Quote:
Originally Posted by Mutt
explain from a neuroscientific point of view how/why men have sexual fetishes based on female body types - from working in porn we know there are many men who desire fat women, morbidly obese bodies the vast majority of men would reject. others desire super skinny anorexic unhealthy looking women. for others it's old women, past their child bearing years. what's going on in their brains?
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That gets extremely complex and speculative and things can also have multiple causes at once. It's actually something that interests me a great deal. Fetishes interest me but theres not a lot of reliable, published studies examining the brain and weird fetishes.
The first problem of our conscious thinking is that our brain is wired to identify a single cause and has an area of the brain fully dedicated to this. (i.e. "why did i get burned"... "the fire burned me" "therefore, done touch fire... and you won't get burned") but life today is infinitely more complicated than hunting/gathering and fucking and fighting and we tend to always overlook the feat that we live in an incredibly complex environment and for any action or behavior or event, there are multiple causes.
If you look at something like a foot fetish, where a male is turned on sexually by female feet, that's likely caused by something difficult to sum up. The short story is that your brain actually has a map of the body laid over one side of it in a strip which it references for a variety of reason (determining locations of sensations etc). It's just a jumble of physical features (right hand, left hand, lips, nose, left foot, right foot etc), not a picture of a body. The feet and genitals are located next to each other and a sexual attraction / or sexual stimulation relating to feet is most likely the result of and overlap/cross chatter in this area of that map. Conversely, disruptions in the signaling in those areas can cause conditions where you might not recognize your own arm as your own.... leading you to amputate it and not just amputate it, but know the exact line on your arm where you want it amputated (yes, thats a thing) because thats the only way your brain can escape the 24/7 chatter saying "thats not your arm... whos arm is that... why is that arm there... do something about that strange arm" and so on. (see image below)
Asking why a person likes a skinny girl or overweight girl, i would guess is like asking "why does he enjoy being shit on during sex" or "why does pain turn him on during sex" or any other sexual preference. It could be for a multitude of reasons or multiple reasons combined. There aren't usually clear answers to questions like that as they aren't typically the result of brain function/miswiring as much as influenced by environment/experiences/abuse etc. I used to love skinny girls because I grew up around very fat girls. All i ever fantasized about was skinny girls. Then you spend 2 weeks banging a bag of bones, and suddenly something else seems more appealing and tastes and desires move in another direction.
Exceptions to the rule however, do not negate the evolutionary rules which guide our behavior and which are innate to all of us.
