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How can one write a history of perversion? Is it possible to detail the successive incarnations of a notion that calls up both delirium and delight, sadistic crimes and more delicate transgressions? Can one eschew voyeuristic enjoyment and moralistic condemnation? I keep an amused memory of how, while in high school, I would share with friends the pleasures of dipping at random into Krafft-Ebing's thick volume Psychopathia Sexualis, focusing, of course, on the forbidden passages in Latin.1 Our nervous laughter barely concealed our embarrassment facing apparently absurd vignettes of sexual perversions. We had a fondness for the Parisian coupeurs de nattes who would snatch and cut locks from little girls out of school and were disgusted by the unfortunates who would eat soggy bread full of urine left in public urinoirs… all in all, we were baffled by the weird tricks human desire invents to reach satisfaction.
Today, when it seems that culture has become more relativistic, although perhaps less tolerant, we imagine either a collection of social stigmata or a history of the conceptions of perversion. Perversion would be considered in an evolutionary way, as varied ideological projections, each sending us back to norms of social reprobation, a nomenclature of practices deemed to be deviating from set standards. For instance, Aquinas's hierarchy of perversions entailed that masturbation was worse than “sodomy,” which is not the case today in most US states. For Aquinas, Onan's sin was condemned as a refusal of the act leading to the propagation of species, whereas sodomy was an error as to the proper aim of sex, when people miss the right orifice or do not recognize preordained sexual partners. Thus each culture will establish different gradations, opposing what is supposed to be “natural” to what is not. The “perversion” invoked by the French judges who condemned Joan of Arc to the stake had little to do with the medical ideas that underpinned Oscar Wilde's notorious con