probably have two pages.
We'll take one more quick, quick, quick question
and a quick, quick answer from Jesse,
and then he'll be signing books outside,
so you can ask him more
and you can ask him what the craziest paraphilia is that he knows about,
and things like that.
-(LAUGHTER) -Quick question.
-JESSE: Hey, Kat, how are you? -Hey.
My name's Katerina and I'm a *** pervert.
-Yeah, I recognise you. -(LAUGHS)
So, this next weekend I'm heading up to the Gold Coast
to meet with a gay couple and their surrogate
with a view to donating my eggs.
What are your thoughts on the impact of creating a child with two daddies?
The impact on the child developing without a mother?
Both - your view as a psychologist and who happens to be gay.
DANIELLE: Quick answer.
-(LAUGHS) -I think it's a good thing.
(LAUGHTER)
KAT: Right.
No, there's no data suggesting that there is some inherently...
..that there are any sort of deep, significant emotional trauma
for the child in not having a mother raise the child if, you know...
To me, it's rather common sense
that if you've got two caring adults that are invested in the wellbeing
and the development of the child,
that's much better than having
a mother and a father that aren't as parentally, sort of, concerned.
So I think you're doing a good thing.
I don't think that the gender influence
is going to be terribly significant
in terms of any orientation that the child may have
and there's no data suggesting
that that's going to play any role whatsoever.
DANIELLE: There you go. (CHUCKLES)
(APPLAUSE)
Jesse Bering.