Use And Discard

A new anthology published by a UK-based group with the cultish name Natural Basis of Order explores the darkest deviance of human sexual behavior through a microscopic lens that effectively projects every crudity, every blemish that the majority of us would probably rather ignore. For most of the contributors to A Commodity Called Sex, that ugliness is the state of arousal.

Commodity is a twisted encyclopedia of contemporary perversion, and a valuable resource for understanding the psychology of exploitation and the media's appetite for reporting stories of non-consensual sex. Unsurprisingly, given the extreme (illegal) nature of the material, all contributors have opted for anonymity. The end result is a brilliant collage of disturbance filtered through a guise of victimization.

The book's contents are haphazardly arranged, with little attention paid to design or the quality of the writing. Sex offenders (often grammatically challenged) are permitted to rant, unedited and for pages at a time, about their objects of perversion, while more objective interviews and reportage provide less tiresome diversion.

An example of the latter is an exposé of bukkake, the latest trend in extreme pornography. Bukkake is said to have originated in Japan, where the men of a village would traditionally ejaculate en masse on the face of a woman who'd been caught being unfaithful. Of course, something of an underground bukkake "scene"-centered around the act not as sexist communal punishment but as orgiastic spectacle-has developed in the United States in recent years-underground because the videos often cross the boundaries of legality (as when they involve minors, or the mentally deficient).

More disturbing is an interview with "Elise," a woman who works as a procurer of children for pedophile networks. "What you cannot comprehend is that I'm a woman who procures children and therefore you can only accept that I must be a pedophile myself." Elise isn't a pedophile, but, unsurprisingly, a survivor of abuse herself.

Throughout the interview, Elise reveals not only how covert pedophile networks operate in the age of internet hedonism, but her own cold relationship to the job. "Human beings are like any other species, we operate on a hierarchical layer and some of us act as predators towards those who are weak and vulnerable. Could it not be that I am merely operating by my nature, that it is you who are constrained by these ideas of social value that you cannot comprehend what I do?"

In the end, it's hard to tell how much of the content is real and how much is fantasy. This is due to both the anonymity and the generally extreme nature of much of the content. In a way, it's nothing new. The social realm that all of us occupy is little more than an elaborate chain of manipulative exchanges; why should sex be any different? Commodity gives us a clearer idea of who both the predators and the victims are, or could potentially be, while challenging our inherited notions about how the two roles are played out.