Why do people start liking vore so young?

[LongtimeVFan]

All I have to say is Men in Black 2....2002 I was about 8 or 9

[RuffledFerret]

Okay, so they're saying that - for men - having older brothers, being left-handed, and having a longer index finger than ring finger (on your right hand) are signs that you are more likely to exhibit paraphilic interests, of which they are naming homosexuality and pedophilia as examples in the literature review - though this research was done among (allegedly) heterosexual men.

Could you point out where homosexuality and pedophilia are referenced? I seem to have missed that.

While I suppose the correlations mean something, it seems like the direction of the paraphilia (among which, as I understand it, we don't really consider homosexuality anymore) is completely left unexplained.
While obviously individuals vary tremendously, and any exception does not necessarily disprove a tendency, I'd point out that I'm an only child (no older brothers), my ring finger is longer than my index finger on my right hand, and I'm right-handed. I'm not homosexual, though I will confess to having had an attraction to boys when I was young (<10) and still find boyish women very attractive.

As stated in my last post, I too am disappointed in how vague the Wikipedia summary is. I don't fit into very many of the categories they describe either. My response to the thread's original question I wanted to be more science-based than the typical and anecdotal "I watched cartoons with vore when I was a kid" (though I'll admit the number of such accounts does contain a hint of scientific evidence in a few ways).

The phrase 'excessive prenatal estrogen exposure' sounds to me like a dig suggesting that these men are perhaps 'too girly' because they've had too much estrogen, which has 'disturbed' them. The feminist in me is wondering if this is just some sexist garbage wrapped in scientific language, but I'm going to let the social justice warrior rest for now. Still, if this is the best that the 'nature' side of the debate has to offer, then I'd hardly say that the case is proven.

Considering this paragraph points toward prenatal neurodevelopmental correlation as a renowned cause of paraphilic preferences, I'm inclined to agree with its inclusion that significant exposure to a specific hormone may be relevant to the point.

Okay, this says 'early in life' - so, not prenatal.

This is a quote from the second paragraph which deals specifically in behavioral explanations. The first paragraph focuses on biological - and prenatal - evidence in development.

[MirceaKitsune]

I loved vore since as long as I can remember, which starts from roughly around the age of 3. I would thus say it's a like I was born with. No idea how but I wouldn't change a thing

[voidrunner]

I couldn't tell you why, but my first fascination with vore was when I was 7. I had a dream I was eaten by a tiger. I don't know why, but somehow that fascinated me... I guess I was weird

[Scrumptious]

Okay, so they're saying that - for men - having older brothers, being left-handed, and having a longer index finger than ring finger (on your right hand) are signs that you are more likely to exhibit paraphilic interests, of which they are naming homosexuality and pedophilia as examples in the literature review - though this research was done among (allegedly) heterosexual men.

Could you point out where homosexuality and pedophilia are referenced? I seem to have missed that.

It was in the Rahman & Symeonides article that Wikipedia cites.

As stated in my last post, I too am disappointed in how vague the Wikipedia summary is. I don't fit into very many of the categories they describe either. My response to the thread's original question I wanted to be more science-based than the typical and anecdotal "I watched cartoons with vore when I was a kid" (though I'll admit the number of such accounts does contain a hint of scientific evidence in a few ways).

Yes, Wikipedia is only as good as its contributors. I contribute to Wikipedia on issues that are within my expertise, but I'm hesitant to do so with this sort of material, since my IRL name might then be attached to it. (If I neglect to log out, for example.) I agree that delving into the literature would be good. Like me you would want access to a good academic library and its databases.

The phrase 'excessive prenatal estrogen exposure' sounds to me like a dig suggesting that these men are perhaps 'too girly' because they've had too much estrogen, which has 'disturbed' them. The feminist in me is wondering if this is just some sexist garbage wrapped in scientific language, but I'm going to let the social justice warrior rest for now. Still, if this is the best that the 'nature' side of the debate has to offer, then I'd hardly say that the case is proven.

Considering this paragraph points toward prenatal neurodevelopmental correlation as a renowned cause of paraphilic preferences, I'm inclined to agree with its inclusion that significant exposure to a specific hormone may be relevant to the point.

It might be innocent, but the phrase 'excessive' might also imply a value judgement - especially where it relates to homosexuality.

[Filan]

I think a big part of it especially for those of us who grew up with the classic animation is that Vore has always been there, Now admittedly 95% of what we saw as kids was purely comedy. But the fact is it was still there and rattling in our heads when we grew up and into more adult material.

[Garber09]

I also remember going to a childrens museum when I was in early elementary school and seeing the biological exhibit. It was a tunnel of different biological functions kinda like a bounce-house obstacle course, but it specifically featured the digestive system. The entrance was a mouth, and I remember vividly as I stepped on the tongue I froze and got the chills.

Wow, I would have loved to go to that museum. A pity there were no one here at Spain, or at least no One I could knew. I know that if I went there while I was a kid, I'd have felt "funny" for sure and my Family or friends would have noticed something, despite it being innocent as can be. You were Lucky.

[GastricAztec]

At Disneyland, back in the 1970s, there was a boat ride where you rode through the mouth of the whale that swallowed Pinocchio. I rode it two or three times when I was five or six years old.

[OhSevenTen]

I've never thought about the "why."

As for my story, I learned about vore when I was maybe 9 or 10, but it has roots from back when I was 3 or 4.
When I was 3 or 4, I had a dream that I was sitting in front of the TV, watching some kind of show involving a belly dancer. I placed my hand on the TV and went straight through it.
I would later discover that I had a thing for tummies, eventually leading to an interest in vore, sexual and otherwise.

I don't know anything about the reasoning behind why I like what I like, I just do. And I have memories of being young and liking it.

[Theguythatdoes]

I'd like to say because it shows up in a lot of children's media.

[Intoweirdthings01]

Maybe Im a bit of an odd case then.

I do remember when I was younger being into vore and voreish things, although I wasn't aware at the time that it was called vore. I think the biggest jump into vore for me was the Men In Black 2 movie, with the iconic vore scene in it and I remember that it made me feel tingly like never before. Honestly im not sure why, but I would remember that I would sneak an old t.v. with a dvd player and watch the f out of that scene. I had no idea about the internet and all of its wonders.

As for the reason why, I think its because of the internet expanding so much, and probably the blow up of those minecraft vore videos on youtube, cause those things have an unbelievable amount of views. This probably being the fact that minecraft is popular enough as is, and the fact it's being pushed for kids, and then this content makes some people begin to question themselves, and delve deeper into it with the internet today and more and eventually build up this fetish or kink. There are obviously other reasons too, such as the fact that there are different fetishes, such as furry, bdsm, and others that also associate with vore at some point and then that brings in a whole other set of feels (I believe I read that particular statement in this thread or a similar one).

And yeah, sometimes it is just the way it is, like before I felt that first tingly feeling, I never would've thought I would be into something like this, but look at me now!I love vore, and that's a part of me for better or worse.

Edit: I prefer to be prey, btw. Not sure if that has an impact on anything major, but it could. I think I also associate some pleasure with vore because I can't seem to *enjoy* M/F vore vs F/? vore after puberty hit me, or before for that matter.

[undisclosed]

Once in a kinder garden they gave us a foreign processed cheese, a small container to everyone. It was a Soviet Union, and this kind of food was very unusual there and it was a deficit (something rarely found in public trade). And it tasted wrong for me, as if I were eating other person. I refused to eat it, and they even did not punish me (they usually did for leaving food), probably because anyone of the staff was willing to take it home.

And the next night in my dream I saw a boy that, well, sort of smelled like that cheese. We became aquianted, yet not friends I think.

I don't know why my imagination could have worked that weird way back then.

[MasterMage13]

No idea what started it, but I've been into it since before I can remember; certainly when I was a very young child. I'm older than the internet. Probably influenced by books and movies. I used to read a lot. A lot of kids books have vore in them. Like, quite a few. Little kids being led into the woods to be cooked and eaten by a witch. Little Red Riding Hood. Even the three little pigs is a predator\prey story. Lot of vore in Goosebumps, particularly the interactive ones. One of my favorite books when I was a kid was The Teacher from the Black Lagoon, little 10 or 15 page picture book, where illustrated in one page is the teacher, a big green dragon lizard thing, swallows a girl whole and then later remarks that the girl is "digesting". It's a book for like, 1st graders... And lots of movies, particularly from the 80s and 90s had creature vore and it was made with practical effects. I used to have quite the collection.

So, lets not blame the internet too much. I didn't discover the vore community until I was in High School. And, of course, I'd never even heard the word before. Stumbled across it by total accident. Someone used the word on some forum somewhere and I Googled it and found some ancient FTP site with some old hand drawn stuff and a couple stories on it. And then I think vore.net. And then it was like "oh wow..."

Which, was actually really nice to discover that there were others. It was a big deal to me, psychologically, I think.

I've always been really self-conscious of it. And I have a really hard time talking to people even here about it. And certainly never anyone IRL. But, at least around here I'm starting to get more comfortable talking. I try not to be such a lurker, like I was for a very very long time. When I was a kid I thought that, if anyone found out that I was into people being eaten alive by monsters and stuff, that they'd make me go see a therapist or something. So I learned to keep my mouth shut.

[umayo]

I quite firmly hold the opinion that I've always been into it, and any media portrayals to which I was exposed did not cause the affliction, but just made me notice it. Specifically, I strongly disagree with the apparently somewhat popular theory that fetishes are caused by some sort of exposure to a behaviour/body part/object in a sexual context at a "critical point" in development.

As evidence:

• I have memories of "feeling funny" and somehow being "into" vore-related scenes in movies, fairy tales, and real-life situations (such as cats chasing mice, birds of prey, that sort of thing, thinking, "I'd like to be that cat in this situation") starting from age 5 or so.


• I have a particular unambiguous memory of a physiological response (meaning, getting a boner) from reading and seeing an illustration about white blood cells swallowing microbes in a children's biology book when I was around 8. (I then locked myself in alone in a room, took all my clothes off, and tried my best to pretend to be a white blood cell, but it was not very successful, from what I remember. Obviously, I could not go further or 'finish' in any way at that age.) My point here is that the stimulus had absolutely nothing to do with sex, so it could not have been a case of a confused response to sexual imagery, as you might be able to argue with cases of attractive actresses being swallowed by monsters in film.


• I once spontaneously came up with a fantasy of cock voring tinies while lying in bed at night, also around age 8 or 9. This only happened once, and the memory stayed buried deep in my mind until I found out cock vore was a thing on the internet many years later.


• All of the above occurred before I knew what sex was or had had any exposure to adult content. I genuinely had no idea what sex was until I was given "the talk" by my parents around age 10. I don't know how I managed to avoid finding out earlier despite having access to a computer with an unrestricted internet connection, but I know I didn't know what it was because I remember being surprised when it was being explained to me, and thinking to myself, "okay...getting a boner from seeing naked ladies seems plausible...I think I've had that happen a couple of times, too, although it's not the primary trigger I've noticed...but when are they going to get to the part about getting a boner from eating creatures alive???" That part, of course, never came, leaving me very confused for a few more years.


• Puberty did not start for me until around age 12 or 13, and I never saw porn of any sort until around age 14, not counting the occasional sex scene in a movie, so all of the above happened at least a couple of years before any physical changes started.

All in all, if my interest was caused by some life event or exposure to particular media, then the event must have happened before age 5, it must have given me this interest independent of association with any sexual context, and I either do not recognise what the event was or have no memory of it. I don't think it's completely impossible, but I find it highly unlikely, and it sounds like some Freudian nonsense to me.

No idea what started it, but I've been into it since before I can remember; certainly when I was a very young child. I'm older than the internet. Probably influenced by books and movies. I used to read a lot. A lot of kids books have vore in them. Like, quite a few. Little kids being led into the woods to be cooked and eaten by a witch. Little Red Riding Hood. Even the three little pigs is a predator\prey story. Lot of vore in Goosebumps, particularly the interactive ones. One of my favorite books when I was a kid was The Teacher from the Black Lagoon, little 10 or 15 page picture book, where illustrated in one page is the teacher, a big green dragon lizard thing, swallows a girl whole and then later remarks that the girl is "digesting". It's a book for like, 1st graders... And lots of movies, particularly from the 80s and 90s had creature vore and it was made with practical effects. I used to have quite the collection.

So, lets not blame the internet too much. I didn't discover the vore community until I was in High School. And, of course, I'd never even heard the word before. Stumbled across it by total accident. Someone used the word on some forum somewhere and I Googled it and found some ancient FTP site with some old hand drawn stuff and a couple stories on it. And then I think vore.net. And then it was like "oh wow..."

Which, was actually really nice to discover that there were others. It was a big deal to me, psychologically, I think.

I've always been really self-conscious of it. And I have a really hard time talking to people even here about it. And certainly never anyone IRL. But, at least around here I'm starting to get more comfortable talking. I try not to be such a lurker, like I was for a very very long time. When I was a kid I thought that, if anyone found out that I was into people being eaten alive by monsters and stuff, that they'd make me go see a therapist or something. So I learned to keep my mouth shut.

I agree completely. I don't think there's anything new about the vore interest, or that it has anything to do with the internet. My guess is that it's been around at the same rate for a long time, possibly forever, but that before the internet, it was much harder to find out that you weren't alone. I know that even as a child who didn't know what a boner meant, I had an instinct to keep my mouth shut about exactly what sort of thoughts would produce this effect, probably because feeling good about people getting eaten alive contradicts the most basic morals that all children are taught. I remember wondering whether I was alone in it, or whether it was one of those things that's normal for everyone but nobody talks about. I became pretty sure that it was not the latter after the conspicuous absence of any explanation of vore from my sexual education, and I imagine that after that I would have lived the rest of my life without ever telling anyone or finding out I wasn't the only one, if not for the internet. On the other hand, if I hadn't found out that there were others like me online, I might have been more tempted to mention it to someone at some point in my life...perhaps a girlfriend, or a therapist...who knows. As it is, I've still never talked to anyone about it in real life, and I don't plan to. Like yourself, I'm even a bit paranoid about talking about it here, so I've lurked for a long time. Recently, I've had conversations with a few people on here, and, seeing as my life has not collapsed yet, I've become a bit more bold.

[fieldmousse]

I strongly disagree with the apparently somewhat popular theory that fetishes are caused by some sort of exposure to a behaviour/body part/object in a sexual context at a "critical point" in development.

I agree with most of you said. It boils down to the "nature vs nurture" debate or how much of sexuality is due to our biology and innate properties vs how much is due to our environment and how we are raised.

Firstly, if we separate science and culture - I think culturally, it's generally harmful to think of sex as a "nurtured" thing. In non-technical discussions, one should refrain from doing such because it leads to the false inference that people's sexuality can be manipulated or engineered. Think "gay conversion camps" and how ineffective they are.
Like you, I'm also annoyed by Freudian discourse and the whole "oedipus complex" is far too reductive for my taste. Like with any social science, sexuality should not be represented as being captured by a single model / way of thinking because any one theory will surely miss some nuances.

That being said, if we put culture aside, it's my opinion that paraphilic sexuality has to be due to some combination of nature and nurture.
We shouldn't write off all of the influences that our upbringing has had on our sexuality.

All in all, if my interest was caused by some life event or exposure to particular media, then the event must have happened before age 5, it must have given me this interest independent of association with any sexual context,

Introspection is hard and I feel like "whether or not sexuality is attributed to some past life event" is more of a conscious choice than a reality. It sounds like you've decided that it isn't and people who think it is have probably found some memory that "really fits the puzzle well".
But I don't think it's even possible to have a "certain" answer Maybe an empirical answer is possible.

[FunnelVortex]

The quickest and easiest answer is by looking at all the cartoons we likely watched as kids.

The longer answer is that the vore fetish likely goes back a long ways and is embedded within the human mythological narrative and collective consciousness at this point and most regularly manifests itself in the media we often consume.

The super long answer is what people in this thread have already covered.

[RoTheHuman]

I'm firmly in the camp that it isn't media exposure that causes vorarephilia, but rather the latent vorarephilia being there as young children and therefore we found ourselves responding to -- and remembering -- media that resonated with us in that funny vorish way.

I think the formation of it happens either prenatally or at a very, very young age, like age 0-2, and I say that because my experience of it is that it was always there, as far back as I can remember, and there was never any one thing that incited it. I think I had dreams about it well before I saw any media that triggered "funny" feelings. And that seems to line up with a lot of other experiences of people here. There's a clear pattern!

Granted not everyone has to come into it the same way. There are clearly people who develop kinks well into adulthood with no experience of there being anything latent in them before that point, and there are some people for whom that's the case with vore specifically. But maybe vorarephilia is still different in some way? It could be that it has a strong tendency to form in very early development, and a lot of people who have it clearly remember the interest being there well into early childhood.

"Where does a vore kink come from?" is a question that has always fascinated me, and more broadly the question of where kinks in general come from. It's too bad we don't have more solid research about that. It seems like all we have right now are theories that can't really easily be proven or disproven because humans with all their immense complexities and convoluted psychologies tend to be really hard to categorize and run reproducible tests on. I'm not expecting ever to have a solid answer but I still love delving into the question anyway!

[umayo]

Granted not everyone has to come into it the same way. There are clearly people who develop kinks well into adulthood with no experience of there being anything latent in them before that point, and there are some people for whom that's the case with vore specifically. But maybe vorarephilia is still different in some way? It could be that it has a strong tendency to form in very early development, and a lot of people who have it clearly remember the interest being there well into early childhood.

My inclination is that there is nothing special about vore in this regard. Your post reminded me that at some point, after seeing a few of these "early-childhood experience" threads here, I became curious about how early in life other fetishes tended to appear, so I did some reconnaissance on various foot-fetish forums for a couple of hours, searching archives for threads with topics similar to this one and reading through them. I found plenty of stories of first foot-fascination memories occurring at ages well before puberty, as early as age 5 or so, just like we have with vore. (I chose foot fetish sites for several reasons: It's a relatively common fetish; it has large online communities that are easy to find; it's considered relatively less 'taboo', so I figured people would tend to be more open with their childhood memories; it's one of the fetishes that features nothing man-made, so it could plausibly be a natural occurrence from birth (unlike e.g. fetishes for particular types of clothing); and it's one of the less gross ones to read about if you don't have it yourself.)

I haven't taken the time to do this for any other fetishes yet, but I plan to at some point, when I have the time (or courage, as might be the case for some of the less pleasant ones). I suspect that results will be similar for at least most of the "body parts" and "fluids" fetishes.

[StrawberryStereo]

I was born with whatever wiring would eventually become a vore fetish, unfortunately. I can remember having nonsexual thoughts and an interest in the topic since I was 4 or 5.

[RacingLagxxxn]

Reading through this thread, I could say my case isn't unique - having a glimpse of MiB2, though Peter Jackson's King Kong, iirc, had me actually start thinking scenes of myself as a prey, having that weird feeling every time thinking about it. Having no internet at the time, I didn't know there was a term for this until I started using DeviantArt in 2015ish