This is one of those occasional Slogposts that could lose me a lot of readers, but it has to be written. It’s about sex (good for hits) but it takes a censorious view about elements of it.

One of the defining features of contemporary discussion about male homosexual practices is the adventurousness of them. We hear of fisting and felching and hinging and every variation on these. But my question is this: how many of these adventures are mutual in nature?

I must have had endless early morning hours debates about what is normal or perverted over the years, but I haven’t really changed my view for several decades about it: if adults consent to do these things in private  – without the involvement of innocent minors and for mutual pleasure – then that’s their affair, and it’s nothing to do with the State or its laws.

However, there comes a point when some practices are really nothing more than onanism. Toilet-roll inners along which ferrets scramble and scratch have more to do with heightened self-indulgence than sexual joy between two loving partners. In the heterosexual realm, for example, smacking, tying-up, soixante-neuf, anal penetration and pleasuring without penetration are the choice or otherwise of more couples than many people appreciate. But to push your partner off a table while he or she bites on an LSD-laced orange – and relies on you to cut the rope prior to strangulation….well, I’m damned if I know what pleasure (other than sadistic) there is for the passive partner in that lark. I’m not even sure it’s sex in any meaningful sense.

The distinction I’m making here is not a means of prising open the door between private preference and public legislation: rather, my issue is where the line gets blurred between consent and grudging acceptance.

Sociopathic sex (and be in no doubt, it exists) pushes hard not only to erase that line, but also to cross it in the hope of humiliating the partner involved. There are homosexual and heterosexual men who hide behind what they call a preference for experimental and ‘rough’ sex. But their pleasure is not only selfish: the domination with a view to humiliation can easily become a justification for predatory sex with the vulnerable.

When people ask themselves about the eclectically perverse sex life in which Jimmy Savile appears to have indulged, it never seems to occur to them that innocent children and disabled adults would represent similar ‘prey’ in his eyes. In both cases, the predator is enjoying the participant with no thought whatsoever for that person’s feelings….but in the certainty that resistance would be unlikely.

From that place, it isn’t that big a step for the psychopath to decide that the victim’s death is of no consequence either. Such an idea is, after all, a logical extension for the tragically disordered mind.

There is a senior and highly respected member of the British Establishment who (I am convinced) overtly employs his persona in order to inhabit this odd area of life with near-total safety. Every word of drivel written by the Boris Johnsons and Rob Wilsons of this world about ‘vile innuendo’ makes him feel safer still. How angry Bojo and Rob would be if they knew the totality of it.

My thesis is this: do not assume that paedophilia and the rape of the defenceless are either unrelated or exist in isolation. They are part of a controlling mental attitude. And that attitude can trigger the most unthinkably appalling behaviour