While I agree that there is less perversion in a relationship where there is more love, that is my private belief; I could not prove it, and no one else has. Yet, if one is to state such beliefs publicly, one has to be convincing. The issues are too important. Before we reduce freedom of speech or the rights of consenting adults to privacy, including privacy to engage in aberrant sexual behavior, the argument must be a match for the risks we are asked to run. Here is what I need in order to be convinced: some demonstration that the mass of mankind is inherently good and that its capacity for love rather than hatred can be harnessed now, not in some unstated future; a worthy description of what is meant by love between two people, so that I can judge whether it is worth more to our society—right now, in these dangerous times— than the freedom of press and speech and the right to private perversion we are asked to limit; a reasonable demonstration that this love is available—now, by some route that can be revealed—to most people, so that this means of saving society can be instituted; some demonstration that if perversion and hostility will not go away, punitive laws will either dissipate these conditions or drive them underground without their still being dangerous; guidelines on how we should call up the forces of repression and then soften them before these forces, and especially the people who will take the power of repression into their own hands, go further than the sorcerer’s apprentices would want. I am uneasy with the idea that the prime solution to the problem of corruption is that man’s inherent capacity to love will see us through but that till we can tap that love, we should take away some of his freedom.
I happen to agree (though not intensely) that pornography is debasing, that people would be better off nonperverse, that gorging on pregenital pleasures will make people frantic (or is it that frantic people are the ones who gorge?). I might even agree that licentiousness damages the fabric of society (though, in fact, I rather believe that licentiousness is more the result of a change in the fabric than the other way round). But, perhaps because I live in the United States of today, I am even more worried about repression of freedom than about the price we pay if we permit corruption. Our civilization has been traumatized in this century by the police state, and the United States is at this moment still so threatened by those who would tighten the laws that I would rather let freedom run a bit more before we panic.
There are, among others, two types of freedom. One is (relative) freedom from one’s neurotic unconscious demands; that is lost in perversion. The other is the (relative) freedom a society can grant all its citizens. Both are precious, but in this time of emergency, I would try to save the latter first.
Chapter 12
The Necessity of Perversion
Until the family no longer functions as the primal unit in the maintenance of society, perversion will serve four necessities: preservation of the individual’s pleasure, preservation of the family, preservation of society, and preservation of the species. In claiming this, I am moving beyond Freud’s fundamental discovery that the perverse person is a casualty of that necessity of society, the family, to the position that perversion is a necessity created by society and the family so as not themselves to become worse casualties.
The first necessity, preservation of pleasure, has been discussed enough in this book; and it has been at the heart of the theory and data of psychoanalysis since its beginnings. So I can allow our common knowledge of this factor—in case this book did not do its work well enough—to speak for itself.
As we know from studying oedipal conflict, intimacy causes erotic strains so severe that the family’s stability is chronically endangered. Thus a second necessity: perversion must act as a repository of conservatism to stabilize otherwise explosive forces. It allows cruelty and hatred in the family to be contained before they become
too destructive, and the resulting efficiency permits parents to secure themselves and their family by means of the presence of their perverse child. For instance, a future homosexual man’s mother, in innumerable small doses, may release on her little boy her bitterness toward males in general and her unsatisfying husband in particular; in being distant and accepting her scorn without argument, her husband may be allowed to retain his passivity; and by developing a mimicking effeminacy, the boy can secretly despise his mother.
Additionally, scapegoating helps many families, who choose one member to serve as the “sick” or “evil” one, allowing projection to protect the other members as individuals as well as the whole family as a unit. Once this is done, parents can live out some of their perverse wishes in the chosen child (cf. 70). Then, too, perversion allows parents to play their assigned parts in the oedipal production, to preserve their own sexual pleasure, and to reinforce themselves in their uneasy role of parent. For this, their child’s perversion is a sacrifice they are willing to make. In brief, perversion not only may be the price in neurosis paid for the institution that is the family, but also, when we turn the coin over, we find as its other side that perversion has served—as a counterrevolutionary force—to allow the family to persist.
Third, by preserving the family, perversion saves society, in all the forms the latter has taken so far in evolving over the millennia. And with the terrible strains laid upon society, especially in the last century, by the material successes of the Industrial Revolution, one can expect to see a reflex demand that perversion widen its counterrevolutionary function to save the present forms of society from the dissolution threatened by physical well-being. But it now looks as if the production of goods may soon reach the point that it will make obsolete for some countries certain formerly necessary functions of the family; more and more, progress provides protec-lions to many who, in the past, could persist by means only the family could consistently provide: food, shelter, protection of the children, a bit of luxury, a few quiet moments. Equally important, birth control greatly reduces the frightful work load that massive procreation demanded. These changes may free the forces of perversion for more lighthearted services, such as the arts. And then, as usually happens with major social phenomena, something—like perversion or the methodology of science—that starts out as a defender of the status quo will gradually be elaborated, with scarcely a wrench, into a radical agent of change.
Perversion, thus, is to serve society’s and the species’ abiding changelessness. But a constant threat to perversion ’s smooth function is the perverse person and his paranoia. He who breaks the rules by refusing to play the part of pervert as written in society’s mores and sanctions— who rebels against his assignment and will not help his neighbor by being clown and victim—may in time force social change, if not downright revolution.