Sex, Drugs & Rock'n'Roll: Psychological, Legal and Cultural Examinations of Sex and Sexuality

Abstract

One topic is guaranteed to polarise any group that discusses it, and
 that is sex. What other word is guaranteed to make the person you say it to
 hot and bothered? Ask the people around you what is the most perverted
 thing you can think of and there would be as many answers as there are
 people present. One of the world’s favourite authors, Terry Pratchett, musing
 on the difference between erotic and perverted, suggested that erotic would
 be using feathers during the sexual act, whereas perverted means using the
 whole chickeni. Some of the following chapters stretch this distinction to its
 limit.
 The perception of what is sexually perverted shifts dependent on
 who is talking about it. A person’s profession, gender, age, race, proclivities,
 education and even which century they live in, have all effected the
 viewpoint on sex and sexual perversions. For example, homosexuality has
 long been stigmatised as sexually perverted, (and remains so among some
 portions of society), but in most of the world it is no longer considered
 pathological. However, in some individual minds and religious dogma,
 atypical sex and sexualities are still judged as wrong, unnatural, or immoral.
 So what is bad sex? Indeed, do we even have an understanding of
 what is good sex? The papers collected in this volume reflect debate and
 discussion about these very questions that took place in Prague at the 2nd
 Global Conference Good Sex, Bad Sex, Sex Law, Crime, and Ethics in May
 2010. The deliberations covered issues of defining sex, sexual consent,
 sexual law and its agencies and sexual crimes. Some papers are deliberately
 provocative, designed to stimulate dialogue and debate. Others are intended
 to be informative, or to signal areas of potential empirical investigation. All
 of them address the vexed and vexing topic of sex.
 In the section Defining Sex and Sex Crime, the editors’ paper on
 sexual deviancy asks what exactly is bad sex? If it is an issue of consent, then
 why do we still have intensely negative views about extreme, but consensual
 sexual acts that involve no (clear) victim, such as necrophilia, or in which
 lack of consent cannot be assumed, such as autassinophilia? We also explore
 the background to sexual intolerance as one of state-controlled intrusion and
 hypocrisy. In her paper, Claudia Lodia goes further, and suggests that
 society’s pathologising of sex that is outside the strict binary of adult
 heterosexuality is akin to other undesirable perspectives, such as racism. Just
 as racism refuses to acknowledge the benefits of diversity, so does sexual
 intolerance and inequality. The argument is extended to zoophilia by Brian
 Cutteridge, who points out that the animal husbandry and harvesting
 practices that we accept as normal, are exceedingly more harmful to anim