I recently stopped by a "Different Sexualities" seminar to see what people were talking about. One of the provocative topics was whether pedophilia was a sexual orientation. Some said yes, and some said it was a latent tendency in all males. Another topic addressed rape and sexual violence. Some felt it was a sexual preference, and some claimed it was latent in all males. Sex addiction? There was no agreement about whether it even exists but it was a consensus that the Western bourgeois nuclear family was an unnatural and possibly "unhealthy" artifact of culture, economics, and male power. Also discussed were fetishes (cross-dressing, item fetishes, S&M, exhibitionism). It was made clear at the outset that anything LGBT was normal and would not be discussed to keep the meeting "safe." Whatever. How they could be sure that there were no uncomfortable pedophiles in the room, I do not know.
I can not claim to be able to measure how much "polymorphous perversity" or ordinary perversity might be latent or only partially expressed in a given human, male or female, so I just listened. What struck me most, and discouraged me most, was how politicized it all became, and how quickly complex psychological issues became subsumed under feminist rubrics of "patriarchal hegemony" and "oppression." These do not enlighten, they are just cant.
Contrary to some popular impressions, sexuality is not the central topic in modern Psychology, Psychiatry, or Psychoanalysis. It is just one aspect of who a person is and, generally, we are interested in all aspects of a person.
