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Although perversion as a psychoanalytic diagnosis is almost as old as the field itself, the comparatively few books devoted to the topic each renew the same fundamental question: what is perversion? There are two basic ways to define perversion: behaviorally and structurally (i.e., via the personality). When perversion is defined by actions, those actions are perverse insofar as they violate a social norm. Despite Freud's observation that we are all originally polymorphously perverse (insofar as we enjoy bodily acts other than heterosexual vaginal penetration) and that some of us somehow manage to grow up to become sexually “normal”—a development that clearly depends on the child's socialization—some 20th and even 21st century psychoanalysts continue to define perverse behaviors against the backdrop of what was considered abnormal in the early 20th century. Homosexuality, for example, is now widely considered to be a socially acceptable form of sexuality, and yet some psychoanalysts who define perversion on the basis of abnormal behaviors continue to consider homosexuality to be a form of perversion. In Sergio Benvenuto's book, What Are Perversions? Sexuality, Ethics, Psychoanalysis , Benvenuto shows how the behaviorally-based definition of perversion falls short. Using behavioral nosology, not only are we faced with difficult questions of where to draw the line between abnormal and normal, ethical and unethical, but we leave out the sense that the behaviors have for the subject. In other words, according to Benvenuto, depending on the meanings that a homosexual act has for an individual, she or he can engage in primarily homosexual acts and be either neurotic or perverse. Indeed, Benvenuto's book is reflective of the second approach to defining perversion insofar as he argues for ways in which we can understand a perversely structured person—rather than someone who behaves in a way that society would deem perverse—as engaging in acts which reflect a certain relatio