The Tar Pit

In this post I'll discuss how perversion, or the act thereof, is a fundamental property of life; or, at the very least, of animal life, not to mention its ubiquitousness within the human species.

As per tradition, let us try to get a definition from the dictionary:

perversion (noun)

1 : the action of perverting : the condition of being perverted

2 : a perverted form
especially : an aberrant sexual practice or interest especially when habitual

So... ok, I'll admit that this doesn't clear things up for me -- the noun is defined mostly as a pointer to the verb. So then, let's look at the definition of "to pervert":

pervert (verb)

1 a : to cause to turn aside or away from what is good or true or morally right : CORRUPT
b : to cause to turn aside or away from what is generally done or accepted : MISDIRECT

2 a : to divert to a wrong end or purpose : MISUSE
b : to twist the meaning or sense of : MISINTERPRET

For what it's worth, this doesn't look much clearer either. We can discuss morals, sure, but since we live in eminently crazy times, let's make the following exercise. Not sure if you've seen that Monty Python sketch with the Ministry of Silly Walks, but for the sake of example -- say that it's "morally right" to walk that way instead of y'know, how people have been walking for millenia. Which one's the perversion then, the "normal" walk or the "silly" one? And which one's "normal", by the way? If this whole thing confuses you, then ponder it for a moment, who knows, you may end up being illuminated¹. Anyways, to me this moral relativity is enough ground to reject 1 a. Same goes for 2 a, which I personally find to point towards the wrong end (or purpose), and thus may indeed be construed as a perversion of a definition.

This leaves me with 1 b and 2 b. I will ignore the latter and observe that the former is closest to at least what I have in mind when I think of perversion: a processor whose instruction pointer is misdirected with respect to some expectation, yet fully according to some other expectation. In other words, perversion is nature's return oriented programming, or rather, in metaphorical computing terms, a generalization thereof.

Now that it's somewhat clearer what it is that we're talking about, let's also clarify what "being a fundamental property of life" means. I think that the idea that perversion is confined to animal life is highly dubious. Take viruses for example. For one, it's not even clearly established whether they are life or not; the only clear fact is that they are isolated bits of genetic material which "infects" -- whatever the exact meaning of this "infection" is, it lies very well within the definition of the thing under discussion here -- a living organism, animal or otherwise, and manages to co-opt certain characteristics, such as the immune response in the case of coronaviruses, to the point where said genetic material becomes integrated into the living host. So for all we currently know, perversion is generic to any form of life; and at the most basic level, its occurrence relies on agents that exist on a fine line between living and non-living. For all we know, it's quite possible that life itself is not even possible in the absence of this sort of phenomenon.

Now, let us zoom in to the animal aspect. And in illustrating it, I will use an example: as the spring comes in March and the sun greets the walls of my balcony earlier than seven in the morning, the sparrows in my attic leave the nests they built last year with a view towards building new ones, especially considering the start of their inevitable mating season. And as they do this, they use small twigs as material for their renovated homes. So now, tell me, doesn't that strike you as particularly... perverse? The twigs were never "meant" to be used this way, and anyways, nobody asked them, yet the birds in question always, without mistake, from one generation to the other, do the same thing, despite the fact that they don't have any books to teach their offspring any sort of "nest engineering"². This isn't specific to birds either; insects do it; mammals do it all the same; and of all mammals, it ain't the beavers who do it the most, nor the most intensely, but well... humans.

Perversion is so characteristic of human behaviour, that in this particular case perversion itself is perverted. In pondering this, try to think beyond the usual examples of assfucking and BDSM -- yes, they are perverse; and their being done for shits and giggles rather than as a survival mechanism is equally meta-perverse. But so is, say, taking water from a river, processing it and selling it, of all things, as... water! Or take for example "corruption", a particular case of perversion, namely of power, whose meaning is quite often perverted to denote an opposite, depending on which way the wind blows; or, since we're here, take politics, whose public face is reduced to nothing in particular through its process of transformation into sheer entertainment. Or... really, I could go on and on for days without so much as taking a break³.

So I guess the point of all this meandering through the boundless realm of perversion is... next time you run into it, don't even think about preventing it; but rather, ponder how to pervert it.

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