Do you consider that you have “normal” sexual tastes? Well, if not, there is no reason to set off the alarms. A new study published in The Journal of Sex Research shows that sexual behaviors that are often considered out of the ordinary are actually far more prevalent in the general population than we think.
Research carried out by the University of Quebec in Trois-Rivières (Canada) and the Institut Philippe-Pinel de Montréal (Canada) examined the prevalence of paraphilic -or anomalous- sexual interests, as contemplated in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders among Quebec residents. The result was that the participants’ experiences and their desire to experience certain paraphilic behaviors, including fetishism or masochism, were considered neither rare nor unusual.
Thus, 1,040 individuals between 16 and 64 years of age participated in online questionnaires and telephone surveys about their sexual desires and behaviors. Almost half of the respondents reported a desire to experience at least one behavior considered paraphilic and about a third of them (30%) had engaged in such sexual behavior at least once. Fetishism and masochism were the most common. Necrophilia and bestiality, extremely rare.
While some paraphilic behaviors, such as pedophilia, exhibitionism and voyeurism, are illegal and imply a lack of consensus in one of the parties involved, others should not be taken as such: “If people are happy and everything is consensual, I don’t know why it should be abnormal, especially in 2016. Normality is very difficult to define and I don’t think it’s a good idea to try to do it, ”says Joyal.Christian Joyal, study leader.
