by Saftkeur » Fri Feb 01, 2013 10:14 pm
Hmm, this may not quite be on the same topic as mental illness, since that is a subject I have very little experience with. But from what I've seen...
It does sometimes feel like the community in not only here, but lots of other fetishes, has a strong "weird" theme to it. At the very least, weird by current social standards; I'm probably pretty weird myself, though I'd like to think it doesn't show very well. (I'm pretty quiet in real life.)
I think the main thing is, a lot of people who work up the courage to participate in community forums such as here are bound to seem a bit odd to others. "Normal" in today's society tends to translate to "weird but never tells anyone", so if you talk about it, you're already straying off from normal.
That being said, I think there's still a large majority of folks within a fetish such as this who, quite simply, can't ever bring themselves to talk about it or otherwise participate in a community like this. I know I still feel a bit odd nowadays adding sexy or fetish-themed art to my favorites on deviantART, simply for the fear of someone looking through my favorites and thinking "oh wow, this person is a total perv". (I'm a bit more lax about this now, plus my Saftkeur account is anonymous and I could care less what people think of it.)
So what we end up with is a vocal community of people who have worked up the courage to participate; they've either embraced the anonymity of the internet (case-in-point: yours truly), or accepted the fact that nobody is "100% normal", or just got tired of trying to live up to social expectations at the expense of their own interests. And of course, at the extreme end of the spectrum, you have people who are simply lacking in social skills, or just can't seem to enjoy things in moderation. (you see this nearly everywhere, it just appears much differently depending on its context; the sports fan who loves his team way too much and will go so far as to get into fights about it, the gamer who doesn't think about what they're saying while playing an online game, etc.)
To me, I just see people who are sometimes getting a bit too caught-up in their fantasies, or having a bit of trouble expressing what they'd like to say; not necessarily mentally-ill people, though suicidal thoughts would certainly count as such. I can even relate to the second poster's dilemma, I've been really bothered by fatal vore stories as well (though for me, it just reinforced that I only like specific types of vore, and I simply avoid fatal vore stories now).
Er, let me wrap this post up.
To summarize, I'm of the opinion that, while fetish and similar communities do tend to have a larger concentration of "weird" folks, there's no more of a correlation between mental illness and any fetish than with anything else; as with any community, it's simply a smaller group that is the most vocal, and well, in this case the majority of these cases tend to find their way into the more vocal group. Going back to sports, it's the same thing that causes the stereotype of loud, drunken sports fans; they're the most vocal of the vocal majority, even though so many quiet, calm folks enjoy watching sports. You could easily draw a line between football fans and drinking, if you just looked at the vocal majority. Same for bar-goers and brawls, because nobody pays attention to the people who go to a bar, drink, and then just go home.
Fantasy/Fetish artist, specializing in 3D vore, macro/micro, and tongue fetishes.
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