ABSTRACT
Consider an individual who genuinely loves someone but enjoys pornography or uses it to enhance private or consensual pleasure. Historically, the description of perversions owes much to psychoanalytic theory with homosexual behavior playing a central role. Some perversions are obvious, especially when pronounced, such as self-mutilation, lust murder, necrophilia, bestiality, cross-dressing, exhibitionism, voyeurism, and sado-masochism, but there is often no clear boundary with normal behavior. Self-mutilation is common in tattooing or piercing, but to cut one's own or other's sexual organs crosses the line. The masochistic turn in religious activity, detaching sexual pleasure for love union with god, takes voluntary suffering out of sexuality and allows us to think of it as basic process, de-sexualized and linked to separation and fusion or autonomy and oneness. Pornography has interest in its relation to science, with which it shares a radical objectivity, and with art, where theme, use and intent are the primary distinctions.
