The Great Attempt to Catalog All Fetishes (including the pacemaker fetish)

On 28 October 2004 we humans took a giant step towards cataloguing all of our sexual fetishes. An Italian/Swedish research team, led by Claudia Scorolli [pictured here] at the University of Bologna, downloaded data from hundreds of online fetish discussion groups and spent the next three years analysing their haul. Then they published a study in the International Journal of Impotence Research: Relative Prevalence of Different Fetishes….

So begins this month’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

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BONUS: Here’s a piece of info that did not appear  (because the column has to fit into a set space in the print edition of The Guardian) in the published version of the column:

Two of the fetish study’s co-authors, Stefano Ghirlanda and Magnus Enquist, had been awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in 2003, for a study called “Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans“, which was not about fetishes.