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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/40186
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I'd echo the above answers that it's possible to write a likeable pervert provided they're harmless, and provided the scope is narrowed to that character and does not creep into the narration of the story. You don't want to alienate readers by allowing a misogynistic undertone to infect the narrative.

Think about why your character is the way he is. We struggle to feel sympathetic for someone who comes on to every woman he meets if he's cocky, arrogant and pig-headed (and we hate him all the more if he's charismatic enough to have at least some success with this approach), but we can feel sympathy for a man whose inability to interact with women as anything other than sex objects is an undesired symptom of a social interaction problem. We might even feel sympathy for a young man brought up in a sheltered household where women have been always been treated as objects, and we can come to like him once he gets into the real world, upsets some people, and must battle his own upbringing to find his place in the world. There's a story right there.

With enough skill and sensitivity, I think you could even make the reader sympathetic to someone with a violent or dangerous perversion. Your character might have violent or abusive fantasies, but he might be disgusted by these fantasies and he might feel that they are a kind of illness that he's desperate to be rid of. That's a very powerful angle to write from.

You can get some inspiration by remembering that today's norms are yesterday's perversions, and history is full of real life people who struggled to come to terms with what were at the time considered to be perversions. Brian Sewell once described his homosexuality as an "affliction" and a "disability" in an article which no longer seems to be online but is referenced on his wikipedia entry.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian\_Sewell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Sewell)

Remember that sexual behaviour can be very compulsive and that can create terrible conflict in a person who is compelled to do a thing by their desires which they consider to be morally abhorrent. There's a lot of creative material there for someone with the determination and sensitivity to pull it off.

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