I’m doubtful there’s more than a smattering of “phthiriophiles” (those attracted to lice) walking among us.Ī fetish is basically a subtype of paraphilia. But it’s also important to remember that, with some of the more exotic paraphilias, there may be just one or two people in the entire world whose sexuality is expressed in that particularly unusual way.

After directing me to a few obscure clinical case studies in the literature (including a piece on “emetophilia,” or erotic vomiting), he indeed confirmed that each named paraphilia in his list had been the subject of either a peer-reviewed, published report or had been otherwise documented by therapists who’d seen such a patient in their private practice. I mean, are there really people out there who experience their most intense orgasms while watching tornadoes (“lilapsophilia”) or who can only become sexually aroused when their partners pretend to be dead (“pseudonecrophilia”)? Early on, I reached out to Aggrawal, asking him as much. Throughout the early to the middle of the twentieth century, when gender relations had become increasingly tense due to an urbanized workforce and the military demands of two world wars, sexologists who objectively studied homosexuality, and who didn’t see it as intrinsically diseased, were likewise accused of trying to normalize this “perversion.”Īnd yes-I was skeptical about many of them too, to say the least. In the pathologically prudish Victorian era, research on women’s sexuality was especially scandalous, since any woman who masturbated or wanted to have sex (in other words, any woman with a pulse) was seen as a “nymphomaniac.” This was a period when overzealous Darwinians were pointing out how human beings share a common ancestor with gorillas and chimpanzees, and so sexuality became even more disturbing to people due of its animalistic connotations.

I’m not sure that there will ever be a last frontier, because the boundaries continually change with shifts in societal attitudes.

Getting in touch with your sexuality