10 Weird Fetishes (and why they aren't weird at all)

Human beings evolved to enjoy getting covered in each other's piss. For the same reason (almost) everybody loves boobs, many people love having and making love to a prolapsed rectum (when your insides become your outsides), or putting meat hooks through their backs and suspending themselves. It's all about survival, but more on this in a moment.

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This month, I'm writing to you about weird fetishes, but it's important to me to point out that I love pleasure. I want you to have pleasure. As long as consenting adults are involved, I am all for anything you do to each other. As my mentor, Ariadne H. Luya put it, after I made a face about anal prolapse fetishes, "Don't yuck other people's yums." And she's right! I don't want to piss on the party, but even if I did, somebody would be into it, and they'd be having a better time than I am, so cheers to them.

The fetishes I will describe here are weird in that they are not normative. They aren't frequently practiced, they aren't commonly talked about. They aren't weird in that people who enjoy these activities are freaks. If your partner has an unusual fetish, 'run, don't walk!' right to the nearest private space and indulge them! Or do it in public, if that's what you're into, but if you get busted, don't tell the cops I gave you permission.

Although there is some debate about the exact origins of fetishes, and certainly every fetish develops differently in every person, I will classify fetishes into four categories, with examples of each.

1. Anal Prolapse and bathtubs of piss--the evolutionary fetishes.

Pornography can't get much more revealing and explicit than showing the inside of a person's body. In order to cultivate prolapsed anuses, fetishists stretch their assholes with toys or fists, practice bearing down with their muscles, and apply suction after intense anal stretching to turn themselves inside out.

On the other side of the human excrement party platter are "boot camps for piss", a 1970s leather culture term for parties where men take turns getting into the bathtub to have the rest of the men piss all over them and in their mouths. The parties work best at bars, because as you can imagine, drinking heavily helps out everybody in this situation.

But why would people want to turn their assholes inside out and drink the piss of dozens of strange men? Frankly, because pissing and shitting feel so damn good.

We're all born confused and helpless. We can't even see straight, let alone study nutrition and physiology, so we just do what feels awesome--we touch our sensitive lips to soft nipples. The sensation is amazing, so we start sucking! Eventually this produces milk, and we gain nourishment--not because we knew milk comes from tits, but because we just enjoyed sucking on them, and amazingly, this kept us alive. Similarly, pissing and shitting can be nearly orgasmic in and of themselves. If shitting felt awful, we would never do it, and we'd poison ourselves within days by keeping in our toxic waste. Sexual function is as primal as eating and shitting--they're all the things that keep us passing on our genes.

Sexual shame is a ubiquitous contributor to sexual fetishes. The more shaming a culture is, the more unusual fetishes develop. In this case, anal and pee play are connected to shame because for a lot of us, our first sexual exploration happens alone in the bathroom. We're fascinated with our "private parts", we feel pleasure when we use the bathroom, we explore, we remain in the bathroom longer than we have to. For some, masturbation intertwines seamlessly--they masturbate while pooping, they develop an interest in their excrement.

This leads me to my next group of fetishes.

2. Nasophilia, Tampons and Tree Rape: Developmental Fetishes

This is probably the largest group of fetishes. Developmental fetishes are basically taught, albeit unknowingly, through association and life experience. Early sexual experiences are hugely influential on our sexual development and lifetime of sexual preferences. Sexual experiences during puberty--when we are experiencing huge peaks in sex hormones--are oftentimes more intense than any we will experience for the rest of our lives.

During these early experiences, while our brains are also developing, we associate certain elements. Like the way pop songs of your childhood bring you back to middle school dances, certain non-sexual stimuli can bring your body back to intense sexual experiences.

The 1981 scene The Evil Dead showed a young woman getting raped by a possessed tree. Depending on who you ask, this scene is either totally hot or extremely disturbing. If you're hitting puberty and feeling irrationally horny anyway, and you're exposed to this scene, it might be the first time you discover masturbation. Without realizing it, many of your future masturbation fantasies will go back to these images. Years later, you might forget all about The Evil Dead, but your mind's eye still fixates on the shape of her thighs or the arch of her back. 20 years later, you walk across a gnarly tree and get an inexpicable hard-on. Developmental association.

This same principle can apply to any object or body part you naively believe has sexual significance. Many men who are kept ignorant about feminine hygiene products and their purpose become particularly entranced with the sight of a tampon. It's phallic, it's mysterious, and it has something to do with the vagina. Do women use it to masturbate? Does this cotton thing turn them on? The thought of women getting turned on is hot, so now they're masturbating to the box of tampons in the bathroom closet.

Pioneer sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld famously described a man with a nose fetish (nasophilia) who was arrested for sexual harassment. He believed women could be penetrated in their nose, and became obsessed with women's nostrils. When he saw a woman with a particularly large nose, he followed her home and wouldn't leave her alone. He didn't lust after noses because he thought they made women better lovers, or because they can realistically provide sexual pleasure. He had a juvenile fascination with a misunderstanding of how sex actually works. Another example of how sexual repression and misinformation can lead to fetishes.

3. Algophilia and Phobophilia: Fetishes from Physiology

Algophilia means you can only derive pleasure from pain and there are many unusual examples, from monks flagellating themselves into erotic trances (for God!), to pacificnorthwesterners using blackberry vines and stinging nettle. Phobophilia is sexual arousal from fear and unusual examples include acrophilia (sex at heights) and what I can only imagine is involved when people go to clown orgies.

In principle, both these things are actually extremely common and arise for the same reason: the physiology of sexual response heavily overlaps with the physiological response of fear and pain. Commonalities include elevated heart rates and blood pressure, sexy breathing, and finer-tuned senses (paying attention to our environment to keep us safe from the murderous clown incidentally makes your nipples hard and sensitive). Put another way, adrenaline creates more testosterone, and testosterone makes us horny.

Try it some time.

4. Dentists: Situational/Fantasy

As a person with soft teeth and a candy addiction, I have a reasonably bad relationship with dentists, so this one freaks me out: Dentist chairs are highly valued fetish items.

Odontophilia, or an attraction to teeth, teeth pulling and/or dentists actually has elements of all of the above categories. For some, dentist fetishes are related to the pain. For others, it is about the mind-altering experience of the nitrous oxide. But for many, the attraction to the dentist has to do with a power dynamic and the opportunity to be out of control.

Especially in people with religious backgrounds, rape or submission fantasies are particularly common--if the dentist decides to drug you and have his way with you, you don't have any control and can't be found guilty by God or your parents.

An attraction to the dentist, thoughts about cavities or getting turned on by dental equipment and the chair can actually be traced back to a fantasy, and the fetish may not be about the objects themselves.

PLEASE NOTE: the prevalence of rape fantasies has no actual correlation to desire to be raped, which so far as I can tell is a 0.00% occurrence. Like I said, for most people, rape fantasies arise out of a need to find sexual fulfillment, and a guilt over those feelings. Even people who engage in rape or submission roleplay or activity are doing so consensually, and all good Dominant/submissive relationships actually give a lot of power to the person on the receiving end.

Fetishes aren't so weird once you stop to think about them. So lighten up and have a little fun!

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This article originally published in the August, 2015 issue of Exotic Magazine.