Perversity Think Tank attempts to formulate a philosophical conception of sexual perversion. It emerges directly from PervScan in the sense that the web site has served as a sort of research laboratory — a place to examine real-world examples of deviant behavior, to experiment with concepts, and to workshop them with the thousands of visitors who have left comments on the site.

To be clear, Perversity Think Tank is not a “blook” or a “book of the blog” or a compendium of entries from PervScan. It is an entirely new work that considers a variety of perversions drawn from literature, art, individual experience, and sometimes PervScan. If you have followed the site, you may recognize a few favorites such as the German cannibal who ate his own penis. However, these case histories have been subsumed into an entirely new conceptual framework never explicity offered on PervScan itself.

At any rate, there is no need to sell you on Perversity Think Tank. You can freely download a pdf of the entire book from supervert.com. You may also choose to purchase the printed version.

Because Perversity Think Tank is a culminating effort — and because, to be honest, PervScan has left its author in a jaded, seen-it-all and heard-it-all place — PervScan will cease operation effective immediately. The site will remain online, comments will remain open, but no further cases will be posted.

Perversion, however, remains an integral part of Supervert’s vision. For those of you who delight in the daily churn of deviance provided by PervScan, you might want to subscribe to Supervert’s Twitter feed, which regularly offers telegraphic versions of the same type of material previously featured on the site.

All of you are also invited to keep supervert.com on the radar. Supervert has a master plan to produce six books. Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish was the first. Necrophilia Variations was the second. Perversity Think Tank is the third. Supervert plans to concentrate its efforts on the three books to come — a plan that, roughly speaking, ought to take another ten or fifteen years (yes, yes, man plans and God laughs) — and then…

Well, who knows? A plan that the poet Charles Baudelaire once announced to a friend comes to mind:

I intend to write a novel in which my hero will be a scoundrel, I mean a real scoundrel, a murderer, a thief, an incendiary and a buccaneer, and who will conclude my book with the following little speech: “And in the soft shade of this tree planted by my own hands, surrounded by a loving family, by children that adore me, a wife that dotes on me, I savor amidst peace and tranquility the fruits of my crimes.”

A curse on the spammers who have wasted countless hours of precious time and a tremendous thank you to everyone who has made PervScan such a stimulating forum over the last six and a half years. RIP PervScan, 2003-2010.

Here is a photograph of Mr Hersel. He has brown eyes, a small mouth, large cheeks, and ears that look like they’ve been surgically stapled to the sides of his head. The news reports make no mention of his profession, but his appearance suggests a line of work ranging from sports agent to car salesman. Of course, appearances can be deceptive. His colleagues, whoever they are, probably had no idea he liked to be humiliated by the Westlake Warriors. According to another report, “It didn’t take long for word to spread among local teens that they could get paid to spit in a man’s face.” Easy money.

Unlike the “saliva fetish” pervert — a guy who would obtain spittle from young girls under false pretenses and then masturbate with it — Mr Hersel apparently sought from teen boys what many men seek from sadists, masters, and dominatrixes. What he wanted to do was not uncommon, nor who he wanted to do it. Thus far there have been no reports that he sought out boys younger than 16 or so. A law blog expresses skepticism about the worth of even arresting the guy: “After years of practicing criminal law, most lawyers will never see a charge of ‘child annoyance’ being prosecuted. The question for many is whether with California’s budget crisis, this is a crime truly worth prosecuting and spending precious local resources on.”

It would be interesting to calculate how much money is spent every year on the criminalization of sexual behaviors. In America, there has doubtless been a drastic decrease in the amount spent on the criminalization of homosexuality. Conversely, there has been an exponential increase in the amount spent on pedophilia. Probably that is quite rational, since a child has less ability to engage in a consensual relationship with an adult than an adult has to engage with another person of the same gender. But how much is a society willing to pony up to rid itself of any given form of deviance? Is a billion dollars too much or too little to combat perversion x? Or what if the question was posed on a very direct, individual level… How much tax would you be willing to pay to combat, say, pedophilia? Ten dollars a year? A hundred? A thousand? More? Or to the contrary, would you pay to promote rather than suppress it?

It is not always easy to make out the line between perversion and insanity. Suppose this guy didn’t jerk off while rolling about in manure and setting fire to farm equipment. You might think he was mentally ill. You would expect him to be put on a regimen of antipsychotics while a battery of therapists ask him questions such as, “Why do you hate yourself? Because of your mommy?” But once masturbation figures into it, the picture seems to change. The guy’s not a lunatic. He’s a pervert. He doesn’t suffer from deranged ideas. He harbors disgusting fetishes. He doesn’t need antipsychotics. He needs “harsh medicine,” punishment, prison. It’s as though the sexualization of an essentially insane activity puts the guy into an entirely different category of existence.

Havelock Ellis, in his classic Studies in the Psychology of Sex, discusses this wavering line between insanity and perversion, particularly with regard to coprophagia (the eating of fecal matter):

Coprophagic acts, whether under the influences of religious exaltation or of sexual rapture, inevitably excite our disgust. We regard them as almost insane, fortified in that belief by the undoubted fact that coprophagia is not uncommon among the insane. It may, therefore, be proper to point out that it is not so very long since the ingestion of human excrement was carried out by our own forefathers in the most sane and deliberate manner.

Ellis goes on to give examples of “normal” coprophagia. Nowadays these examples could be supplemented with other forms of scatology — urine therapy, for example, or the intentionally polemical argument that “Americans should ingest more excrement” as a way of building up resistances that we have lost owing to an oversanitized culture. It all makes you wonder how an individual who eats or, as the case may be, pleasures himself with excrement ends up being defined. Why is it perverse to jerk off in a manure spreader when it is sometimes mad and other times normal to interact with excrement? Ellis indicates that, in his view, it is a matter of degree:

the impulse to bestow a symbolic value on the act of urination in a beloved person, is not extremely uncommon; it has been noted of men of high intellectual distinction; it occurs in women as well as men; when existing in only a slight degree, it must be regarded as within the normal limits of variation of sexual emotion.

Perhaps Ellis would have thought the arsonist with a manure fetish crossed the line — the guy sought feces, not urine; the excrement came not from a “beloved person” but from farm animals; and then there’s the matter of burning an animal to death… Perhaps the pervert was trying to “bestow a symbolic value” on the act, suggesting that, in matters of sexuality, we should rid ourselves of our sacred cows?

In case you missed it, a month or so ago there was a panic about syringe attacks in China’s “AIDS capital.” Evidently two drug users happened to stab people with syringes. One stabbed a cab driver in an attempted robbery, another stabbed a cop in an effort to avoid being arrested. The panic took off from there. (”Some reported incidents were caused by mosquito bites or ‘other psychogenic reasons.’”) With this hysteria still fresh in people’s minds, Mr Van Diep picked a bad time to go around poking women in the ass with toothpicks.

Why, if he was truly in the grip of a fetish for buttocks, did this man go around poking them (rather than, say, groping them, pinching them, etc)? He must have had something of the piquerist in him. Piquerism is a sexual pathology in which the fetishist delights in the act of poking. The term comes from the French piquer, to poke, pick, stab. A few years ago there was a case in which a man would pay exorbitant sums to teen girls for the privilege of poking them with a needle. Perhaps similarly, Mr Van Diep wasn’t just fixated on asses but rather on a more refined act — the stabbing of asses.

You can’t often laugh at a sexual fetish, but there is something funny about the image of this guy going around poking people, like a schoolboy putting a tack on his teacher’s chair. Of course, it’s all a matter of degree. A toothpick is funny. If the guy were stabbing people in the ass with a bayonet or a dagger, it would suggest a different series of images — wounding an excretory organ… When you consider it that way, somehow you can imagine the opposite too — defecating into an open wound… Ah, perverts. You know that somewhere out there in the deviant wilds there is a fetishist excited at the prospect of shitting into a chest cavity that’s been ripped open in an automobile accident.

(Thanks to Asmo and to Furpo for links.)

Several commenters on an article about Mr Patton at the Houston Press claim to have found him “creepy” when working with him. “This guy is the creepiest dude ever. He handled my mother’s funeral and if they find pics of her he won’t have to worry about the law.” Here is a picture of the perp himself. There is something lopsided about his face. One ear sticks out. His lips droop to the side. His nose looks like it was broken. As if to reaffirm the lack of symmetry, the police photo casts a sharp light on one side of his face and leaves the other in shadow. Perhaps all this symbolizes Mr Patton’s dual nature. Clearly he is a man with a dark side.

He posed with his penis against the feet of a female cadaver. According to another article, he also took images “of a female corpse with the legs spread open.” The local District Attorney stated that “the defendant’s male sexual organ was seen in various poses with those of dead bodies.” The wording isn’t clear. The images show his genitalia with “those of dead bodies,” ie in proximity to the genitalia of cadavers? Or just in proximity to the cadavers? Of course, you can’t help but wonder if all this posing led to the next logical step in the abuse of a corpse…

When you consider that these necro photos were found on Mr Patton’s computer during the investigation of an unrelated matter, you realize that there must literally be millions of such photos and videos lurking out there on the hard drives of random deviants and freaks. Just imagine the astonishing exhibition you could curate, presuming you and your photographers weren’t bound by obscenity laws, of every perversion known to man. The internet, with its proliferating pornography and true underground of sites catering to illegal activities, already forms a rough draft of this exhibit. What do you think the gallery would look like if it were completed with the pictures that no one but the freaks and the law ever see?

The patient, a 57-year-old right-handed man, sustained his first cerebral vascular accident in the right middle cerebral artery region at the age of 45, which resulted in right-sided hemiparesis that resolved completely within 3 months… [After his recovery, he was fine] until he sustained the second cerebral vascular accident in the left middle cerebral artery region at age 53.

The patient started complaining of his changed personality and heterosexual orientation 6 months after his second stroke. At the same time he complained of excessive mood swings and changed interests… His sexual orientation remained heterosexual 4 years following the second stroke, and he preferred to describe himself as bisexual because of his previous homosexual orientation.

Our patient was aware of his homosexual orientation beginning in his early teens. He always enjoyed his gay relationships and had had at some point a live-in partner… It is unlikely that his psychological reaction to his first and/or second stroke could explain his altered sexual orientation, and his sexuality was accepted by his social network and family members.

Taking into consideration the interval between his first and second stroke, it is likely that an organic process within the left middle cerebral artery region is the cause of his altered sexual orientation.

While there is a great deal of debate about whether it is nature and/or nurture that determines sexual orientation, the one thing you never quite imagine is that gender preferences can be flipped on or off like a light switch. When a gay person comes out, it generally appears to be a matter of learning to accept the social consequences of a pre-existing orientation. This is reinforced by the fact that gays — and straights — often know their orientation at a very young age. It seems hard-wired.

But what if sexual orientation is as simple as that — a switch in the brain? How would you feel to know that a good bop in the head might cause you to wake up the next day with a desire for something you never desired before? And what if it weren’t just a matter of gay or straight but of a variety of sexual types? For example, it is known that various types of head injury can result in hypersexuality. What if you were to have a stroke and suddenly find yourself with an irresistible fetish for feet or puppies? Is it possible that perverts are not sexually liberated (as they like to think) or mentally ill (as some like to think) but rather victims of cerebral events? What if perversion is nothing more than a symptom in the same class as slurred speech or blurry vision?

Of course, if it turns out that sexual orientation is a switch, there will be those who want to flip others’ switches — puritans who want to straighten the queer, or maybe militant queers who want to undermine the straight. On the bright side, there will also arise a class of people who flip their switch back and forth just for kicks. “Now what sexual orientation matches my shoes tonight? Hmmm…” Gender hackers… Sexual proclivity tinkerers… Pansexual dilettantes… Is it possible that the future of fun lies in the hands of neuroscientists?

Here are the categories proposed by Dr Anil Aggrawal, a well-known professor of forensic medicine in India:

Class I — Role Players — “They do not have sex with a dead body, but get intense arousal from having sex with a living person pretending to be dead.”

Class II — Romantic Necrophiles — “These are the normal bereaved people, who cannot bear separation from their loved ones.”

Class III — Necrophilic Fantasizers — This type is “content simply with fantasizing sexual intercourse with the dead.”

Class IV — Tactile Necrophiles — These necros “need to touch a dead body in some erotic way in order to get an orgasm.”

Class V — Fetishistic Necrophiles — This type “would cut up some portion of the body — perhaps a breast — for later fetishistic activities.”

Class VI — Necromutilomaniacs — For this category of necrophile, “pleasure comes from mutilating the dead body and masturbating simultaneously.” Evidently fetishistic necrophiles fixate on the result of an act of mutilation, whereas simultaneously enjoy the process of mutilation itself.

Class VII — Opportunistic Necrophiles — These necrophiles are basically scavengers. “Normally they are quite content having intercourse with the living and would not think of engaging in sexual intercourse with the dead. However if an opportunity arose, they would.”

Class VII — Regular Necrophiles — “They would not enjoy sexual intercourse with the living, even if this choice were available to them. Instead they would seek out a dead body to have sexual intercourse with, because they get more pleasure in having sex with a dead body.”

Class IX — Homicidal Necrophiles — These necros have such a dire need for cadavers “that they resort to killing.”

Class X — Exclusive Necrophiles — “These offenders need only dead bodies for intercourse.”

Certainly experts in sexual pathology will debate the merits of these classifications and point out some of the underlying judgements inherent in them. For example, Dr Aggrawal begins his paper with the assertion that necrophilia is “one of the most weird, bizarre and revolting practices of abnormal and perverse sensuality.” Is that a diagnostic criterion or a moral judgement? By and large, however, this classification is a reasonable effort. There is a clear difference between the couple who engages in role play, the mortician who gropes a boob, and the killer who assaults the cadaver of his victim. It is only right and proper to recognize that these constitute different forms or perhaps intensities of necrophilia.

Taking a broader view of the matter, it is difficult not to remark that necrophilia has become increasingly visible in society. It used to be that necrophilia was a subject reserved for obscure medical journals and the occasional novel. Before the advent of the internet, PervScan had gathered a small collection of necrophilia cases from medical journals, scholarly works of psychiatry such as Erich Fromm’s Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, and counter-culture publications such as Adam Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture. Material was difficult to find. Nowadays the situation is the opposite. Necrophilia is on tv. Necrophilia is on the internet. Necrophilia is the subject of one of Supervert’s own books. Necrophilia is, in short, coming out of the closet.

Dr Aggrawal’s effort to classify the varieties of necrophilia is one expression of this. There is now enough freely available case material to create a taxonomy of necrophiles. Another expression of the increasing visibility of necrophilia lies in the fact that states are only recently starting to outlaw it. Previously it was too obscure or hidden even to warrant legislation. Taken together, all these point to a process comparable to the “invention” of homosexuality in the 19th century. People have always had same-sex relationships, but it was only a century or so ago that homosexuality became a term, an existential category, a medical condition, and a legal status. Something similar is at work with necrophilia. In classifications, laws, necro-porn sites, novels, and tv shows, you can literally witness the invention of a sexual perversion. In the near future, there may well be such a sophisticated notion of necrophilia that everything before will have been just sex with corpses.

(Thanks to Furpo and “Yahweh Ben Yahweh Sheikh Hassan Al-Nasri” for the link.)

Clearly there are still plenty of men who believe that chat rooms are breeding grounds for hot, bored adolescents anxious to lose their sexual innocence in the arms of older, experienced men. Of course, “older” and “experienced” too often means meaty, middle-aged, married, and quite possibly mindless. There has been a ton of media attention paid to OMFG! ONLINE PREDATORS!. How is it that these Humbert Humberts have not yet figured out that the only visitors to chat rooms are cops, cyber-vigilantes, and other pedophiles? Does their lust compromise their judgement? (Yes.) Are they just plain dumb? (Maybe.) Impulsive? (Probably.)

It is difficult to figure. But then PervScan and its readership are clearly attuned to the latest developments in the world of kink. (Desensitized? Yes. Clueless? No.) Maybe some of these men who get caught with their hands in the candy jar don’t have the informational sophistication to understand the perils of trolling for teens online. They may come from repressive environments… Sexuality is not spoken about… “Deviant” is a word they learn from the condemnation of homosexuals in a Bible study group… Meanwhile they struggle with irrepressible urges… One day they can no longer resist. Rather than test the waters (go slowly, dip in a foot, stay near the bank), they leap directly into the center of the pond. “Here I go. Banzai!”

It must come as quite a shock to be handcuffed in the back seat of a police cruiser. Perhaps one day a clever perv will demonstrate that pedophiles are not so mindless. “I was not trying to molest a child,” he will argue in his defense. “I was only satisfying my fetish for roleplaying cops. After all, if I were a pedophile, I certainly would not be hanging out in a chat room. Everybody knows that these chat rooms are inhabited not by little girls but by detectives who pretend to be little girls.”

You can almost imagine that the very word “pedophilia” will mutate in meaning. Instead of “sexual feelings directed toward children,” it will come to signify “sexual feelings toward police offers with adult baby syndrome.”

This was the moment at which our libertine’s pleasure attained its crisis: to have filled the young and pretty cunt to overflowing with shit, to crowd it with shit and stuff it with yet more, that was his supreme delight: all the while in action, he opens his fly and draws out a species of prick, very flaccid it is, and he shakes it, and as he toils away in his disgusting manner, he manages to spatter upon the floor a few drops of thin, discolored sperm, whose loss may be credited solely to the infamies he has been performing.

Sometimes the blog posts here at PervScan are the verbal equivalents of that thin, discolored sperm. In a sense, it is the price that PervScan pays for “toiling away in this disgusting manner” for so long. When the site launched in 2003, there was nothing quite like PervScan online, and it was titillating to see that search technologies made it possible to discover a new perversion a day. Six years later, that process of desensitization has really taken hold. Net porn, sex blogs, communities dedicated to every perversion imaginable — a significant portion of the internet has become the dark mass of kink that was taboo a few decades ago and illegal a generation ago. The repressed has returned with a vengeance.

What is the mission for PervScan at a time when it is becoming increasingly absurd to speak meaningfully of any sexuality as perverse? Is the mission to chronicle the decay of old values? To document every perverse act or to highlight only the most extreme ones? To understand what drives a person to sexually assault a dog? To provide a forum for discussion? To maintain a bored but desperate adherence to its mission, like that flaccid libertine? Hmm…

Jenny whispered, “They go to bed. Then he puts out the light. Then their toes touch. And then Miss Brodie… Miss Brodie…” She broke into giggles.

“Miss Brodie yawns,” said Sandy in order to restore decency, now that she suspected it was all true. (Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie)

Perhaps there is inspiration to be had in the knowledge that that yawn does anything but restore decency.

First, Margaret sent in the sordid tale of a South Carolina man caught for having sex with a horse. Incredibly, he’d already been apprehended once before with the exact same animal.

[The owner] noticed several weeks ago her 21-year-old horse Sugar was acting strange and getting infections again… “Police kept telling me it couldn’t be the same guy [but] I couldn’t believe that there were two guys going around doing this to the same horse…” [The owner] installed surveillance cameras, and when she reviewed the footage from July 19, she couldn’t believe she was seeing the same man doing the same thing to her horse… [The owner] staked out the barn and caught Vereen inside Monday night, chasing him to his truck and holding him with her shotgun until police came.

You would imagine that the pain and humiliation of being arrested the first time would have prevented a second occurrence. Or you would expect the bestialist, if he really couldn’t prevent himself from dallying with animals, to pursue a different creature in a different place. The fact that he risked so much in returning to the same horse makes you wonder if his perversion went far beyond physical pleasure. Perhaps he really loved the thing?

Second, another story in the news concerns a young man arresting “for having sex with a whippet mix named Silvy.” When police arrived, “they found the dog’s legs were duct-taped closed with a cloth pressed against her lower half.” Later the animal had to be euthanized. “A necropsy was conducted on the animal and veterinarians discovered human, male DNA inside the dog’s body.” The perp declared he had been abusing the dog because “he was lonely” — an example which was probably as true as it was bathetic.

For the most part, the sad saga of this dog fucker is mundane enough. It only differs from a thousand other stories in those little details about the cloth and the duct tape. What was the cloth for? To keep the dog from shitting or pissing on him? (Hate when that happens. There you are ready to bone a dog and the thing shits on your crotch…) And while you can imagine why the duct tape was useful, in that it kept the dog from running away, it also serves as a rather disturbing detail. Didn’t it make the dog resemble the lame or the physically disabled? Maybe that was his real thing — crippled creatures…