When people talk about perversion in left theory circles, I am never on the same page. I don’t think of sex or BDSM as being on a real spectrum of perversion, as I think it requires, usually, a degree of respect at baseline between people. This kind of mutual activity dons perversion like a mask. It points at perversion, tries to draw out its effects from the psyche, and even attempts to give the perverse structure a place where it can exist and not cause real harm. It is more like perversion being properly socialized, when it counts as perversion at all. It is often likely inadvertently therapeutic in some way, if not explicitly so.

Sometimes people take this activity as a reclaiming of perversion against certain standards of psychiatry or mainstream psychology, but this can elide what the more problematic version of perversion actually amounts to. I don’t know how to relate a lot of the calls to reclaim perversion because, still, BDSM does not seem perverse to me in the most meaningful sense. I think it is typically, but not always, an activity that treats the effects of a more social and structural perversion, and typically does so humanely.

BDSM itself seems more like a sensible way of trying to get a handle on a society that is extremely destructive and violent. I can most certainly sympathize with those who say “fuck psychiatry” or “fuck the DSM”, but then what perversion actually is escapes all of these responses. Perversion is structural in subjectivity and in society. It does not neccerily need sexual content. It is in capitalist processes and shape social behaviour. The one-sided objectification, that seeks making others only subjects of objectified domination, is the perverse subjectivity that pervades society. The key here is that it is non-consensual, but also mostly unconscious. It draws a transgressive satisfaction out of non-consensuality, although aggrievement at being wounded is, too, a secret underside to the satisfaction.

Or possibly, the satisfaction comes in adopting the instrumentalization that should ward off psychic castration. Yet psychic castration is itself something that can live without repression, i.e., it can be disavowed and acknowledged, while also refused. The extreme perversion can acknowledge their castration, yet the perverse processes of the world command they continue to act against what they say they know. Capitalist processes instigate and reinforce this perverse behavior and disavowal. It isn’t just natural subjectivity in how it would appear in all simulations. The more extreme realities you go to in terms of the economy, the more life is both transactional and disposable, and the more perversion becomes even necessary for survival..

Most of the people I grew up with were at one point very kind and sweet as children, and after their parents beat them enough, and they were violated in endless ways by the world around them, they got the message: you should orient towards the world on zero-sum terms, and prepare to take advantage of others. Not every kid I grew up with ended up being domineering in this way, but many did, and especially the ones I watched being beat as children. That is an example of a particular kind of education that conditions a perverse response to the world, that moves towards the habitual instrumentalization of violence.

Once I refuse the conservative or moralistic version of perversion, there is still the perversion that is structural and does not depend on sexual fetishism. This is a problem in as much as we encourage capitalism’s specific forms of objectification. These forms cause us to think of the world as a kind of buffet course of objects for which you are a master subject, but then this is a world of subjects who resist objectification. In this problem of capitalist subjectivity, we get the push to make others subject to objectification on narrow terms. The economy conditions us towards the objectification of others, while fighting to prevent being made an object. But then this also scars the subject with resentment, when not being perceived in mutually respectful terms. Their desire to be respected as subject drives on their domination of the other, which also insists the other being subject to domination is a nature consequence.

Where perversion is strongest is where the mutuality of any kind of sexual act or any kind of fetish play is impossible. It is nearly diametrically the opposite of the conservative’s defintion, who would label a sex act, independent of context, inherently perverted. Perversion in its most consequential sense does not have to be a matter of moral condemnation, but then this depends on what you’re doing with it. We can accept that we are conditioned in certain ways, and are idiosyncratic in others, but a society that pushes us towards violating one another is itself a problem, even if we forgive people being imprinted with this structural logic.

Because what is the law of capitalist society underneath all of this? Coercion, non-consent, and a lack of mutuality. The default state is for the system to inculcate into you a feeling of violation. We are always already violated. You are made into a subject through processes that are totally unfree. You are given a path into your own survival with total violation of your being taken as natural. To live up to capitalism’s baseline command is to violate and instrumentalize in accordance with reality, and fend off any further attack from what is embedded as natural. You are violating from a default position that says you are merely breaking even in the act of dominating the other. It is a state of affairs that structures perversion in all of us.