Here’s an extract from a wonderful article at Martlet.ca, the University of Victoria’s Independent Newspaper.  In “one vanilla’s journey to the dark side”, Danielle Pope discovers and explores her lover’s fetish for body modification, and seeks to understand his kinks and those of others through psychology, sociology and her own personal experimentation.

“…When my partner, Cody, first told me he had a fetish for tattoos and piercings, I brushed it off — sure, tattoos were cool, and piercings could look hot on a lot of people, though I’d never had many myself.

It wasn’t until some time later, when I found out that Cody’s fascination with body modification was on a deeply sexual level, that I began to understand the seriousness of his fetish. This was no optical appreciation — it made up the bread and butter of his sex drive.

The more I learned, the less I understood. For me, there was a line where beauty became grotesque. A woman with her face tattooed so deeply you can’t see the skin anymore, or the infamous Internet pictures of people taken over by their piercings — these were the obvious lines where hot is not, weren’t they? Not for Cody.

Finding out your partner is attracted to something you don’t understand can crumple a relationship. And because so many relationships take time to discover these little truths about each other, there’s often a cut-and-run point. You have to decide whether it’s worth staying the course, or getting out while you still can.

But first, you have to have all the information. Trusting your partner to be able to handle that information takes a great deal of courage and honesty — honesty that fetishists are often forced to stifle…”

To read the full article, click here.