Editing Perversion (section)

===Critical views===
For some participants, "Liberation, at least in its sexual form, was a new kind of imposed morality, quite as restricting" as what had gone before—one that "took very little account of the complexity of human emotional connections".<ref>[[Jenny Diski]], ''The Sixties'' (London 2009) p. 62</ref> New, more sceptical currents of disenchantment with perversion emerged as a result (alongside more traditional condemnations) in both the French-speaking and English-speaking worlds.

[[Jacques Lacan|Lacan]] had early highlighted "the [[ambivalence]] proper to the 'partial drives' of scoptophilia, [[sadomasochism]] ... the often very little 'realised' aspect of the apprehension of others in the practice of certain of these perversions".<ref>Jacques Lacan, ''Ecrits: A Selection'' (London 1960 p. 25</ref> In his wake, others would stress how "there is always, in any perverse act, an aspect of rape, in the sense that the Other must find himself drawn into the experience despite himself ... a loss or abandonment of subjectivity."<ref>Jean Clavreul, "The Perverse Couple", in Stuart Schneiderman ed., ''Returning to Freud'' (New York 1980) p. 227–8</ref>

Similarly, [[object relations theory]] would point to the way "in perversion there is the refusal, the terror of strangeness"; to the way "the 'pervert' ... attacks imaginative elaboration through compulsive action with an accomplice; and this is done to mask psychic pain".<ref>Adam Phillips, ''On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored'' (London 1994) p. 64</ref> Empirical studies would find "in the perverse relationships described...an absolute absence of any shared pleasures";<ref>Phillips, ''On Flirtation'' p. 104</ref> while at the theoretical level "perversions involve—the theory tells us—an attempted denial of the difference between the sexes and the generations", and include "the wish to damage and dehumanize ... the misery of the driven, damaging life".<ref>Phillips, ''On Flirtation'' p. 108, Raymond Harris, III The Pervert.</ref>