By Jesse Bering Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 2013 Science writer extraordinaire and erstwhile psychologist Jesse Bering has again plumbed the depths of human sexuality in his latest offering, Perv. After last year’s Why is the Penis Shaped Like That?, Bering again demonstrates that he feels right at home exploring the more salacious aspects of the human condition. In Perv, Bering deconstructs scores of “paraphilias,” which he defines as “sexual orientations toward people or things that most of us wouldn’t consider to be particularly erotic.” He injects a fair amount of historical and societal perspective into his treatment of both well-known and rarer ones: acrotomophilia (arousal to amputees), lithophilia (arousal to stone and gravel), and psychrophilia (arousal to being cold and watching others who ...
