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?

(Thanks to “Chris Finch” for the link.)

Jesus, one minute you’re hanging out on a throw rug in the basement. Maybe you’re gnawing on a bone or you’re picking fleas out of your fur. The next minute some drunken idiot is pissing on you. For a shocked moment you’re not sure what’s going on. A bath? But wait — you’re a dog. You know that smell. If you could talk, you’d bark out something like, “What the fuck? You wig or something? I’m man’s best friend!” They don’t call it a dog’s life for nothing.

Evidently this is less a story about sex than about drink. It’s one thing to have blue balls when you’re all worked up and can’t get laid. It’s another thing to decide that peeing on a mutt is a good way of exacting revenge. If he were sober when pursuing this line of retribution, you might think that the guy knew that the reticent victim liked a good golden shower. “I’ll show her what she’s missing,” a sober guy might have thought. But a drunk? He was just pissing a stream of pure stupid anger out of his system.

Of course, this guy and his victim were roommates. Hopefully the dog went into his room and took a dump in his underwear drawer. That would put the dog ahead of the man in understanding the “eye for an eye” principle of retaliation.

Here is Mr. Patton’s picture again — “again” because he was already featured on PervScan for his 2006 arrest. Frankly it is not surprising to see Mr. Patton in trouble a second time. He has been indulging his fetish for almost 50 years already. Technically it’s not illegal. And so far as fetishes go, it’s pretty simple to act on. If you’re a necrophile, it’s not so easy to scare up dead bodies. But if you’re a urophile, it’s relatively easy to slip into a public restroom and collect some of that golden fluid.

Undoubtedly some lawmakers whose time could be spent on more meaningful projects will sponsor a bill making it illegal to drink somebody’s urine without first obtaining consent. For a lawmaker, that’s a win-win bill. None of your peers will oppose it — what legislator will stand up to defend the right to forage for piss? — and, once the law is passed, you can brag to your constituents about how you’re being tough on sex offenders. But let’s think about this for a second. By his own admission, Mr Patton has been slurping urine from public toilets since Lyndon B. Johnson was president. He has never been accused of physically accosting someone. If he presents a danger to anyone, it may only be to himself. There is something sad about the thought of this guy stuck in the grips of a childhood compulsion, but he’s right when he says that he’s not hurting anybody.

If you’re a devil’s advocate, you can’t help but think that the law should leave the guy alone. He’s drinking waste products. Ok, so what? If he were to harm someone, the law would be fully justified in dealing with him. But is there any harm in drinking the waste that others have left behind? There are plenty of dumpster divers who find value in the garbage that strangers throw away. Is a guy who drinks urine any different?

For those of you who haven’t heard of the Whizzinator, here is a picture of the gizmo — and here is another showing it in action. (NSFW) According to an interview with its inventor, it was designed with a sort of one-size-fits-all penis:

“We have them made by a large sex-toy manufacturer,” Catalano says. “When we met with their head guy, we told him we needed something that realistically looked like a flaccid penis. He chuckled and said, ‘Well, we deal in fantasy here.’ But we got their designer to come up with something that looked very average. It had to be believable, comfortable to wear and easy to use, to pull out and put away.” For women, they make the Whizzinator available “with the wiener on the side,” detached so they can use the rest of the apparatus without the bulge.

So far as Mr. Matthews is concerned, his excuse — that he used it as a sex toy — is about the only one conceivable, and yet for obvious reasons it’s hardly believable. In the first place, who brings or wears a sex toy when going to see his parole officer? In the second place, how would you use the Whizzinator as a sex toy? Presumably you could pee all over somebody using the Whizzinator’s special pseudo-urine. (Anybody ever tried it? Does it smell or taste like piss?) But this would seem to be redundant for a man, who could just pee all over somebody anyway. Maybe a woman could use the male version — somewhere out there in the internet wilderness there is probably a porn film of a woman Whizzinating on somebody. Better yet, maybe you could wear it on your head. You could pee on somebody from a penis attached to your face. Is that sexy?

While you may laugh to watch the reaction videos, which show people unable to withstand the mere sight of something that the actresses endured in reality, do you find anything perverse about them? It goes without saying that coprophilia and coprophagia have typically been considered perverse activities. But is it also perverse to want to watch coprophilia, knowing full well that the sight of it will nauseate you? More generally, what is the relationship between disgust and perversion? Many of the sexual practices traditionally considered deviant are also sick-making — a connection made clear in the “2 Girls, 1 Cup” reaction videos, in which people are barely able to refrain from puking while watching a fetish activity.

Clearly perversion and disgust share a border deep in the psyche. Disgust researchers have remarked on this:

Core disgust was “designed” as a food rejection system, as indicated by its link to nausea, its concerns about contamination, and its nasal/oral facial expression. Human societies, however, need to reject many things, including sexual and social “deviants”. Core disgust may have been preadapted as a rejection system, easily harnessed to other kinds of rejection… Human societies take advantage of the schemata of core disgust in constructing their moral and social lives, and in socializing their children about what to avoid.

In other words, disgust is essentially the way that the animal in us keeps itself from ingesting toxins — and perversion is the way that the human in us willfully ignores this impulse. “Ugh,” says the body, “don’t put shit in your mouth.” To which the mind retorts, “Why not? Just a little won’t hurt. And it might be interesting. Here now, crap in this cup and let’s see…”

These reaction videos call to mind The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Darwin’s last major work, this book sought to extend the argument for evolution by comparing the expression of emotions in man and animals. It gave precise descriptions of the facial configurations of emotion and complemented these with a suite of images showing faces in states of joy, fear, sadness, wonder, and so on. Two of these images purported to show disgust, about which Darwin wrote:

The most common method of expressing contempt is by movements about the nose, or round the mouth; but the latter movements, when strongly pronounced, indicate disgust. The nose may be slightly turned up, which apparently follows from the turning up of the upper lip; or the movement may be abbreviated into the mere wrinkling of the nose. The nose is often slightly contracted, so as partly to close the passage; and this is commonly accompanied by a slight snort or expiration. All these actions are the same with those which we employ when we perceive an offensive odour, and wish to exclude or expel it. In extreme cases, as Dr. Piderit remarks, we protrude and raise both lips, or the upper lip alone, so as to close the nostrils as by a valve, the nose being thus turned up.

If you watch the “2 Girls, 1 Cup” reaction videos on YouTube, you see people’s faces undergo these contortions and configurations. Invariably faces begin with an expression of curiosity or daring, proceed from there to shock, often to nausea. The one thing you see in the videos that Darwin doesn’t mention in his description of the musculature of disgust is laughter. Sometimes people exhibit annoyance, especially when they’ve been duped into watching “2 Girls, 1 Cup,” but more often than not they alternate between retching and laughing. It’s a hoot, a riot, hey, let’s watch — let’s see if we can withstand watching — these two chicks eat their shit out of a cup, woohoo, barf!

This is the nouveau frisson that drives the “2 Girls, 1 Cup” phenomenon. The creators of the Disgust Scale, which researchers use to measure disgust sensitivity, admit that they “have also noticed, in the course of our own research, that when we ask people ‘do you want to see something disgusting?’ the answer is usually a cautious ‘yes.’” Yes, you want to be disgusted? You want to test yourself against something which is merely disgusting and not genuinely dangerous for you? “2 Girls, 1 Cup” — you want to see it but you don’t want to see it, and in the gap between these two desires there erupts a howling, almost mad laughter. Maybe that’s what explains the enigmatic popularity of the reaction videos: whether you do or don’t want to see the video, you can’t help but envy the wild laughter that explodes in the interval.

Read The “2 Girls, 1 Cup” Phenomenon, Part 3

If you don’t know what this is all about, you could begin with the video itself. Made by a Brazilian director who avows his own fetishism, the video itself is actually illegal in the United States. For that reason PervScan won’t link to it. But if you know that the name of the video is “2 Girls, 1 Cup,” the url is pretty easy to figure out. It is definitely not safe for work. And be cautious about googling it, because there are sites that host the video but dump malware on Windows users. (Which raises fascinating security implications, as a concerned blogger noted: “I am concerned that… I can’t believe I am writing this… security vendors will be loathe to post warnings regarding malicious versions of the content because the content itself is so wretched.”)

After you’ve endured the video, you might want to begin delving into the really astonishing part of the story: the reaction videos showing people watching “2 Girls, 1 Cup” for the first time. To take a random example, watch these guys watch it. From there you can begin to see the enormous number of similar videos listed in YouTube’s Related Videos. There are men, women, parties, families, even a husband and wife who alternate but thankfully don’t show it to their baby. There is an entire subgenre of videos that capture grandmothers being subjected to “2 Girls, 1 Cup”: the classic one, the 91-year-old one, the grandma who says “It’s not really that bad,” and the one showing two gym rats holding down their young-looking grandmother. When you watch this and some of the “Here’s my mom watching it” videos, you start to think the incest implications are creepier than the scat video could ever be.

Without doubt the funniest reaction video belongs to Kermit the Frog. Jon Lajoie also penned a hilarious love song inspired by the thing. Feel free to sing along with the chorus that runs like this: “Some people like to kiss / Some people like to hug / Some lesbians like eatin’ each other’s shit out of a cup.”

The grassroots popularity of the video — or of the reaction videos — calls to mind the notoriety of the Enumclaw horse sex story, which was even made into a succesful documentary. In each case, an “unspeakable” perversion became something that people couldn’t stop talking about. On one hand, this is astonishing. Just when did bestiality and coprophilia become so acceptable that you can talk about it with your grandmother? On the other hand, perhaps it’s not surprising at all. Both perversions take fundamental human experiences — everyone is an animal and everyone is a shitter — and push them to “inhuman” extremes. Everyone can relate to the preconditions of the perversions, if not the perversions themselves. Everyone is only one short step away from being able to commit these perversions. All it takes is a little perforation of the membrane between your current behavior and your sense of wrong (or “wrong”). Perhaps that is why people laugh so uproariously in spite of the fact that they’re vomiting while watching “2 Girls, 1 Cup”: their laughter says “I’d never do that” and thereby reasserts their normality.

Read The “2 Girls, 1 Cup” Phenomenon, Part 2 ,

(Thanks for the link to Belial, who thought “this sounded quite perverted.”)

Clearly this was not perverse in any sexual sense. The man’s motivation for pissing on a dying woman did not involve urolagnia, coprophilia, or necrophilia. Everything you need to know about his motivation was expressed in the exclamation “This is YouTube material!” It was not a sexual act but a lark, a stupid stunt, an outrage performed for the mobile phone that filmed it — and for the potential audience that gobbles up such stuff on the internet.

Even if the act wasn’t sexually perverse, was there still something perverse about it? To answer the question takes you to the very heart of a difficult matter. What is perversity? If you go to Google News and search for “perversity,” you’ll be surprised by the diversity of results. Right this second the top result is a story called “Perversity as Secularism.” It’s about Indian politics, not sexual deviance. Another top result from a British paper speaks about the “perversity of some of the earnings rules in our benefits system.” What is the common thread that unites political perversity, economic perversity, sexual perversity, and whatever sort of perversity it is that causes a young man to pee on a sick person?

The typical definition of perversity emphasizes its irrationality — its obstinacy in the face of reason, taste, decorum, morality. Certainly the bad Samaritan who assaults a dying person is being, by most standards, unreasonable and immoral. But is this act truly perverse? Or is it just a moment of stoned and drunken idiocy? Shouldn’t it be possible to define perversity in a way that clearly distinguishes it from mere idiocy?

PervScan rarely reprints the commentary of sex columnists, but this morsel by Mistress Matisse was simply too tasty to pass up. On one hand, it’s just plain funny. Somehow the guy’s sexuality is caught up in the grossifying humor of pubescent stunts. If he were sadistic rather than masochistic, he would have been the kind of kid who found it hilarious to stick a firecracker in the mouth of a frog. Instead he wants to see a hot chick — and Mistress Matisse certainly qualifies — squirt on a roach or grasshopper or something. Maybe he had an unstated intention to pull a Gregor Samsa routine on her and be the bug himself.

On the other hand, the story serves as an excellent reminder — especially to jaded PervScanners — that sometimes the understanding just collides into a fetish the way a car slams into a brick wall. It’s possible that there is some complex personal etiology to a man’s sexual enjoyment at the sight of centipedes immersed in piss. It’s also possible that every explanation is forced, every analysis a lie, every justification a con. The guy’s fetish could be some inscrutable, irreducible thing that, like a minimalist sculpture, slaps us in the face with its brute existence but doesn’t offer much more than that — no meaning, no significance, just a hard metal cube of depravity jutting up into the landscape of sexuality.

Can you help me in this site finding me a sex partner to do coprophilia.

Well, Fernando, you write the same way that Borat speaks, so presumably English is not your native language. Perhaps you misunderstood the intent of the site. To be clear, PervScan does not keep an active roster of coprophiles to introduce you to. The site scans for pervs. It does not pimp them.

In a more general sense, it’s possible you could pick up a few pointers about coprophilia by reading the stories on PervScan. For example, this story might show you that it’s a bad idea to hide yourself in an outhouse septic tank. Or if this story is to believed, there may be furtive groups of coprophiles lurking amongst law enforcement personnel. You should be cautious arranging coprophiliac trysts with police, however. If you approach an officer and offer to shit in his mouth, he may well find some excuse to arrest you.

For that matter, you fail to specify whether it’s your pleasure to give or receive. No doubt it is easier to find people to piss or shit on you than it is to find people to drink your pee or smear themselves with your feces. When seeking coprophiliac partners, you might do well to invert the traditional holiday formula and remind yourself that it’s better to receive than to give.