Abstract

When people think about perversion, sexual examples come readily to mind, and this is probably as it should be. Sexual attraction centrally involves a range of desires, some of them typically intense, for the object of the attraction; and such desires are, if anything can be, candidates for being perverted. Philosophers who investigate perversion, too, are drawn to sexual instances of perversion, doubtless for similar reasons. Up to a point, I shall conform to this tendency myself, but my chief interest lies in resisting a sexual focus, and in spending more time on the general idea of a perversion, which can be considered independently of sexual examples.