Defining Sexual Perversion

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Sexual perversion is distinguished from natural behavior by involving unnatural desires or actions that deviate from societal norms. The root is in abnormal desires, not behavior driven by external factors like religious beliefs. Even if an act is not arousing but performed for a cult or ritual, it still falls under sexual perversion due to the unnatural inclination. Defining sexual perversion proves challenging as it lacks a universal explanation and remains subjective to individual intuition.

David and Tamler play the old hits – Thomas Nagel and sex robots. In the main segment we talk about Nagel’s essay “Sexual Perversion”, a surprising essay on many fronts (Sartre, erotic fiction, conceptual analysis, much more). What’s the nature of sexual desires? Can we say that some sexual interactions are perversions? Which ones? Can we have a perverse form of a hunger? Plus, a new study examines attitudes about sexual assault by probing for intuitions on assaulting sex robots. It gets more confusing from there.

Links:

Grigoreva, A. D., Rottman, J., & Tasimi, A. (2024). When does “no” mean no? Insights from sex robots. Cognition, 244, 105687.

Nagel, T. (1969). Sexual perversion. The Journal of Philosophy, 5-17.