Here is a snapshot showing Ms. Shrider with Mini Me. And here is a more sultry photograph of the would-be actress. It would be nice to think about the two finding the inner beauty in each other — she overlooking Mr. Troyer’s dwarfism, he overlooking her, um, well, maybe just looking her over. For it is clear that her outer beauty was no match for the inner ugliness that the relationship brought out in both of them. According to Ms. Shrider’s account, Mr. Troyer is a mean little son of a bitch. But it is difficult not to suspect the worst of her too. Her “romantic” feelings for the celebrity dwarf may well have been driven by her own ambitions. Even if they weren’t, it is not exactly a demonstration of noble character for her to be blabbing about his sex life, drinking habits, and chronic depression to the tabloids. How much did they pay her?

If there is a moral to the story, it’s that they both got pretty much what they should have expected from a mutually exploitative relationship. It’s a sordid, not a perverse, tale. However, you do have to wonder about Ms. Shrider’s assertion that she doesn’t “date normal people.” What does that mean? She prefers to date abnormal people? Does her dating history contain a parade of circus freaks — dwarves, fat ladies, sword swallowers, hirsute women?

If you google around, you’ll find other interviews in which Ms Shrider offers sensationalistic details of her relationship. (”For a small guy he’s quite well endowed. I had no complaints.”) You’ll also find plenty of pictures of the ill-matched couple. Viewing them, you may find it difficult not to agree with Ms. Shrider that there’s something “abnormal” about her former relationship. Doubtless there are happy, loving couples in which one suffers from dwarfism and the other doesn’t. But at the same time, you view these pictures with midget porn and pedophilia echoing in your head. If Ms. Shrider were pursuing the relationship for careerist reasons, it makes the story garish. If she were pursuing it because she fetishized dwarves, it would be perverse. Do you think that intention is what separates the lurid from the deviant?

Not long ago I interviewed some retail clerks for a documentary about people who deal with the public on the job. One woman who worked at the cosmetics counter of a high-end department store told of a man who used to eat the pressed powder right out of the compacts. (I wonder what shade goes best with stomach contents…) Another ate lipstick. One more told of people who mistook a remote corner of the store for a restroom and left a steaming brown present. Then there were the perverts. These guys would hide in the rooms, listening to all the women self-deprecating in the harshly-lit mirrors who were sometimes talking to themselves, sometimes two in a room… If a guy were lucky, he’d find a partitioned area with merchandise still in it, surrounded by hurriedly discarded cloth that had just recently been next to a woman’s naked body. He could imagine all the half naked women who had been in this very room, examining themselves for flaws, struggling to see if maybe a skirt would be better with this shirt, so they must take off the prospective pants and stand there in the mirror with no bottoms contemplating their exoskeletons. Maybe he could even see their nude calves in that coveted rectangle of space under the door. This was just too much to take, amid the warm cloth…and the chatter…release. There is nothing romantic about the aftermath. Some underpaid clerk has to go in and clean up the remains of the day, according to my sources, without even the benefit of a HAZMAT suit. Was this in the job description?! You though you were just supposed to ring up purchases and send people off with a smile and less of their money. No way are you responsible for post-porn offerings on a size twelve camisole, no way! Maybe it’s the thrill of getting caught. Or a more auditory version of the Peeping Tom. Regardless, I look at a pile of clothes in a dressing cubicle like there is a snake in it.

What makes the piece especially interesting is that Molique, the author of an erotic tale or two, sees the fetish from several vantage points. She understands the fetishist’s excitement at the chemise or skirt that has acquired a talismanic power by rubbing against a naked body. She understands the women in the dressing rooms, who are engaged in private debates about their body images and don’t realize that perverts are staring at their ankles and toes. Finally, she understands the folks whose job it is to mop up the mess. Really, what do stores do with cum-stained clothing? Throw it out? Put it on the sales rack?

As for the dressing-room fetish itself, it’s hardly novel. If there is a paucity of information about it online, the reason is probably that this fetish is, relatively speaking, kid stuff, a consumerist variant of voyeurism. It is easy to satisfy (dressing rooms are everywhere) and presents a low risk of apprehension. (Can you see the store detective chasing you down in the parking lot with a cummy pinafore? … “Excuse me, sir, is this yours? Can we take you downtown for a DNA match?”) The fetish only starts to get illegal when it edges over into video voyeurism or pedophilia — and if you google those, you’ll see that plenty of fetish activity occurs in dressing rooms.

Meanwhile, how about that guy who likes to eat the pressed powder from compacts? Now that’s an interesting fetish. Googling it brings up little except the early John Waters film Eat Your Makeup, in which women are obliged to eat makeup and “model themselves to death.” Molique mentions that a “dressing room fetish” doesn’t even have a proper name, but doubtless that is because the fetish disappears into others — voyeurism and so on. But how about a makeup-eating fetish? That’s a kink with no name, so let’s give it one: cosmeticophagia, from the Greek kosmetikos (cosmetics) and -phagia (eating, swallowing, as in coprophagia). You heard it here first.

(Thanks to “Chris Finch” for the link.)

In a way, this story is simply an illustration of the truism that the abused tend to become abusers. Researchers estimate that anywhere from ten to thirty percent of abused children go on to repeat the maltreatment that they suffered. To be clear, the story doesn’t specify that the father abused the son. But all the same, you can’t help but think that something about the home environment encouraged him to repeat the sins of his father. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, as the saying goes.

Looked at another way, this is a story that’s less about perversion than about recklessness or outright idiocy. You would imagine that, when a person in someone’s own home has been arrested for a crime, the other people living there would be highly motivated to keep out of trouble for a while — ditch the drugs, lay off the child porn, maintain a low profile. How is it that the junior Mr Hunter failed to keep clean? Did he not care? Did he think he could blame his father for the continued presence of child pornography? (”No, no, that’s my dad’s kiddie porn… Uh, what? It has a file date of yesterday? No, I don’t know how to explain that… Maybe it’s my mom’s?”)

Finally, there is also a comic aspect to the whole thing. It used to be that fathers and sons went fishing together or attended baseball games. These guys evidently swapped illegal pornography. (”Hey dad, look at this infant getting ass-fucked… Wow, son, that’s really hot… I think so too. Let’s jerk off together like we used to…”) Or maybe it would be even more comical if each had absolutely no idea what the other was up to. You can imagine them sitting in separate rooms, downloading their depraved images and chatting to each other’s aliases in some pedophile chat room…

Most people probably read this and think, “Aha! Well, of course he was cheating. Why else would he react so violently to the thought of his wife smelling his penis?” True enough. But then again, if beating up your wife amounts to a confession, why bother? Why not just come out with the truth? It’s easier and doesn’t land your ass in jail for assault and battery. There must be a less obvious reason he didn’t want his penis sniffed up. Maybe it smelled like another man’s rectum. Or the tongue of a dog. Or maybe it smelled like a cadaver.

If you’re a savvy cheater, you avoid all these problems by washing your penis before returning home to your spouse. How hard is it to find a restroom somewhere? Or to buy some baby wipes? Or a bottle of Purell?

On another note, it’s odd to think about people’s “private” parts entering into the public sphere. Andy Warhol famously said that everybody would have their fifteen minutes of fame. Sometimes, though, the fame comes not to a person but a body part — an eye, a leg, a tit, a dick. Seriously, there’s a whole parade of detached penises that just drift through the news on a daily basis. Like this guy: “She said she saw the man’s penis outside of his pants as he was urinating…. Officers saw a large puddle on top of the stairwell where the woman said she observed the man urinating.” Or this guy: “He ranked the pain during urination and erection an eight out of ten. The suppurating wound had a ‘foul odor,’ a necrotic smell, the death of living tissue. The lesion was ‘now draining pus’ and was ‘more macerated at the glans,’ or penis head.” Or the guy who threw pictures of his penis at a schoolgirl, or the guy whose penis was nearly severed by “the propeller blade of a concrete mixer,” or the guy who killed his wife because she suggested he should get an enlargement.

Every day the news offers a wave of stories about penises, vaginas, breasts, asses, mouths. It’s like a subset of celebrity culture, the nether parts corresponding to the procession of pretty faces that dominate the covers of glossy magazines. Who are the people behind these organs? How do they feel about fifteen minutes of infamy attaching to their crotch? Do they gather news clippings into an album? “Sure, I was in the newspaper one day because I scored the game-winning touchdown in a high-school football game… Oh, and here, look at this. I was in the paper this time when my wife wanted to smell my penis, so I flipped out and kicked the shit out of her…”

… upon patching up their own DNA, the bdelloids simultaneously incorporate random scraps of DNA from other organisms. This so-called horizontal gene transfer is extremely rare among animals, and in the bdelloids’ case can include DNA from almost anything that was in their soupy habitat at the time things dried up, including whatever they just ate. In only 1 percent of the bdelloid genome, Meselson found dozens of foreign genes from bacteria, plants, and fungi inserted among the native nucleotides.

You read that correctly. The organisms can absorb DNA from their own food products. That would be like going to a fast-food restaurant and picking up some DNA from a hamburger. Or would it be more like going to a fast-food restaurant and picking up some DNA from the toilet? The article isn’t quite clear on this point, but if the creature is vacuuming up DNA from anything in its soupy environment, this would seem to include waste products.

Even more astonishingly, the rotifers also pick up DNA from the corpses of fellow rotifers.

It’s likely, he says, that during recovery from dessication, bdelloids pick up genes from members of their own species, too — dead members, that is, whose genes spill out of ruptured cell membranes. That process would provide the kind of genetic reshuffling that other animals achieve through sexual reproduction. “It may be their form of sex,” Meselson says. “But their partner is essentially dead. So you’d have to call it necrophilia. Actually, since they’re all females, lesbian necrophilia.”

What makes this especially interesting is that perversion is customarily defined by its sterility. An act is considered perverse, according to this view, when leads to spilled seed rather than to baby-making. That’s why traditionally masturbation and homosexuality were considered perverse. They occurred outside the baby-making context of man and wife. In the case of these rotifers, however, it is precisely a “sterile” act — necrophilia — which has become a means of perpetuating the species. It practically makes you fantasize about some post-apocalyptic scenario such as a sci-fi novel might present. If a nuclear bomb killed all the men in the world, would women find a way to vary their DNA by rubbing up against the cadavers?

Once you’ve contemplated the notorious case in Washington of the man who was fucked to death by a horse, it’s not so shocking to see others “interfering” or “playing around” with the animal. Mr. Le Gallais may have been caught, but at least his colon wasn’t perforated by a phallus the size of a grown man’s arm.

The peculiar thing about this story is the way the man spoke about the deed in court. “I had a few beers, I went to the stable and interfered with the horse… Maybe I had a little bit of an urge or something. I mean, like a sexual, a sexual thing, I suppose you could call it that.” A little bit of an urge? A little urge causes a guy to jerk off or make a pass at someone. To break into an animal stable and do naughty things to a horse requires something more than that — an urge large enough to cause you to commit a petty crime and to violate an imposing taboo on sexual activity between humans and animals.

What’s peculiar is that the guy — and many others like him — was able to do the deed but not talk about it very directly. There are people who can do it, who can fuck animals, and there are people who can talk about it comfortably enough (hi commenters), but to do it and get up on a podium to talk about it? It takes a special perv to say, “Yeah, well, it sucks I got caught, but I was horny, a little drunk, and that horse seemed mighty appealing at the time. What’s the big deal?”

Several different readers (Warren, Emma, and Chris Finch) sent in links to this story about a Simpsons cartoon parody being classified as child pornography. This New York Times article does a decent job summarizing the issues.

It is obvious that child pornography — and child prostitution as well — have become international hot-button issues. In the past, the difficulty has been how to determine what is or isn’t pornographic, as exemplified by the famous pronouncement “I know it when I see it” offered by Justice Potter Stewart in 1964. In this case, the emphasis is on a different point — not what is pornography but what is a child or, more broadly, a person. Does an animated character count? It may seem ridiculous to consider a Simpsons character a “person,” but what authorities fear is a slippery slope. Given the sophistication of computer illustration, if a cartoon character isn’t considered a “person,” it will open up the way for forms of animation that are virtually indistinguishable from photographic — i.e. real and abusive — child pornography.

The irony, of course, is that while lawmakers are battening down on child pornography, children are making themselves increasingly pornographic. Just today PervScan reader Furpo sent in two links to articles declaring More Young Adults Engaging In Risky Anal Sex and 1 in 5 Teens Engaging in “Tech” Sex. What happens when these young people who have grown up with a lifelong awareness of pornography become adults and lawmakers?

In his book Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, the historian Philippe Ariès writes about the development of the notion of childhood innocence, defined roughly as “should be kept away from all matters sexual.” His work is worth quoting at length not only for its humor but for the perspective that it gives:

One of the unwritten laws of contemporary morality, the strictest and best respected of all, requires adults to avoid any reference, above all humorous reference, to sexual matters in the presence of children. This notion was entirely foreign to the society of old. The modern reader of the diary in which Henry IV’s physician, Heroard, recorded the details of the young Louis XIII’s life is astonished by the liberties which people took with children, by the coarseness of the jokes they made, and by the indecency of gestures made in public which shocked nobody and which were regarded as perfectly natural. No other document can give us a better idea of the non-existence of the modern idea of childhood at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

Louis XIII was not yet one year old: “He laughed uproariously when his nanny waggled his cock with her fingers.” An amusing trick which the child soon copied. Calling a page, “he shouted ‘Hey there!’ and pulled up his robe, showing him his cock.”

He was one year old: “In high spirits,” notes Heroard, “he made everybody kiss his cock.” This amused them all…

Ariès gives further examples. This is not to say that morality, where childhood is concerned, was better or worse in the 17th century. It is to say, rather, that morality is historically conditioned. Can there be any doubt that we are going through the growing pains that signal a transition from one conception of childhood to another? Adults today continue to uphold the identification of childhood and innocence — and yet children themselves already seem to be abandoning it to play with their cocks, like Louis XIII.

(Thanks to Angela St Lawrence for the link.)

If you were keeping a list of the year’s lamest excuses, “fell ass-down on a potato” has to rank near the top. You can’t help but wonder if it was peeled or not. And good lord, what if, instead of a potato, he’d had a watermelon on the table? A gourd? Would he have accidentally sodomized himself with that too? And doesn’t his excuse contains a subtle admission of perverse behavior anyway? If he was changing curtains while naked, it implies that he might have been trying to expose himself.

Ever hear that old Smiths song “Vicar in a Tutu?” Well, this case was something more like “Tater in a Vicar.” The glorious part about the song, though, is that it portrays the tutu-wearing vicar as “not strange… He just wants to live his life this way.” It’s too bad the Tater Vicar can’t achieve the same self-acceptance. In the Bible there are prohibitions against adultery, incest, and bestiality, but nowhere in the good book does it say you can’t fuck yourself in the ass with a tuber.

(Thanks to “Chris Finch” for the link.)

The authors of this study were quick to point out that their finding does not indicate that less intelligent men necessarily have poor sperm quality. Instead they found a “small, but statistically significant link” between intelligence and sperm quality. It has a vaguely eugenic air — have you ever, in a frustrated moment, wished to bring genocide on the heads of idiots? Well, physiologically, they’re already doing it to themselves. Scientifically, though, it all makes perfect sense. Evolution weeds out the weak, and intelligence is a strength.

It would be really fascinating to test the semen of sexual deviants as well. Is there any correlation between sperm quality and a tendency to perversion? Maybe it would turn out that, statistically, perverts have inferior sperm and therefore lust after things — feet, animals, cadavers — where, pregnancy being impossible, sperm quality is irrelevant. Or maybe it would be the exact opposite. Maybe perverted men would have wonderful, powerful sperm. Because of this, their reproductive prospects would be so generally good that these guys could afford to blow a few wads on, say, dead deer.

Any graduate students out there? Bored lab techs working at sperm clinics? Hardcore pervs who have happened to have their semen analyzed (a common procedure when a couple is having difficulty conceiving)?

If you listen to part of the husband’s 911 call, you can hear his exchange with the dispatcher. What makes his call disturbing is not what he says but how he says it. After all, if you’d just shot somebody you loved, wouldn’t you be saying something like, “Oh shit, Jesus fucking Christ, come quick, help, she’s bleeding, I can’t believe what happened, holy fuck!” Mr. Havens, in contrast, is terse in his responses and affectless in his tone. He sounds bored. Maybe it’s a result of the numbness that comes with post-traumatic shock…

Or maybe not. Let’s reconstruct the crime. A guy has been legally obliged to take anger management classes for assaulting his wife. Ignoring the restraining order, he invites her over one night, puts on some romantic records, wines and dines her into the bedroom, where he just happens to have a loaded pistol lying beside the bed. And, shit, he just happens to have left off the safety. And shit, while he’s banging away at the missus, he just happens to realize he should move this dangerous weapon away from the bed. And whoops, while he’s moving it, it just happens to hit his old lady right in the boiler room (deer-hunter lingo for chest cavity). That’s a few too many just happens to be credible.

Deliberate? Possibly. Stupid? Undoubtedly. Perverse? No. Why feature it on PervScan? Because it’s got sex and violence and, really, it’s a relief after reading the ten-thousandth news item about yet another middle-aged man caught with child pornography.