Bureau of Lost Culture – Countercultural Libido: A History of Perversion (20/01/2024)
Trigger warning: Masturbation, male and female homosexuality, cross-dressing, bestiality, sadomasochism, necrophilia, incest, exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, even straight-up vanilla heterosexual sex in certain circumstances, have all been described as ‘Perversion’ at different times in history,
Why? And what makes a sexual activity ‘perverse’ anyway?
There are very few people better suited to answer these questions than Julie Peakman, historian of eighteenth-century culture whose specialist subject is sexuality (of all eras), pornography, gender and – ‘perversion’.
Her most recent book ‘The Pleasure’s All Mine’ is a history of perverse sex and contains many affecting stories of how benign sexual difference has, in the past, lead to what we would now perceive as unjust and brutal persecution.
