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Heterosexual intercourse is Sexistan's capital. Sex makes birds and bees after all. But Sexistan is a big country, and the paraphilias -- sexual impulses not geared to reproduction -- cover pretty much the rest of the territory. If you want to learn the lay of Sexistan's varied and kinky landscape, you need a guide.

ABCs of Kinky Pleasures -- to be published next month by New York's Haiduk Press ( Haidukpress.com ) -- is noted Dutch gay scholar Gert Hekma's opinionated Baedeker to the highway and byways of sexual fetish. Perversion, actually, is his chosen term: a word, he says that "sounds serious and nasty, while paraphilia sounds tasteless and tame."

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What's perverse, says Judeo-Christian prejudice, "turns away" -- from life and morals. But Hekma didn't write his book -- based on columns he penned for Amsterdam's Gay News -- to diss sexual variety.

"There is no reason to be negative about perversion because it is everywhere and can be put to positive and negative uses, like all other things," Hekma declares. "Moreover, kinky sex is the best food for thought."

Making list, checking twice

Any catalog of kink owes a debt to Richard von Krafft-Ebing, a German doctor whose 1886 Psychopathia Sexualis was science's first self-proclaimed index of erotic disturbance. With gusto, 19th century authorities took to the task of slotting humans into pigeonholes -- a project still going strong. Krafft-Ebing's forerunner to the American psychiatry's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is still in print.

The Stuttgart professor's work marked a shift from prohibitions on acts to the demarcation of specific kinds of people. Sporting new labels, some of these folks found themselves -- and each other. Medical systematizing had unexpected consequences. But the condemning gaze of doctors only got added to wagging fingers of priests.

Medicalizers and moralizers -- from centuries past or latter-day -- have it wrong about perversion, Hekma contends.

Take the animal-rights watchdog PETA, which in September protested a Michigan appellate court decision absolving Jeffrey Haynes, in prison for sex with a sheep, from registering as a sex offender upon release. Victims, the court said, had to be human. PETA insisted that a sheep-fucker was a moral outlaw who might be capable of anything.

"Having sex with animals is, of course, much less horrible than murdering them for the meat industry," Hekma contends. Enlightened liberal opinion, he says, gets it wrong by underestimating just how kinky folks ordinarily are.

Gay people have been joined by sadomasochists, foot fetishists and nipple lovers in marching out of the closet to chants about equality and democracy. We've demanded -- and in the West, largely won -- recognition, or at least the right to be left alone.

Un-PC, unprotected

But equality and democracy have become, Hekma argues, fetishes of their own.

"People nowadays believe strongly in erotic democracy and become more critical of sexual pleasures that were common and often accepted in the past," Hekma contends, such as prostitution, sex among people of different ages and bestiality.

"Sadomasochists do their best to tell us that their relations are really not about power differences, but are based on the consent of the masochist," he says. "Why can't we simply accept that many desires have nothing to do with democratic ideals of equality or liberal beliefs about consent? These may be good for politics but are much less so for sex."

Sex and danger are kissing kin, Hekma argues. "Butcher boys, soldiers, sailors and crooks with blood on their hands aroused queers of past times who loved the look and the feel of their beloveds' murderous weapons."

Hekma runs down an exhaustive list of sexual types to make his point that desire and political correctness don't connect. Odontophiles get off on pulling teeth, or at least leaving a dental imprint of theirs on their lover's flesh. Tafephilia is the yen to bury, or be buried, alive. Even impulses toward lust murder and cannibalism, Hekma ventures boldly, "are not intrinsically pathological."

"Some of these perversions can be played out in innocent forms," Hekma says -- a point not lost on Hollywood, which has made billions breaking the silence of lambs, and in all other ways, pressing the buttons of taboo lust.

Slaves to style

Like the pop culture in which they are increasingly explored, fetishes, Hekma asserts, follow fashions.

"How could the preference for fur that masochists like Leopold von Sacher-Masoch deemed essential a century ago be innate, while our contemporaries prefer leather in their SM games?" he queries.

The cultural climate establishes conditions where sexual varietals can either wither or bloom. "As far as I know," Hekma says, "SM was unknown in ancient Greece and Rome. These cultures had a more easygoing sexual culture, while those who were into violence and humiliation received their part in daily life that was dominated by slavery and cruelty."

Hekma is ambivalent as to whether the future of fetish is cloudy or bright. The internet allows for exploration of sexual varieties beyond Kraft-Ebbing's imagination -- even while it unleashes new means for surveillance and policing. And has cyberspace proven more means or substitute for actual human connection?

One thing's certain: tomorrow's technological marvels -- like yesterday's -- are certain to expand erotic horizons.

"Any time a new invention is announced, I ask myself how soon it will be put to perverse use," Hekma says. "Hypoxyphilia -- the desire for a lack of oxygen -- appeared shortly after the invention of plastic bags."

As Hekma guides us through alphabet of fetish types, he offers up his own experiences, opinions and tastes. We learn of his fondness for men who bite their nails, his ideas for replacing "male" and "female" with a rainbow of a thousand gradations and his taste for sailors, soldiers and other men in uniform -- with the exception of cops. In Sexistan's wild hinterlands, luckily they're not out in force.

Author Profile:  Bill Andriette
Bill Andriette is features editor of The Guide
Email:	theguide@guidemag.com