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(Ever)lasting Beauty: A Sexual Attraction to the Elderly
Léon Augustin L'hermitte. An Elderly Peasant Woman, ca.1878 Gerontophilia is an “erotic age orientation” in which one is most strongly aroused by the elderly, and so it is at the opposite end of the...
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Apotemnophilia: A Cut Above the Rest (of the Sexual Deviancies)
Kritios Boy. Marble, c. 480 BC. Acropolis Museum, Athens. Apotemnophiles (from the Greek, apo, away from + temnien, to cut) are individuals who exhibit an intense desire for one of their own limbs to...
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Meet the Feeders: Getting Off by Getting Fat
Venus and Cupid, Titian, c. 1550 “If I offered you a million dollars if you could have an orgasm in the next 60 seconds,” said the psychologist to the woman, “what would you do or fantasize about in...
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Bromidrophilia: Beauty is in the Nose of the Besniffer
“Coming home soon; don’t wash,” Napoleon Bonaparte once wrote to his wife, Joséphine. It’s unclear from this snippet of a love note if the most famous Emperor in French history had a certifiable case...
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Erotic Vomiting: You’re So Hot You Make Me Barf
“Erotic” and “vomiting” are not words that appear together often—and fortunately so, for most of us. Orgasms and barfing are strange bedfellows, even natural enemies, you might say. Yet when it comes...
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Hearts of Stone: Sexual Deviants in Antiquity
Paraphilias change with the times—and with the materials at hand. One of the reasons that completely new forms of sexual deviancy continue to emerge, while others vanish, is the fact that, as society...
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The Opposite of “Protection”: A Fetish for Used Condoms
Using condoms is a good thing. Using used condoms, well, not so much. In a 2009 article published in Sexually Transmitted Infections, the British medical author Vincent Tremayne explains the fetish for...
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Bite Those Nails, Baby: A “Quick” Tale of Fingernail Fetishism
Suum cuique pulchrum est—“to each his own is beautiful.” For an otherwise normal, 23-year-old male patient described by the Wisconsin psychiatrist Austin McSweeny in 1972, the most arousing sexual...
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I Don’t Mean to be Forward, but Please Park on my Face?
Christie Brinkley, "The Girl in the Red Ferrari"/National Lampoon's Vacation (1983) For most of us, the prospect of getting injured in a car accident isn’t particularly erotic. But of course, that’s...
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Beware the Ultimate Orgasm: Autoerotic Fatalities
The recent headlining report of a 70-year-old man who inserted a fork into his urethra in a misplaced effort to obtain sexual gratification—and who, in the process, unleashed a collective wince heard...
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Of Cultures Destroyed by Western Sexual Exploitation and Violent Religious...
In working on my latest book Perv, some of the saddest material I came across involved the stormy cross-cultural conflicts erupting between Western ideals of sex and those discovered among other...
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The Lustful Human Animal: Cultural Differences in Sexual Harm and Consent
Bronisław Malinowski with Trobriand Islanders, ca. 1918 Most of us are convinced that we excel at being clearheaded, humane thinkers when it comes to sex. We appeal, and admirably so, to notions such...
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Ian Stevenson’s Case for the Afterlife: Are We ‘Skeptics’ Really Just Cynics?
If you’re anything like me, with eyes that roll over to the back of your head whenever you hear words like “reincarnation” or “parapsychology,” if you suffer great paroxysms of despair for human...
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Darwin’s Morning After Pill: How Couples Who Want Children Can Increase Their...
"Pregnant Woman" by Alice Neels (1971) If you’re desperate for a child but have been having trouble in this area, semen may be the solution to your reproductive woes. That may sound like the most...
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A Baker’s Dozen Old-Fashioned Anti-Erection Gadgets for Men (with Illustrations)
It should come as no surprise that an archival search of the U.S. Patent Office yields an embarrassment of riches regarding various contraptions for guarding against “self-abuse” (masturbation) and...
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Are Straight Women and Gay Men “Natural Allies”? An Evolutionary Account
Still from the movie G.B.F (2013, "Gay Best Friend") Not every gay man has a female best friend, nor does every straight woman have a gay man as her most trusted confidant. But according to a recent...
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The Original Cupid Was a Sociopath
"Jupiter and Antiope" by Anthony Van Dyck, c. 1620 “Winged Cupid, rash and hardy, who by his evil manners, contemning all public justice and law, armed with fire and arrows, running up and down in the...
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Voices Carry (Signals of Your Sexual Intent and Reproductive Value)
If you really want to know if someone is into you – as in, wants to have your babies – never mind what they say. It’s all in how they say it. A team of researchers led by Juan David Leongómez, a...
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A Good Man Is Hard to Find, So Here’s an (Evolutionary) Tip
Scene From "Between Two Women" (1937, MGM Studios) We’re herd animals… especially the female members of our species when it comes to their dating instincts. That’s the conclusion one might reasonably...
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The High-Heel Hottie Effect: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women’s Shoes
On a trip to Italy a few years ago, my partner and I peered into the faraway distance at that famously angled phallus that is the Leaning Tower of Pisa, when suddenly we became aware of a small scene...
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This Queasy Love: How Having Frequent Diarrhea as a Child Shapes Your Adult...
It’s not everyday that love and diarrhea come together in theoretical matrimony. Recently, however, a study by an interdisciplinary team of scientists managed to form this near-perfect union. Oh relax....
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Nice Grill: You Look Like Your Car (and Your Car Looks Like Your Dog)
Photograph by Glen Mitchell In a recent article over at Slate, I reviewed an astonishing new set of findings from Japan showing that subjects can correctly match people to their pets when given only a...
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One Last Goodbye: The Strange Case of Terminal Lucidity
Deathbed, 1886 (oil on canvas) by Jessen, Carl Ludwig (1833-1917) I’m as sworn to radical rationalism as the next neo-Darwinian materialist. That said, over the years I’ve had to “quarantine,” for lack...
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Gender and Suicide: Why Do More Men than Women Kill Themselves?
Le Suicidé (1881) by Édouard Manet How far is it from being to nothingness? I hope it’s a journey you never decide to take, but wherever death by firearm is the most common method of suicide, it’s...
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“I Am a Lonely Soul”: Does Culture Determine How People Commit Suicide?
"Lucretia" by Rembrandt (1664) In my last post, we saw how suicide rates differ by gender. But when it comes to the myriad ways to terminate one’s subjective existence, there’s far more diversity...
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