Persons, acts, or states of mind may be sexually perverted, but persons are referred to as perverse in virtue of a disposition or inclination toward entertaining perverse desires. If perversion is defined as a psychological state, acts are perverse only in virtue of the perverse desires that motivate them. Moreover, a person's sexual self-identification may not match that person's actual sexual practices, as when a married man who has frequent affairs with gay men continues to regard himself as heterosexual. In this way he can reassure himself, and reinforce in others, that he is "normal." This way of thinking about perversion accommodates both perversions that are deep-seated sexual orientations and those that are consciously chosen preferences. However, choosing to practice sexual perversion as a substitute for the normal sex that one in fact desires does not make one a pervert. Perversion is subversive in its total annihilation of "normal" desire. 19 This conception of sexual perversion is at odds with Sara Ketchum's claim that sexually perverse preferences constitute the reverse of a sexual ideal.20 I suggest that sexual perversion is more than a reversal of an ideal, since one's failure to live up to a sexual ideal can simply result in wrongful or unpleasant behavior that is socially deviant but not sexually perverse.
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