“A 39-year-old Southern California man has been arrested for misdemeanor child annoyance after allegedly paying a teenager $31 to spit in his face. The Ventura County Sheriff’s Department says Charles Hersel was arrested Wednesday in a sting operation at a mall in Thousand Oaks. He’s free from jail pending a court hearing. A sheriff’s statement says Westlake High School students claimed Hersel paid them to yell profanities, spit and slap him in the face. Several also claimed he offered them cash to urinate and defecate on him. A motive wasn’t clear. Authorities say Hersel contacted some teens through the MySpace social networking site. Hersel couldn’t be reached for comment Friday. He had no listed phone number in Thousand Oaks.” — San Francisco Chronicle (U.S.)

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?

“A pervert got thrills from covering himself in farmyard manure and performing sex acts, a court heard yesterday. Weirdo David Truscott loved pleasuring himself while wallowing in muck. And he terrorised a farmer’s family with another bizarre fetish for setting fire to things including outbuildings and machinery, causing thousands of pounds’ damage. Truscott targeted Clive Roth’s farm for seven months before he was caught in a police surveillance operation. Cops nabbed him prowling round the property near Red-ruth, Cornwall, at 1am in shiny red shorts and latex gloves. Truro magistrates heard jobless Truscott, 35, who owned 360 pairs of knickers and slept in ladies’ pyjamas, admitted he got a kick out of manure. Once he stripped to his pants and climbed inside a muckspreader to fondle himself. Another time he rolled around in dung while trying to set Mr Roth’s tractor ablaze. Prosecutor Simon Jones said his antics increasingly frightened the Roth family, especially when one fire he started caused the death of a cow. Truscott, from Redruth, admitted three charges of arson and one of burglary. He will be sentenced at Truro Crown Court next month.” — The Sun (UK)

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?

“A stalker with a fetish for big bottoms was behind bars Friday after spreading fears of syringe attacks in Hong Kong by poking women in the buttocks with toothpicks. The attacks by 43-year-old Vietnamese labourer Pham Van Diep in early October triggered fears of random syringe attacks similar to incidents reported in Xinjiang, western China, in September. ‘The hunt for the attacker drew wide publicity after two women told how they had been followed and felt stabbing pains in their buttocks. One returned home and found a painful red dot on her backside. ‘At a court hearing Thursday, however, Diep said he followed women in Hong Kong and poked their bottoms with toothpicks because he ‘could not resist their big buttocks.’ ‘He pleaded guilty to two assaults and was remanded in custody to allow for psychiatric reports to be prepared.’” — AsiaOne (Singapore)

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.

“A funeral director at Earthman Funeral Home has been charged with abuse of a corpse after investigators found digital photos dating back five years of the director posing with his penis touching the feet of a nude female cadaver. According to court documents, James Howard Patton, 38, is free on a $1,500 bond after being charged with a class A misdemeanor. An investigator with the Houston Police Department was looking into allegations of Internet harassment lodged against Patton by his ex-girlfriend when an April 2 search warrant turned up several photos on Patton’s computer. It was unclear from court documents whether there was more than one corpse and one incident. Lisa Marshall, a spokeswoman for Earthman’s parent company, Service Corporation International, said the photos recovered from Patton’s computer were taken in 2004… ‘These are very disturbing allegations,’ Marshall said. ‘I hope people understand that this incident is unusual and is not indicative of what we’re like as an industry.’” — Chron (US)

(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?

There is an astonishing article in the Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurology. Its title is “Altered Sexual Orientation Following Dominant Hemisphere Infarct.” (An infarct is dead tissue caused by a lack of blood supply.) The article gives the case history of a happily homosexual man who, after this “cerebral accident,” underwent a complete reversal in sexual orientation.

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?

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