Why not start from the be-
ginning: the small package of three books had been opened on one side of the Atlantic or the other. Clearly, perverts infest the UK and US postal–security bur-
eaucracies, but whether they are of the type that would appreciate Supervert’s books is doubtful, even if they did allow the books
to reach their destination.

Perversity Think Tank in many ways is a distillation of Supervert’s thought, and, as far as his three books are concerned, the culmin-
ation of his work, although there is every indication the author has not had his final word on the sub-
jects that so clearly occupy so much of his time. As far as his lat-
est book is concerned, the topic is approached more directly, the author’s focus unhindered by lit-
erary forays and explorations of other major themes such as the question of the existence of extra-
terrestrial life, or grappling with the reality of mortality.

Thus, the principal questions asked in Perversity Think Tank are those such as What is perversity;

how can it be defined?; What is
the nature of perversity?; What acts, what thoughts, are, in fact, “perverse”? These questions are at the crux of this work, and they lead to other, more concentrated questions, many of which are more intriguing than they may appear at first glance; for example: “is it precisely pervers-
ity that gives birth to normality, and vice versa?”.

The reader encounters early statements setting out the author’s starting point, as when he explains how he was “not sexually but conceptually excited” when he discovered a magazine devoted to apotemnophilia, or Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID), formerly known as Amputee Identity Disorder: “My thoughts poured into all the spaces where limbs used to be, and I realized that these deform-
ities of the flesh demanded a cor-
responding deformity of thought – a new way of thinking about desire, beauty, pleasure”.

Whether Supervert has succeed-
ed in thinking in a new way about

the issues he treats is perhaps entirely in the realm of philos-
ophy, but the book’s text is cert-
ainly unusually structured: it is reminiscent of his first book, Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish, but not as formally compartmentalised. Perversity Think Tank is all-the-more interesting for its structure: three, thematically linked philoso-
phical and reflective narratives weave their way through the book. One of the narratives is foc-
ussed on imagery that Supervert, for reasons best known to himself (copyright issues? censorship issues?), has chosen to represent as solid black rectangles. The reader must do some work for himself to follow up on the imag-
ery, but the result is a greater and more rewarding engagement with the subject: the reader must invest his own stake in what is essentially a contemplative pro-
cess, and hopefully also an edu-
cational one.

This does not mean that Supervert
could not perhaps have done a little more in offering concrete criticisms of established thought. For example, early discussion of