Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us

When the system works smoothly, sexual arousal can serve to anesthetize the otherwise adaptive disgust response long enough for people to get on with the Darwinian business of reproduction.

” Feelings of disgust have a way of undermining our social intelligence and indeed of compromising our very humanity.

it’s the sort of bad philosophy that often leads to adaptive social decision making

Research on the “white bear effect” by the social psychologist Daniel Wegner has shown, for instance, that forcing a person to suppress specific thoughts leads to those very thoughts invading the subject’s consciousness even more than they otherwise would. (Whatever you do, don’t—I repeat, do not—think about a white bear during the next thirty seconds.)

If the supermodel Kate Upton were to walk into my office right now and tie me to my chair before doing a slow striptease and depositing her vagina in my face, I think I’d require therapy for years. But if this identical event were to happen to my heterosexual brother or to one of my lesbian friends, I suspect their brains would process such a “tragic” experience very differently. (And that of my not-very-amused sister-in-law would see my brother’s encounter with said vagina differently still.)

Not only are “consenting adult bonobos” being “naturally” gay and promiscuous with each other, but you’ll also find, for example, adult male bonobos “naturally” fondling immature males alongside adult female bonobos “naturally” mouthing the genitals of juvenile females.

After all, sex acts with reproductively immature juveniles and forced copulation are also commonly found in nature—in fact, much more so than homosexuality. Yet these more impolite details about the sex lives of other species haven’t led to many moral arguments (or at least persuasive ones) for human adults having sex with children or men raping women

Looking back now, it becomes evident that Ellis and Symonds’s careful distinction between homosexual behavior and homosexual orientation was an important step in the history of gay rights

Apologies should be applied only to the things we’ve done wrong, not for who we unalterably are.