Perversion is a form of human behavior which deviates from what is considered to be orthodox or normal . Although the term perversion can refer to a variety of forms of deviation, it is most often used to describe sexual behaviors that are considered particularly abnormal, repulsive or obsessive . Perversion differs from deviant behavior, in that the latter covers areas of behavior (such as petty crime) for which perversion would be too strong a term. It is often considered derogatory , and, in psychological literature, the term paraphilia has been used as a replacement, though this term is controversial, and deviation is sometimes used in its place.
64-487: One view is that the concept of perversion is subjective, and its application varies depending on the individual. Another view considers that perversion is a degradation of an objectively true morality. Originating in the 1660s, a pervert was originally defined as "one who has forsaken a doctrine or system regarded as true, apostate." The sense of a pervert as a sexual term was derived in 1896, and applied originally to variants of sexualities or sexual behavior believed harmful by
128-460: A "topless bikini " or "unikini", was designed by Rudi Gernreich in 1964, consisting of only a brief, close-fitting bottom and two thin straps; it was the first women's topless swimsuit . Gernreich's revolutionary and controversial design included a bottom that "extended from the midriff to the upper thigh" and was "held up by shoestring laces that make a halter around the neck." Some credit Gernreich's design with initiating, or describe it as
192-425: A form of "cultural critique" insofar as it transgresses societal conventions. Manuel Castells claims that the online communities, which emerged (from the 1980s) around early bulletin-board systems, originated from the ranks of those who had been part of the counterculture movements and alternative way of life emerging out of the sexual revolution. Lynn Hunt points out that early modern "pornography" (18th century)
256-525: A lake. This film, as well as Bergman's Sommaren med Monika ( The Summer with Monika , 1951) and Tystnaden (The Silence , 1963), caused an international uproar, not least in the United States, where the films were charged with violating standards of decency. Vilgot Sjöman's film I Am Curious (Yellow) , also was very popular in the United States. Another of his films, 491 , highlighted homosexuality. Kärlekens språk ( The Language of Love )
320-406: A new wide-ranging liberal consensus. At times this might lead to a kind of Panglossian world view where every fetishist has his "fetishera ... for every man who is hung up on shoes, there is a woman ready to cater for and groove with him, and for every man who gets his thrills from hair, there is a woman who gets hers from having her locks raped . Havelock Ellis has many cases of this meeting of
384-491: A popular movie for heterosexual couples. The movie played all over America and was the first porn movie to earn a gross of a million dollars. Pornography was less stigmatized by the end of the 1980s, and more mainstream movies depicted sexual intercourse as entertainment. Magazines depicting nudity, such as the popular Playboy and Penthouse magazines, won some acceptance as mainstream journals, in which public figures felt safe expressing their fantasies. Some figures in
448-591: A review of The Complete Works of Arlene Richards in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, noted prior to that time, "virtually no analysts were writing about female perversion. This pioneering work undoubtedly paved the way for others, including Louise Kaplan (1991), to explore this relatively uncharted territory." With the sexual revolution of the later twentieth century, much that Freud had argued for became part of
512-602: A symbol of, the 1960s sexual revolution. The court decisions that legalized the publication of Fanny Hill had an even more important effect: freed from fears of legal action, nonfiction works about sex and sexuality started to appear more often. These books were factual and in fact, educational, made available in mainstream bookstores and mail-order book clubs to a mainstream readership, and their authors were guests on late-night talk shows. Earlier books such as What Every Girl Should Know ( Margaret Sanger , 1920) and A Marriage Manual (Hannah and Abraham Stone, 1939) had broken
576-439: A well-organized tyranny has been established, but in each of the two a different family has seized the reins of power'. A few years later, in "A Child is Being Beaten" (1919), Freud laid greater stress on the fact that perversions "go through a process of development, that they represent an end-product and not an initial manifestation ... that the sexual aberrations of childhood, as well as those of mature life, are ramifications of
640-401: A woman has said ... is a long step closer to a direct attempt at seduction or rape." The noun sometimes occurs in abbreviated slang form as "perv" and used as a verb meaning "to act like a pervert", and the adjective "pervy" also occurs. All are often, but not exclusively, used non-seriously. In economics , the term " perverse incentive " means a policy that results in an effect contrary to
704-566: A year later as Our Bodies, Ourselves ). Though not an erotic treatise or sex manual, the book included frank descriptions of sexuality, and contained illustrations that could have caused legal problems just a few years earlier. Alex Comfort 's The Joy of Sex : A Gourmet Guide to Love Making appeared in 1972. In later editions, Comfort's exuberance was tamed in response to AIDS. In 1975 Will McBride's Zeig Mal! ( Show Me! ), written with psychologist Helga Fleichhauer-Hardt for children and their parents, appeared in bookstores on both sides of
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#1732780754847768-523: Is a 1934 book by English social anthropologist J. D. Unwin concerning the correlation between a society's level of "cultural achievement" and its level of sexual restraint. The book concluded with the theory that as societies develop, they become more sexually liberal, accelerating the social entropy of the society, thereby diminishing its "creative" and "expansive" energy. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Alfred C. Kinsey published two surveys of modern sexual behavior. In 1948 Kinsey published
832-445: Is marked by a "preponderance of female narrators", that the women were portrayed as independent, determined, financially successful (though not always socially successful and recognized) and scornful of the new ideals of female virtue and domesticity, and not objectification of women's bodies as many view pornography today. The sexual revolution was not unprecedented in identifying sex as a site of political potential and social culture. It
896-431: Is the source of the widely quoted statistic that 4% of the male population is primarily homosexual. He advocated using this information to reform sex-related laws, which at the time were often draconian (for example two men having consensual sex in private was considered a crime ). Kinsey's books became bestsellers when published, and laid the groundwork for researchers William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson to study
960-591: The Age of Enlightenment —approximately the 18th century—as a major period of transition in the United Kingdom. During this time, the philosophy of liberalism developed and was popularized, and migration to cities increased opportunities for sex and made enforcement of rules more difficult than in small villages. Sexual misconduct in the Catholic Church undermined the credibility of religious authorities, and
1024-605: The Obelisk Press in Paris and copies were smuggled into the United States. In 1961 Grove Press issued a copy of the work, and dozens of booksellers were sued for selling it. The issue was ultimately settled by the U.S. Supreme Court's 1964 decision in Grove Press, Inc. v. Gerstein . In 1963 Putnam published John Cleland 's 1750 novel Fanny Hill . Charles Rembar appealed a restraining order against it all
1088-474: The Surrealist movement . The counterculture wanted to explore the body and mind, and free the personal self from the moral and legal sexual confines of modern America, as well as from the 1940s–50s morals in general. The sexual revolution of the 1960s grew from a conviction that the erotic should be celebrated as a normal part of life and not repressed by family, industrialized sexual morality, religion and
1152-416: The counterculture , the women's movement, and the gay rights movement. The counterculture contributed to the awareness of radical cultural change that was the social matrix of the sexual revolution. The sexual revolution was initiated by those who shared a belief in the detrimental impact of sexual repression, a view that had previously been argued by Wilhelm Reich , D. H. Lawrence , Sigmund Freud , and
1216-443: The fear of intimacy in perversion as "a kind of sex ... which is hedged about with special conditions ... puts a vast distance between the partners". From such a standpoint, "whatever the deviant impulse or fantasy may be, that's where the real, true, loving sexuality is hidden"—a point of transition perhaps to some of the bleaker post-permissive visions of perversion. For some participants, "Liberation, at least in its sexual form,
1280-506: The feminist movement, such as Andrea Dworkin , challenged the depiction of women as objects in these pornographic or "urban men's" magazines. Other feminists such as Betty Dodson went on to found the pro-sex feminist movement in response to anti-pornography campaigns. In India, an organization named Indians For Sexual Liberties is advocating the legalization of the porn business in India. The organization's founder, Laxman Singh, questioned
1344-405: The sexual liberation , was a social movement that challenged traditional codes of behavior related to sexuality and interpersonal relationships throughout the developed Western world from the 1960s to the 1970s. Sexual liberation included increased acceptance of sex outside of traditional heterosexual, monogamous relationships (primarily marriage). The normalization of contraception and
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#17327807548471408-510: The 'partial drives' of scoptophilia, sadomasochism ... the often very little 'realised' aspect of the apprehension of others in the practice of certain of these perversions". In his wake, others would stress how "there is always, in any perverse act, an aspect of rape, in the sense that the Other must find himself drawn into the experience despite himself ... a loss or abandonment of subjectivity." Similarly, object relations theory would point to
1472-465: The 1920s in the United States. His conception of a primary sexual drive that would not be ultimately curbed by law, education or standards of decorum spelled a serious challenge to Victorian prudishness , and his theory of psychosexual development proposed a model for the development of sexual orientations and desires; children emerged from the Oedipus complex , a sexual desire towards their parent of
1536-541: The 1928 novel Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence . The U.S. Post Office confiscated copies sent through the mail. Lawyer Charles Rembar sued the New York City Postmaster, and won in New York and then on federal appeal. Henry Miller 's 1934 novel, Tropic of Cancer , had explicit sexual passages and could not be published in the United States; an edition was printed by
1600-725: The 1966 decision "the end of obscenity". Only books primarily appealing to "prurient interest" could be banned. In a famous phrase, the court said that obscenity is "utterly without redeeming social importance"—meaning that a work with any redeeming social importance or literary merit was arguably not obscene, even if it contained isolated passages that could "deprave and corrupt" some readers. Swedish filmmakers like Ingmar Bergman and Vilgot Sjöman contributed to sexual liberation with sexually themed films that challenged conservative international standards. The 1951 film Hon dansade en sommar ( She Danced One Summer AKA One Summer of Happiness ) displayed explicit nudity, including bathing in
1664-456: The Atlantic. Appreciated by many parents for its frank depiction of pre-adolescent sexual discovery and exploration, it scandalized others and was pulled from circulation in the United States and some other countries. The book was followed in 1989 by Zeig Mal Mehr! ("Show Me More!"). The somewhat more open and commercial circulation of pornography was a new phenomenon. Pornography operated as
1728-609: The Freudian interpretation. Hence, the liberation of sexual behavior was considered by them to be a means to social revolution. The 1928 publication of anthropologist Margaret Mead 's Coming of Age in Samoa brought the sexual revolution to the public scene, as her thoughts concerning sexual freedom pervaded academia. Mead's ethnography focused on the psychosexual development of adolescents in Samoa . She recorded that their adolescence
1792-564: The Sensuous Woman , with information on exercises to improve the dexterity of one's tongue and how to have anal sex. The same year saw the appearance of David Reuben's book Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) . Despite the dignity of Reuben's medical credentials, this book was light-hearted in tone. In 1970 the Boston Women's Health Collective published Women and Their Bodies , reissued
1856-562: The United Kingdom starting with the 1959 Obscene Publications Act and reaching a peak with the Lady Chatterley's Lover court case. Prior to this time, a patchwork of regulations (as well as local customs and vigilante actions) governed what could and could not be published. For example, the United States Customs Service banned James Joyce 's Ulysses by refusing to allow it to be imported into
1920-452: The United States. The Roman Catholic Church 's Index Librorum Prohibitorum carried great weight among Catholics and amounted to an effective and instant boycott of any book appearing on it. Boston's Watch and Ward Society , a largely Protestant creation inspired by Anthony Comstock , made " banned in Boston " a national by-word. In 1959 Grove Press published an unexpurgated version of
1984-666: The book Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do by James Thurber and E. B. White , has a chapter titled "The Sexual Revolution: Being a Rather Complete Survey of the Entire Sexual Scene". According to Konstantin Dushenko , the term was in use in Soviet Russia in 1925. When speaking of the sexual revolution, historians make a distinction between the first and the second sexual revolution. In
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2048-635: The book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male . He followed this five years later with Sexual Behavior in the Human Female . These books began a revolution in social awareness of, and public attention given to, human sexuality. Kinsey based his findings in both these books on interviews that he and his team of researchers conducted with thousands of Americans, beginning in the 1930s. The interviews were extensive and could last for several hours; they were supplemented by diaries and other documents that
2112-637: The difference between the sexes and the generations", and include "the wish to damage and dehumanize ... the misery of the driven, damaging life". Perverting the course of justice Too Many Requests If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below. Request from 172.68.168.237 via cp1104 cp1104, Varnish XID 199841533 Upstream caches: cp1104 int Error: 429, Too Many Requests at Thu, 28 Nov 2024 07:59:15 GMT Sexual revolution The sexual revolution , also known as
2176-426: The field, though it has spurred critical developments in the humanities. Two anarchist and Marxist proponents of Freud, Otto Gross and Wilhelm Reich (who famously coined the phrase "Sexual Revolution"), developed a sociology of sex in the 1910s through the 1930s in which the animal-like competitive reproductive behavior was seen as a legacy of ancestral human evolution reflecting in every social relation, as per
2240-484: The first sexual revolution (1870–1910), Victorian morality lost its universal appeal. However, it did not lead to the rise of a "permissive society". Exemplary for this period is the rise and differentiation in forms of regulating sexuality. Classics professor Kyle Harper uses the phrase "first sexual revolution" to refer to the displacement of the norms of sexuality in Ancient Rome with those of Christianity as it
2304-463: The individual or group using the term. The verb pervert is less narrow in reference than the related nouns, and can be used without any sexual connotations. It is used in English law for the crime of perverting the course of justice which is a common law offence. There is a transition to the sexual in 'the technique of purposeful perversion' of conversational remarks: "Purposeful perversion of what
2368-418: The interviewees were willing to have copied, and sometimes film of them masturbation or having sex with others, if they volunteered and it was practical. Kinsey found in the course of these interviews that many sexual behaviors which had previously been seen as marginal or "abnormal" were in fact more common than previously recognized and were part of the normal spectrum of human sexual behavior; for instance, he
2432-539: The mid to late 1950s. There was an increase in sexual encounters between unmarried adults. Divorce rates were dramatically increasing and marriage rates were significantly decreasing in this time period. The number of unmarried Americans aged twenty to twenty-four more than doubled from 4.3 million in 1960 to 9.7 million in 1976. Men and women sought to reshape marriage by instilling new institutions of open marriage, mate swapping, swinging , and communal sex. Sigmund Freud of Vienna believed human behavior
2496-414: The mid to late 1950s. It brought about profound shifts in attitudes toward women's sexuality, homosexuality, pre-marital sexuality, and the freedom of sexual expression. Psychologists and scientists such as Wilhelm Reich and Alfred Kinsey influenced the changes. As well, changing mores were both stimulated by and reflected in literature and films, and by the social movements of the period, including
2560-447: The minds: the man who yearns to get pressed on by high heels sooner or later meets the woman who has daydreamed all her life of heel-pressing". Where internal controversy did arise in the liberal consensus was about the exact relation of variations to normal development—some considering in the wake of Freud that "these different sexual orientations can best be explained and understood by comparison with normal development", and highlighting
2624-405: The nature and scope of sexual practices among young Americans. Their books, Human Sexual Response and Human Sexual Inadequacy , published in 1966 and 1970 respectively, were also best-sellers, and are now considered classic texts in the field. In the United States in the years 1959 through 1966, bans on three books with explicit erotic content were challenged and overturned. This also occurred in
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2688-419: The opposite sex. The idea of children having their parents as their early sexual targets was particularly shocking to Victorian and early 20th-century society. According to Freud's theory, in the earliest stage of a child's psychosexual development, the oral stage , the mother's breast became the formative source of all later erotic sensation. Much of his research remains widely contested by professionals in
2752-489: The perverts who express the perverse longings openly". Freud wrote extensively on perversion in men. However, he and his successors paid scant attention to perversion in women. In 2003, psychologist, psychoanalyst and feminist Arlene Kramer Richards published a seminal paper on female perversion, "A Fresh look at Perversion", in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association . In 2015, psychoanalyst Lynn Friedman, in
2816-503: The pill , public nudity , pornography , premarital sex , homosexuality , masturbation , alternative forms of sexuality , and the legalization of abortion all followed. Several other periods in Western culture have been called the "first sexual revolution", to which the 1960s revolution would be the second (or later). The term "sexual revolution" itself has been used since at least the late 1920s. The term appeared as early as 1929;
2880-535: The policymakers' intention. Freud 's didactic strategy in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality was to construct a bridge between the "perversions" and "normal" sexuality. Clinically exploring "a richly diversified collection of erotic endowments and inclinations: hermaphroditism , pedophilia , sodomy , fetishism , exhibitionism , sadism , masochism , coprophilia , necrophilia " among them, Freud concluded that "all humans are innately perverse". He found
2944-447: The reasoning behind deeming as illegal the depiction of legal acts. In 1953, Chicago resident Hugh Hefner founded Playboy , a magazine which aimed to target males between the ages of 21 and 45. The coverpage and nude centerfold in the first edition featured Marilyn Monroe , then a rising sex symbol . Featuring cartoons, interviews, short fiction, Hefner's "Playboy Philosophy" and unclothed female "Playmates" posing provocatively,
3008-515: The rise of urban police forces helped distinguish crime from sin . Overall, toleration increased for heterosexual sex outside marriage, including prostitution, mistresses, and pre-marital sex. Though these acts were still condemned by many as libertine , infidelity became more often a civil matter than a criminal offense receiving capital punishment. Masturbation , homosexuality , and rape were generally less tolerated. Women went from being considered as lustful as men to passive partners, whose purity
3072-516: The roots of such perversions in infantile sexuality—in 'the child's " polymorphously perverse " inclinations ... the "aptitude" for such perversity is innate'. The 'crucial irony of Freud's account in the Three Essays was that perversion in childhood was the norm'. Refining his analysis a decade later, Freud stressed that while childhood sexuality involved a wide and unfocused range of perverse activities, by contrast with adult perversion there
3136-460: The same complex"—the Oedipus complex . Otto Fenichel took up the point about the defensive function of perversions—of "experiences of sexual satisfactions which simultaneously gave a feeling of security by denying or contradicting some fear"; adding that while "some people think that perverts are enjoying some kind of more intense sexual pleasure than normal people. This is not true ... [though] neurotics, who have repressed perverse longings, may envy
3200-456: The silence and, by the 1950s, in the United States, it had become rare for women to go into their wedding nights not knowing what to expect. The open discussion of sex as pleasure, and descriptions of sexual practices and techniques, was revolutionary. There were practices that some had heard of, but many adults did not know if they were realities or fantasies found only in pornographic books. The Kinsey report revealed that these practices were, at
3264-417: The state. The development of the birth control pill in 1960 gave women access to easy and more reliable contraception . Another likely cause was a vast improvement in obstetrics , greatly reducing the number of women who died due to childbearing, thus increasing the life expectancy of women. A third, more indirect cause was the large number of children born in the 1940s and throughout the 1950s all over
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#17327807548473328-505: The time, these films, by virtue of being made by directors who had established themselves as leading names in their generation, helped delegitimize the idea of habitually demanding that films should avoid overtly sexual subject matter. The films eventually progressed the public's attitude toward sex, especially in Sweden and other northern European countries, which today tend to be more sexually liberal than others. The monokini , also known as
3392-529: The very least, surprisingly frequent. These other books asserted, in the words of a 1980 book by Irene Kassorla , that Nice Girls Do – And Now You Can Too . In 1962, Helen Gurley Brown published Sex and the Single Girl : The Unmarried Woman's Guide to Men, Careers, the Apartment, Diet, Fashion, Money and Men. In 1969 Joan Garrity , identifying herself only as "J.", published The Way to Become
3456-433: The way "in perversion there is the refusal, the terror of strangeness"; to the way "the 'pervert' ... attacks imaginative elaboration through compulsive action with an accomplice; and this is done to mask psychic pain". Empirical studies would find "in the perverse relationships described...an absolute absence of any shared pleasures"; while at the theoretical level "perversions involve—the theory tells us—an attempted denial of
3520-467: The way to the U.S. Supreme Court and won. In Memoirs v. Massachusetts , 383 U.S. 413, the court ruled that sex was "a great and mysterious motive force in human life", and that its expression in literature was protected by the First Amendment . By permitting the publication of Fanny Hill , the U.S. Supreme Court set the bar for any ban so high that Rembar himself called
3584-543: The western world—the " Baby Boom Generation "—many of whom would grow up in relatively prosperous and safe conditions, within a middle class on the rise and with better access to education and entertainment than ever before. By their demographic weight and their social and educational background, they came to trigger a shift in society towards more permissive and informalized attitudes. The discovery of penicillin led to significant reductions in syphilis mortality, which, in turn, spurred an increase in non-traditional sex during
3648-431: Was 'an important difference between them. Perverse sexuality is as a rule excellently centred: all its activities are directed to an aim—usually a single one; one component instinct has gained the upper hand...In that respect there is no difference between perverse and normal sexuality other than the fact that their dominating component instincts and consequently their sexual aims are different. In both of them, one might say,
3712-476: Was a new kind of imposed morality, quite as restricting" as what had gone before—one that "took very little account of the complexity of human emotional connections". New, more sceptical currents of disenchantment with perversion emerged as a result (alongside more traditional condemnations) in both the French-speaking and English-speaking worlds. Lacan had early highlighted "the ambivalence proper to
3776-621: Was adopted throughout the Roman Empire. Romans accepted and legalized prostitution, bisexuality , and pederasty . Male promiscuity was considered normal and healthy as long as masculinity was maintained, associated with being the penetrating partner. In contrast, female chastity was required for respectable women, to ensure the integrity of family bloodlines. These attitudes were replaced by Christian prohibitions on homosexual acts and any sex outside marriage (including with slaves and prostitutes). History professor Faramerz Dabhoiwala cites
3840-470: Was an informative documentary about sex and sexual techniques that featured the first real act of sex in a mainstream film. From these films, the myth of "Swedish sin" (licentiousness and seductive nudity) arose. The image of "hot love and cold people" emerged, with sexual liberalism seen as part of the modernization process that, by breaking down traditional borders, would lead to the emancipation of natural forces and desires. In Sweden and nearby countries at
3904-665: Was important to reputation. Commentators such as history professor Kevin F. White have used the phrase "first sexual revolution" to refer to the Roaring Twenties . Victorian Era attitudes were somewhat destabilized by World War I and alcohol prohibition in the United States . At the same time the women's suffrage movement obtained voting rights, the subculture of the flapper girl included pre-marital sex and "petting parties". Indicators of non-traditional sexual behavior (e.g., gonorrhea incidence, births out of wedlock, and births to teenagers) began to rise dramatically in
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#17327807548473968-525: Was motivated by unconscious drives , primarily by the libido or "Sexual Energy". Freud proposed to study how these unconscious drives were repressed and found expression through other cultural outlets. He called this therapy " psychoanalysis ". While Freud's ideas were sometimes ignored or provoked resistance within Viennese society, his ideas soon entered the discussions and working methods of anthropologists, artists and writers all over Europe, and from
4032-414: Was not, in fact, a time of "storm and stress" as Erikson's stages of development suggest, but that the sexual freedom experienced by the adolescents actually permitted them an easy transition from childhood to adulthood. Mead's findings were later criticized by anthropologist Derek Freeman , who investigated her claims of promiscuity and conducted his own ethnography of Samoan society. Sex and Culture
4096-458: Was suggested that the interchangeability of bodies within pornography had radical implications for the meaning of gender differences, roles and norms. In 1971 Playboy stopped airbrushing pubic hair out of its centerfold picture spreads; this new addition caused the magazine to hit its all-time peak circulation of more than seven million copies in 1972 and men started having more choices when it came to magazines. In 1972 Deep Throat became
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