Washington : If you get aroused by weird things, then don’t worry, you are not alone. A new study has revealed that nearly half of us have deviant sexual fantasies.
Researchers asked 1,040 Quebec residents and revealed that sexual tastes which are considered abnormal by psychiatrists are actually a lot more normal than you might think.
Out of the eight “paraphilic” fetishes listed, voyeurism, exhibitionism, frotteurism, masochism, sadism, fetishism and transvestism, four of them were found to be surprisingly common desires.
“Overall, nearly half of the sample subjects were interested in at least one type of sexual behaviour that is considered anomalous, whereas one third (33%) had experienced the behaviour at least once,” Christian Joyal, one of the study’s authors, said.
Joyal added these facts suggest that people need to know what normal sexual practices are before we label a legal sexual interest as anomalous, noting that some paraphilic interests are more common than people might think, not only in terms of fantasies but also in terms of desire and behavior.
Of the sample, 35 per cent said they were interested in voyeurism, 26 per cent in fetishism, another 26 per cent in frotteurism and 19 per cent in masochism.
The researchers also found people were more likely to acknowledge their interests in fetishes in an online, rather than telephone, survey.
Joyal concluded that in general, it is true that men are more interested in paraphilic behaviors than women, but this doesn’t mean that women don’t have these interests at all. In fact, women who report an interest in sexual submission have more varied sexual interests and report greater satisfaction with their sex lives. Sexual submission is therefore not an abnormal interest.
The study is published in The Journal of Sex Research. (ANI)