Perv review – Jesse Bering's engaging study of sexual deviancy

With genial rhetorical flair, Jesse Bering "PhD" kicks off his perv polemic with a humorous account of his own cloistered gay childhood and outlandish masturbatory tools (a textbook picture of a Neanderthal). Reader, relax: if Bering used to find intense pleasure in the image of Homo neanderthalensis, and he's obviously a stand-up guy (his likability oozes through every hard-working, joke-stuffed page), then your sexual predilection for amputees, giants, tall architectural structures, feet, pain or poo are nothing to worry about. Unless, of course, they cause you or others harm: that's where Bering draws his well-intentioned though often slightly flimsy line in the sand.

Perv is part psycho-neurological explanation, part sexology history, and mostly a scattered polemic about the distorted logic and hypocrisy that creates destructive and dangerous environments for those with orientations beyond the "norm". Homosexuals may be better off today, but what about paraphiliacs, horse-fanciers and gerontophiles? Bering's argument makes heavy use of paedophiles, supporting his thesis that it's not what you think or desire but what you do that should be judged.

Meanwhile, through jaunty if superficial historical storytelling, Bering notes the newness of the category of "homosexual" and the way in which the very word "pervert" has moved from the religious to the sexual sphere. Whether or not you agree that there is no such thing as absolute morality "out there", or that all meanings change over time and are therefore subjective, this book throws a good deal of (secondhand) research at its staunchly anti-conservative central argument and makes for an engaging study of the weirdness of human sexuality. With its empirical and historical evidence thickly wrapped in a committedly conversational tone, it's particularly well suited to younger readers who are interested in science, sex and therefore, as Bering would argue, themselves.