Land of Human Sexuality (click to view full size)

Franklin Veaux was inspired to update Katherine Gates’ map of human sexuality:

My first impression upon seeing this fetish map was that it was woefully incomplete. About the same time as I became aware of this attempt to map the range of human fetishes and sexual activity, I also saw a conversation on another forum in which a woman was complaining that she wanted to spice up her sex life, but she didn’t want to do too much, because if she did too much too fast then by the time she was 30 she’d have done every sexual act there was to do, and where would she be able to find sexual ideas after that?

That particular conversation, and another with an 18-year-old who claimed to be “bored with sex” because he’d “done it all,” got me to thinking about the range of the human sexual condition (vast beyond all reckoning) and the range of sexual things many people think there is (tiny).

I wanted to try my hand at designing a fetish map that would be a bit more complete than Ms. Gates’, and I thought, why not do it as an actual map? One of the ideas I wanted to convey was how small most folks’ sexual experience is, how small most folks’ conception of the whole range of sexual expression is, and how vast the actual range of sexual expression is. And, I thought, a map of an imaginary world might be a way to do that.

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