Louise Kaplan has written an imaginative literary study on the topic of perversions. The book is as much about men as it is about women, and it is more a social and political commentary than it is a psychoanalytic investigation. Case material as well as literary works are used to help elucidate the thesis of the book, which is that perversions are “as much pathologies of gender role identity as they are pathologies of sexuality” (p. 14).

In the first chapter, Kaplan defines what she means by a perversion, and she is critical of those definitions that keep the focus on the manifest aims of the behavior. For her, a perversion is an unconscious psychological strategy that demands performance. It “uses one or another social stereotype of masculinity and femininity in a way that deceives the onlooker about the unconscious meanings of the behaviors she or he is observing” (p. 9). Deception is a