Quotes from a review by Steven Poole, in The Guardian, 12 Februari 2014

"We cannot choose who we are sexually attracted to – so stop judging."

Not many pop-science books open with a breezy confession that the author once masturbated to an image of a Neanderthal, but then Jesse Bering thinks the social emotion of shame is corrosive and that we should all be more open about our own sexual quirks and kinks. Admirable, then, that he has the balls (so to speak) to go first. Don't worry, I won't be reciprocating.

In a friendly way, Bering, a former psychologist, argues that all sexual "perversions" or "deviancies" should be viewed objectively as just statistically more-or-less common structures of desire, without the moral disapproval that usually attaches to them. (...) Language, he notes, is unhelpful here, as the idea of a "pervert" implies an immoral choice, but research shows that people's proclivities, from the vanilla to the baroque, are fixed in early development.

Homosexuality, of course, was until recently considered deviant, and Bering writes movingly of his own experience as a confused and frightened closeted teenager. 

• (Those long suspicious of homophobic ranters will be tickled to learn that, according to laboratory tests, "the more hostile a man is toward gay men, the stronger his erectile response is to gay male porn".) 

These days, one often finds people sympathetic to gay rights observing that homosexual behaviours are also found in other species, eg the bonobo. But this employment of the "naturalistic fallacy", Bering points out, is misguided. After all, animals also force themselves on one another, but that doesn't make it OK for men to rape women.

[... ... ...] 

For the middle third of the book Bering scoots through an eye-opening panoply of case studies and research findings about everything from a preference for amputees (acrotomophilia) to a passionate love of bees (melissophilia). One "objectophile" woman is "in a relationship with a flag named Libby". A psychiatrist even thinks there is a category of people who have "excessive desire" for other consenting adults in socially approved ways, and suggests we call them "normophiles", though I think that term is better reserved for people who fancy the generous-waisted pants off Norm from Cheers.

[... ... ... ... ...] 

Abruptly, he becomes more serious during the last third of the book, which is about paedophilia. 

• (Paedophilia is distinguished in science, as it rarely is in the media, from a primary sexual attraction to pubescents, which is called hebephilia, and from attraction to older adolescents: ephebophilia.) 

[... ...] The most demonised members of modern society, Bering says, did not choose their orientation either. "Telling a paedophile that he needs to be attracted to grown-ups, not kids, is like telling a lesbian that she just hasn't found the right guy." Bering displays an impressive sympathy for the cultural devil, imagining the sheer fear in which paedophiles must live. "These people aren't living their lives in the closet; they're eternally hunkered down in a panic room."

What some will find most controversial is Bering's argument about child porn. The available research suggests, he writes, that possession of child porn is not a predictor of future child abuse, but actually helps forestall it by providing a fantasy outlet. So if governments are really interested in preventing harm to children, he argues, they should provide (already made) child porn to paedophiles. Much better, of course, would be synthetic or digitally simulated child porn, the making of which involves no children at all, but Bering points out that this is already illegal almost everywhere – an example, he believes, of the quixotic official attempt to regulate desire as thought crime.

Despite its wild variations in tone, this is, overall, a serious and humane book. 
[... ... ...]