Paraphilia

Richard Von Kraft Ebbing, the father of perversion, undertook the task of defining the difference between normal and deviant sex.

He began categorising sexual behaviour and coined the terms – heterosexual, sadist and masochist.

He deemed that sex was for procreation and that any type of sexual behaviour which was not directed towards that goal was a perversion.

Kraft Ebbing said that normal sex is you get married, you procreate and have a family.

He wrote the book Psychopathia Sexualis in 1886 and ruled masturbation as abnormal, saying that it was a cause of criminal behaviour.

Having categorised half the population of perverse, in stepped Alfred Kinsey in the 1940s, the godfather of 20th century sex research.

Paraphilias range from the quirky to extreme – spanking, bondage, sadism, cross dressing, spanking. There seem to be certain clusters that go together – one is cross-dressing and masochism, another is shoe and foot fetishes.

There are fetishes about enemas and breast milk, as well as fornophilia which is turning a human into a piece of furniture. I’ve written before about formicophilia, which involves getting turned on by insects crawling on your body.

One study identified 549 different paraphilias varying. It is a sexual attraction to something beyond the norm, however bizarre and baffling.

Of course some paraphilias are not ok, the most serious being paedophilia or hebophilia – interest in males between the age of 11 and 14. But is it something that we are all capable of or are these people different?

Using the latest brain imagery, James Cantor has found that is it not a specific part of the brain that is involved but the connective tissues between them that has malfunctioned. This ‘white matter’ joins the different parts of the brain to make a network, allowing the brain to perform as a whole. In normal people, it allows the correct caring behaviour to be evoked when we see a child and an appropriate sexual response when we see something erotic. In paedophiles, the brain scans seem to show that the white matter is malformed, almost as if a cross-wiring has occurred in the brain so that the stimulus of a child – big eyes relative to the size of the head and body is evoking the sexual instincts instead of the parental, nurturing instincts.

A biological aberration which is statistically rare but socially unacceptable.