There is a persistent and spooky attempt to medicalise sex and sexuality. The French philosopher Michel Foucault has argued, for example, that since The Enlightenment, knowledge has been institutionalised by, amongst others, doctors and psychologists, and become instruments of their power. That power is in pathologising sex (classify it into diseases), giving themselves the power to decide whether a particular sexual conduct is a madness, a crime and/or a sexuality abnormality. But then he would say that, he was a poof — and homosexuals have at various points been (and still are in many places) regarded as mentally ill, criminal, and/or perverts.
Unfortunately Foucault is very difficult to read, suffering under the triple of disadvantages of being a philosopher (so using a technical language), French (so everything has to be translated), and a follower of Roland Barthes in his rejection of “clarity” (and this is so not the place to explain that one). So before we disappear up the intertextuality of our own bottoms, we'll move on.
Problems in defining paraphilia
Paraphilia is a medicalised term for "a group of 'disorders'
wherein sexual excitement is derived from anything or anyone other than the
'body and soul' of another adult, or 'love', to give it its more commonplace
name."
Now I don't mind putting my hand up and saying yeah, sure, I'm a paraphilic or pervert or whatever. But I do strongly object to stupidity. Can we spot the flaws in this paraphilia definition?
1. Who do they think they are to be drawing the boundaries, some sort of sexual God? I don't think so.
2. I am a urophile (I love piss sex). Do you really think it's the piss that we're attracted to? Well OK, it's not unattractive. But it's the "body and soul" of the person pissing on me that is the main turn on, stupid.
3. Love is … Romantic love that is … is a modern notion. In most places and at most times couples were formed for economic, political or social reasons (and still is in a lot of places). Growing to love one another meant something more like fondness rather than the heady infatuation of romantic love. If sex outside of romantic love is a "disorder", humanity has been sick for a long time.
4. It is a descriptive definition, it doesn't explain anything, it merely says there are these people who do this sort of stuff. Which sounds perfectly innocent - indeed, perhaps even attractively scientific. The trouble is, names are powerful. You give a name to something, you invite name-calling. You give a name to something, it defines it as The Other, not like us, strange, dangerous, creepy. The Other needs to be controlled, or banned, or cured. So we have laws to ban most paraphilic behaviours.
5. Soul? Excuse me, what is a metaphysical concept such as "soul" doing in a physical description? Well, guess it runs as part of the puritan, "without love sex is meaningless" argument. No, without love, sex is sex, with love, sex is loving. But love isn't necessary for great sex, though it can help. It is a largely religious construct that sex is wrong outside love.
Well OK, how about the other main definition of Paraphilia. Instead of it being a disorder because of the lack of love, it can be "a sexual disorder where individuals only become aroused by inappropriate objects or fantasies."
You see, there we go again, slipping in value judgments into a notionally medical description. Before we had "the soul", now we have "inappropriate". Who says it's inappropriate? Well obviously society is one agent that does that, but societies change, and change radically over time and space. By conforming to societal views of "inappropriate" the medical profession becomes an agent of social control. Now, you may not think that's a problem — after all, we trust doctors, they've promised to "do no harm" and all that hippo stuff.
Do you trust your Doctor?
So when Society held the view that some life was not worth living and was
better terminated (eg, Nazi Germany), did doctors and the whole medical establishment
resist tooth-and-nail the attempts to kill such worthless life? Or did they
have their hands on the gas release valve? Guess.
Mentally and physically disabled children were starved, lethally injected and gassed. Soon to be joined by their adults equivalents. And then the list grew: homosexuals, communists, Jehovah Witnesses (fair enough), gypsies, enemies of the state, and of course Jews. Even, German soldiers with terrible wounds fell under the "euthanasia" programme. 'Ah yes', you say, but the Nazis were a one off.
OK, how about those nice doctors who worked so hard to try and "cure" homosexuals of their "illness". Or infected healthy African-Americans with syphilis and watched them suffer for decades. Or strongly advocated their own "euthanasia" programme. And that's just 20th Century American doctors.
Don't get me wrong, I'll be first in the waiting room if I'm physically ill. Doctors are great. But let them "treat" my sexuality? I don't think so.
Treating paraphilia
So how are paraphilias medically treated?
Well with all the very finest mumbo-jumbo treatments, such as cognitive, behavioural, and psychoanalytic therapies. These ensure that the "patient" reconstructs their "illness" as a problem to be cured. And in the delightful double-bind of thought control, if you deny you are ill, it demonstrates how very ill you actually are. Denial, what a great concept for so much abusive psychiatry.
Some prescription medicines are used to help decrease the compulsive thinking associated with the paraphilias. Yes, they don't want you to think.
Hormones are prescribed occasionally for individuals who experience intrusive sexual thoughts, urges, or abnormally frequent sexual behaviours. So if they can't stop you thinking, they try and stop you being sexual at all.
Finally, almost always the treatment must be long-term if it is to be "effective". And why would that be? Because paraphilic disorders are incurable? Or because they are not actually medical conditions in the first place? Hence their lack of responsiveness to medical treatment.
So are there no paraphilic problems?
Well of course there are, but they are symptoms, not the illnesses themselves.
For example, any compulsive behaviour that interferes with the person leading
a happy life (as defined by the individual, not by the medical establishment)
can be reasonably called a disorder. But the disorder is the tendency towards
compulsion, not the behaviour, which could be frottage or could be stamp collecting.
As a guide, your paraphilic pleasure is symptomatic of a problem if it either:
Now rule 1 in particular has some gray areas. Can adolescents consent to sex? In practice yes, legally no. Can pre-pubescent children or babies consent to sex? In practice no, as they don't really understand the question. Can animals consent to sex? Not really an intelligible question, it's like asking, 'can rocks reason', animals can't consent at all.
And in rule 2, "significantly impairs" is a value-judgment, which can have a lot of personal discrepancies, and opportunities for denial (well, just because psychiatrists abuse 'denial', doesn't mean it doesn't exist). Moreover, the "significantly impairment" might not be because of you spending 18 hours a day wanking and rubbing your willy down to the numb of a bloody stump. It might be the an impairment imposed by others because they object to your behaviour. Though this outside kind of impairment sounds a lot like an infringement of your liberties.
If, however, the you enjoy your paraphilia with consenting partners and without screwing up your own life, and most of us do, then there is no problem, no disorder.
Who isn't a paraphilic?
Who indeed? We see how people behave, the conformities they conform
to, and we extrapolate from that they are "normal", unaffected by
perverse paraphilic desires. But it's just an inference, just inductive reasoning.
We don't know. We don't have a window into the minds of others.
But we can confidently say this. If paraphilia is a "disorder", there's a hell of lot disordered people out there. This site gets around 500,000 visitors a year. I think that's a lot for something that isn't advertised or marketed in any special way. You have to come looking for me, seek me out. OK, some of you are repeat visitors (bless you). But there are no videos here, and no really any dirty pictures. So you come from that more educated slice of the paraphilic world that likes its fetishes literate. If half a million of you a year are like this, just think how many people there are out there who haven't evolved beyond the picture-book stage.
Then consider all the millions whose tastes are less explicitly defined. Are women who read "romantic" fiction where the heroine is adducted and ravished soft-core biastophiles? Probably. Though I'm not sure it helps anyone to say so, except to say, it is normal to be abnormal.
That Emily, you know, she's just this woman…
In the end, does it help to say that I am urophile, ephebophile, coprophilic,
mixophile, pornographomanic, pictohile, and troilist; with sometime flirtations
with gynemimetophile, klismaphile, snuffistic, voyeur and zoophile indulgences;
and occasional biastophile, autagonistophilia and stigmatophile experiences?
Makes me sound like a bloody medical textbook, rather than completely normal
suburban woman who you wouldn't look twice at if you saw me chatting in the
supermarket. How "normal" am I, well how "normal" are
you? Normally abnormal, I hope.