There’s this fetish out there where some people are turned on sexually by amputees. It’s called apotemnophilia. Some of the folks who have this condition desire amputees sexually and some want to be amputees themselves. To be honest, I don’t understand either proclivity. However, I will say that over the years I’ve met some perfectly nice folks with these leanings and found them to be harmless–even if they are unusually curious about my body.
But occasionally I come across some not-so-perfectly-nice things in connection with this condition. It tends to happen often on flickr, when someone asks to be my ‘contact.’ When someone sends such a request, I typically click through to their profile or their photos to see if I know this person or to find what we might have in common (because, I do love photography and flickr is one of my favorite social media spaces). Oh, but today, as has happened more than a few times before, I didn’t see any lovely landscapes or kitties. Instead, when I clicked through to the profile I landed on a site with terrifically graphic and disturbing images of women’s disembodied limbs [scrub, scrub, scrubbing my eyeballs now]. What I saw…I can’t understand or be tolerant of–it’s simply sick. And it’s one of the main reasons that I don’t watch slasher horror movies or attend zombie walks. My life has enough of the zombie already.
Posting this with a picture of a pretty kitten–a small attempt to overwrite the ugliness dancing around in my brain right now.