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Two recent books by Danielle Knafo and Rocco Lo Bosco offer fascinating perspectives on the nature and consequences of a dramatic shift in the sexual landscape in recent decades. Clear and analytical, but also profoundly complex, these volumes investigate how conceptions of gender and sexuality exist in relation to radically shifting ideas about sex, self, and culture in the digital world. Perhaps most significantly, they investigate how radical changes in sexual attitudes accompany the ever-increasing uses of virtual reality for sexual pleasure.
The Age of Perversion: Desire and Technology in Psychoanalysis and Culture (2017) argues that the concept of perversion, which has often been defined as at the edge of human experience, aptly captures many individual, social, and sexual practices today. Online pornography sites, sex dolls, online dating, sex-ting, and various forms social media shape the modern subject. But how do patients speak about their involvement in various forms of digital technology? What sense of themselves as human subjects do these technologies produce? These questions animate the volume.
The authors first define the concept of perversion today as a cultural phenomenon. Perversion is that which navigates away from the norm and what is considered normal. The book does not offer a precise definition, but that is perhaps for the best, as the term does not mean one thing, but rather a set of relationships. They argue that the digital world itself has produced a culture of perversion which humanizes objects and dehumanizes individuals, who thereby push the concept of the human far beyond existing boundaries. Historicizing the concept, the authors chart the essence of perversion as a disavowal of the human relationship. It is perverse to treat other
humans or ourselves as pure objects. Although it is common to see perversion as entirely negative, the authors consider positive aspects of perversion as well: when perversion enables an acting out of trau