One interesting way to categorize perversions is by the degree of difficulty that they present. For example, unless you happen to work with cadavers, it’s no easy matter to be a necrophile. Where do you get dead bodies? Do you break into funeral parlors? Dig up graves? Kill people? Once you get a cadaver, where do you molest it? In your house? In a hotel room? Out in some woods? Do you bother to preserve it? Do you let it rot? Where do you dispose of it? How do you make sure you didn’t leave any of your DNA on it? Do you wash it afterward? What if an arm falls off while you’re trying to wash your cum off it in the bathtub? Problems, problems, problems. Necrophiles may be corrupt, but they also have to bring a certain ingenuity to the satisfaction of their whacked lusts.

In contrast there are also perversions that are relatively easy to satisfy. For example, if your thing is to be abused by telephone operators, there is little standing between you and ecstasy. It’s just a phone call. It’s free. It’s easy. It’s not clearly illegal until you do it so much that it becomes harassment. The risk of getting caught is relatively low. The punishment likely won’t be too severe. It’s no wonder that Mr. Fujinuma may have made some ten thousand of these calls. That’s about ten a day for three years.

What pervert, if his kink were easy to satisfy, wouldn’t indulge in such a quantity of gratification? Suppose a necrophile had all the dead bodies he could want. Suppose the likelihood of getting caught were low. Suppose the punishment weren’t severe. You think he wouldn’t abuse a similarly tremendous number of cadavers?

It also makes you wonder if there doesn’t come a point at which a pervert simply tires of his own thing. Evidently some fetishes, such as Mr. Fujinuma’s, are inexhaustible. He never got tired of it. Other fetishes are probably impossible to exhaust for practical reasons. Even among embalmers and morgue attendants, for example, the opportunities for satisfaction are probably not so numerous that a necrophile could grow tired of molesting bodies. Necrophilia may make plenty of people sick, but a necrophile may never have enough corpse-fucking to get sick of it himself.

There probably isn’t much you can learn about sexual perversity from this story, but it certainly is humorous. The Associated Press had a particularly cheeky write-up that began with “Thou shalt not use a church’s telephone to call a sex hot line” and ended wryly with the note that “a desk officer at the jail said it wasn’t possible to put Macnair on the phone to speak to a reporter.” You can’t help but wonder if Macnair himself recognized the comicality of the scene. Did he call sex hotlines from the church because it was easy to break into? Because it appealed to some latent sense of blasphemy? Did he laugh at himself? “A shmuck like me,” he might have smirked. “Jerking off on the vicar’s dime…”

Often it is difficult to understand why a certain story or incident is humorous, but in this case the incongruity is clear. The church is supposed to be a place of abstinence and spirituality. When somebody farts or fucks in this holy atmosphere, it brings the place careening back down to earth. It reasserts our fundamental physicality in the face of all pretensions to anything nobler. We’re animals. We stink. We eat. We copulate. We laugh.

On reflection, you might note that the church is sometimes willing to accommodate human fleshliness. For example, religious organizations often offer food to the homeless. So why do you think they’re not willing to offer satisfaction to other urges? If they feed the hungry, why not the horny too?

It is quite probable that this poor boy’s suicide was conditioned by behavioral codes unique to the time and place — a particularly Chinese sense of honor, a shame that sexual secrets were exposed, a desperation that comes from dire poverty. But all the same, what this incident amounts to is a horny teenage boy killing himself because his natural desires caused him to blow a few weeks’ wages. For an American, that’s like setting the value of a human life at the cost of an iPhone.

In spite of the fact that prostitution is thriving, China has been trying to crack down on sex-related businesses, particularly anything conjoining pornography and technology. No doubt Communist authorities will use a suicide such as this to say, “See? Phone sex leads to death!” It’s too bad, because these sorts of businesses will exist so long as anyone has lust and a dollar — which is to say that they’ll always exist. If authorities really want to prevent needless deaths such as this, they would do better to apply their Communist precepts to the business itself. Rather than hound the poor girls who staff the phones, find some way to spread around their cost. If that poor boy had enjoyed cheap or even free access to PSOs, he’d still be alive today.

When you first read that headline, it conjures up all sorts of images. Man steals phone for sex — you imagine him suffering from some weird sort of gadget fetish that causes him to fondle phones or insert them into his private parts. Then when you read that the perp was both deaf and mute, the weird images are reinforced. Obviously he couldn’t use the phone for its intended purposes, you think, so he must have been using them for perverted ones.

The great part about the story, though, is not the solution to the mystery but rather the followup. The solution — ie that the guy pawned the phone to pay a hooker — is trivial enough. It reduces the story to petty larceny. But consider the denouement. Many people would feel shock and disappointment to learn that a long-time friend had stolen something from them, but the “victim” in this case was entirely sympathetic to his friend’s plight. So long as he got his phone back, he didn’t want to make any further issue out of it. What a different resolution to a story that could have so easily ended in bitterness and lawsuits! It practically gives the story a moral — a testament to the power of friendship, compassion, and fellow-feeling.

When he dreamed up Big Brother, George Orwell imagined him — or it? — as an extension of fundamental Western tendencies: totalitarianism, technocracy, propagandism. And while contemporary society is not without traces of Big Brother, he is probably doing better in places like Malaysia and Iran. That’s right — he’s less likely to be found these days with Emmanuel Goldstein than with Abdullah Badawi, the current prime minister of Malaysia.

Certainly that’s how Malaysians must feel if and when they get stopped on the street so that police can perform a random porn-check on their mobile phones. After all, who really cares if somebody wants to watch a blowjob video on the postage-stamp-sized screen of his phone? It’s not hard to think of a lot of other acts with greater potential to threaten society. True, pornography is technically illegal in Muslim Malaysia — but then that’s a joke, considering that Malaysia plays a central role in the trafficking of young girls for the sex trade. Apparently it’s ok to offer up the local adolescents to slobbering German tourists, but it’s not ok for those same adolescents to be caught with porn on their phones. Porn corrupts them, whereas German pedos must, uh, uplift them.

It’s no secret that commercial phone sex, just like a Hollywood movie, requires what critics call suspension of disbelief. In order to enjoy phone sex, you have to set aside your knowledge of the fact that, in all likelihood, that chick with the sexy voice is really some sort of ugly troll — or somebody’s grandmother, as in this case. You know this and yet you don’t want to know this, so you tend to suppress it and call to mind an image of Aurora Snow while getting off to the dirty talk emitted by arthritic septuagenarians. But you know it’s not Aurora. It’s really Elizabeth Breeze.

That’s the obvious moral of this story. The unobvious moral is perhaps even more shocking. Consider this. The UK’s case is that Ms. Breeze was receiving disability benefits while in fact working as a phone sex maven. Because these benefits are supposed to be received by people who can’t work, and because Ms. Breeze was in fact working, then she shouldn’t have been receiving benefits. Simple enough. However, if the government recognizes phone sex as a valid form of work, does this not imply that every arthritic grandmother should be refused disability benefits — on the grounds that she could always earn money through dirty talk?

The first time you read this story, it’s hard not to find yourself being impressed with Friday Goldman (which is the pseudonym of a girl who, by day, is earning a women’s studies degree at Cleveland State University). She’s like Gregor Mendel, the “father of genetics,” or Carolus Linnaeus, who developed the taxonomic groups you learn in high-school biology. Ms. Goldman has taken a sort of wilderness and discovered the structures that give it order and form. Setting + Sex Act + Character = Hot Phone Sex. Amazing!

However, once you get over this first flush of awe at the enterprising Ms. Goldman, a rather disturbing truth settles in. That’s right: your sexual desires are astonishingly formulaic. You can be spoonfed preconcocted narratives from a sort of cookbook for dirty talk — and you’ll love it. If you ever thought you felt a thrill of discovery in exploring sexuality, you have to remind yourself that researching the libido, unlike climbing Mount Everest or exploring space, really takes you nowhere new. Others have been there before and done that already. Every bed has used sheets.

To recognize this is to find yourself in a weird position. You have lusts and urges and these are like bulls rushing a matador’s cape. They have no thought for anything, just a sort of unstoppable forward momentum. On the other hand, somewhere in the wake of this bull run your brain comes struggling along, knowing full well that it is the job of any sex worker to make you feel special, unique, desirable, excited. You know that the sex worker, whether it’s a phone sex operator or a prostitute, doesn’t really think anything more of you than your wallet. But still you have to fall for the fantasy or else you won’t get off. Does the knowledge that s/he might be feeding you a formula from a book undercut your ability to suspend disbelief, to fall for the fantasy? (”I know she’s a hooker but I think she really liked me.”) Or should you just accept how entirely trivial your fantasies are? Just sit back, relax, enjoy the ride, take it in like a good Hollywood adventure movie?

Unfortunately, very little information about this case has made its way into the press. This story did not even give the perp’s name. One other story did identify the perp, but his name is so common that googling it doesn’t accomplish much. You’re just left with a bunch of unanswered questions: What prior relationship (if any) did this perp have with the boy or his family? What motivated the guy to share this video with a thirteen-year-old? Was it a simple case of indiscretion or poor judgement? After all, it’s not unheard of for older men to sometimes take a benevolent attitude toward the prurient interests of youths. A guy is not necessarily a pedophile if he gives a teen a pornographic magazine or lectures him on the importance of condoms. Maybe this was an episode like that. The teen was curious about the Hilton video (which is rather tame, after all). The older man thought it wouldn’t be a big deal to forward him a still from it. End of story.

Or is it? If you look closely at the story, one thing stands out: the fact that the boy’s family notified the police. This suggests that they didn’t quite trust the motives of the perp. Think about it. Suppose a colleague or a neighbor gave your thirteen-year-old kid a can of beer at a party. You disapprove. What do you do? Do you go to the police? Or do you approach the guy and say, “Hey, that’s not cool. My kid’s growing up fast enough without any help from you. Don’t do it again.” You’d think that, in most cases, you would take the latter approach — unless you had reason to be suspicious of the guy anyway. If he was habitually plying kids with alcohol, you might be leery of his motives. And a similar line of reasoning pertains to this case. The very fact that the parents called the police suggest that there might be more to this story than anyone is reporting…

Consider what this story is actually saying: useful information is more worthwhile than pornography. This is something you see plainly on the internet: porn is everywhere, so ubiquitous that spammers slam you with their unwanted emails in an effort to get you to see their little portion of it. But have you ever gotten spam from Google? Of course not. Why? Because the service Google provides is so valuable that it advertises itself. You’ll go to Google voluntarily. Whereas pornography is, relatively speaking, so valueless that it has to seduce you into its arms.

Why is that? Why is good information so much more valuable than even good porn? If you think about it, you see a fundamental point — a sort of crass implication of the disparity between body and mind. Anyone with tits and a camera can become a pornographer. Anyone with a voice and a telephone can become a phone sex operator. But do you know what sort of resources it takes to create a phone book? To create a good web directory or a genuinely useful search engine? Lots. It calls to mind that old Marxist saw about workers and the means of production. Anyone can be a porn worker. But it takes entrepreneurialism to seize hold of the means of production. And the big bucks, of course, are in the latter. Linda Lovelace, one of the most famous porn stars ever, didn’t exactly get rich from Deep Throat. But look at Hugh Hefner — owning Playboy did good things for his bottom line.

It is difficult to believe that anybody could get arrested for leaving his phone number on the wall of a public toilet. It must be a matter of demographics. La Mesa is a suburb of San Diego that calls itself the Jewel of the Hills. It must not have much crime if its police are targeting the scrawlers of lovelorn graffiti. Here in New York, if you arrested every guy who posted his — or maliciously posted somebody else’s — phone number on a toilet wall, you’d probably end up with a prison population larger than the city of La Mesa itself.

Besides which, New Yorkers come to appreciate this sort of graffiti as an art form in its own right. Granted, a lot of graffiti lacks any real imagination, but sometimes it can really be comic or creative. Few movie posters in the subway escape the rapier wit of impromptu film critics armed with Sharpies or spray paint. Few people can post graffiti classifieds on toilet walls without getting razzed by the next sarcastic defecator. The vertical surfaces of the city are kind of like craigslist without the internet: a primitive place to communicate with random passersby and strangers. It’s part of the local color.

Granted, as is always the case with various endeavors, sometimes people go too far. It’s annoying to see some idiot’s “tag” sprawled across the facade of one of the local landmarks. Leave the Empire State Building untainted by spray paint, please. But on the other hand, public restrooms and subway stops should be free for scrawling. And if you’re going to impugn somebody for writing on a toilet wall, impugn him not for his lust but for his ability or inability to entertain. For graffiti is the poor man’s public art, and it should be judged not by legal but by aesthetic standards — which is to say, not by the police but by the public.