UPDATING SEXUAL DEVIANCY

In the late Eighties Henry Rollins wrote a postcard to the lesbian rights punk band God is my Co-Pilot saying: "Who cares who you fuck?" A good question, because aside from everyone involved in the act, no one should be interested. Unfortunately, we don't live in this kind of world, so the band wrote back something along the lines of "Well, the state, the church, the schools, our employers, ..."

As long as your sexual interests roll around the regular T&A or hotbodies from Angelina Jolie to Brad Pitt everything is okay for you. In more open and liberal communities even a little straying aside into fetish or pornography seems okay. But even among the most liberal and educated people you will feel a lot of distance if stating that you enjoy cross-dressing or real S&M. And confessing that you have felt the urge to sexually encountering children - even if you have never acted out the urge and feel in good shape to never do so - will kick you out immediately and mark you as a sick person. And because this principle will run through all layers of society "sick person" also means "mentally insane" and that could mean losing your job, your social security and finally our liberties and civil rights.

X

The homosexuals were the first to fight for their rights openly. On April 9, 1974 the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The moment was a milestone for the gay rights movement because it meant that homosexuals applying for security clearances, child custody or employment could no longer be considere de facto deviants. The fight still lingrs on with homosexual partners now being more and more commonly allowed to marry and equalled to "normal" couples.

On May 19, 2003 Dr. Charles Moser of the Institute for Advanced Study of the Human Sexuality presented a paper at the APA's annual meeting. He and Peggy Kleinplatz of the University of Ottawa called for another watershed moment: the removal from the DSM of all unusual sexual interests, including exhibitionism, voyeurism, S&M, frotteurism, cross-dressinga and, most controversially, pedophilia.

In the paper, which will be published in The Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality, Moser and Kleinplatz argue that there is no evidence that paraphilias (which includes all forms of -philias outside regular sex) meet the DSM's own definition of a mental disorder. Moser says he was surprised to find that a number of statistics cited in the 10-page section devoted to deviaions , such as the "fact" that there are 20 male masochists to ever female masochist, come from dubious or even non-existend studies. The section also offers many conflicting, muddled definitions that make it hard to pin down what seperates a sick fetishist from a healthy eccentric. It says, for example, that a patient must be distressed by a sexual interest for it to be considered a psychiatric problem., then acknowledges that most people aren't, as evidenced by the fact that they rarely visit shrinks. It also notes that a patient's distress cannot result solely from being discriminated against or shunned, then says this is the most common complaint of paraphiliacs who do seek help.

XX

The battle over defining deviations has raged since the 19th century. "For thousands of year the perversions had been the exclusive property of the church, until medicin began to claim them, "says Alan Snoble, a professor at the University of New Orleans who is editing Sex From Plato to Paglia: A Philosophical Encyclopedia. "The philosophers feel perversions should be dealt with by the legal system if problematic, but if not, who cares? As it stands, the paraphilias remain in the DSM because psychiatrists want to be in charge of sex."

As once was the case with homosexuality, being labelled as mentally ill has other implications. Bernard Gert, a philosophy professor at Dartmouth, remembers a call he received after arguing for an overhaul of the paraphilias in a 1992 issue of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. "A cross-dresser who had served in the armed services told me he had been drinking with the buddies when he confided his secret," Gert says. "He cross-dressed only in private. His wife knew. He didn't feel distress, but he was discharged because  he suffered from a recognized mental disorder."

The act of defining a differing state of mind, opinion or belief as a mental disorder has been an easy way out for authorities for centuries. "In Russia they once had a psychiatric diagnosis called sluggish schizophrenia," Gert continues. "That was the ailment of political dissidents. In America what's important is sex, not politics, so you have the paraphilias. I consider them the last hurrah of the Freudians, who regard any deviation as sick."

Moser and Kleinplatz's call to action might have remained a hot topic only among academics except that it does not exclude pedophilia. "If we took a vote, the idea that pedophiles are crazy would win hands down, but that doesn't make it scientifically correct," Moser says. In their paper, he and Kleinplatz include a no-brainer disclaimer, writing that "our suggestion to remove the paraphilias does not mean that sexual acts with children are not crimes." In fact, they argue, that removing them would make it more difficult for a molester to use insanity as a defense.

XXX

The point was lost entirely on the Traditional Values Coalition and other extremists who reacted after excerpts of the paper appeared online without the disclaimer. They accused reform-minded psychiatrists of wanting to "normalize sexual torture, perversion and the molestation of children." After getting dozens of calls from reporters asking about their plan to "legalize pedophilia," Moser and Kleinplatz took the unusal step of posting their paper online before publication. That has doused the flames, at least for now and on this little fireplace.

After all, defining sexual deviancy or any other kind of deviancy remains most of all an ethical problem, a battlefield in which religion, politics, medicine, psychiatry and all other kinds of groups have traditionally taken a big interest. The old common sense principle of everything being okay that is okay to all people involved and everything else being a crime doesn't go a long way with people keen on pressing their own lifestyle and philosophy onto everyone else and denouncing everyone not prepared to follow that lifestyle as a deviant. According to the size of power ordained by this group the consequences for the deviants can be drastic.