M Jenny Edwards
Criminologist, Independent Researcher
What makes for "sick" sex?
December 22, 2014
When it comes to sex, what is considered unusual or deviant differs not just from person to person, but among mental health and legal professionals as well.
MENTAL HEALTH
From a mental health point of view, both the DSM-V and the ICD-10 consider voyeurism, exhibitionism, frotteurism fetishism, cross-dressing, masochism, sadism (or sadomasochism), , and pedophilia to be diagnosable mental health disorders.
By comparison, zoophilia (sometimes referred to as bestiality) is considered a non-specific paraphilia. In other words, it's not a mental health problem unless it's causing significant distress to the person practicing it.
LEGAL
From a legal point of view, voyeurism, exhibitionism, frotteurism, pedophilia, and bestiality are all generally illegal. Fetishes, cross-dressing, and BDSM are not typically illegal unless they infringe on the rights of another person.
SOCIETAL
When it comes to search terms, Ogas and Gaddam (2010) found that among the top twenty sexual search terms, seven could be considered unusual or abnormal: youth, incest, domination, submission, bestiality, transsexual, and grannies - in that order.
In a recent study i the Journal of Sexual Medicine, researchers Joyal et al (2014) attempted to determine just what makes a sexual fantasy unusual. They also wanted to know whether the nature and intensity of sexual fantasies differed for men and women. To find out, they surveyed more than a thousand Canadian men and women, asking them to rank 55 different sexual fantasies. The result was that the most common "unsual" fantasies were thos involving exhibitionism, domination/submission (except watersports), voyeurism, and fetishism.
Significantly, the two most rare or unusual fantasies for women or men was having sex with a child under the age of 12, or having sex with an an animal.
