Blog Archives
Can you stomach it? Another look at ‘bellypunching’ for sexual arousal
In a previous blog, I briefly looked at gastergastrizophilia (a sadomasochistic sexual paraphilia in which individuals derive sexual pleasure and arousal from bellypunching). I also noted that I had never seen it listed in any reputable academic source (and that it did not appear in either Dr. Anil Aggrawal’s Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices or Dr. Brenda Love’s Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices). I also wondered whether it really existed. Since writing that blog I’ve had a few people write to me saying that it definitely exists (see the comment section of my previous blog). I also described it as “one of the weirdest sounding sexual paraphilias that I have come across”. Last week I received some feedback from a man who criticized my article on the topic. I always welcome feedback (however critical) so I thought I would use today’s blog to respond to the criticism I received. I have included all the feedback I received along with my responses. Although I have the name and email address of the man who contacted me, I have decided not to use them in this article as he did not give me permission to do so (although if he does, I will update this accordingly).
Gutpuncher: I must admit – coming from a phycologist [sic] – I find that opening statement (“one of the weirdest sounding sexual paraphilias that I have come across”) to be an exceedingly derogatory and leading comment, immediately stamping all that is to follow with a big, bold stigma… That statement is as perverted as it is pejorative. It erroneously throws all who enjoy and practice this fetish into the fringe of lawlessness and make them sexual deviants without ethics or conscience. It’s the insane equivalent of saying, “we have no idea how many people actually engage in sex, because the participants themselves aren’t really sure of what is consent and what is rape.” REALLY?! EVERYONE with whom I have EVER participated in this fetish, myself very much included, has ALWAYS done so with complete and total CONSENT. The only reason we might not so quickly stand up to be counted –– is we’re not so keen on pointed fingers labeling us as “weird.
My response: Obviously I am a psychologist not a ‘phycologist’. But more seriously, what I actually wrote was that it one of the “weirdest sounding” paraphilias. To me, ‘gastergastrizophilia’ does sound weird compared to hundreds of other paraphilias that I have written about. I used the word ‘weird’ as a synonym for ‘strange’ or ‘unusual’. I think ‘Gutpuncher’ interpreted “one of the weirdest sounding paraphilias” as being “one of the weirdest paraphilias” which is somewhat different. Having said that, even if I had written what ‘Gutpuncher’ appears to think I have written, I would still argue that the use of ‘weird’ is a legitimate word to use (and I think most individuals would agree). Also, ‘Gutpuncher’ appears to think that calling an activity “weird” means that the person doing it is ‘weird’ but this is simply not true. I have a number of self-acknowledged weird hobbies (some of which I’ve written about such as being a record collecting completist who will happily pay lots of money for something that I may not even like) but this does not make me (as an individual) weird. The activity and the individual are two distinct things. But I’d just like to reiterate, what I actually wrote was that ‘gastergastrizophilia’ is weird-sounding.
Gutpuncher: Having just come across your article, though, I honestly don’t even know if the true purpose of your blog is to actually “help” anyone with real questions, concerns, or confusion about their own lives or sexuality. After a quick check and realizing that your expertise lies in gaming and gambling addictions, quite possibly your dealing with matters of sexuality here may just be a fun outlet, a way of creating a relaxed, man-of-the-people presence here on the internet, without any real offerings of advice or council – well, other than proclaiming certain things as “weird.”
My response: My blog page clearly states on every article that I have ever published: “Welcome to my blog! If you are interested in addictive, obsessional, compulsive and/or extreme behaviours, you’ve come to the right place”. The primary purpose of my blog is to write about things that I think people might want to read. My aim is not to help people, but if it does, that’s great, but it’s not the primary purpose. ‘Gutpuncher’ says my “expertise lies in gaming and gambling addictions” and that “dealing with matters of sexuality here may just be a fun outlet”. I do indeed have expertise in gambling and gaming addictions as well as in many other behavioural addictions. While gambling and gaming are among my main areas of expertise, I’ve also published over 50 academic papers (as well as many populist articles) on human sexual behaviour including papers on paraphilias (a small selection of which I list in the ‘Further reading’ section below). I think this more than qualifies me to write about human sexual behaviour. Even if I didn’t have expertise in researching sexual behaviour, it still wouldn’t invalidate me from writing about things that interest me (which sex does).
Gutpuncher: I also take great offense at the included quote (though not your own, but presented nonetheless to be considered) that “nobody has any real numbers, in part because the participants themselves don’t know where the line actually divides consent and abuse.”
My response: Any quotes that I use in blogs are fully referenced and are the views of the person writing it. Quotes used may or may not match my own views. This doesn’t mean I can’t use them. The quote came from the Wikipedia entry on ‘bellypunching’ and it’s the only article on the topic that I found when I wrote the article at the time.
Gutpuncher: But still, as a male who (purely from a homoerotic perspective) finds great pleasure in this fetish (known in male form as “Gutpunching” or “ab punching”), and as one who has personally connected with 60+ other males in the flesh who – most definitely – also find arousal in this sexual proclivity, and as someone who has personally witnessed hundreds and hundreds of other males online (through profile-posting websites and video uploads) who also claim this fetish as their own, I wonder why the male perspective has been entirely ignored here? Since this blog post was to give a look, however “brief,” at the subject, that seems to me a rather large omission. Again, quite possibly, this blog may playfully lean toward titillation instead of factual inclusivity, and “gay” stuff may add a whole other unappealing level of “weird.” But, this fetish IS most assuredly both a female and a MALE subject, to be correct.
My response: This is useful anecdotal information from someone who has first-hand experience of the gutpunching community. I wrote my article on gastergastrizophilia in August 2015 (i.e., four years ago). As with all my blogs, I researched the area and referenced everything I was able to locate scientifically and empirically (I found nothing published on any academic database) and anecdotally (i.e., searching online). I referenced everything that I found and only located one article (on Wikipedia) and also found some first-person accounts on the Dark Fetish website, as well as reference to hundreds of bellypunching videos. I didn’t ignore (or deliberately omit) anything and I wrote about what I found. I look forward to you sending me more information so that I can do a follow-up article.
Dr. Mark Griffiths, Distinguished Professor of Behavioural Addiction, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
Further reading
Aggrawal A. (2009). Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices. Boca Raton: CRC Press.
Bőthe, B., Bartók, R., Tóth-Király, I., Reid, R.C., Griffiths, M.D., Demetrovics, Z., Orosz, G. (2018). Hypersexuality, gender, and sexual orientation: A largescale psychometric survey study. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 47, 2265-2276.
Bőthe, B., Kovács, M., Tóth-Király, I., Reid, R.C., Griffiths, M.D., Orosz, G., Demetrovics, Z. (2019). The psychometric properties Hypersexual Behavior Inventory using a large-scale nonclinical sample. Journal of Sex Research, 56, 180-190.
Bőthe, B., Tóth-Király, I., Zsila, Á., Griffiths, M.D., Demetrovics, Z., Orosz, G. (2018). The development of the Problematic Pornography Consumption Scale (PPCS). Journal of Sex Research, 55, 395-406.
Dhuffar, M. & Griffiths, M.D. (2015). A systematic review of online sex addiction and clinical treatments using CONSORT evaluation. Current Addiction Reports, 2, 163-174.
Dhuffar, M. & Griffiths, M.D. (2014). Understanding the role of shame and its consequences in female hypersexual behaviours: A pilot study. Journal of Behavioural Addictions, 3, 231–237.
Dhuffar, M.K. & Griffiths, M.D. (2015). Understanding conceptualisations of female sex addiction and recovery using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Psychology Research, 5, 585-603.
Dhuffar, M., Pontes, H.M. & Griffiths, M.D. (2015). The role of negative mood states and consequences of hypersexual behaviours in predicting hypersexuality among university students. Journal of Behavioural Addictions, 4, 181–188.
Dhuffar, M. & Griffiths, M.D. (2016). Barriers to female sex addiction treatment in the UK. Journal of Behavioural Addictions, 5, 562–567.
Fernandez, D. & Griffiths, M.D. (2019). Psychometric instruments for problematic pornography use: A systematic review. Evaluation and the Health Professions. Epub ahead of print, doi: 10.1177/0163278719861688
Greenhill, R. & Griffiths, M.D. (2015). Compassion, dominance/submission, and curled lips: A thematic analysis of dacryphilic experience. International Journal of Sexual Health, 27, 337-350.
Greenhill, R. & Griffiths, M.D. (2016). Sexual interest as performance, intellect and pathological dilemma: A critical discursive case study of dacryphilia. Psychology and Sexuality, 7, 265-278.
Griffiths, M.D. (1999). Dying for it: Autoerotic deaths. Bizarre, 24, 62-65.
Griffiths, M.D. (2000). Excessive internet use: Implications for sexual behavior. CyberPsychology and Behavior, 3, 537-552.
Griffiths, M.D. (2001). Sex on the internet: Observations and implications for sex addiction. Journal of Sex Research, 38, 333-342.
Griffiths, M.D. (2001). Stumped! Amputee fetishes. Bizarre, 44, 70-74.
Griffiths, M.D. (2010). Addicted to sex? Psychology Review, 16(1), 27-29.
Griffiths, M.D. (2012). The use of online methodologies in studying paraphilias: A review. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 1, 143-150.
Griffiths, M.D. (2013). Eproctophilia in a young adult male: A case study. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 42, 1383-1386.
Griffiths, M.D. (2019). Paraphilias and the press – Don’t always believe what you read. Medical Journal Armed Forces India, 75, 232-233.
Griffiths, M.D. (2019). Salirophilia and other co-occurring paraphilias in a middle-aged male: A case study. Journal of Concurrent Disorders, 1(2), 1-8.
Griffiths, M.D. & Dhuffar, M. (2014). Treatment of sexual addiction within the British National Health Service. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 12, 561-571.
The Full Wiki (2013). Bellypunching. Located at: http://www.thefullwiki.org/Bellypunching
Love, B. (2001). Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices. London: Greenwich Editions.
Van Gordon, W., Shonin, E., & Griffiths, M.D. (2016). Meditation Awareness Training for the treatment of sex addiction: A case study. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 5, 363–372.
Farm assist? A brief look at ‘tractor sex’
One of my good friends, Dr. Mike Sutton, recently sent me a story he’d come across with the headline “Suffolk man had sex with 450 tractors”. Given my academic interest in paraphilias and fetishism, I decided to try and track down the original source of the story and found that it was first published by the Suffolk Gazette back in 2015. According to the news report:
“Ralph Bishop, 53, was found by police with his trousers around his ankles “interfering” with a tractor parked in a field outside Saxmundham. He was arrested on suspicion of outraging public decency, and admitted to having had sex with around 450 tractors all over the Suffolk countryside. When officers searched his terraced home they found a collection of more than 5,000 tractor images on his laptop. The photos showed Bishop had a special desire for John Deere and Massey Ferguson tractors, particularly green ones. A police insider said: “We couldn’t believe it when we found him in the field. He was wearing a white t-shirt and Wellington boots and very little else. He was clearly in state of high excitement at the rear of the machine. Thankfully nobody else was around, but the field is close to a village primary school so we had to arrest him and educate him about the error of his ways. He told us he was particularly ‘in to’ axle grease and the presence of this around the back of tractors was all too much for him.” Bishop, twice divorced, was released without charge on condition he sought psychological help. He was put on the sex-offenders’ register. “He is also banned from the countryside and is now forbidden to go within one mile of a farm,” the police insider added. “So he has to live and remain in the middle of Ipswich to comply with that. However, we are watching him because we are worried about the safety of several street-cleaning machines.” Another policeman added: “He’ll also need to keep away from the town’s gardens – if he takes a fancy to a lawn mower he might find he loses more than just his liberty.”
Since the publication of this story, it has been re-reported dozens of times including the Daily Star and has even had follow-up stories (also in the Suffolk Gazette) – just type in the words ‘Ralph Bishop’ and ‘tractor’ and you’ll see what I am referring to. Given that I have written a number of articles on what has been termed ‘objectum sexuality’ (involving individuals who have sexual relationships with cars, trains, and bicycles) I wouldn’t have been overly surprised to hear of such a story, but the story is a hoax. My suspicions were raised by some of the alleged quotes from the nameless police officers in the story but the real clue to the story being a hoax (along with the follow-up stories) was that these stories were written by a ‘Crime correspondent’ called ‘Hugh Dunnett’ (‘whodunit’).
Despite the story being a hoax I decided to see if there were any real examples of ‘tractor sex’. A quick bit of Googling demonstrated that there is certainly a niche market for pornographic videos featuring individuals having sex in tractors including Porn Hub and elsewhere (please be warned that clicking on these links leads directly to sexually explicit material). I also found the occasional admission in online forums of individuals who had sexual fantasies concerning tractors but these appeared to be nothing more than isolated dreams rather than being a fetish that was enacted. I also discovered that there is a sexual practice colloquially known as a ‘Kentucky Tractor Puller’. According to online sources, the description is as follows:
“The act of a male and a male or male and a female preforming anal sex. During sex the receiver clenches their butt-cheeks tightly and runs with the penis still in the buttocks”.
I then went onto Google Scholar, and a just published 2018 paper appeared after I had typed in the words ‘tractor sex’. A paper in the journal Medical Journal Armed Forces India by Antonio Ventriglio and colleagues entitled ‘Sexuality in the 21st century: Leather or rubber? Fetishism explained’. Unfortunately, I was disappointed by what I found. In the very first paragraph of the paper, the authors repeated the hoax story:
“In the UK, in early October 2015, a man was arrested for having had sex with 450 tractors. According to the news report, he was found to have over 5000 tractor images on his laptop. He had a special desire for John Deere and Massey Ferguson tractors, particularly the green ones. He was into axle grease, which apparently turned him on sexually. He was placed on the Sexual Offenders’ Register”.
Although academics (including myself) can be fooled by hoaxes, the authors of the paper clearly didn’t even check out the original source. In fact, the authors cited the article that appeared in the Daily Star but if they had continued to read the story to the very end, they would have seen the fact that even the newspaper believed the story to be a hoax.
I then found a 2016 paper by Brian Holoyda and William Newman in the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry entitled ‘Childhood animal cruelty, bestiality, and the link to adult interpersonal violence’. I knew the word ‘tractor’ appeared in the paper but I had no idea in what context. I emailed Dr. Holoyda who sent me the paper. I had been expecting to read that there was some kind of bestial act relating to a tractor but this wasn’t the case. It cited a paper published in a 1963 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry by Dr. John Macdonald which related sadistic acts by a farmer (the so-called ‘homocidal triad‘) towards animals:
“Macdonald described some patients who were “very sadistic,” including one patient who “derived satisfaction from telling his wife again and again of an incident in which he assisted in the birth of a calf by hitching the cow to a post and tying a rope from the presenting legs of the calf to his tractor,” the result being that he “gunned the motor and eviscerated the cow” (p. 126). He claimed that “in the very sadistic patients, the triad of childhood cruelty to animals, fire setting and enuresis was often encountered” (p. 126–127), though he never explicitly stated how many patients had a history of these comorbid behaviors. Macdonald reported that within six months of his study, two patients killed a person, neither of whom he identified as having a history of animal cruelty (or enuresis or fire setting, for that matter), and that one patient with schizophrenia committed suicide”.
I ought to add that bestial acts by farmers is not uncommon. The Kinsey Reports (of 1948 and 1953) arguably shocked its readers when it reported that 8% of males and 4% females had at least one sexual experience with an animal. As with necrophiliacs who are often employed in jobs that provide regular contact with dead people, the Kinsey Reports provided much higher prevalence for zoophilic acts among those who worked on farms (for instance, 17% males who had worked on farms had experienced an orgasmic episode involving animals). A more recent reference by Dr. Anil Aggrawal outlining his new typology for zoophilia (which I overviewed in a previous blog) noted the cases of what he described as opportunistic zoosexuals who have normal sexual encounters but who Aggrawal argued would not refrain from having sexual intercourse with animals if the opportunity arose. Aggrawal claims that such behaviour occurs most often in incarcerated or stranded persons, or when the person sees an opportunity to have sex with an animal when they are sure no-one else is present (e.g., farmhands). Aggrawal claims that opportunistic zoosexuals have no emotional attachment to animals despite having sex with them.
Thankfully, I did manage to locate one paper in the academic literature where tractors were inextricably linked with paraphilic behaviour. In 1993, a paper by P.E. Dietz and R.L. O’Halloran entitled ‘Autoerotic fatalities with power hydraulics’ published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. They reported two case studies of men who used “the hydraulic shovels on tractors to suspend themselves for masochistic sexual stimulation”. One of the men was an objectophile (although the authors didn’t call him that – I am using Dr. Amy Marsh’s definition in a 2010 paper on objectum sexuality in the Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality to classify him as such). This man actually developed a romantic attachment to his tractor, and went as far as giving his tractor a name and writing poetry about it. Unfortunately, the man “died accidentally while intentionally asphyxiating himself through suspension by the neck, leaving clues that he enjoyed perceptual distortions during asphyxiation”.
The second case was a man who was found dead in a barn lying on his front pinned under the hydraulic shovel of his tractor. His body was covered with semen stains and there was evidence of masochistic sexual bondage. His clothes were folded neatly away nearby. He was found naked except for a pair of women’s red shoes (with 8 inch heels), knee high stockings and tape duct wrapped around his ankles. Ropes led from his feet to the tractor which when raised would lift his inverted body causing complete suspension. It is not known exactly what happened but it is likely that the engine stalled and he was crushed underneath the tractor shovel. He died of positional asphyxiation by chest compression. This was an atypical autoerotic fatality because he did not purposely use asphyxiation but it did cause his death.
Dr. Mark Griffiths, Distinguished Professor of Behavioural Addiction, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
Further reading
Aggrawal A. (2009). Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices. Boca Raton: CRC Press.
Aggrawal, A. (2011). A new classification of zoophilia. Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, 18, 73-78.
Dietz, P. E., & O’Halloran, R.L. (1993). Autoerotic fatalities with power hydraulics. Journal of Forensic Science, 38(2), 359-364.
“Dunnett, H.” (2015). Suffolk man ‘had sex with 450 tractors’. Suffolk Gazette. Located at: https://www.suffolkgazette.com/news/suffolk-man-sex-with-tractors/
Holoyda, B. J., & Newman, W. J. (2016). Childhood animal cruelty, bestiality, and the link to adult interpersonal violence. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 47, 129-135.
Kinsey, A. C., Pomeroy, W. B., Martin, C.E., Gebhard, P.H. (1953). Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Philadelphia, PA: W.B. Saunders Company.
Kinsey, A. C., Pomeroy, W. B., Martin, C.E., (1948). Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia, PA: W.B. Saunders Company.
Love, B. (2001). Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices. London: Greenwich Editions.
Macdonald, J. M. (1963). The threat to kill. American Journal of Psychiatry, 120(2), 125-130.
Marsh, A. (2010). Love among the objectum sexuals. Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality, 13, March 1. Located at: http://www.ejhs.org/volume13/ObjSexuals.htm
Rawle, T. (2015). Perv who romped with 450 TRACTORS caught with 5,000 racy pics of farming vehicles. Daily Star, October 21. Located at: https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/471306/Pervert-tractor-sex-fetish-farm-vehicles-arrested
Ventriglio, A., Bhat, P. S., Torales, J., & Bhugra, D. (2018). Sexuality in the 21st century: Leather or rubber? Fetishism explained. Medical Journal Armed Forces India. Epub ahead of print. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mjafi.2018.09.009
Paint what you do, it’s the way that you do it: The (not so) secret sex life of Salvador Dali
In a previous blog, I briefly overviewed the influence that the Catalonian surrealist artist Salvador Dali had made on psychology (based on a couple of articles I had published about him earlier in my academic career – see ‘Further reading’ below). In that blog I briefly mentioned some of the strange aspects in his life relating to his sexuality and sexual desires but did not go into any details. In this article, I delve a little deeper into Dali’s sexual psychology and concentrate on some of the more extreme aspects of his life. I’m certainly not the first person to do this given that there are various online articles covering similar ground such as ‘Five sadistic and depraved secrets of Salvador Dali’, ‘10 depraved secrets of Salvador Dali’, and ‘17 unbelievably weird stories most people don’t know about Salvador Dali’. In a nutshell (and if you believe everything you read about him), Dali didn’t like sexual intercourse, was ‘addicted to masturbation’, was a sexual voyeur, was obsessed by buttocks, had an interest in necrophilia, was sexually attracted to Adolf Hitler and hermaphrodites, and was a candaulist (i.e., he liked to watch his wife have sex with other men).
The first observation to make concerning Dali is that he had little interest in sexual intercourse. All Dali’s biographers make reference to this because this was something that Dali admitted himself (for instance in his book The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali). In Ian Gibson’s (1998) biography The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali, it notes that Dali had been fixated on his unusually complex sexuality since his teenage years. Dali wrote that:
”For a long time I experienced the misery of believing I was impotent…Naked, and comparing myself to my schoolfriends, I discovered that my penis was small, pitiful and soft. I can recall a pornographic novel whose Don Juan machine-gunned female genitals with ferocious glee, saying that he enjoyed hearing women creak like watermelons. I convinced myself that I would never be able to make a woman creak like a watermelon”.
It was in his teenage years that Dali acquainted himself with the pleasures of masturbation even though he had a fear that it would cause homosexuality, impotence, and madness. However, sexual self-gratification became his primary (and many biographers allege only) sexual activity he engaged in throughout his life, often in front of a mirror. It’s also been noted by many authors that Dali “associated sex with decay” and that the roots of this association were due to his father’s strange form of sex education (such as being shown sexually explicit photographs of individuals with advanced, untreated sexually transmitted infections that Dali described as “the color of hell”). After viewing the pictures of grotesque genitalia, Dali started to associate sexual activity with decay and putrefaction (which came to the fore in his paintings). In his 1942 autobiography (The Secret Life of Salvador Dali) he even claimed that he became interested in necrophilia but was then later “cured” of it (but to what level his interest spanned is unknown). Dali had many obsessions including a deep fascination of buttocks (both men’s and women’s) as well as many phobias including female genitalia and a fear of castration (and appears to be the basis of his infamous painting The Great Masturbator). As a 2014 article by Jackie Fuchs noted:
“These fears and obsessions – along with a lifelong fascination with ants – became recurrent motifs in his paintings. In ‘The Great Masturbator’, Dali’s first significant work, a woman believed to be Dali’s future wife Gala rises out of a downward-facing head, which is suspended over a locust swarming with ants. The positioning of the woman’s mouth next to a thinly clad male crotch suggests fellatio, while the trickle of blood on the male figure’s thighs reflects Dali’s castration anxiety (see below)”.
A 2011 online article in Living in Philistia by Joshua White makes other allegations about Dali’s early childhood saying that he might have been sexually abused by one of his schoolteachers and that he might have had an incestuous relationship with his sister (although I’ve found little evidence of these allegations):
“[Dali] later pinned his ‘impotence’ on his father, as well as his mother, and naturally Dali went on to fantasise of sodomising his dying father. This also might explain the direct kind of gynophobia Dali later developed. It has been suggested that he was molested by a teacher who used to have Dali sit on his lap while he stroked him. That would explain the artist’s lifelong hatred of being touched. The subject of twelve of his early paintings was Dali’s sister Ana Maria, a number of which tellingly depict her from the rear, which has led some to conclude that the relationship between them may have been incestuous. The sex life of Salvador Dali was not a common one to say the least”.
An online article by Mateo Sol also alluded to Dali’s poor relationship with his parents. On one occasion Dali exhibited an artwork in which he wrote “Sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother’s portrait.” His father asked him to publicly apologise but Dali declined to do so. Following this incident, Dali sent his father a condom in the post (into which he had added his own semen) with a short note that simply read: “This is all I owe you”.
Dali’s wife and muse Gala (born in Russia as Helena Diakanoff Devulina) appears to have dominated Dali from their first meeting in 1929 (figuratively, psychologically, and arguably sexually given that almost no physical intimacy took place between Dali and Gala). It’s also generally agreed among scholars that Dali was a virgin when he married Gala (at least heterosexually) and they remained married for 53 years until Gala’s death. Gala was ten years older than Dali and had many sexual conquests before they married. Gala might perhaps best be described as a ‘swinger’, and at the time she met Dali was married to Paul Éluard (the poet) who both adhered to the sexual philosophy of ‘free love’.
Many biographers describe Gala as a highly-sexed nymphomaniac. Éluard and Gala were constantly sexually unfaithful to each other and (according to some accounts) encouraged each other’s infidelity. Gibson’s biography recounted Dali and Gala’s ‘mutual degradation’ of each other and Dali became some who tolerated all her extra-marital lovers. According to Zuzanna Stranska in a 2017 article in the Daily Art Magazine, Dali bought Gala a castle in Púbol (Girona) in 1968, but Dali was not allowed to visit without Gala’s written permission (and described in Joshua White’s article as Gala’s “fuck-nest” rather than a ‘love-nest’). It was here that Gala entertained her younger lovers.
It’s also been claimed that Dali had a homosexual relationship with poet Federico García Lorca (but has never been verified). It’s been alleged by a number of authors that Lorca twice tried to seduce Dali (and Dali said “Lorca tried to screw me twice”). Lorca was shocked when Dali married Gala because (according to a 2009 paper in the PsyArt Journal by Zoltán Kováry) “he was convinced that the painter had erection only with a finger in his anus”. Although Dali claims never to have had a relationship with Lorca, it appears they did have one sexual liaison because Dali wrote that: “I tried sex once with a woman and it was Gala. It was overrated. I tried sex once with a man and that man was the famous juggler Frederico Garcia Lorca. It was very painful”. Dali also wrote that:
“Deep down I felt that [Lorca] was a great poet and that I owe him a tiny bit of the Divine Dali’s asshole. He eventually bagged a young girl, and she replaced me in the sacrifice. Failing to get me to put my ass at his disposal, he swore that the girl’s sacrifice was matched by his own: it was the first time he had ever slept with a woman”.
According to the article by Joshua White, Dali was arguably more homosexual than heterosexual. He claimed that:
“[Dali] developed a penchant for persuading youths to drop their trousers and masturbate as he watched. He hoarded thousands of photos with many different lads. There has been a long speculation over the exact sexuality of the exhibitionist painter. We might be able to trace the misogynistic, or more accurately gynophobic, tendencies of Dalinian art down to Dali’s fear of a particular part of the female anatomy. To put it more bluntly, Salvador Dalí was a self-professed worshiper of the female posterior. The extent of this obsession drew the concern of his fellow Surrealists, he denied he was coprophagic one minute and in the next instance would state ‘true love would be to eat one’s partner’s excrement.’ Perhaps we should keep in mind that the Catalonians are a very scatological people, for it is custom before eating to exclaim “Eat well, shit hard.” The specific preference he had was for hermaphrodites, which he never encountered and only ever fantasised about. Not masculine or feminine, androgyne was the order of the day”.
Consequently, masturbation became Dali’s only physical sexual activity throughout his life. While this might be psychologically devastating for most people, his sexual psyche, tortured sexuality, and sexual inadequacy are critical to understanding the great art he produced. It certainly appears he had a great fascination with masturbation. For instance, Brian Sewell, the British art historian, claimed that Dali once asked him strip naked, lie down in the foetal position, and masturbate in front of a sculpture of Christ. Dali’s voyeuristic tendencies have also documented by others, most notably the alleged weekly orgies that Dali used to host which not only catered for Dali’s love of voyeurism but also his candaulism (where he would enjoy other men having sex with his wife). The most infamous story was told by American singer and actress Cher who arrived at Dali’s apartment mid-orgy. She picked up “a beautiful, painted rubber fish. Just fabulous. It has this little remote-control handset, and I’m playing with it, and the tail is going back and forth, and I’m thinking it’s a child’s toy. So I said to Salvador: ‘This is really funny.’ And he said: ‘It’s wonderful when you place it on your clitoris’”.
It has also been claimed that Dali had a perverse obsession with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. Most individuals in the surrealist movement were politically left-wing but Dali was expelled for being a Nazi sympathiser (an allegation that Dali strenuously denied). Whether he was a Nazi sympathiser or not, Dali definitely painted a number of artworks featuring the ‘great dictator’ including The Enigma of Hitler and Hitler Masturbating. In his book (The Unspeakable Confessions) Dali also said that he “often dreamed of Hitler as a woman” and that Hitler “turned [him] on in the highest…His fat back, especially when I saw him appear in the uniform with the Sam Browne belt and shoulder straps that tightly held in his flesh, aroused in me a delicious gustatory thrill originating in the mouth and affording me a Wagnerian ecstasy”. An online article by Stephan Roget notes that there’s a good chance that Dali said such things for shock value, but also notes that Dali didn’t appear to have problems with what the Fuhrer was doing in Nazi Germany.
Most Dali scholars believe he was a sexual voyeur and derived great sexual arousal from watching other people (including his wife) have sex. According to the article by Jackie Fuchs:
“[Dali] was attracted to androgynous bodies – women with small breasts and men having feminine lines. Dali wrote of his ‘penetrating voyeur experiences’ during childhood and even titled one of his early paintings ‘Voyeur’.”
Joshua White also noted that:
“Originally [Dali’s] art served as a vent for the eccentricities, fetishes and obsessions that lurked beneath the surface of a shy Catalonian boy. But as he crafted a persona through which he could express these same things with almost the same level of impunity, then the standard of his art went into a steep decline in his later years. The sexual ambiguity, explicit paraphilia and vivid androgyny found so exuberant in Dalinian artwork…The 20th Century leitmotifs of sex and paranoia are conjoined twins in Dali’s work…We find some of the worst nightmares of the 20th Century conjured up by the more sinister works he churned out, while the juxtaposition with sex introduces a sadomasochistic element into the situations portrayed”
Perhaps the best (or worst, depending upon your viewpoint) eye-opener concerning Dali’s alleged sex life was a book first published in 2000 by former dancer and (struggling) actor Carlos Lozano entitled Sex, Surrealism, Dali and Me (and translated into English by Clifford Thurlow; a reprinting of the book in 2004 with new material was published by Thurlow as The Sex Life of Salvador Dali: The Memoirs of Carlos Lozano). Given that Dali had been dead over a decade by the time this book was published it’s hard for any of the stories to be substantiated (particularly as Lozano died shortly after the book was published). After starting out as one of Dali’s nude models, Lozano claimed he became Dali’s young lover and was Dali’s main confidante in the last two decades of his life. Among the book’s revelations were that Dali: (i) orchestrated sex games for his celebrity guests (including the King of Spain, the artist Marcel Duchamp, actor Yul Brynner, and Prince Dado Ruspoli), (ii) was obsessed with humiliating friends for his own amusement and sexual gratification (such as forcing them to strip and then getting them to engage in sexual acts of his choosing) while he masturbated from the side lines, and (iii) forced a famous Hollywood actress to strip naked and crawl through a plastic ‘uterus’ to allow her to re-experience birth.
It is clear from reading about Dali’s various (s)exploits that his sexual behaviour and sexuality were extreme but that much of his early great art derived from his strange sexual psyche. While some of the alleged sexual behaviours may have been embellished over the years, all of the allegations appear to have some truth in them. Many may argue that Dali’s sex life (or absence of it) was as surreal as his paintings, but none of this takes away from the fact that his art is awe-inspiring to many (myself included).
Dr. Mark Griffiths, Distinguished Professor of Behavioural Addiction, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
Further reading
Brennan, A. (2016). 11 seriously strange things you didn’t know about Salvador Dali. GQ, May 11. Located at: https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/salvador-dali-facts
Dali, S. (1942). The Secret Life of Salvador Dali. Dial Press.
Dali, S. (1976). The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali. New York: W.H. Allen.
Fuchs, J. (2014). 10 depraved secrets of Salvador Dali. Listverse, May 26. Located at: http://listverse.com/2014/05/26/10-depraved-secrets-of-salvador-dali/
Gibson, I. (1998). The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali. New York: WW Norton & Company.
Griffiths, M.D. (1989). Salvador Dali and psychology. BPS History and Philosophy Newsletter, 9, 14-17.
Griffiths, M.D. (1989). Salvador Dali, surrealism and psychology. Psychology PAG Quarterly, 4, 15-17.
Griffiths, M.D. (1994). Heroes: Salvador Dali. The Psychologist: Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, 7, 240.
Kovary, Z. (2009). The enigma of desire: Salvador Dalí and the conquest of the irrational. PsyArt Journal, June 29. Located at: http://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/kovry-the_enigma_of_desire_salvador_dal_and_th
Lopez, A. I. (2016). Five sadistic and depraved secrets of Salvador Dalí. Cultura Colectivia, August 22. Located at: https://culturacolectiva.com/design/the-sadistic-and-depraved-salvador-dali-secrets/
Maclean, A. (2016). Your ultimate guide to Salvador Dali. Dazed, September 27. Located at: http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/32985/1/your-ultimate-guide-to-salvador-dali
Roget, S. (no date). 17 unbelievably weird stories most people don’t know about Salvador Dali. Ranker. Located at: https://www.ranker.com/list/crazy-salvador-dali-facts/stephanroget
Stranska, Z. (2017). Dali and Gala – the love story. Daily Art Magazine, February 14. Located at: http://www.dailyartmagazine.com/dali-gala-great-love-story/
Sol, M. (2013). 7 eccentric things you didn’t know about Salvador Dali. Loner Wolf. Located at: https://lonerwolf.com/salvador-dali/
Thorpe, V. (2000). Hollywood, sex and the surrealist. The Guardian, February 20. Located at: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/feb/20/vanessathorpe.theobserver
Thurlow, C. (2004). The Sex Life of Salvador Dali: The Memoirs of Carlos Lozano. Tethered Camel Publishing.
White, J. (2011). The divine anus of Salvador Dali. Living in Philistia, August 5. Located at: http://livinginphilistia.blogspot.com/2011/08/divine-anus-of-salvador-dali.html
Cattle-star gallactica: A brief look at ‘hucow’ fetishism
According to the online Urban Dictionary, a ‘hucow’ (a portmanteau of ‘human cow’) is “a woman who chooses to be objectified for her large mammaries and ability to lactate constantly”. It also features ‘human cow’ separately and defines it as “a lactating female who allows herself to have her jugs [breasts] hooked up to a cow milking machine, usually wearing a cow mask and cow print leather chaps”. In the writing of my previous blogs on lactation fetishes and furries, I had come across ‘hucow’ fetishism but at the time there was little on which to write about. A few weeks ago, I was interviewed by Mark Hay of Vice magazine who wanted my views about the behaviour so this provided a spur for me to write this article. There is obviously nothing in the academic literature concerning the phenomenon (and to be honest, little anywhere else). A small article on the Kinkly website makes the following observations:
“A hucow is a submissive person, usually a woman, who enjoys participating in forced lactation. A hucow’s breasts are milked by a dominant partner, usually a man, as a real cow is milked by a farmer. Milking techniques can vary…A dominant partner may use a variety of techniques to milk a hucow. They may milk her by hand, by suckling her breasts with their mouth, or by using a breast pump. Some hucows and their partners stick to one preferred technique while others like to mix things up. Some people become hucows following childbirth, when they are lactating naturally. Others bring on lactation using a variety of techniques including using a breast pump, manual stimulation, suckling, and taking supplements including fenugreek powder”.
It’s hard to know where the person writing this article got their information although my own viewing of online hucow videos confirm much of what is claimed above although it’s questionable whether the women in such videos “enjoy” what they are doing because they may just be doing it for money. The article goes on to say:
“Hucows enjoy being cared for like a pet because it takes them away from their regular lives with adult responsibilities. The breast stimulation that comes with lactating is also very sensual. Men with hucows enjoy the dominance and power that comes from their role in the forced lactation. When women lactate, their breasts increase in size, which is also a real perk for many men. Some men also have breastfeeding fetishes and lactation fetishes that their hucows can satisfy. As with many alternative lifestyles, there are communities for hucows and erotic fiction and videos focused on their activities. Several erotic writers and bloggers focus their works on hucows. Their writing might include fictional accounts and scenarios or non-fiction posts about their own experiences as a hucow. Hucows are also represented on niche dating websites, including Fetlife, and social media platforms like Reddit and Tumblr”.
Again, some of this I’ve confirmed for myself as I found many examples of hucow fan fiction online as well as many porn sites catering for hucow fetishism. Another short article on the Manic Love website was written after its anonymous author was reading through the personal ads on Craig’s List and came across a personal ad that “depicted a cow milking machine on a woman and turned into someone’s personal hucow”. They wrote that:
“As you can imagine, a hucow is a woman pantomiming the experiences of a dairy cow. These particular women’s vaginas gush at the thought of having a slave collar put on their neck and having a milking machine hooked up to their nipples for hours at a time. Another facet of this fetish is the concept of breeding the hucows by the hucow milker. This is when the hucows partner (the Bull) mounts her and begins to [have sex with her]. All the while this lovely faux bovine is attached to an industrial device that is collecting her milk from the opened faucets of her [breasts]. The hucow fetish is a marvellous fusion of BDSM and lactation kinks”.
Again, how the writer knows the women involved like such activity is unknown. The author found a personal testimony from a hucow (a “baby-faced blonde with a curvy figure” called ‘Kate’) who described her hucow experiences:
“Once lactation had been induced on Katie the milking began. At first she used a simple breast pump to wring her mammary glands dry, but once Katie was used to the sensation of the pump she graduated to a milking machine that would be at home on a dairy farm. Katie related the sensation she felt while being milked…At first it was uncomfortable but the feeling grew on our dear Katie and before long she loved being a hucow. With the machine being attached to Katie’s nipples for hours she described how her nipples were becoming elongated – all the better for suckling… not only was her milking erotic but it also gave her a sensation of relief. Whenever a milking session was occurring Katie was always restrained; whether handcuffed to a rack or wearing a slave collar…Once the Bull [has sex with] Katie they begin to treat each other like true animals. They begin to rut like they belong on a farm”.
I was contacted by Mark Hay (with whom I’ve done various interviews in the past including ones on sea monster pornography, giantess pornography) who knew I’d written about lactation fetishes in my blog in the past. He asked me if I had ever come across hucow fetishes where “individuals fantasize about or play out scenes in which (usually) men treat (usually) women as livestock, forcibly milking them. Sometimes the women dress up like cows”. I told him that I had but that I’d never written about it. I told him that from a definitional perspective, ‘hucow’ fetishes were originally was the same thing as lactation fetishes. However, I told him that hucow fetishes now appeared to have expanded to include women dressing and/or acting like cows in which the milking was at the core of the fetish. I went on to say that this was not a type of furryism (where individuals dress up as animals and often have sex with other as animals) but was more akin to ‘pony play‘ because both ‘ponyplay’ and ‘hucow’ tend to have women in submissive modes and both have the animals’ most well-known type of behaviour at the heart of the fetish (i.e., milking in cows and riding/equestrianism in horses).
I was aware that there is a big niche market for this type of porn (even on mainstream porn sites like Pornhub). He was interested to hear that I thought the fetish had evolved and asked me (i) when, how, or why that might have happened, and (ii) whether I thought the fetish was especially visible, accessible, or common, and what that might say about the audience for it and the scale of its appeal. I have to admit I hadn’t many answers for these questions. I also had to clarify that I didn’t say the fetish had evolved but the definition of hucow had evolved (in my view, a subtle but important distinction). I believe the internet itself has played a major role in the dispersal of material that individuals can fetishise and hucow appears to be one of them. Most fetishes appear to have sub-divisions and at the edges they sometimes cross over into completely different fetishes. Hucow fetishism clearly has crossovers with lactation fetishism, pregnancy fetishism, infantilism/diaper fetishism (adults dressing up as a baby), transformation fetishism, and sadomasochism/BDSM, as well as having similarities with furries and ponyplay. Personally, I don’t believe it’s a common fetish because individuals have to go looking for it (as I did in researching this article).
Within five minutes of searching on the internet I located dedicated hucow porn (including material at sites including Pornhub, Heavy-R, Xvideos) as well as bespoke hucow fiction (Kobo, Literotica, and Amazon) and fantasy art (on Deviant Art). Hay’s article in Vice reported that the hucow Tumblr site has over 10,000 followers and that the hucow Reddit site has over 23,000 subscribers. Hay interviewed ‘Ed’, the person that runs the hucows.com website. According to Hay:
“[Ed] says his fans seem most excited by women being milked than anything else in his clips. Ditto Sally Anon, an amateur lactation fetish producer, who first encountered HuCow fetishists on lactophilia Reddit communities, who asked her to cross-post to their groups even though she didn’t dress up or act like a cow in the content she produced”.
In addition to interviewing me for the article. Hay also interviewed the ethicist Rebecca Kukla who has written about cultural perceptions of breastfeeding and made some interesting observations. She was quoted as saying:
“Lactation, of course, leads to increased breast size, which explains its appeal to some. Some women enjoy the breast stimulation of milking, so such fetishes are likely to be more about reciprocal pleasure than many others. Consuming breast milk plays into a common kinky urge to be infantilized. Perhaps most importantly, sexualizing something culturally asexual is an appealing form of transgression and re-appropriation. Many kinksters get erotic pleasure from playing at what they fear most, or find most violating of the proper order…[However] cows aren’t only good for milk production. They are the ultimate animals produced specifically for consumption, bred into highly artificial-looking consumer products. In HuCow, the cow-woman is simulating an object produced specifically to be consumed by her partner”.
This concurs with what I have written myself about why dominant and submissive types may enjoy hucow fetishism. As noted in my previous blogs, animal play in general often toys with transforming a complex human into a wholly service-oriented beast. Hay then goes on to say:
“As with many hard submissive fetishes, this may sound terrifying to those looking in from the outside. But even on their own fetishist-facing blogs, HuCow practitioners often acknowledge this is a well-negotiated fantasy, ideally built on mutual respect and desire in participants’ wider lives”.
Hay also quotes Sunny Megatron, an “adult sexuality educator and pleasure advocate” who asserts:
“Remember this is just fantasy role play where turning humans into fantasy cattle is fetishized. And just like any other kind of BDSM or fetish play, this is carefully negotiated by all participants and done consensually. Treating a woman – or anybody – as just a mere object is very wrong if it’s done without their consent. But if objectification is mutually desired by both partners, they’ve thoroughly and clearly talked about it ahead of time and then they play it out in a healthy fun fantasy sense, then that’s different…When BDSM scenes are negotiated they are done so according to the desires and limits of the submissive. The submissive calls the shots”.
As I know from my own empirical studies on eproctophilia (sexual arousal from flatulence) and dacryphilia (sexual arousal from crying), even within very niche fetishes, many sub-types start to develop and cross-fertilise with other more established fetishes and paraphilias, and hucow fetishism appears to be another niche sexual behaviour that (with the help of the internet) is continuing to evolve.
Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Behavioural Addiction, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
Further reading
Good Reads (2014). Definition of a Hucow. Goodreads.com, October 3. Located at: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/7114274-definition-of-a-hucow
Greenhill, R. & Griffiths, M.D. (2015). Compassion, dominance/submission, and curled lips: A thematic analysis of dacryphilic experience. International Journal of Sexual Health, 27, 337-350.
Greenhill, R. & Griffiths, M.D. (2016). Sexual interest as performance, intellect and pathological dilemma: A critical discursive case study of dacryphilia. Psychology and Sexuality, 7, 265-278.
Griffiths, M.D. (2012). The use of online methodologies in studying paraphilias: A review. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 1, 143-150.
Griffiths, M.D. (2013). Eproctophilia in a young adult male: A case study. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 42, 1383-1386.
Hay, M. (2018). Inside HuCow, the fetish that imagines women as cows. Vice, April 24. Located at: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3599y/inside-hucow-the-fetish-that-imagines-women-as-cows
Kinkly (2018). Kinkly explains Hucow. Kinkly.com. Located at: https://www.kinkly.com/definition/15836/hucow
Manic Love (2017). Learn about hucows. October 12. Located at: https://maniclove.com/free-blog/hucows
Seedy CD*: A psychologist’s look at the music of Soft Cell
In a previous blog on examining all Adam Ant’s songs about sexual paraphilias, I noted that Soft Cell are probably the only other recording artists who come close to talking about the seedier side of sex. They are also artists that (like one of my other favourite bands, Throbbing Gristle) have never been afraid to sing about taboo topics including prostitution (‘Secret Life’, A Divided Soul’), a housewife’s sexual fantasy about the paper boy (‘Kitchen Sink Drama’), pure hedonism (‘Sensation Nation’), alternative therapies such as colonic irrigation, meditation, and crystal therapy (‘Whatever It Takes’), murder (‘The Best Way To Kill’, ‘Meet Murder My Angel’), suicide (‘Darker Times’, ‘Frustration’ and ‘Down In The Subway’ – “Jump on that train track and die”), incest (‘I Am 16’), psychopathic killers (‘Martin’ based on the story of a serial killer in a film of the same name), shopaholism (‘Whatever It Takes’), anorexia nervosa (‘Excretory Eat Anorexia’), and obsessional cleansing (‘Cleansing Fanatic’), to name but a few.
Soft Cell arguably saw themselves as outside of the norm. Their first official release, an EP entitled ‘Mutant Moments’ EP set out their psychological store (and where ‘Metro Mr. X’ was their “favourite mutant”). They also had a track on the seminal 1980 (various artists) Some Bizarre Album about a disfigured woman (‘The Girl With The Patent Leather Face’). Very few artists would ever sing about such topics (although there are a few exceptions such as Throbbing Gristle’s ‘Hamburger Lady’ based on the medical case notes of a badly burned woman).
Soft Cell’s reputation as a band that focused on the sleazy side of everyday life was cemented after the release of their 1981 debut album Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret (NSEC). The cover featured a photo of the band’s two members (Marc Almond and Dave Ball) taken outside the Raymond Revue Bar, a notorious strip joint in the heart of London’s Soho district.
Just as the Velvet Underground’s debut album was viewed as a ‘sex and drugs’ LP because of a couple of songs about sadomasochistic sex (‘Venus In Furs’) and drug-taking (‘Heroin’), NSEC’s reputation as a ‘sleazy sex’ album also rested on just a few songs – most notably ‘Seedy Films’ (about telephone sex as well as pornographic films), ‘Secret Life’ (about using prostitutes behind a wife’s back), and the (now infamous) ‘Sex Dwarf’ (a song glorifying sadomasochistic sex). Later songs and albums also touched on various aspects of sexuality (their third album This Last Night In Sodom raising a few eyebrows on its’ release in 1984). They wanted to “try all of the vices” (in ‘The Art Of Falling Apart’) and also sang about having sex in cars (‘It’s A Mug’s Game’ and ‘Where Was Your Heart [When You Needed It Most’).
One of my personal favourite in the Soft Cell canon is the 2002 song ‘Perversity’ which was a bonus track on their comeback single ‘Monoculture’ after reforming in 2001. It talked about studying at the “university of perversity” and provided me with the title to my series of blogs on the A-Z of little known paraphilias and fetishes. As Marc Almond and Friends, there was also a great cover version of Throbbing Gristle’s ‘Discipline’ (a song about sadomasochism) and ‘Sleaze It, Take It, Shake It’ (by Almond’s side-project, Marc and the Mambas)
Soft cell’s second hit single ‘Bedsitter’ summed up my formative years as a teenage clubber and shares some of the same lyrical DNA as The Smiths classic ‘How Soon Is Now?’ (going to nightclubs in search of love and/or sex but going home alone). I’d also argue that Soft Cell sometimes give The Smiths a run for their money when it comes to songs about misery (e.g., ‘Chips On My Shoulder’, ‘Mr. Self-Destruct’, ‘Bleak Is My Favourite Cliché’, ‘Forever The Same’, ‘Down In The Subway’ and ‘Born To Lose’).
But Soft Cell aren’t just about sex, they also like songs about love more generally although their take on love is more about the unrequited love, the disintegration of love (‘Tainted Love’, ‘Say Hello, Wave Goodbye’, ‘Where Did Our Love Go?’, ‘All Out Of Love’, ‘Together Alone’, ‘Desperate [For Love]’, ‘L.O.V.E. Feelings’, ‘Whatever It Takes’, ‘Last Chance’, ‘What’, ‘Barriers’, ‘Disease And Desire’, ‘Her Imagination’, ‘Desperate’, and ‘Torch’). In short they focus on (as they describe in their song ‘Loving You, Hating Me’) “the other side of love” and the “devil in my bed” (‘from ‘God-Shaped Hole’). The only other band that have explored the ‘darker’ side of love lyrically in so many different songs are Depeche Mode (which I discussed in a previous blog on obsessional lyrics in pop music). Their songs aren’t afraid to feature one-night stands and casual sex (‘Numbers’, ‘Surrender To A Stranger’, ‘Heat’, ‘Where Was Your Heart [When You Needed It Most’ and ‘Fun City’). It’s also worth noting that Soft Cell were never afraid to talk about drug use in their songs including cocaine (‘Frustration’), LSD (‘Frustration’), alcohol (‘It’s A Mug’s Game’), valium (‘Tupperware Party’, ‘My Secret Life’), heroin (‘L’Esqualita’) and their “dealer in the hall” (‘Divided Soul’).
They also made cover versions that were often better than the originals. They sexed the songs up or made them mean, moody and menacing. Soft Cell were huge fans of Northern soul and is evident in their covers of songs like ‘Tainted Love’, ‘The Night’ and ‘Where Did Our Love Go?’ but their other cover versions came from a wide variety of artists including Jimi Hendrix (their 11-minute ‘Hendrix Medley’ comprising ‘Hey Joe’, ‘Purple Haze’ and ‘Voodoo Chile’), Johnny Thunders (‘Born To Lose’), Suicide (‘Ghostrider’), Lou Reed (‘Caroline Says’ as Marc and the Mambas), and John Barry (‘007 Theme’ and ‘You Only Live Twice’). From the very first note, this were instantly Soft Cell even though they didn’t write the songs.
Lyrically (and musically), some of their best songs were on their final 2000 studio album Cruelty Without Beauty. For instance, ‘Caligula Syndrome’ depicts sadomasochism (“crawling down on your hands and knees like slaves”), orgies, and “every kind of deviation on demand”. The song ‘Grand Guignol’ is about the Parisian theatre that operated from 1897 until it closed in 1962. The theatre specialised in naturalistic amoral horror entertainment shows horror shows or as Soft Cell put it: “It’s Grand Guignol/It’s rock ‘n’ roll/It’s vaudeville and burlesque/All of human life is here/In the theatre of the grotesque”. A sentiment that (I would argue) also sums up the many of the blogs I have published on this website.
*With thanks to The Passage (one of my favourite bands) who used the homonym ‘Seedy’ when naming their first CD [C-D, geddit?] compilation.
Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Behavioural Addictions, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
Further reading
Almond, M. (1999). Tainted Life. London: Sidgwick and Jackson.
Almond, M. (2004). In Search Of The Pleasure Palace. London: Sidgwick and Jackson.
Fanni Tutti, C. (2017). Art Sex Music. Faber & Faber: London.
Lindsay, M. (2013). Sex music for gargoyles: Soft Cell’s The Art Of Falling Apart. The Quietus, December 12. Located at: http://thequietus.com/articles/14100-soft-cell-interview-marc-almond
Reed, J. (1999). Marc Almond: The Last Star. London: Creation Books.
Reynolds, S. (2006). Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk, 1978–1984. New York: Penguin.
Tebbutt, S. (1984). Soft Cell. London: Sidgwick and Jackson.
Wikipedia (2017). Marc Almond. Located at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Almond
Wikipedia (2017). Soft Cell. Located at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_Cell
Crossing the see: A brief look at ‘strabismusophilia’
Some time ago I came across a 2012 online article entitled ‘18 Sexual Fetishes That Sound Made Up (But They’re Not)’ on The Date Report website. Of the 18 fetishes listed, I knew about 17 of them (15 of which I have written articles on for this blog including emetophilia [sexual arousal from vomit], dendrophilia [sexual arousal from trees], pyrophilia [sexual arpusal from fire], taphephilia [sexual arousal from being buried alive], and arachnephilia [sexual arousal from spiders]). The one that I had little awareness of was ‘cross-eyed fetishism’ (although I was aware of the sexual paraphilia ‘oculophilia’ in which individuals are sexually aroused by eyes and which I also covered in a previous blog). The article contained only one sentence relating to cross-eyed fetishes which read “Not sure what the scientific name for this fetish is, but this is good news for Dannielynn Birkhead, Anna Nicole Smith’s cross-eyed offspring”. If such a fetish exists, I would name it strabismusophilia (as strabismus is the medical condition of having non-aligned eyes).
Having already written my previous blog on eye fetishes more generally, I would argue that strabismusophilia is a sub-type of oculophilia as the condition manifests itself in a desire for actual physical contact and interaction with the eye (albeit a very particular type of eye). An online article at the Page Pulp website about sexual fetishes of famous authors alleged that F. Scott Fitzgerald had a foot fetish, James Joyce had a fart fetish, Lord Byron was a sex addict, Marquis de Sade had a fetish for “anything and everything”, (the most notable being sadomasochism), and that the philosopher Rene Descartes had a cross-eye fetish.
Descartes’ sexual fetish for cross-eyed women is well documented including the work of psychiatric sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Descartes himself wrote that:
“As a child I was in love with a girl of my own age, who was slightly cross-eyed. The imprint made on my brain by the wayward eyes became so mingled with whatever else had aroused in me the feeling of love that for years afterwards, when I saw a cross-eyed woman, I was more prone to love her than any other, simply for that flaw…The impression made in my brain when I looked at her wandering eyes was joined so much to that which also occurred when the passion of love moved me, that for a long time afterward, in seeing cross-eyed women, I felt more inclined to love them than others, simply because they had that defect; and I did not know that was the reason.”
Descartes’ passion for cross-eyed women was also discussed in a 2011 paper in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, (by Alex Voorhoeve, Elie During, David Jopling, Timothy Wilson, and Frances Kamm). In one of the passages by Dr. Voorhoeve, he discussed Queen Christina of Sweden asking Descartes what causes us to “love one person rather than another before we know their merit”. According to Voorhoeve:
“Descartes replied that when we experience a strong sensation, this causes the brain to crease like a piece of paper. And when the stimulus stops, the brain uncreases, but it stays ready to be creased again in the same way. And when a similar stimulus is presented, then we get the same response, because the brain is ready to crease again. And what did he mean by all this? Well, he gave an example. He said that all his life he had had a fetish for cross-eyed women. Whenever he came across a cross-eyed woman, desire would enflame him. And he figured out…after introspection, that this was because his brain had been strongly creased by his first childhood love, who was cross-eyed”.
This classical conditioning type explanation was also alluded to in a 2011 article on the Psychology Today website by Dr. Aaron Ben-Zeév that examined ‘Why Did Descartes Love Cross-Eyed Women?’ Dr. Ben-Zeév noted:
“It would appear that when Descartes fell in love with the young girl, he loved her whole Gestalt, which included other characteristics, but her crossed eyes were the most unique. This feature of the girl distinguished her from most other girls. It is as if he subconsciously thought that every woman who shared that distinctive feature would have the other positive characteristics of the girl with whom he had originally fallen in love and would therefore generate the same profound love. This attitude makes him perceive these women as beautiful…However, the fact that the girl he fell in love had the distinctive feature of crossed eyes did not mean that her other characteristics would be shared by other women who have the same feature. In fact, however, this mistaken association set off a feeling of love when he encountered this characteristic in other women…It is a kind of Pavlovian response which makes us more likely to love this person”.
It appears there are modern day adherents to cross-eyed fetishism as I found these extracts in online forums discussing the fetish:
- Extract 1: “I get insanely turned on when I see a girl crosses her eyes. I go on video and image sites to see girls crossing their eyes. I have requested custom videos of girls crossing their eyes. I am not sure how to break this fetish. It is something that is hard for me to talk about and I recently revealed it to my girlfriend in a text. I have asked her to cross her eyes for me but she cannot do it. In fact my last two girlfriends have not been able to cross their eyes. I feel like if maybe we could play out that fetish in my personal life it would deter me from looking online at stuff. I am not sure what to do”
- Extract 2: “I am attracted to people that have lazy eyes. The more lazy their eye, the more attractive it is to me. It’s a huge turn-on, especially eyes that turn outward (e.g., exotropia)”
- Extract 3: “Them cross-eyed girls drive me wild! I’m a lazy eye man myself. I like when one gets a lil’ googly after they’ve had a few drinks”
Although there is no academic research on cross-eye fetishism, I did come across two other types of fetishistic behavior that overlaps with being cross-eyed. The first is in relation to balloon fetishism (i.e., individuals that get sexually aroused from inflating, deflating and/or popping balloons). I came across online sex videos that were tagged ‘cross-eyed balloon inflation’ comprising women blowing up big balloons where they were also cross-eyed (and to which male ‘looners’ found this both erotic and arousing. After watching one of these idiosyncratic videos, one looner commented: “I for one really enjoyed this [cross-eyed woman inflating a balloon] – makes it looks like she’s really concentrated on the inflation, which I like to see. And variety is nice; I, for one, get tired of clips that are too alike”. Perhaps more worryingly is the association of being cross-eyed with sexually sadistic acts of women being strangled on film on hard-core BDSM videos. As the blurb on one sex video available online noted: “There are women that are strangled, and sometimes become cross-eyed. It’s the stupid impression somehow, you will not ever afford to worry about such a thing is the person being strangled. Your beauty is one of [being] cross-eyed”.
I also wonder whether cross-eyed fetishism is a sub-type of teratophilia – typically defined as being sexually aroused by ugly people? According to Dr. Anil Aggrawal’s book Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices, teratophilia is defined as those people who derive sexual pleasure and arousal from “deformed or monstrous people”. The online Urban Dictionary defines it as “the ability to see beauty in the unusual [and] clinically described as a sexual preference for deformed people”. Being cross-eyed could arguably fit these definitions (particularly the one from the Urban Dictionary of seeing beauty in the unusual).
From my own research, I have come to the conclusion that cross-eyed fetishism (that I have termed ‘strabismusophilia’) probably exists but is very rare with an incredibly low prevalence rate among the general population. It may be a sub-type of both oculophilia and teratophilia but further research is needed to confirm such speculations.
Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
Further reading
Aggrawal A. (2009). Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices. Boca Raton: CRC Press.
Ben-Zeév, A. (2011). Why did Descartes love cross-eyed women? The lure of imperfection, Psychology Today, November 29. Located at: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/in-the-name-love/201111/why-did-descartes-love-cross-eyed-women-the-lure-imperfection
Descartes, R. (1978). His Moral Philosophy and Psychology (translated by John J. Blom). New York: New York University Press.
Divine Caroline (2012). 18 Sexual Fetishes That Sound Made Up (But They’re Not). The Date Report, September 20. Located at: http://www.thedatereport.com/dating/sex/sexual-fetishes-emetophilia-tree-sex/
Love, B. (2001). Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices. London: Greenwich Editions.
Love, B. (2005). Cat-fighting, eye-licking, head-sitting and statue-screwing. In R. Kick (Ed.), Everything You Know About Sex is Wrong (pp.122-129). New York: The Disinformation Company.
Page Pulp (2014). Sexual fetishes of famous authors. Located at: http://www.pagepulp.com/2091/sexual-fetishes-of-famous-authors/
Voorhoeve, A., During, E., Jopling, D., Wilson, T., & Kamm, F. (2011). Who am I? Beyond “I think, therefore I am”. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1234(1), 134-148.
Wikipedia (2014). Oculophilia. Located at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oculophilia
Getting a leg up: A brief look at pantyhose fetishism
“As far as I can remember I have been easily aroused by women wearing pantyhose. At the age of about 14 or 15 [years] I started wearing pantyhose and masturbating with them. At the time I was ashamed to tell my girlfriend at the time about it. I continued this up until about 19 or 20, when I finally had a girlfriend who I told about my fetish. I thought that by sharing this with my significant other at the time that it would help but it did not. I would just want it more and more. Now I am in a long-term relationship with a woman that I love. I have told her about my fetish and how I masturbate with her pantyhose and she said that she did not have a problem with it. She wears pantyhose for me rather frequently because she knows that I really like them…My obsession has really intensified to the point that I am doing more to achieve a stronger orgasm…I really feel like my fetish is out of control. In general my fetish for pantyhose has lead me to do immoral things that I would not do unless pantyhose are involved” (Letter sent to Dr. Marie Hartwell-Walker)
For the benefit of my non-UK readers, here in the UK, ‘pantyhose fetishism’ is more commonly known as ‘tights fetishism’ (and is very similar to ‘stocking fetishism’, the commonality being the fact they are both clothing items worn on the legs that are often made of nylon and that have a silky veneer). The few online articles concerning pantyhose fetishism make similar claims although empirical evidence for such claims are generally lacking. For instance, the articles claim that pantyhose fetishism is (i) commonplace and (ii) usually first begins in childhood and/or early adolescence (after seeing pantyhose being worn by a significant person in the fetishist’s life such as their mother, sister, aunt, grandmother, family friend, neighbour and/or teacher).
One of the best studies published in a 2007 issue of the International Journal of Impotence Research by Dr G. Scorolli and his colleagues on the relative prevalence of different fetishes using online fetish forum data did not report the specific existence of pantyhose fetishism at all, although around 12% had fetishes concerning something associated with the body such as legs (which could have included pantyhouse). However, if you type ‘pantyhose fetishism’ into Google lots of dedicated pornographic photography and video sites can be found on the first few pages.
According to Wikipedia men may have a preference for pantyhose because unlike stocking, pantyhose has direct contact with female genitalia. An article on the Kinkly website claims individuals with a pantyhose fetish most commonly become sexually aroused by wearing pantyhose, watching other people wear (or undress wearing) pantyhose, or both. The Wikipedia article is a little more detailed and claims that the fetish manifests in one or more of the following ways (and which I have repeated verbatim):
- “Tearing or cutting holes in pantyhose to modify the garment or gain access to the wearer’s body.
- Wearing of pantyhose by either or both partners during sexual activity.
- A male wearing pantyhose alone or in front of others who may praise or humiliate him.
- Using pantyhose as bondage restraints.
- Interacting with pantyhose in any other way or form during sexual activity.
- Simply observing/admiring and experiencing heightened arousal/interest of females or males who are wearing pantyhose.
- Viewing material from store catalogues to pornography of models and actors wearing pantyhose.
- A man or woman in pantyhose encasement”.
As far as I am aware, only one paper solely devoted to pantyhose fetishism has ever been published in the psychological literature. This was a 1997 paper written from a psychodynamic perspective by Dr. L.M. Lothstein in the journal Gender and Psychoanalysis. In her paper, Lothstein describes this “unique fetish” using clinical vignettes of gender dysphoric men (i.e., transgendered males). The paper claims the pantyhose served a number of different functions (such as the repairing of psychic structure, and an expression and defence against underlying aggression). More specifically, Lothstein refers to pantyhose as a functional ‘magic skin’ or ‘second skin’ in repairing a defective ego and acting as a transitional object to allay annihilation and separation anxiety.
The Wikipedia and Kinkly articles claim that there are many sub-types of pantyhose fetish and that such fetishes often co-occur with other fetishes and sexual paraphilias such as shoe fetishes, transvestism, sadomasochism, and schoolgirl fetishes. For instance, the Wikipedia article notes that pantyhose fetishism can include:
- A focus on certain areas of the body while wearing pantyhose, [such as] feet, a variation of the very common foot fetishism.
- Wearing pantyhose with other specific garments, e.g. shoes, boots, or skirts, uniforms that usually include pantyhose (girl at work, secretary, flight stewardess, policewoman, Hooters waitress, girl next door etc.)
- Certain styles e.g. sheer-to-waist, opaque, patterned or specific deniers, certain brands or shades.
- Simply admiring women who wear pantyhose (a mild form of voyeurism).
- Finding the wearing of them to be a primarily sensual comforting experience, rather than sexual.
- The act of purchasing pantyhose, especially when aided by a female assistant, can also generate a degree of arousal”.
One of the problems with the Wikipedia article as that it is included in the entry on underwear fetishism and the section concerning pantyhose fetishes specifically notes that the section “does not cite any references or sources”. It then goes on to claim:
“The pantyhose covered foot can be extremely arousing to men who often find satisfaction in just looking at or more in that of rubbing, sucking/licking, and massage of the penis with the nylon clad feet. Others find arousal in sniffing the sour and pungent smell of soles made by excessive sweat when in pantyhose. Foot-jobs can be very intense and stimulating and covering a woman in pantyhose in semen is a common fantasy with some men. Pantyhose fetish can also be linked to that of the women dressing as the schoolgirl where stockings, knee high socks and pantyhose can be worn with a short skirt”.
The same article also lists a number of reasons why females wear pantyhose and then claims that these reasons as to why women wear pantyhose provides possible reasons for the allure of pantyhose fetishism:
- “They remove the appearance of blemishes, making the legs ‘perfect’.
- The reflectiveness of the material, coupled with the way they appear less transparent at the edges, often gives legs more contrast and definition, as though lit by dramatic lighting. This accentuates the curves of the legs, making them less ‘flat’, and can also make legs appear slimmer (with dark pantyhose).
- They often have a silky texture which is pleasing to both the wearer and her partner.
- They enhance the pleasure (and anticipation) associated with the removal of a woman’s clothes. Not only serving as an additional item to be removed; they allow the exciting moment of exposure to be drawn out much longer than other clothing items, as the pantyhose are slowly pulled down the legs. In addition to this, they do not actually hide what they cover.
- The slipperiness and smoothness of sheer pantyhose and stockings also makes women’s low cut court shoes slip off more easily. This vulnerability is often sexually attractive, and can often result in the women engaging in shoe dangling or shoe play which is also appealing to shoe and foot fetishists”.
Although I mentioned above I only knew of one academic paper on pantyhose fetishism, there are a few academic writings that have mentioned it in passing. For instance, in a 1979 issue of the Journal of Applied Behavioral Analysis, Dr. W.L. Marshall reported the treatment of two male paedophiles with satiation therapy, one of who was also a pantyhose fetishist (but no detail was given on this aspect of their sexual behaviour except he was also a shoe fetishist). A paper by Dr. L.F. Lowenstein in a 2002 issue of Sexuality and Disability claimed that pantyhose fetishism was “very common” but the only evidence given for this was a reference to Lothstein’s paper (which contained no information on the prevalence of the fetish). Finally, in a 2008 book chapter on themes of sadomasochism self-expression by Dr. Charles Moser and Dr. Peggy Kleinplatz, they used the example of pantyhose to define and explain what fetishes are:
“A fetish is characterized by sexual arousal to an inanimate object…Individuals who enjoy SM accessories often describe their interests as fetishes. They find wearing or touching the preferred articles highly arousing. The articles themselves are rarely arousing, but if they are worn by a partner, it heightens the partner’s attractiveness and heightens the eroticism of the sex. For example, pantyhose can be a fetish object, but brand new pairs, never worn, rarely become a focus of erotic interest. The same pantyhose worn by the participant or a partner can elicit a strong erotic response. Similarly an article of clothing that reminds the person of a partner or a specific erotic interlude can become a fetish object”.
Again, this simply confirms that pantyhose fetishes exist (or theoretically exist) but there is no information on incidence, prevalence, or their psychosocial impact. I did come across one online account written by someone who confesses to being a pantyhose fetishist on the Act Sensuous blog site, and which I found a lot more enlightening that anything academic that I have read on the topic:
“I had tried several times before, but during my research to find scientific facts…I wanted to learn where pantyhose rank on a list of the most prevalent fetishes, but I couldn’t find credible material that could be documented. I did find one thing I expected – that the foot fetish is still No. 1, apparently, the most common. Suffice it to say that pantyhose are high up there somewhere. And, thankfully, pantyhose and foot fetishes seem to go hand-in-hand, or make that foot-in-hand…Obviously, there’s more to a pantyhose fetish than [what is on Wikipedia]…To me, pantyhose always have been about three things: the way they look, the way they feel to the touch, and the very concept of them in the first place. Maybe it’s just that they are designed to enhance the beauty of everything they cover. To me, there’s a profound dichotomy about pantyhose, which I find very exciting. Pantyhose possess enormous power, yet, by design, they are extremely delicate and feminine, causing an irresistible vulnerability for the wearer. This is never more evident than in the way the nylon fabric moves to the touch on a woman’s legs and feet. It’s almost as if she has a second, delicate, delicious skin. It’s as if the pantyhose are a living, breathing intimate part of the wearer. You can physically manipulate that lifeforce, and you have to be careful not to hurt it. Once on, any item of clothing a person wears, sort of disappears. You stop feeling it on your body. And even though you can touch the pantyhose on yourself, it isn’t the same as feeling them on someone else. Want your lover to feel what you feel when you caress her legs in pantyhose? All it takes is to move that delicate nylon fabric over her skin. The sensation is incredible for both parties”.
Maybe we will never know how common pantyhose fetish is but there appears to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that it exists, is male-dominated, and that there is some crossover with other more (empirically) established fetishes (such as foot fetishes).
Dr. Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
Further reading
The Act Sensuous Blog (2010). What drives our pantyhose fetish? April 11. Located at: https://actsensuous.wordpress.com/2010/04/11/what-drives-our-fetish-for-pantyhose/
Kinkly (2015). Pantyhose fetish. Located at: http://www.kinkly.com/definition/6774/pantyhose-fetish
Lothstein, L.M. (1997). Pantyhose fetishism and self cohesion: A Paraphilic Solution? Gender and Psychoanalysis, 2(1), 103-121.
Lowenstein, L.F. (2002). Fetishes and their associated behaviour. Sexuality and Disability, 20, 135-147.
Moser, C., & Kleinplatz, P.J. (2007). Themes of SM expression. In D. Langbridge, & Meg Barker (Eds.), Safe, sane and consensual: Contemporary perspectives on SM (pp.35-54). Hampshire, UK: MacMillan.
Scorolli, C., Ghirlanda, S., Enquist, M., Zattoni, S. & Jannini, E.A. (2007). Relative prevalence of different fetishes. International Journal of Impotence Research, 19, 432-437.
Wikipedia (2015). Underwear fetishism. Located at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwear_fetishism#Panties
Take a stance on me: A brief look at ‘hands on hips’ fetish
I can’t remember exactly how, but one day last year I came across a website called ‘Hands On Her Hips’ which is totally dedicated to pictures of females posing with their hands on their hips. As the website states:
“The mission statement of this blog is very simple. The blog contains picture of women holding their hands on their hips. To me the pose is very feminine, attractive, powerful and confident. The simple gesture of a woman putting her hands on her hips appeals to me and this blog is dedicated to that pose”
However, I soon discovered on doing a little Googling that there appears to be a niche community of ‘hands on hip’ [HoH] fetishists out there. I’m not aware of any academic research on HoH fetishism but there are a number of online references to the practice. According to a short 2009 online article on ‘eight freaky fetishes’ by Grace Murano, she claims that:
“Hands on the Hip is a type of hand partialism, which means the attraction to a specific action performed by the hands. It’s very hard to explain the presence of a fetish site devoted entirely to women posing with their hands on their hips, standing defiantly and angrily in the way so many mothers do when their children misbehave. Somewhere, deep in the psyche of the site’s creator, he desperately wants to find a mother figure who will discipline him with nothing harsher than a time out and denial of television”.
Murano’s brief description appears to somewhat concur with Wikipedia’s brief entry on hand fetishism (that appears to have come from Dr. Ellen McCallum’s 1998 book Object Lessons: How to Do Things With Fetishism). This entry claims that hand fetishism:
“…may include the sexual attraction to a specific area such as the fingers, palm or nails, or the attraction to a specific action performed by the hands; which may otherwise be considered non-sexual – such as washing or drying dishes. This fetish may manifest itself as a desire to experience physical interaction, or as a source of sexual fantasy”.
Another 2009 short online article by Gloria Brame asserts that HoH fetishism is actually an ‘action fetish’ (i.e., an individual who derives sexual arousal not from an object or body part but from an action that someone performs). Brame then goes on to assert that:
“For most, that includes seeing it, but it isn’t just a branch of voyeurism: the fundamental thrill attaches to the action itself, and not just its visual or auditory pleasures. One very broad example would be spankers who get off on the action (of spanking) itself, and not – as is more common among [sadomasochists] – the pain or humiliation or its place in a power dynamic…Some of us know SM players too who are turned on by the actions but not the psychological space…It’s a bit easier to sort out when the action fetish is highly particularized. For example, a fetish for watching a woman in stockings and high heels step on a car’s brakes, or a fetish for seeing a coed in her underwear bouncing on a big balloon There are scores of barely documented action fetishes, so I’m always happy when I see an enthusiast build a blog to his/her own fetish, like this one [Hands on her hips]”
In another list of ‘weird fetishes’ from 2007, Anthony Burch and Frank Movsesian also listed HoH fetish and tried to add in a bit of psychodynamic psychology into the mix. They claimed that HoH fetish sites prove that Sigmund Freud was right. I personally don’t adhere to this viewpoint at all but given the lack of any psychological insight and theorizing, they go as far as to say:
“There’s no other way to explain the presence of a fetish site devoted entirely to women posing with their hands on their hips, standing defiantly and angrily in the way so many mothers do when their children misbehave. Somewhere, deep in the psyche of the site’s creator, he desperately wants to find and have sex with a mother figure who will discipline him with nothing harsher than a Time Out and denial of television. I guess this fetish is for people who aren’t quite into sadomasochistic discipline, but think they might one day be. Bondage training wheels, if you will”.
There are loads of articles and papers on various aspects of non-verbal communication and to be honest (and because it is not my area of expertise) I haven’t got the time to read everything that’s been written about ‘hands on hips’ gestures, but most online sources appear to indicate that the ‘hands on hips’ stance helps give the appearance of being physically bigger and is a non-verbal cue that shows others that we are “ready for action” (i.e., a ‘readiness gesture’) but is sometimes mistaken for unfriendliness. One website claims that the people most likely to be observed in are “workaholics, athletes and productive people” and can demonstrate a show of authority and superiority. Another website article notes that:
“Hands-on-Hips is used by the child arguing with its parent, the athlete waiting for his event to begin, the boxer waiting for the bout to start and males who want to issue a non-verbal challenge to other males who enter their territory. In each instance the person takes the Hands-on-Hips pose and this is a universal gesture used to communicate that a person is ready for assertive action. It lets the person take up more space and has the threat value of the pointed elbows that act as weapons, preventing others from approaching or passing. The arms being half raised show readiness for attack and this is the position taken by cowboys in a gunfight. Even one hand on the hip will send the intended message, particularly when it’s pointed at the intended victim. It’s used everywhere and in the Philippines and Malaysia it carries the even stronger message of anger or outrage…Its basic meaning carries a subtly aggressive attitude everywhere. It has also been called the achiever stance, related to the goal-directed person who is ready to tackle their objectives or is ready to take action on something. Men often use this gesture around women to display an assertive male attitude”
If these observations are true, it would seem to suggest that those who have HoH fetishes may like being/feeling in submissive positions and being sexually dominated (although that’s pure speculation on my part as there is simply no empirical research whatsoever). I honestly can’t see HoH fetishes ever being the subject of serious scientific study as they are unlikely to have any appreciable negative impact in the lives of such people (if such people even exist).
Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
Further reading
Brame, G. (2009). Action fetishes and hands on hips. July 28. Located at: http://gloriabrame.typepad.com/inside_the_mind_of_gloria/2009/07/hands-on-her-hips.html
Burch, A. & Movsesian, F. (2007). 10 really weird fetishes. Double Viking, November 9. Located at: http://www.doubleviking.com/bullet-points-10-really-weird-fetishes-6984-p.html
McCallum. E.L. (1998.) Object Lessons: How to Do Things With Fetishism. New York: State University of New York Press.
Murano, G. (2009). 8 freakiest fetishes. Oddee, June 18. Located at: http://www.oddee.com/item_96718.aspx
Mould on tight: A brief look at plaster cast fetishism
Back in the early 2000s I remember watching Plaster Caster, a documentary film that looked at the life of artist and groupie, Cynthia Plaster Caster (i.e., Cynthia Albritton). Cynthia is in/famous for her plaster casting of rock star penises such as Jimi Hendrix and Noel Redding (both in the Jimi Hendrix Experience), Eric Burdon (The Animals), Wayne Kramer (MC-5), Jello Biafra (The Dead Kennedys), and Pete Shelley (Buzzcocks), She began her career in erotic plaster casting in 1968 but now includes women as her artistic clients (and typically makes plaster casts of their breasts). Her plaster casting skills have also been immortalized in song by both Kiss (‘Plaster Caster’) and Jim Croce (‘Five Short Minutes’). As her Wikipedia entry points out:
“In college, when her art teacher gave the class an assignment to ‘plaster cast something solid that could retain its shape’, her idea to use the assignment as a lure to entice rock stars to have sex with her became a hit, even before she made a cast of anyone’s genitalia. Finding a dental mould making substance called alginate to be sufficient, she found her first client in Jimi Hendrix, the first of many to submit to the idea. Meeting Frank Zappa, who found the concept of ‘casting’ both humorous and creative as an art form, Albritton found in him something of a patron”.
However, sexual plaster casting does not begin and end with Cynthia Plaster Caster. In a previous blog, I briefly mentioned the practice of mummification within a sadomasochistic context. According to Dr. Aggrawal’s 2009 book Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices, mummification is:
“An extreme form of bondage in which the person is wrapped from head to toe, much like a mummy, completely immobilizing him. Materials used may be clingfilm, cloth, bandages, rubber strips, duct tape, plaster bandages, bodybags, or straitjackets. The immobilized person may then be left bound in a state of effective sensory deprivation for a period of time or sensually stimulated in his state of bondage – before being released from his wrappings”.
One type of restrictive mummification practice not mentioned by Dr. Aggrawal is that of plaster cast fetishism. Although there is little academic research on the topic, a quick Google search throws up many dedicated online sites and hundreds of video clips for sale and/or sharing. For instance, I came across the Casted Angel website (that claims to be the oldest ‘cast and bandage site’), the Cast Fetish website, the Cast Paradise website, and the Fantacast website (please be warned that if you click on any of the links, all of these sites are sexually explicit)
The Wikipedia entry on mummification reports that such activity is typically used to enhance the feelings of total bodily helplessness (which would be totally fulfilled by those engaging in plaster cast fetishism), and is incorporated with sensation play (i.e., a group of erotic activities that facilitate particular physical sensations upon a sexual partner). As a 2010 article on ‘The Erotic Secrets of the Mummy’ notes:
“A variant of this extreme and spectacular form of bondage is mummification made with plaster…Anyone who has taken an arm or leg immobilized by a cast can imagine how restrictive it is to use this material for bondage. Obviously there are safety precautions which must be taken: you must cover the body of the person to be bound with a protective layer (e.g. plastic) so the plaster does not come into direct contact with skin, and make sure to have safety scissors around for easy removal of the bindings. It is also important to note that mummification increases body temperature and therefore sweating, so you must make sure to hydrate the person being bound. An example of complete plaster mummification can be seen in a nonsexual context, in the comedy After Hours by Martin Scorsese”.
As well as being a form of extreme mummification, plaster cast fetishism is also a sub-variant of ‘cast fetishism’ that according to the Encyclopedia Dramatica comprises erotic “concentration on orthopedic casts (plaster, polymer, bandage, etc.) It is usually related to the fetishes of feet, stockings, shoes and amputees”. Cast fetishists derive sexual pleasure and arousal from people (typically the opposite sex) wearing casts on their limbs (but may also be additionally aroused by people using crutches or who have a limp). I’ve come across dozens of people who have posted in online forums and claiming they have cast fetishes and/or fixations. Here are just a few:
- Extract 1: “It is no bad thing to have a cast fetish when you have an ongoing foot injury. This morning I got [a plaster cast] for my left leg as my foot is giving trouble. Wanting to keep my foot up when riding in my friend’s car I put the window down and rested my cast on the top of the door. The wind blowing across my bare casted toes as we drove down the street was just the ultimate turn-on!”
- Extract 2: “Since I was a child I had a strong fetish for casts and bandages. When I was 6 or 7 years old I saw a girl in at the local hospital, with a freshly applied plaster [cast] in her right leg, and how she cleaned her toes with a damp cloth. That’s still one of the memories that arouses me. Two years ago, I had a girlfriend, who came to know about my fetish, it was kinda difficult for me to say, but she liked the idea and I put her in a homemade [plaster cast], then I painted her toenails and put a toe-ring. It was a shame that it was one night only and the plaster didn’t dry at all, but it was so good to stay with her and kiss her toes wiggling out of her cast. It was one of the most pleasant nights that I’ve had”.
- Extract 3: “I have been in love with casts since about 13 yrs old. I have had the chance to [wear a] dual hip [cast] and several short and long term casts but want to wear possibly a full body one day if I find the right cast partner”.
- Extract 4: “I’ve had an interest seeing girls in casts for quite some time now. I think it started when I was a little kid and broke my leg. Probably since then I have always wanted to be in a cast, but didn’t want to hurt myself! I just recently discovered the ease and community around the world of recreational casting. I have a short leg cast and it’s an amazing feeling!”
- Extract 5: “I have always had a fascination for seeing people in a cast, and in particular girls in long leg casts. It may have something to do with the restricted movement I don’t know. I am not interested in the associated, implied pain aspect but more the caring aspect. I always thought that this was an idea peculiar to me but, I was recently inspired to search the net and found a whole community subscribing to the cast fetish idea with many images…I have never fractured a limb so I have never had a cast but, I have made a couple of attempts at self-casting”
- Extract 6: “I love being in a cast. For years I have studied the casting processes in both plaster and fiberglass. I have honed these skills to the point [that] nobody, [not] even an orthopedic assistant can tell it was not applied professionally”
- Extract 7: “I have always wanted to have a cast on my leg and or arm. I have tried hitting my hand on the ground but I still have not fractured it…I would even pay someone to break both my arm and leg”
One of the most detailed I have come across is this one:
“I have a strong sexual attraction to, and erotic fascination with, the sight of the female leg wearing an orthopaedic cast, particularly along its full extent, from toes to hip. Now in my mid-forties, I have been aware of this ‘interest’ since my early teens, which might explain my particular attraction to plaster casts, as were the norm at such a time, which somehow seem heavier and more of a physical entity than contemporary casts. For many years, I assumed this peculiar attraction to be mine alone, and looked forward to those rare occasions when I might see a woman with a leg in plaster in public or otherwise find a picture in a newspaper or magazine, which I would collect. However, since the advent of the internet, I have become aware that a number of like-minded souls exist all over the world, that the ‘cast fetish’ is out there in the world of cyberspace, is shared and enjoyed by people and is practised recreationally in the real, everyday world by those who have the inclination and means to do so”.
“As the online aspect of this fetish has developed over recent years, I now find I am able to better satisfy my visual needs through the large number of available images, of both medically and recreationally-worn leg casts. I have obsessively built a large collection of pictures of women wearing leg casts, and frequently enjoy these. Sometimes I feel a certain frustration that my need to satisfy the desire to find and see more images consumes more time than I have available to ‘waste’, but this is not something over which I have full control – it is a compulsion and needs to be fulfilled in this way, in the manner of such a condition, even if it never seems possible to have quite enough of such images, there is always the thrill of the anticipation of finding a new, ‘perfect’ picture of a cast and its wearer. I have always assumed that my obsession is based on the aesthetics of the leg cast, being related as it is to my general attraction to women’s legs, feet, toes, boots, etc. The leg cast is very much an ‘object of desire’ in its appearance and in the manner it objectifies the leg inside, I enjoy the way a cast looks and find this arousing”.
“However, I wonder whether my ‘interest’ may have other underlying, hidden causes and inspirations, and exactly what might have triggered this fetish? I wonder this because although I have never had occasion to wear a cast myself (and thus experienced the physical restrictions imposed by one), and neither has anyone with whom I might spend regular, extended periods of time, such as a family member or close friend, I have often imagined that female friends might have to have a leg in plaster that I might be around them, or that I might meet and form a relationship with a woman in such a situation (not that I have any desire to see anyone come to harm, suffer an injury, etc, but I would love to see the effect of such – the wearing of a cast – if it ever occurred). I have a very strong desire to be in the presence of a leg cast as it is being worn, that I might interact with it and the wearer, that I might experience the sexuality of such, and it is something about which I have frequent sexual fantasies, being the most arousing situation I am able to imagine”.
In a short 2006 article on ‘Women with Plaster Casts’ at the online Trendhunter website, Hernando Gomez Salinas wrote about the Cast Fetish website and then used the writings of Sigmund Freud to provide some theoretical insight into the fetish:
“According to Freud, fetishism is considered a paraphilia or sexual deviation as a consequence of an infantile trauma with the fear of castration. When a kid discovers the absence of penis in his mother, he looks away from her terrified, and the first object he stares at after the trauma turns into his fetish object. So, according to Freud, it is possible that the fans of [the Cast Fetish webpage] saw their fathers or a relative with a plaster cast”
I am not a fan of Freud’s theorizing, and I personally believe that the origin of such fetishes is most likely behavioural conditioning (classical and/or operant). However, given the complete lack of empirical research, this was the only article I came across that featured anything vaguely academic in relation to the fetishizing of plaster casts. It would appear from both anecdotal evidence that plaster cast mummification (particularly within a BDSM context) comprises a significant minority interest and is probably nowhere near as rare as some other sexual behaviours that I have covered in my previous blogs.
Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
Further reading
Aggrawal A. (2009). Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices. Boca Raton: CRC Press.
Forbidden Sexuality (2004). Mummification bondage. Located at: http://www.forbiddensexuality.com/mummification_bondage.htm
Salinas, H.G. (2006). Women with plaster casts. Trend Hunter, November 29. Located at: http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/weird-fetishism-women-with-plaster-casts
Wikipedia (2013). Sensation play (BDSM). Located at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensation_play_(BDSM)
Wikipedia (2013). Total enclosure fetishism. Located at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_enclosure_fetishism
Wikipedia (2013). Mummification (BDSM). Located at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummification_(BDSM)
drmarkgriffiths 