The show presented, among other excitements, Damien Hirst's shark, the Chapman brothers' polymorphously perverse child mannequins, and Sarah Lucas's mordant mattress with its cucumber penis.
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All of these points together suggest that there's a strong argument to be made that we women—way more than men—are polymorphously perverse, being sexually aroused by far more configurations of bodies than men.
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Comfort & Joy (2015), Julie Verhoeven's giddy, polymorphously perverse film, employs everything from feathers to cake in service of demonstrating how sexist and archaic Alex Comfort's 1972 manual The Joy of Sex is, and acts as the capstone of this section of the show.
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Lewis Call said the episode was a "multi-signifying masterpiece". In "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered", an earlier episode also written by Marti Noxon, a love-struck Willow responds to Xander's threat to use force with an enthusiastic "Force is OK!". Call writes that this indicates a character trait in Willow that is brought to the fore in "The Wish" where she is portrayed as polymorphously perverse and sadomasochistic.
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Freud thought that during this stage of undifferentiated impulse for pleasure, incestuous and bisexual urges are normal. Lacking knowledge that certain modes of gratification are forbidden, the polymorphously perverse child seeks gratification wherever it occurs. In the earliest phase, the oral phase, the child forms a libidinal bond with the mother via the inherent pleasure gained from suckling at the breast. For Freud, "perversion" is a non-judgmental term.
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The episode also mocks what many LGBT activists perceive as hatred and misunderstandings about homosexuality often expressed by anti-LGBT and right-wing activists, including Christian ministers Jerry Falwell and Fred Phelps. This is partially illustrated in this episode by Mr. Garrison's condemnation of homosexuals, rooted in deep-seated fear of his own sexuality. Basing his comment off this episode, Gardiner commented that South Park had a "Queer Lite" attitude towards homosexuality, stating "they are unemphatically tolerant, polymorphously perverse, ambiguously gay affirmative".
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Freud's didactic strategy in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality was to construct a bridge between the "perversions" and "normal" sexuality. Clinically exploring "a richly diversified collection of erotic endowments and inclinations: hermaphroditism, pedophilia, sodomy, fetishism, exhibitionism, sadism, masochism, coprophilia, necrophilia" among them, Freud concluded that "all humans are innately perverse".Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for our Time (London 1988) p. 145–6 He found the roots of such perversions in infantile sexuality—in 'the child's "polymorphously perverse" inclinations ... the "aptitude" for such perversity is innate'.
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" New York magazine concurred in this assessment, with reviewer John Leonard calling the film "calm and matter-of-fact, and perhaps too tidy". Leonard lavished Redgrave with praise for her performance, writing: > Redgrave, tall and vulnerable, athletic and bewildered, fearful and loving > competitive and lonely, manages to transsex both ways. She embodies, with > the fine bones of that face and the twitching of her various limbs, every > internal contradiction of the polymorphously perverse." Second Serve was not universally praised by critics, receiving negative reviews from such outlets as the Chicago Sun-Times.
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