The word kink has myriad associations — leather, spanking, corsets, whips, maybe even a ginger root. While its depictions in popular culture are abundant and eager, they are hardly ever accurate. BDSM practitioners have called the movie more vanilla than BDSM , or dangerous, because of its superficial understanding of violent sex , glorifyingly portrayed without context. The kink sexual preference is a greatly stigmatized one, and the psychology behind it misunderstood. Understanding how kink develops and what kinky people get out of it are initial steps toward normalizing an integral aspect of human sexuality.

Experts weigh in on whether mental illness is involved when people have fetishes such as bondage, obsession with feet, or adult diapers. Others may develop a liking for a particular lifestyle that allows them to live out their fetish or interest in erotic role-playing, such as bondage, dominance, submission, and sadomasochism BDSM. Fetishes and alternative erotic lifestyles come in a wide variety of forms, from common to extreme. Consider John-Michael Williams, owner of Tykables, an adult baby fetish shop in Illinois that sells adult diapers to people who are aroused by being treated like babies. I relate it to an underwear fetish.

Though once considered deviant and shameful, today most psychologists lend us an entirely different view. Sexual fetishes are far more common than we think. A recent study published in the Journal of Sex Research, finds that one in three people in the US have taken part in one, at least once in their lives.

Google the word "quicksand. Because there's an online community of sex fetishists who have a thing for quicksand. When a person derives strong sexual arousal from some non-human object, a non-genital body part, or a bodily secretion, that's a rough definition of a fetish, Lehmiller says. Activities like role-playing and bondage are also lumped into the fetish category. Fetishes evolve with the times, studies suggest.