From the university of perversity: An A to Z of non-researched sexual paraphilias (Part 4)

Today’s blog is the fourth part in my review of little researched (and in most cases non-researched) sexual paraphilias and strange sexual behaviours. (You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here). I’ve tried to locate information on all of these alleged sexual behaviours listed below and in some cases have found nothing more than a definition (some of which were in Dr. Anil Aggrawal’s book Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices and/or Dr. Brenda Love’s Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices).

• Astraphilia: This behaviour refers to the sexual attraction toward thunder and lightening, although is sometimes defined as sexual attraction to lightening only. (In a previous blog, I noted that brontophilia is often defined as being sexually attracted to thunder and lightening).
• Bastinado: This behaviour (also known as Falanga) is a form of foot beating where the soles of a person’s bare feet are beaten continually with such implements as leather/rubber straps, bats, canes, rods, electric cords, truncheons, etc. According to Michael Samadhi’s Joy of Kink website, “the documented history of bastinado goes back more than 1000 years, and it’s been employed by repressive regimes like the Nazi’s and the Khmer Rouge”.
• Climacophilia: This behaviour refers to individuals that get sexually aroused from falling down the stairs. There hasn’t been a wide body of research conducted on people affected with this particular sexual preference and/or fetish. This particular paraphilia got lots of press coverage when the psychologist Dr. Jesse Bering published his 2014 book Perv: The Sexual Deviant In All Of Us that mentioned 46 different paraphilias, many of which were described as “outside of the statistical norm”.
• Defecaloesiophilia: This behaviour refers to individuals that are sexual aroused by painful bowel movements (the word derived from its phobia opposite ‘defecaloesiophobia’). I’ve never found anyone online admitting to having such a paraphilia although there certainly appears to be those with haemorrhoid fetishes as I outlined in one of my previous blogs.
• Erythrophilia: This behaviour (sometimes referred to as erytophilia and ereuthophilia) refers to being sexually aroused by the colour red (but some definitions say it is also to red lights and even blushing (i.e., red faced individuals). Although I’ve come across a few individuals online that admit to having a blushing fetish I’ve yet to find anyone admitted to being sexually aroused specifically by the colour red.
• Francophilia: This behaviour refers to those who derive sexual arousal towards France or French culture. Anecdotally I know of women who claim to be sexually aroused to the French accent and I mentioned a few examples in my blog on xenophilia (sexual arousal from foreigners) but whether this paraphilia genuinely exists is debateable.
• Gomphipothic: According to the Right Diagnosis website, gomphipothic refers to being sexually aroused by the sight of teeth. (This appears to be another name for odontophilia that I covered in a previous blog).
• Hephephilia: This behaviour refers to individuals who have a compulsion to steal specific items related to their fetish such as retifists (shoe fetishists) who steal items of footwear (for example) from shoe shops or innocent victims at the beach. An article on the Toeslayer website recalls an infamous case from 1979 in Japan involving the “shoe thief of Tokyo”. Over three-and-a-half years (before he was finally caught), he accosted women, stole their shoes, and then ran off. When arrested, the police found 127 pairs of women’s shoes at his home.
• Ichthyophilia: This behaviour refers to those who derive sexual arousal from fish. I have never seen any case study in the academic literature although in previous blogs I did outline cases of humans having sex with other water creatures (cephalopods like octopus and squid) and there are certainly zoophilic films where fish have been used as a masturbatory aid. (There are of course the infamous stories about the band Led Zeppelin, groupies, and fish tales that you can Google for yourselves – just type in ‘Led Zeppelin’ and ‘red snapper’ or ‘mud shark’).
• Japanophilia: This behaviour refers to those who derive adoexual arousal towards Japan or Japanese culture. Some of my readers have accused me of having Japanophilia given the number of blogs I have written about Japanese sexuality and fetishes (but I can assure you I haven’t).
• Kinbaku-bi: This behaviour refers to a Japanese type of bondage and has the literal meaning of ‘tight binding’. According to the Wikipedia entry on Japanese bondage, Kinbaku-bi “involves tying up the bottom [the receiver] using simple yet visually intricate patterns, usually with several pieces of thin rope…In Japanese, this natural-fibre rope is known as ‘asanawa’; the Japanese vocabulary does not make a distinction between hemp and jute. The allusion is to the use of hemp rope for restraining prisoners, as a symbol of power, in the same way that stocks or manacles are used in a Western BDSM context. The word ‘shibari’ came into common use in the West at some point in the 1990s to describe the bondage art Kinbaku”.
• Lockiophilia: This behaviour refers to sexual arousal derived from childbirth (and is named after its opposite phobia – lockiophobia). In a previous blog I did look at childbirth fetishism which you can read here.
• Metrophilia: This behaviour refers to sexual arousal derived from poetry. I don’t doubt that some poetry (like music) can contribute to sexual arousal (and that there is fetish-based and other erotic poetry) but I know of no actual case (anecdotal or otherwise). Prove me wrong and I will happily write about it.
• Normophilia: This was a term coined by the sexologist Professor John Money and refers those only sexually aroused by acts considered normal by their religion or society (and excellently critiqued by Dr. Lisa Downing in a 2010 issue of Psychology and Sexuality).
• Ochlophilia: This behaviour refers to sexual arousal derived from crowds or mobs. I’m not aware this exists as a standalone fetish but frotteurs (those who derive sexual arousal from rubbing up against people) love crowded places as a way of engaging in their preferred sexual behaviour).
• Phalloorchoalgolagnia: According to Dr. Anil Aggrawal’s book Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices, this behaviour refers to sexual arousal by the experiencing of painful stimuli being administered to the male genitals (of which a sub-type would include tamakeri that I examined in a previous blog). It is related to ‘cock and ball torture which the Wikipedia entry (based on Darren Langdridge and Meg Barker’s 2008 book Safe, Sane, and Consensual: Contemporary Perspectives on Sadomasocism) notes “may involve directly painful activities, such as wax play, genital spanking, squeezing, ball-busting, genital flogging, urethral play, tickle torture, erotic electrostimulation, or even kicking. The recipient of such activities may receive direct physical pleasure via masochism, or emotional pleasure through knowledge that the play is pleasing to a sadistic dominant. The practice carries significant health risks”.
• Queefing fetishism: A little bit of a cheat here as I’ve covered queefing fetishes (sexual arousal from vaginal flatulence) in some detail in a previous blog but there are so few potentially paraphilic behaviours beginning with the letter ‘Q’. (If you feel I’m short-changing you, read my previous article here).
• Rhytiphilia: This is where individuals derive sexual arousal from facial wrinkles. This would appear to be related to gerontophilia (sexual arousal to people who are much older than the individuals themselves). I doubted whether this fetish actually exists but I have came across individuals that claim to have such fetishes (such as here and here).
• Stygiophilia: According to Dr. Anil Aggrawal, stygiophilia refers to sexual pleasure from the thought of going to hell. It’s also the name of a novel on the topic by Nathan Tyree.
• Teleiophilia: This neologism was coined by the sexologist Dr. Ray Blanchard and refers to sexual interest in adults. As the Wikipedia entry on Blanchard notes: “Unlike the terms referring to sexual interest in other age groups, such as paedophilia (sexual interest in prepubescent children), teleiophilia is not considered a paraphilia. The term was formalized in order to forestall neologisms, such as ‘adultophilia’ or ‘normophilia’ that were occasionally used, but had no precise definition. The term is used primarily by professional sexologists in the scientific literature”.
• Urethral fetishism: In previous blogs I have examined urethral sex play in its many forms and with its own lexicon (so if you want to read about it in more detail, read more here).
• Venatophilia: In an online article about cartoon quicksand fetishes, there was mention of a fetish group called ‘Giant Video Game Girls’ and they appear to have coined the term ‘venatophilia’ from the Latin venatus, meaning ‘game’ and describes sexual attraction to or fascination with video game characters. Personally I find this strange as most paraphilias derive from Greek (rather than Latin) names. This paraphilia (if it exists) is arguably a sub-type of toonophilia (sexual attraction to cartoon characters) that I examined in a previous blog.
• Wolf-play: In previous blogs I have examined the Furry Fandom (individuals that dress up as animals that engage in both sexual and non-sexual interaction) and various fetish pet play behaviours such as pony play. Wolf-play is just another variant of pet-play.
• Xyrophilia: This behaviour refers to those individuals who derive sexual arousal from razors (and again has a name derived from its opposite condition – xyrophobia). However, there are online forums for razor fetishists and there may be crossover with those that have blood fetishes (which I’ve looked at in various previous blogs).
• “Yaoi fetishism: According to an online article about kinks and fetishes on the Your Tango website, “Yaoi is a type of anime, manga, or fan fiction that originated in Japan which centers on male-on-male sexuality”. The article notes the term ‘Yaoi’ comes from the Japanese phrase “Yama nashi, Ochi nashi, Imi nashi” (and translates to “no climax, no meaning, no point”). An article on the Kinkly website claims that “Yaoi is typically created by women and aimed at women although it has some male fans. It should not be confused with ‘Bara’ which is aimed at a gay male audience”.
• Zentai fetishism: Again, according to the online article on the Your Tango website, zentai fetishism involves individuals that “like to wear, be covered in, bound by and otherwise enjoy lycra full-body suits”.  An article in Fortune magazine notes that the ‘zentai’ is derived from the Japanese words zenshin taitsu that translates as “full body tights”. The same article claims that zentai suits tend to be more fetishistic whereas “morphsuits” are “for more mainstream cosplay fun and are likely to show up at football games, ComicCon, or frat parties”.

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.

Bering, J. (2014). Perv: The Sexual Deviant In All Of Us. London: Doubleday.

Downing, L. (2010). John Money’s ‘Normophilia’: diagnosing sexual normality in late-twentieth-century Anglo-American sexology. Psychology and Sexuality, 1(3), 275-287.

Gates, K. (2000). Deviant Desires: Incredibly Strange Sex. New York: RE/Search Publications.

Langdridge, D. & Barker, M. (2008). Safe, Sane, and Consensual: Contemporary Perspectives on Sadomasocism. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Love, B. (2001). Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices. London: Greenwich Editions.

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.

Serrano, R.H. (2004). Parafilias. Revista Venezolana de Urologia, 50, 64-69.

Shaffer, L. & Penn, J. (2006). A comprehensive paraphilia classification system. In E.W. Hickey (Ed.), Sex crimes and paraphilia. New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Write World (2013). Philias. Located at: http://writeworld.tumblr.com/philiaquirks

Age concern: A brief look at chronophilic behaviours

As someone who is academically interested in sexual paraphilias, it never ceases to amaze me how people working in the sexology field (myself included) love to categorize and sub-categorize every nuance of human sexual behaviour. One of the ways in which sexual behaviour has been categorized relates to the age of the person to which the person has a sexual paraphilia. Most of you reading this blog will probably be thinking that when it comes to age preference, the world is broadly split into the minority of individuals who are involved in paedophilia (i.e., individuals who derive sexual pleasure and arousal from children) and those whose sexual preference is geared towards sex with adults. In fact, in researching this article I was surprised to learn that I am a teleiophile. Teleiophilia (and occasionally called ‘adultophilia’) refers to adult individuals whose primary sexual focus is other adult individuals. (As Dr. Anil Aggrawal reassuringly notes in his book, Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices teleiophilia is not a sexual paraphilia). Those individuals whose primary sexual preference is for elderly adults are said to be engaging in gerontophilia (and sometimes called graeophilia).

According to the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), paedophilia is described as a form of sexual paraphilia whereby individuals experience intense sexual urges towards children (aged under 16 years of age), and experiences recurrent sexual urges towards (and fantasizes about) children that the individual has acted upon and/or causes distress and interpersonal difficulty. Technically, many child abusers would not be defined as paedophiles according to the DSM criteria as the behaviour may not be causing the abusers any psychological problems themselves. However, in day-to-day language, most people would define any adult who engages in any form of sexual behaviour with a minor as paedophilia.

Apologies for what you are about to read because anyone reading it is likely to feel revulsion by what I am about to write. One of the most disturbing and horrific cases that I am aware of involved two children who were systematically abused by their grandfather and their grandfather’s friends. The grandfather had sexually abused his daughter throughout her childhood, and then began abusing his daughter’s children from an early age. After the grandfather died, a video was played at the reading of the will that the family thought contained the grandfather’s verbal reading of his last will and testament. What the video actually contained was a short film of the grandfather having sexual intercourse with his two-year old granddaughter and his four-year old grandson.

The reason I recounted this story is that this is an example of what is known as nepiophilia (or infantophilia) and refers to individuals that have a sexual preference for very young children (usually aged between birth and three years). In the upcoming DSM-V, the term paedohebrephilia refers to the expansion and reclassification of paedophilia into subgroups such as the distinctions between paedophiles that prefer pubescent or post-pubescent children. More specifically, hebephilia refers to those individuals who have a sexual preference for pubescent youths (i.e., typically adolescents aged around 11 to 14 years of age). However, some authors – such as Dr. Anil Aggrawal – claim that hebephilia is a preference for pubescent children between 11 and 14 years for females and 11-16 years for males.

Ephebophilia refers to those individuals sexual preference for post-pubescent youths (mid-to-late adolescents aged around 15 to 19 years of age). Other researchers in the sexual studies field (such as Kurt Freund) have used the term ‘adolescentophilia’ as referring to individuals who have a sexual preference of pubescent and/or adolescent youths. According to the Wikipedia entry on hebephilia:

“In 1914, physician Kurt Boas described hebephilia as ‘an alleged form of female fetishism’. Anthropologist and ethnopsychiatrist Paul K. Benedict uses the term to distinguish pedophiles from sex offenders whose victims were adolescents. Forensic psychologist Karen Franklin traced the history of use of the term in a 2010 article. She states that it is a variation of ephebophilia used by Magnus Hirschfield in 1906 to describe homosexual attraction to males between puberty and their early 20s, who considered the condition normal and nonpathological. Historically, criminal hebephilic acts where victims were ‘biologically ready for coitus’ (i.e. statutory rape) were considered distinct from other forms of criminal sexuality such as rape and pedophilia, with wide variations within and across nations regarding what age was acceptable for adult-adolescent sexual contacts. Bernard Glueck, Jr. conducted research on sex offenders at Sing Sing prison in the 1950s, using ‘hebephilia’ as one of several classifications of subjects according to offense…The prevalence of hebephilia within the general population is unknown”.

In relation to ephebophilia, the Wikipedia entry notes that:

“Because mid-to-late adolescents usually have physical characteristics near (or in some cases, identical) to that of full-grown adults, some level of sexual attraction to persons in the age group is common among adults. Ephebophilia is used only to describe the preference for mid-to-late adolescent sexual partners, not the mere presence of some level of sexual attraction. Generally, the preference is not regarded by psychologists as a pathology when it does not interfere with other major areas of one’s life, and is not listed by name as a mental disorder in the [DSM-IV] or as a paraphilia”.

This also raises questions such as ‘Are some kinds of paedophilic behaviour worse than others?’ For instance, is a 25-year old man that has consensual sex with a 15-year old girl engaging in a sexual behaviour that is as morally repugnant as a 50-yer old man who has non-consensual sex with an 8-year old girl? Such questions have come to the fore over the last year concerning the sexual behaviour of radio and television presenters Jimmy Savile and John Peel. As Dr. Michael Seto notes in a 2008 book chapter on paedophilia in Sexual Deviance: Theory, Assessment and Treatment:

“An interesting theoretical question is whether sexual age preferences can be represented on a continuum, such that most adults are attracted to sexually mature persons, but some individuals are attracted to pubescent children, prepubescent children, or infants in varying degrees. These age preferences may instead represent different “taxa” (plural of “taxon” – i.e., natural group), and it is possible that each taxon involves a different etiological pathway. Thus the causes of pedophilia may differ from the causes of hebephilia, nepiophilia or gerontophilia. It is also plausible that there are multiple etiological pathways for atypical age preferences such as pedophilia, including the genetic transmission of predispositions, poor maternal health, fetal exposure to toxins or infections, and early head injuries”.

Encompassing all of these different types of age-related sexual paraphilias is the term chronophilia. This term was coined by Professor John Money in his 1986 book Lovemaps, and was defined as a form of sexual paraphilia in which individuals experience a sexual preference that is limited to individuals within particular age ranges. However, despite the fact the term was coined by one of the world’s best known sexologists, the term has arguably not been generally accepted, adopted and/or used by most people working in the field of abnormal sexual behaviours.

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.

Blanchard, R. Blanchard, R., Lykins, A. D., Wherrett, D., Kuban, M.E., Cantor, J.M., Blak, T., Dickey, R., & Klassen, P. E. (2008). Paedophilia, hebephilia, and the DSM–V. Archives of Sexual Behavior.

Kaul, A. & Duffy, S. (1991). Gerontophilia: A case report. Medicine, Science and the Law, 31, 110-114.

Seto, M.C. (2008). Pedophilia: Psychopathology and Theory. In Laws, D.R. & O’Donohue, W.T. (Eds.), Sexual Deviance: Theory, Assessment and Treatment (pp. 164-182). New York: Guildford Press.

Money, J. (1984). Paraphilias: Phenomenology and classification. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 38, 164-78.

Money, J. (1986). Lovemaps: Clinical Concepts of Sexual/Erotic Health and Pathology, Paraphilia, and Gender Transposition of Childhood, Adolescence, and Maturity. New York: Irvington Publishers.

Wikipedia (2012). Ephebophilia. Located at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephebophilia

Wikipedia (2012). Hebephilia. Located at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebephilia