I went to a seminar today run by Dr Adam Phillips, a psychologist so renowned he has a proper wikipedia page which might have been written by someone other than him. It was the use of the word "perversion" in clinical practice. For swathes of the 20th Century perversion has been a term designed to separate people in categories. Specifically "normal people" and "perverts" and these categories have been created based on the normative values of particular groups. Psychoanalysts and Christians being just two. Oh what company the scientists are keeping.
However more recent study of psychoanalysis has veered away from seeing people in these categories and has begun to look at the tendencies. Perverse activities vs. perverts. These activities are defined as actions which excite people because they are explicitly or implicitly forbidden by parents. Perversions are activities you believe you shouldn't be indulging in.
They are a way of dealing with and controlling your own sexuality. So if your particular fetish happens to be feet, in my opinion that is no different to being coprophiliac or having a perverse interest in heterosexual penetrative sex with a significant other. Pic related.
It was also fascinating to gain a grounding in psychoanalytic theory. Which perhaps will not help me particularly with my Renaissance Literature MA but continues to fascinate me in ways which probably aren't healthy. The most perfect and simple example of the issues presented by Freud were quoted to me today. "To the child the mother is everything, but to the mother the child is not everything." All those times our needs went unfulfilled, are what drives us to treat our partners the way we do. The way we with-hold sex. Because we can and because we couldn't always get food when we wanted it as a child. It's a fascinating topic, but needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.
As Phillips today informed me, psychoanalysts are the ultimate sadists. They categorise people as perverts in order to have the false sensation that they control the "norms" of sexual behaviour. They do this because sexuality is unnerving. We wonder why people choose to have sex with people of the same sex, why on earth they enjoy pain, or fetishize feet because we are afraid of these different sexualities.
Plus the heavy reliance on Freud leads to some weird conclusions. Men we are told are more perverse than women because they fear castration, so they must find things which arouse them in case they lose their penises. This bullshit has never really flown with me. Women are just as perverse as men, but why on earth would they show it. I am inclined to believe (alongside the unnamed woman in stoller's article: "The Term Perversion") that once women's liberation is fully realised that women will be able to be as open about their own sexuality. They will stop pretending to be content to be the object, (if they still are? This is weird territory for me,) and be more able to talk about what interests them. Having spoken to women about masturbation and most of the time, hit a brick wall, I feel that openness about sexuality will continue to be limited to the bedroom. Or worse cosmo magazine. (Try Scarlet, it got a bit tiring after a while, but it is actually attempting to explore sex, as opposed to normalise.)
