Bizarre Sex by Roy D Eskapa; The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders by Colin Wilson - review by David Profumo

David Profumo

How to Tumble Your Drier

Bizarre Sex

By

Quartet 346pp £14.95

The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders

By

Grafton 272pp £12.95
 

There is really no need for a layman like myself to remind you that some folk aren’t content with the Missionary Position. The curious researcher in the byways of human sexuality can easily discover perfectly reputable volumes of scholarship that furnish details of those who ‘love to devour the scabs taken off persons suffering from smallpox’, or inserting a glass decanter up their ano-rectal conduit and breaking the neck off with a blow from a fire-shovel.

To his eternal credit, Dr Roy Eskapa mentions neither of these foibles in his selective but nonetheless well-intentioned study. Given the eye-catching title that it enjoys, I shall be so amazed if it does not sell several million copies that I will eat my Filofax, tiède, in a puddle of blackberry coulis (only kidding, of course: truth is, I haven’t got one. Promise.) Before we get silly about this, it has to be said that his book contains much that is serious, if not exactly new, and though it is insistently anti-Freudian and struttingly pro-feminist – ‘Since pre-biblical times, Eve and her sisters have suffered immeasurably’ – there are some salutary reminders about sexual exploitation in death camps and the Third world, and some interesting

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