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.

By and large it’s probably not worthwhile to engage in a back-and-forth with a writer at a conservative, religious-based newspaper. The opinions of an adult tend to be too completely embedded in deeply held beliefs to change very drastically through debate. He could say “God lives” and you could reply “God is dead” and the conversation won’t go much further than that.

All the same, it is enlightening to see what the other half is saying. Here is what Mr Shea writes in a recent piece called “How Sin Takes Over” — a title that most PervScan readers will probably interpret as a how-to, whereas he doubtless intends it as a diagnosis of a world gone to hell.

Sin blinds as it kills. The more depraved a culture is, the less it can see its depravity. That is why a culture like ours can reach a state where a professor entrusted with passing on the riches of the Western philosophical tradition can instead be hired by a major university in order to persuade students of the glories of bestiality.

There is a subtle tautology in the assertion that the “more depraved a culture is, the less it can see its depravity.” The phrase is true, in a way, but the reason is not that it becomes blind to its own depravity. (”I’m a pervert and I don’t know it!”) The reason is that it no longer defines certain acts or behaviors as perverse. (”I’m gay. A generation ago, to be homosexual was depraved. Today, not so much.”) In other words, what was once depraved becomes normal. Perhaps Mr Shea would agree that depravity has become the norm. But if that is so, then to be religious may itself be the new depravity.

Meanwhile, presuming that the professor to whom Mr Shea refers is Peter Singer, the Princeton philosopher who has indeed offered radical arguments about bestiality and consent, it is surely overstating the case to say that any university hired him “in order to persuade students of the glories of bestiality.” Why would a university want to convince its incoming freshmen to doodle dogs or shag sheep? It’s funny. It used to be that bestiality was associated with the dim-witted, as though it were the perversion particular to illiterate, uneducated farmers. Now it’s the perversion of the Ivy League elite?

You could carry on analyzing the rest of Mr Shea’s text, most of which concerns society’s “ongoing descent into grave evil,” which somehow he equates with — of all things — consent. Or wait, he thinks consent is just a slippery slope toward enslavement and the “culture of death.” And Catholic doctrine is the one thing “which alone can help us live in ordered liberty.” Shit, maybe it would be better for universities to hire professors to espouse the “glories of bestiality.” At least bestiality, unlike Catholic dogma, need not habituate a mind to thinking in contradictions. Evidently it is only a short step from “virgin birth” to “consent is enslavement.”

Given the increasing use of “location-aware” mobile devices such as the BlackBerry and the iPhone, it is difficult not to wonder if we are about to see technology influence sexuality in yet another way. For example, a science writer recently coined the term “geoshagging“:

Geocaching is a fun nerdy outdoors hobby where you hide tupperware under boulders in the woods and publish their GPS coordinates on the web for other geeks to go look for the tupperware. Sometimes when you look for geocaches in public spaces such as parks, you get funny looks from passing non-geocachers (’muggles’, in potteresque geocacher parlance). Lone guys hanging around in parks and acting as if they’re looking for something are probably interpreted either as drug customers or gay cruisers. Thus, back in 2005 I came up with the ultimate gay nerd pastime: geocruising, where you publish your coordinates online and wait for someone to come along and sweep you off your feet. Gender roles and sexual mores being what they are, I never thought it likely that there could be hetero geocruising. For casual sex with women in western society, you need to buy strange ladies drinks in bars into the wee hours unless you’re willing to frequent prostitutes. Skulking around in parks with your GPS is fun, but let’s face it, it will rarely get a straight male laid. Now though, I find … that ‘geoshagging’ has entered the online vocabulary, referring to ‘location-aware mobile computing’ when it is used to set up such brief liaisons.

A skeptical commenter says that this “geoshagging” business will amount to nothing more than a previous fad called “toothing,” which involved random sexual encounters arranged via Bluetooth devices. The cynicism is understandable. Will people engage in any more or less casual sex simply because they have another means to arrange it? Only time will tell.

However, location-based mobile computing need not affect only promiscuity. There are other sorts — deviant sorts — of sexual behavior that may also be transformed. What if there arises an entire new genre of geoperversions? For example, imagine a pervert who develops a fetish for having sex with people at a certain intersection of longitude and latitude. Or perhaps bestialists could put mobile technology to good use. You know how sometimes wild animals are tagged so that their movements can be studied? Imagine bestialists who hunt down a wild animal, commit an unspeakable act on it, then tag it so that they can have the pleasure of hunting it down again someday…

If all that sounds insane, then perhaps it is time to offer an update to the Ballardian formula: perversion times technology equals the unimaginable.

(Note: The names of the young couple have been removed from the story. Why embarrass them any further?)

PervScan has been online for six years now. There are nearly 1300 stories on the site. For every one of those that made it to the site, PervScan has probably skimmed another ten. You do the math — and then the psychology. Jaded? Yes. Definitely. You can only process so many stories about voyeurs with video cameras, clergymen who molest, and boyfriends caught with their dicks in neighborhood dogs. Eventually it gets hard to feel the nouveau frisson.

It’s that background noise of depravity that makes the tale of this ardent young couple leap out from the news. Reading it, you think, “What? Arrested? For sex in a car? That can’t be all there is to it. That doesn’t happen anymore, does it?” Indeed, when compared to the spectrum of freaks ranging from the cannibal who wanted to eat his own penis to, say, the guy who fucked a dead deer by the side of the road, it is difficult to believe that anyone can get arrested merely for having sex in a car — even if the car isn’t theirs. It almost seems old-fashioned or quaint.

The episode makes you wonder if there are people who get their kicks deliberately indulging in outdated kinks. Fashion often abides by the dictum that “what’s old is new again.” The movies of yesteryear are remade for younger audiences. Even “retro porn” has an enthusiastic following. Why not retro kink too? Maybe there are ways to get off on things that otherwise seem outmoded — parking, petting, the blowing of a kiss, the showing of a woman’s ankle from beneath a bustle. In an age when gays marry, pedos dominate the news, and BDSM is mainstream, maybe the true perversions lie precisely in the areas we thought we’d grown out of…

Let’s be clear that this “national study of evil” was conducted with tongue firmly in cheek. The abstract states that the study was prompted in no small part by the fact that the AAG’s annual convention was being held in “Sin City” itself, Las Vegas. And the study’s brilliant title — “The Spatial Distribution of the Seven Deadly Sins by County within the United States” — parodies other “spatial analyses” and “spatial distributions” presented at the conference.

With that in mind, it’s probably wrong to make too much of the science used to calculate the density of sins in America. Here is the lust map. It visualizes the STDs per capita. Obviously that is not a rigorous way of calculating lust, since it may say less about sexual desire than about healthcare, education, wealth, climate, and so forth. After all, if “the darker a county, the more evil it is,” are we really supposed to believe that a few pockets of Mississippi and South Dakota are among the lustiest counties in the land? If Vegas is Sin City, is South Dakota Sin Country?

What would really be interesting would be to set aside these vague notions of “sin” and develop more objective maps of the spatial distribution of deviant behaviors. It’s entirely doable. For example, a pervy geographer could map all the reported arrests for sexual deviance that occur during a certain period of time. How many bestiality cases occur in a year — five or ten? How many necrophilia cases — five? How many pedophilia cases — several thousand? Where do they occur? Are some counties pervier than others? What revelations about sexual behavior might be inspired by a kink-minded mashup of Google News and Google Maps?

All that pleasure and ecstasy you’ve enjoyed in your life? Here is the fish you have to thank for it. Women should be doubly glad that this specimen won the rat race that is evolution. Sex wouldn’t be too pleasurable if the male creatures with bony and hooked penises had been the fittest to survive. Come to think of it, perhaps their injurious penises were the reason they died out. They couldn’t have gotten a lot of reproductive action from the women fish. (Actually, some of these sadistic sexual behaviors have survived in the animal kingdom.)

If scientists can find the “first animal that had sex,” you think they can find the first animal that perverted sex too? Doubtless that first animal was a man, since there is no perversion where there is no moral circumscription of behavior. Those admonitions about incest and bestiality in the books of the Old Testament paint a shadowy portrait of the ancient history of depravity. Perhaps there are other instances of kink somehow preserved in the fossil record — were any of the inhabitants of ancient Pompeii fucking animals or cadavers when the torrents of lava came to mummify them?

Here is a picture of the renegade ass injector, who has since surrendered to authorities. The St Petersburg Times ran an interesting story about the case, talking about how “pumping parties” are arranged via internet forums. PervScan has previously written about the problems these illegal pumping parties can pose to transgender folks looking to alter their anatomy.

Clearly the underlying issue is that people want to be different (or “better”) than they are, and yet medical procedures are extremely expensive. Consequently, they try to save cash — and sometimes end up paying in health. A surgeon blogging about the case points out that silicone injections in soft tissue are now illegal in the United States. Silicone can migrate to other areas of the body and cause “benign tumors called siliconomas.” Evidently there are a number of other methods to enhance the ass cheeks safely — implants, fat injections, “buttock lifts.” But they are all costly, and thus people approach their buttocks like do-it-yourself home-repair projects.

Probably it is inevitable that people will experiment on themselves. Years ago a photographer friend showed PervScan some images he had taken of a guy who would inject saline water beneath his skin. Have a look at the guy’s bulbous forehead. He can even poke a finger into it to make a donut shape. If there are people willing to do this to their faces, doubtless there are plenty of others who will experiment with their asses too. Maybe one day they’ll get really creative and sculpt buttocks that resemble toaster ovens or iMacs.

Science Daily recently posted an article titled “Interested or Deceptively Flirting?” It describes an experiment recently published in Psychological Science. The researchers showed video clips of speed-dating couples to college students and asked them to make predictions about the couple’s level of mutual interest. The goal was to see how well observers could interpret romantic interest and to field-test a few relevant hypotheses, such as that women would be better judges of romantic interest than men. Here is an excerpt of the news item:

For the study, 28 women and 26 men of college age watched video clips of couples interacting on speed dates. Speed dating is a popular commercial method for singles to meet a large number of individuals in one evening of successive brief one-on-one conversations. Each participant observed 24 videos, all with different men and women, and after each rated whether the man seemed interested in the woman and the woman in the man. The speed dating sessions were all conducted in Germany while the observer ratings were all made by students in Indiana. Despite the language difference, observers were still able to judge men’s romantic interest accurately using body language, tone of voice, eye contact, how often each dater spoke and other non-verbal cues… Observers did not have to see much of this non-verbal behavior. They were just as good at predicting the speed-dating couple’s interest if they saw only 10 seconds of the date as they were if they saw 30 seconds. The researchers say this showed that observers, even with limited information, could make quick, accurate inferences using “thin slices” of behavior. There was, however, great variability in how well observers could predict the interest of any particular speed-dater, ranging from 90 percent accuracy down to 10 percent. In five of the videos, 80 percent of the observers thought the women shown were interested when in fact they were not — they were acting friendly even though they had no interest in the men. Evolutionary theory, said Place, predicts a certain level of coyness or even deceptiveness in women because if a relationship is abandoned they may face greater costs, including pregnancy and child rearing. When choosing a mate, it is in a woman’s best interest to get men to open up and talk honestly to give her a better idea of whether they would be good long-term partners.

The best part about the study is that you can participate too. There is an online version of the experiment. You answer some questions about yourself and how attractive you find some faces in sample images, then you watch video excerpts of speed-dating couples. The whole thing is safe for work and takes about 15 minutes to complete. Afterward, the experiment software tells you how successful you were at predicting couples’ romantic interest. PervScan was 50/50 on both males and females — an average score, one presumes. Go take the test if you have the time and then report back in the comments.

The authors of the study do a fine job drawing out the implications for sexual behavior, so PervScan will only note that it would be fascinating to apply the same techniques to perversion. For example, college students could watch video of the same couples and predict which men and women would be most likely to beg the other for anal sex. Does a man who looks creepy really harbor creepy desires? Is a woman who looks like she’s “begging for it” really begging for it? Or to the contrary, does a sweet or charismatic facade conceal the darkest impulses?

Of course, you could imagine even more outrageous variations on this experiment. You could show videos of bestialists and farm animals or pedophiles and children… How accurate would observers be at predicting whether a cadaver is romantically interested in an ardent necrophile?

(Note: PervScan removed the teenager’s name from the excerpt of the report.)

Apparently there is a teen sex panic in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. The news reports that, the day prior to this arrest, a 17-year-old boy had been arrested for having sex with a 14-year-old girl. At least the local Assistant District Attorney is consistent. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a girl doing a boy or a boy doing a girl. If one of them is underage, he’ll arrest the other.

If you’re a thinking person, it is difficult not to feel a sense of outrage at a story such as this. In the first place, a law may be a law, but to arrest a young person for sleeping with her boyfriend simply defies common sense. If it were really a crime for a 17-year-old to have consensual relations with a 14-year-old, half of America would be in jail. In the second place, the local press did not hesitate to post the young lady’s name, address, and photo. It’s the scarlet-letter treatment, publicly shaming her for an act that few people in the world would consider a crime. In the third place, the age of consent in Wisconsin is 18. When both the accused and her “victim” are legally underage, how can one be charged with a “misdemeanor sexual assault?”

Rather than have an age-of-consent law that stipulates an absolute cut-off age, wouldn’t it be more reasonable to consider the age difference as well? Imagine a law that defines the age of consent as 16, but only with a difference in age greater than 3 years. This would make it legal for a 14-year-old to sleep with a 17-year-old but not a 40-year-old. Perhaps the severity of the crime could even be weighted by the age difference, so that it’s less of a crime when a 20-year-old sleeps with a minor than when a 40-year-old does. Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?

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

This story has been spreading like wildfire online but none of the news accounts actually cite Dr Pollet and Professor Nettle’s published article. Curiously, it took a lot of googling to find the thing. For the record, their study “Partner wealth predicts self-reported orgasm frequency in a sample of Chinese women” was published in the academic journal Evolution and Human Behavior. Unfortunately, you have to pay to read the entire text. (Incidentally, what the hell is it with medical and scientific publishing? Shouldn’t researchers be trying to share their knowledge? How can these publishers charge $31.50 for a PDF when putting a document online costs pennies?) The paper is discussed in more depth at the blog Pleiotropy, which excerpts a few points.

There are a lot of obvious things to say about this research, but what would be interesting to know is how perversion might figure into this model of the female orgasm. Does deviant behavior — traditionally defined by its non-reproductivity — correlate in any way with economic status? Suppose the wealthy are more drawn to perversion than the poor. Is it because their reproductive chances are so good that they can afford to throw away a few orgasms on, say, whips and chains? Conversely, suppose it is the poor who show a greater inclination for deviant behavior. Is it nature’s way of weeding out those less fit to survive?