How do sexual kinks/fetishes develop?
In: 369
Anyone who is answering with any kind of actual “answer” is wrong.
The truth is, many things about how people work are hard to study and hard to have scientific answers for. We still don’t fully understand how the brain works, and are still working on DNA (genetics). Scientists are still trying to figure out how to study “nature” vs “nurture” but it isn’t a “versus” it’s actually both interacting in complicated ways.
Kinks and fetishes are hard to study because they develop in different people in different ways. It’s not possible to do a controlled study where we raise children in very very specific ways for science, so we can do surveys where we ask people to look back and guess, and then we try and track patterns.
This has been done, but not clear answers are out there. For every person that says “this specific event happened to me as a child and now I have this related kink” (such as some of the comments here), there are many other people that had *that exact same experience* and either never developed the kink, or developed a totally different or opposite fetish. Similarly, “conditioning” is not a valid explanation because some people had an interest in something long before they had any exposure to it in any form. It’s probably one of multiple ways a fetish can develop, but no one way is the only way it happens.
For adults, a fantastic book on the subject is Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us by Jesse Bering. This book relies on lots of science and good research, but still does not have a clear answer on this.
Latest Answers