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Given the title of their book, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that when Danielle Knafo and Rocco Lo Bosco look out on the world, they see perversion everywhere. The virtue of this focus is that their world, particularly in some of its more distressingly grotesque features, reveals an orderliness, an underlying orientation that helps make sense of ours. But the near universality of such perversion also tends to flatten that world. As they write at one point, “the fundamental course of perversion – the guarantee of its presence in human affairs – is the existential problem of being a conscious animal” (p. 158). We are human, and therefore perverse.
Knafo comes to this interest in the perverse in part through her clinical encounters with patients and their attachments to dolls. Part I focuses on three cases. The first, Jack, unable to form satisfying or lasting relationships with women, falls in love with a high-end silicone RealDoll, a life-like sex doll. Much as the stuffed animal in The Velveteen Rabbit is made real through love, Jack’s love makes the doll into a real woman, one who makes ordinary women almost unnecessary. We find out a lot from Knafo and Lo Bosco about the sex doll industry that Jack, like many others, comes to depend upon. Some young Japanese men, for example, are too busy for women; artists express themselves through dolls; frugal men find dolls cheaper than marriage; the fastidious find them to be cleaner (pp. 70–72). Apparently, most of us are a little pervy. Twice, Knafo lets us know that she was at first repulsed by Jack’s commitment to his doll, but then her “own perversity and a voyeuristic curiosity surfaced” (p. 63). Jack, however, went too far and, fearing “something might be wrong with him” (p. 71), sought Knafo’s help. The problem Jack and nearly everyone else suffers from, what opens them to perversion, is that they have been traumatized.
When questioned about his past, Jack’s memories came easily and with little resistance. He reca