the whole point: that not every “obvious” case is in fact so obvious.
Take the brothers Elijah and Milo Peters, for example, a pair of twentysomething identical male twins from Prague who appear together in gay porn films featuring full anal penetration— with each other . The Peters twins not only have been having sex together since they were fifteen but also consider themselves romantic partners, just like other young couples with genes that don’t match so perfectly. Outside the porn studio, they claim to be monogamous. “My brother is my boyfriend, and I am his boyfriend,” says one of the other. “He is my lifeblood, and he is my only love.” With the procreation factor removed (and therefore the possibility of genetic harm to any resulting offspring able to be completely ruled out), along with the Peters twins giving mutually enthusiastic consent to sex, their surprising absence of shame about it, and their clear happiness with each other, their steamy incestuous pairing isn’t so obviously “wrong.”
One reason it’s so difficult for us to exercise our mental faculties in a proper way when it comes to the subject of deviant sex, instead being ruled by emotional reactions that fail to give accurate weight to the question of harm, is what we might call “the disgust factor.” Feelings of disgust have a way of undermining our social intelligence and indeed of compromising our very humanity. In fact, as we’re about to see, if there’s anything that researchers have learned about moral reasoning and sex in the past decade, it’s that disgust is the visceral engine of hate. The good news is that once you understand how the whole thing works, you can kill that engine. Our best hope of addressing this deep-seated problem of sexual disgust is to do some reverse engineering on its adaptive functions. Because let’s face it, when you’re not in the mood or you’re not attracted to the person whose sex life it is that you’re contemplating, sex can be gross. And deviant sex, almost by definition, is bound to gross out more people than normal sex. But disgust doesn’t justify the ravages of inequity and oppression on the lives of sexual deviants themselves.
TWO
DAMN DIRTY APES
The butting of his haunches seemed ridiculous to her, and the sort of anxiety of his penis to come to its little evacuating crisis seemed farcical. Yes, this was love, this ridiculous bouncing of the buttocks, and the wilting of the poor insignificant, moist little penis.
—D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)
The entire ordeal is something of a blur to me now, but the one thing that I remember clearly about my first experience with another man (a real Homo sapiens this time) is that he was far more interested in fellating my toes than he was in doing anything with some other body part of mine. Well, different strokes for different folks, you’ll say. Really, that’s quite kind and understanding of you. But if you ever have the misfortune of actually seeing my feet, which are vaguely reminiscent in both color and shape (I hesitate to say smell, but if truth be told, sometimes that too) of the sparsely haired underbelly of a dead possum, you’d realize just how extraordinary this man’s bedroom behaviors really were. That a person could become so sexually excited—in the full curtain-drawn light of day, no less—by something that I perceived to be so disgusting mystified me.
To this day, I avoid making direct eye contact with my feet when taking a shower, so it’s still hard for me to completely understand his actions. I do, however, have a better sense of the mechanics behind this man’s lustful psychology. First of all, it’s clear he was a podophile. The words look and sound very similar, but note that’s an o and not an e as in “pedophile.” (I was young but not that young, after all.) Podophilia, or “foot fetishism,” is by far the most common manifestation of what sexologists refer to as a
Take the brothers Elijah and Milo Peters, for example, a pair of twentysomething identical male twins from Prague who appear together in gay porn films featuring full anal penetration— with each other . The Peters twins not only have been having sex together since they were fifteen but also consider themselves romantic partners, just like other young couples with genes that don’t match so perfectly. Outside the porn studio, they claim to be monogamous. “My brother is my boyfriend, and I am his boyfriend,” says one of the other. “He is my lifeblood, and he is my only love.” With the procreation factor removed (and therefore the possibility of genetic harm to any resulting offspring able to be completely ruled out), along with the Peters twins giving mutually enthusiastic consent to sex, their surprising absence of shame about it, and their clear happiness with each other, their steamy incestuous pairing isn’t so obviously “wrong.”
One reason it’s so difficult for us to exercise our mental faculties in a proper way when it comes to the subject of deviant sex, instead being ruled by emotional reactions that fail to give accurate weight to the question of harm, is what we might call “the disgust factor.” Feelings of disgust have a way of undermining our social intelligence and indeed of compromising our very humanity. In fact, as we’re about to see, if there’s anything that researchers have learned about moral reasoning and sex in the past decade, it’s that disgust is the visceral engine of hate. The good news is that once you understand how the whole thing works, you can kill that engine. Our best hope of addressing this deep-seated problem of sexual disgust is to do some reverse engineering on its adaptive functions. Because let’s face it, when you’re not in the mood or you’re not attracted to the person whose sex life it is that you’re contemplating, sex can be gross. And deviant sex, almost by definition, is bound to gross out more people than normal sex. But disgust doesn’t justify the ravages of inequity and oppression on the lives of sexual deviants themselves.
TWO
DAMN DIRTY APES
The butting of his haunches seemed ridiculous to her, and the sort of anxiety of his penis to come to its little evacuating crisis seemed farcical. Yes, this was love, this ridiculous bouncing of the buttocks, and the wilting of the poor insignificant, moist little penis.
—D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)
The entire ordeal is something of a blur to me now, but the one thing that I remember clearly about my first experience with another man (a real Homo sapiens this time) is that he was far more interested in fellating my toes than he was in doing anything with some other body part of mine. Well, different strokes for different folks, you’ll say. Really, that’s quite kind and understanding of you. But if you ever have the misfortune of actually seeing my feet, which are vaguely reminiscent in both color and shape (I hesitate to say smell, but if truth be told, sometimes that too) of the sparsely haired underbelly of a dead possum, you’d realize just how extraordinary this man’s bedroom behaviors really were. That a person could become so sexually excited—in the full curtain-drawn light of day, no less—by something that I perceived to be so disgusting mystified me.
To this day, I avoid making direct eye contact with my feet when taking a shower, so it’s still hard for me to completely understand his actions. I do, however, have a better sense of the mechanics behind this man’s lustful psychology. First of all, it’s clear he was a podophile. The words look and sound very similar, but note that’s an o and not an e as in “pedophile.” (I was young but not that young, after all.) Podophilia, or “foot fetishism,” is by far the most common manifestation of what sexologists refer to as a
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