Is classical conditioning an answer to developing a kink? 🤔
For a while now, I have been trying to figure out how a fetish develops. Occasionally, I still struggle with it, thinking my life would be easier without it, and I still hope that understanding it will give me a little more peace in dealing with it.
I have always suspected that the development of my kink happened very early in my life, because in retrospect my first kinky memories are of being fascinated with diapers at the age of 6. For that to occur, the stimulus of feeling the diaper on my genitals between the ages of 1–4 must have had an arousing effect on me, triggering fetish development in the sense of classical conditioning (basically like Pavlov’s dogs 🤤🐶).
Recently, while browsing PubMed, I stumbled across an older publication on fetish development that I had missed before. In essence, scientists tried to imprint a fetish on male rats using little jackets. While wearing the jackets, the rats were exposed to females, and copulation behavoir and ejaculation times were measured. Rats that were conditioned with the jacket on had significant problems ejaculating in the presence of a female when they were deprived of their jacket.
I was not surprised by the results, and I think they add a little weight to my suspicion, although how early children can actually begin to feel arousal is probably hard to determine—and my idea is likely quite a stretch.
I have also always wondered about the large gender imbalance in the diaper fetish community. I know that online platforms like Fetlife are not a perfect indicator of how many men or women have a kink, because female membership numbers are generally lower across most kinks on such platforms, likely also due to male behavior in general. I also know that there are controversial discussions about this in several forums. Still, I cannot help but notice that the imbalance seems much greater with the diaper kink in particular.
I know I may be sticking my neck out even further with this thought, but I wonder whether the diaper fetish occurs more in men than in women because the sensory areas of male genitalia are simply more exposed/pressed into the diaper than female genitalia. Consider how much more exposed the glans penis is compared to the clitoral glans—not even taking into account that modern anatomy has finally recognized the sensitivity of the clitoral body, crura, and bulbs as well. This makes the percentage of highly receptive areas exposed to clothing or external stimuli much higher in male genitalia.
Long story short: if classical conditioning is an answer to the development of a kink, and if there is a gender imbalance in a certain kink, anatomy might be part of that answer.
Here is the link to the aforementioned paper "Somatosensory conditioning of sexual arousal and copulatory behavior in the male rat: A model of fetish development":
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031938413002539?via%3Dihub
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