Perversion saturates everything from song lyrics to cinema to advertising and art. Caught in a quagmire that is at once sexy and revolting, thrilling and petrifying, individuals must manage their exposure and decide just how much they want these representations to influence their daily lives. So, how do we respond?

This book offers an erudite yet highly accessible exploration of the presence of sexual perversion in popular culture and its manifestation in everyday life.

An interdisciplinary exploration of sexual perversion in everyday life, Part-Time Perverts: Sex, Pop Culture, and Kink Management starts from the premise that, for better or worse, everyone is exposed to a continual barrage of representations of sexual perversion, both subliminal and overt. Our involvement, Dr. Lauren Rosewarne contends, is universal, but our management strategies cover a spectrum of behavioral possibilities from total repression to total immersion.

It is those strategies that she examines here. Drawing on her own experience, as well as on pop culture and a multidisciplinary mix of theory, Rosewarne shifts the discussion of perversion away from the traditional psychological and psychiatric focus and instead explores it through a feminist lens as a social issue that affects everyone. Her book examines representations of perversion—from suppression to dabbling to full-body immersion—and proposes a classification for perversion management, and charts the diverse strategies we use to manage, and perhaps enjoy, exposure.

Features
• A bibliography of over 400 reference-text-based items including books, journal articles, and news items
• A media reference list of over 100 films, 100 songs, and 75 television programs referred to in the text

Highlights
• Uses a diverse range of popular culture material to highlight the widespread and mainstreamed presence of perversion
• Draws on the author's own involvement in perverse sexual behavior
• Offers an alternative to the dominant psychological analyses of perversion through a multidisciplinary approach that combines feminism, sociology, philosophy, literary theory, and cultural studies
• Provides a widely accessible, engaging approach to the topic

Lauren Rosewarne, PhD, is lecturer in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia. She has degrees in political science, cultural studies, public policy, and education, and is the author of Sex In Public: Women, Outdoor Advertising and Public Policy and Praeger's Cheating On The Sisterhood: Infidelity and Feminism.

Endorsements
"Although practically every reader will find something to take issue with in Rosewarne’s book—after all, it is about perversions—the book is a valuable read, both informed and informative. The author does a nice job of blending together information from the social sciences, popular culture, and her own personal experiences to shed light on a poorly understood feature of human sexual experience."—Professor John Curra, Eastern Kentucky University; author of The Relativity Of Deviance

"Part-Time Perverts provides a useful framework for thinking about the ways cultural artifacts and practices—from popular film and music to public policy and forms of social activism—function as strategies for perversion management. Thoroughly illustrating the ubiquitous nature of kink within broader culture, Dr. Rosewarne successfully confronts the notion that 'the pervert' can be separated from the rest of society and challenges readers to question their own complicity in 'perverse' practices. Touching on a wide range of topics from censorship, confession, to gay bashing and debates within feminism, Part-Time Perverts interweaves examples from popular culture with personal anecdotes in a fashion that is provocative and entertaining as well as informative."—Dr. Dawn Heinecken, author of The Warrior Women of Television: A Feminist Cultural Analysis of the New Female Body in Popular Media

“This book brings perversion out of the closet and examines it in the context of desire and identity, sprinkled liberally with popular culture. Part-Time Perverts is a fascinating book and a terrific read, for perverts and vanillas alike. It will be an important addition to the bookshelves of scholars of cultural studies, pop culture studies, and gender and sexuality studies, and will, I suspect, be prominently displayed on many living room coffee tables as well.”—Margo DeMello, author of Encyclopedia of Body Adornment: A Cultural History

"With humor and insight, Rosewarne challenges the quiet consensus of polite society that perversion is something separate from normal life and normal people. Combining a savvy survey of transnational popular cultures with her amusing personal anecdotes, Rosewarne takes perversion out of the closet and shows her readers that most of us are, already, somewhere on the perversion spectrum—from distancing to dabbling to immersion. Acknowledging that perverts are 'us,' not 'them,' might be the end of the world as we know it…but we feel fine."—Ilana Nash, PhD, author of American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth Century Popular Culture

"Part-Time Perverts explores the cultural and political significance of the mainstreaming of sexual 'perversions'. Because characterizing people as perverts can make them vulnerable to civil rights abuses, Rosewarne’s demystifying and humanizing narrations about how relatively ordinary people manage their diverse sexual tastes and practices provide a welcome contribution to debates about sex and social constraints."—Laurie Shrage, Professor of Philosophy and Director of Women’s Studies, Florida International University

"Part-Time Perverts is a cutting-edge analysis of the pervasive presence of divergent sexual practices within our Anglophile culture. Its strength lies in its knowledgeable overview of contemporary popular culture, analysing how perversion is presented in music, film and television. Its relaxed, intelligent discussion raises important questions about how and why culture ‘others’ the range of ‘safe, sane and consensual’ sexualities and who benefits from this censorship."—Merja Makinen, Middlesex University, UK; Coauthor of Female Fetishism: A New Look

"Part-Time Perverts offers an exotic journey through pop cultural representations of sexual perversions. Rosewarne examines constructions of the perverse in literature, music, and film in this daring new book, intertwining intimately these pop cultural imaginings with her own perverse explorations. Rosewarne expertly maps out for scholars a continuum of choices in managing perversions she argues reside in all of us, acknowledged, or not."—Dr. Karen Yescavage, Colorado State University, Pueblo; Coeditor of Bisexuality and Transgenderism: InterSEXions of the Others