Here is a photograph of Mr Hersel. He has brown eyes, a small mouth, large cheeks, and ears that look like they’ve been surgically stapled to the sides of his head. The news reports make no mention of his profession, but his appearance suggests a line of work ranging from sports agent to car salesman. Of course, appearances can be deceptive. His colleagues, whoever they are, probably had no idea he liked to be humiliated by the Westlake Warriors. According to another report, “It didn’t take long for word to spread among local teens that they could get paid to spit in a man’s face.” Easy money.

Unlike the “saliva fetish” pervert — a guy who would obtain spittle from young girls under false pretenses and then masturbate with it — Mr Hersel apparently sought from teen boys what many men seek from sadists, masters, and dominatrixes. What he wanted to do was not uncommon, nor who he wanted to do it. Thus far there have been no reports that he sought out boys younger than 16 or so. A law blog expresses skepticism about the worth of even arresting the guy: “After years of practicing criminal law, most lawyers will never see a charge of ‘child annoyance’ being prosecuted. The question for many is whether with California’s budget crisis, this is a crime truly worth prosecuting and spending precious local resources on.”

It would be interesting to calculate how much money is spent every year on the criminalization of sexual behaviors. In America, there has doubtless been a drastic decrease in the amount spent on the criminalization of homosexuality. Conversely, there has been an exponential increase in the amount spent on pedophilia. Probably that is quite rational, since a child has less ability to engage in a consensual relationship with an adult than an adult has to engage with another person of the same gender. But how much is a society willing to pony up to rid itself of any given form of deviance? Is a billion dollars too much or too little to combat perversion x? Or what if the question was posed on a very direct, individual level… How much tax would you be willing to pay to combat, say, pedophilia? Ten dollars a year? A hundred? A thousand? More? Or to the contrary, would you pay to promote rather than suppress it?

In case you missed it, a month or so ago there was a panic about syringe attacks in China’s “AIDS capital.” Evidently two drug users happened to stab people with syringes. One stabbed a cab driver in an attempted robbery, another stabbed a cop in an effort to avoid being arrested. The panic took off from there. (”Some reported incidents were caused by mosquito bites or ‘other psychogenic reasons.’”) With this hysteria still fresh in people’s minds, Mr Van Diep picked a bad time to go around poking women in the ass with toothpicks.

Why, if he was truly in the grip of a fetish for buttocks, did this man go around poking them (rather than, say, groping them, pinching them, etc)? He must have had something of the piquerist in him. Piquerism is a sexual pathology in which the fetishist delights in the act of poking. The term comes from the French piquer, to poke, pick, stab. A few years ago there was a case in which a man would pay exorbitant sums to teen girls for the privilege of poking them with a needle. Perhaps similarly, Mr Van Diep wasn’t just fixated on asses but rather on a more refined act — the stabbing of asses.

You can’t often laugh at a sexual fetish, but there is something funny about the image of this guy going around poking people, like a schoolboy putting a tack on his teacher’s chair. Of course, it’s all a matter of degree. A toothpick is funny. If the guy were stabbing people in the ass with a bayonet or a dagger, it would suggest a different series of images — wounding an excretory organ… When you consider it that way, somehow you can imagine the opposite too — defecating into an open wound… Ah, perverts. You know that somewhere out there in the deviant wilds there is a fetishist excited at the prospect of shitting into a chest cavity that’s been ripped open in an automobile accident.

But then, serendipitously, the BBC just posted today a news item about a man who claims to suffer from a fetish for Ugg boots.

A man with a fetish for Ugg boots has admitted using the internet to harass a group of schoolgirls in the Leeds area. Mark Southeby, 38, used social networking sites to contact the girls. An “enormous number” of photographs of teenage girls wearing Ugg boots were found on his mobile phone, Leeds Crown Court heard. Southeby, of Dutton Way, Iver, Bucks, also developed an online relationship with one 15-year-old and tried to goad her into a series of sex acts. Southeby, who is unemployed, admitted three counts of inciting sexual activity involving the same 15-year-old girl and six offences of harassing teenage girls. The court heard the married stepfather infiltrated a group of girls at a secondary school in the Leeds area by posing as their friends using fake email addresses. His mobile phone also contained an “enormous number” of photographs of teenage girls wearing the popular sheepskin footwear. He was particularly interested in Ugg boots, which he later told police he had a fetish about.

If you read the story cynically, you might think that this business about the Ugg boots is just a cover for the real kink — young girls. But then it turns out that there is at least one web site for Ugg fetishists. So perhaps this man really does harbor a brand-specific foot fetish. The boots are kind of cute…

It all makes you wonder, though. Where is the line between the consumer’s “fetish” for branded items and the pervert’s fetish for branded items? Is it time to invent yet another perversion? Brandophilia: noun. Sexual excitement derived from or enhanced by the presence of a brand, trademark, or label. See also brandophile and brandophiliac…

Do people ever really do it? Are there deviant freaks who stick their penises into colostomy holes? Well, as Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in Being and Nothingness, every “hole is originally presented as a nothingness ‘to be filled’ with my own flesh…” Even colostomy holes.

If you google around using terms such as colostomy and sex, you mostly read about the struggles of people who, having undergone surgery, are trying to overcome a new self-consciousness about their bodies. Having a bag of excrement attached to your side is not a typical way to make yourself feel sexy. And yet there are indeed folks for whom a new hole is nothing more or less than an opportunity to perform a new type of sodomy. For example, there is the testimony of the man who, having suffered a “lightbulb injury” requiring a colostomy, discovers that “many of my suitors want to pork this hole.” (Incidentally, of all the things you can put in your asshole, a lightbulb is a really, really bad idea.)

For even more compelling testimony, listen to the front-line healthcare providers who see what happens when colostomy sex goes wrong. There is the nurse who contributed this nugget to a “most disgusting thing you ever witnessed” thread:

I used to work on the GI/GU floor. I had this patient that had a colostomy in one quad of his abdomen and a large scar where he used to have another colostomy in another area of his abdomen. Come to find out later that he had the first appliance because his anal sphincter was ruined from having sex and the first colostomy was ruined the same way.

How much fucking does it take to ruin a colostomy hole? Is there a proper way to lubricate the thing? How deep can you go? Is it inherently dangerous, or can one have safe sex with an open hole in somebody’s abdominal wall? Evidently you can transmit infections fucking a stoma. Consider this report from an emergency department:

A man in his 50’s with HIV came in b/c of pain around his colostomy bag. For those of you that don’t know, some patients have to have a surgery where their intestines are brought to the outside of the stomach wall and left open to poop on the outside of the abdomen into a bag b/c of a problem more distal in their intestines.

Figured it would be easy….go take a look at the bag and the surrounding bag and see if there are any erosions or bleeding around it. I was surprised by what I found. There were red, raised, ulcerated, and friable lesions on the skin around the whole and coming from the intestines going into the body. These looked just like….HERPES! I thought no way this is possible. So took a quick swab and sent it for a test. Sure enough…it came back as herpes. When I told the gentleman about it, he wasn’t very surprised. His explanation was pretty straight forward: Men give him money, and in return he takes off the bag and lets them have sex with his colostomy hole and intestines!!

If there are people who fantasize about fucking colostomy holes, you can be sure that there are also coprophiles who titter at the prospect of a full bag. Last year, against all expectation, the 2 Girls, 1 Cup video became the subject of a YouTube fad. Could a new video, a sort of 2 Girls, 1 Colostomy Bag, go viral next?

There is a subtly comical video about “Diaper Boy” — the authorities’ moniker for Bagnes — at ABC 4. You can watch as the newscaster and a local law-enforcement representative struggle to speak of a grown man wearing a diaper with the gravity that a sex crime involving children would seem to demand. The video also specifies that the man was wearing an Elmo diaper. It makes you wonder whether he had an erection giving three-dimensional form to Elmo’s bulbous nose.

You can find Barton Bagnes’ entry on SONAR, Utah’s sex offender database. (By the way, what the hell sort of registry makes it impossible to link directly to a sex offender’s page? Is that a technological failure or some twisted privacy regulation? Whatever the case, it certainly detracts from the registry’s usefulness.) SONAR reveals that Barton, currently 31 years old, is a tiny man who weighs only one hundred pounds and stands just over five feet tall. Evidently that explains how he is able to fit himself into diapers — and it symbolizes, perhaps, the way in which his sexuality has been stunted at toddler level. When a grown man dons an Elmo diaper and shows it to four-year-olds, it is difficult not to think that he’s trying to say, “Hey, I’m just like you. I want to belong…”

It is instructive to compare the modus operandi of Diaper Boy to Baby Man, purportedly the only “out” “adult baby” in the world. Baby Man wears diapers and has un-learned his toilet training in order to live an open life of infantilism. He seems to function in society and doesn’t have run-ins with the law. What’s more, he doesn’t seem to be a pedophile — or maybe his pedophilia, odd as it sounds to say it, is self-directed, channeled into an effort not to exploit children but to become both child and exploiter in one. Diaper Boy, on the other hand, appears to have the exact opposite m.o. Presumably he creeps around in adult get-up then unleashes his Elmo diaper on unsuspecting children. It makes you wonder if the “cure” for Diaper Boy would not be imprisonment or therapy but a rather a dose of openness in the manner of Baby Man. Maybe he’d leave off with the children if only he could find the courage to become Diaper Man?

Names were removed from the story on the theory that innocent pensioners may not appreciate showing up on PervScan. Besides, the important point is the “fetish” itself. Breaking down the walls — there are many non-fetishistic reasons that a vandal could be inflicting damage on local properties. Some overzealous real estate developer may be trying to spook the old folks out of their homes. Some kleptomaniac metallurgist may be stealing raw materials from the walls. After all, the price of metals such as copper and aluminum have skyrocketed in recent years.

But for the sake of argument, let’s suppose that there really is a person out there with a fetish for knocking down walls. He might resemble the sort of arsonist who derives a vicarious sexual thrill from burning down buildings except that, in the stead of fire, he prefers to go after a structure with hand tools. In his mind, perhaps he identifies removing a wall with undressing a lover. Or perhaps he gets off on the violence implied, as though his every act of destruction symbolizes an assault he would really prefer to perform on a person. Or perhaps it’s an elaborate form of voyeurism, an attempt to see things usually concealed by the walls he tears down. Or perhaps he is just a really, really fucking bored pervert who, in an effort to move beyond the perimeter of his own jadedness, has decided to take hammer and cudgel to every limit.

Not long ago I interviewed some retail clerks for a documentary about people who deal with the public on the job. One woman who worked at the cosmetics counter of a high-end department store told of a man who used to eat the pressed powder right out of the compacts. (I wonder what shade goes best with stomach contents…) Another ate lipstick. One more told of people who mistook a remote corner of the store for a restroom and left a steaming brown present. Then there were the perverts. These guys would hide in the rooms, listening to all the women self-deprecating in the harshly-lit mirrors who were sometimes talking to themselves, sometimes two in a room… If a guy were lucky, he’d find a partitioned area with merchandise still in it, surrounded by hurriedly discarded cloth that had just recently been next to a woman’s naked body. He could imagine all the half naked women who had been in this very room, examining themselves for flaws, struggling to see if maybe a skirt would be better with this shirt, so they must take off the prospective pants and stand there in the mirror with no bottoms contemplating their exoskeletons. Maybe he could even see their nude calves in that coveted rectangle of space under the door. This was just too much to take, amid the warm cloth…and the chatter…release. There is nothing romantic about the aftermath. Some underpaid clerk has to go in and clean up the remains of the day, according to my sources, without even the benefit of a HAZMAT suit. Was this in the job description?! You though you were just supposed to ring up purchases and send people off with a smile and less of their money. No way are you responsible for post-porn offerings on a size twelve camisole, no way! Maybe it’s the thrill of getting caught. Or a more auditory version of the Peeping Tom. Regardless, I look at a pile of clothes in a dressing cubicle like there is a snake in it.

What makes the piece especially interesting is that Molique, the author of an erotic tale or two, sees the fetish from several vantage points. She understands the fetishist’s excitement at the chemise or skirt that has acquired a talismanic power by rubbing against a naked body. She understands the women in the dressing rooms, who are engaged in private debates about their body images and don’t realize that perverts are staring at their ankles and toes. Finally, she understands the folks whose job it is to mop up the mess. Really, what do stores do with cum-stained clothing? Throw it out? Put it on the sales rack?

As for the dressing-room fetish itself, it’s hardly novel. If there is a paucity of information about it online, the reason is probably that this fetish is, relatively speaking, kid stuff, a consumerist variant of voyeurism. It is easy to satisfy (dressing rooms are everywhere) and presents a low risk of apprehension. (Can you see the store detective chasing you down in the parking lot with a cummy pinafore? … “Excuse me, sir, is this yours? Can we take you downtown for a DNA match?”) The fetish only starts to get illegal when it edges over into video voyeurism or pedophilia — and if you google those, you’ll see that plenty of fetish activity occurs in dressing rooms.

Meanwhile, how about that guy who likes to eat the pressed powder from compacts? Now that’s an interesting fetish. Googling it brings up little except the early John Waters film Eat Your Makeup, in which women are obliged to eat makeup and “model themselves to death.” Molique mentions that a “dressing room fetish” doesn’t even have a proper name, but doubtless that is because the fetish disappears into others — voyeurism and so on. But how about a makeup-eating fetish? That’s a kink with no name, so let’s give it one: cosmeticophagia, from the Greek kosmetikos (cosmetics) and -phagia (eating, swallowing, as in coprophagia). You heard it here first.

Given its relatively benign nature, it is surprising that foot fetishism ends up in the news as often as it does. There are currently half a dozen incidents where this congenial fetish crossed over the line into illegality. For example, there is the “alleged foot manipulator” who impersonated a doctor in a Target store and touched a woman’s toes. There is the trial of the Philadelphia man who ordered women “to remove their shoes so he could suck their toes and fondle their feet.” He also robbed them at gunpoint, and yet the story places its emphasis on the foot fetishism. Wouldn’t you rather have your toes sucked and fondled than your purse or wallet taken away? You’d have thought that being robbed is the more noteworthy crime.

Then there is the more interesting story of the Vancouver woman tricked into posing for photographs that subsequently appeared on a fetish site.

Shannon Caicedo, who owns a futon and bed store in the Vancouver Mall, said a man named Tracy came into her store last month and told her he needed video and pictures of feet for a school project.

“He said, ‘I’m with the reflexology school and we’re trying to get some pictures of people’s feet,’” Caicedo said.

At the time, Caicedo said, it seemed like a simple favor for a student.

“He starts taking pictures of my feet and videotaping. I guess, looking back, it was kind of an odd thing,” Caicedo said. “He kept explaining, ‘OK, now this is what I’m doing. This is why I’m taking these pictures. Can you spread out your toes?’”

The photographer’s photos, however, ended up on a foot fetish Web site.

On Tuesday morning, Caicedo received an e-mail from someone in Canada who saw her photo on back40foot.com, a Web site with photos of feet of women older than 40 years old.

“There’s other people who look just like me who look like they’re trying to help, not like they’re trying to be on a foot fetish Web site,” Caicedo said.

Here is a rule of thumb: if you’re not comfortable posing for a foot fetish web site, never take your shoes off in front of a camera. In this day and age, you just don’t know where any photograph is going to turn up. The poet Mallarmé once said that the world exists only to end up in a book. Well, nowadays it exists only to end up on the internet. Ask Paris Hilton. She understands.

Finally, there is the heartwarming tale of the Chinese man who woke his wife from a decade-long coma by biting her toes. “I played the radio, sang and talked to her, even tickled her, but nothing worked,” he told a newspaper. “I then recalled someone saying that the feet are the home for many nerves. I wondered if I could wake her up by biting her feet.” However, given the fact that he spent ten years biting her toes, you have to wonder two things. First, is there really a cause-and-effect relationship between biting the toes and awaking from a coma? Probably not. Second, does the fact that a guy spends ten years gnawing his comatose wife’s toes say anything about his psychology? Is that love? A benign fetishism? Both?

Here is a picture of Mr. Johnson, the bottom fetishist. He looks like he’s wearing plum lipstick and some rouge. He’s not the scariest looking guy. Then again, if you’re walking alone in the evening, having any man grab your ass can be a frightening experience — particularly if he’s emitting “I have a knife in my rucksack” vibes.

You can understand Mr. Johnson’s motivation without too much effort. Approximately four out of fifteen women complained to police about his behavior. Maybe a few more said “fuck off, jerk” or “leave me alone, creep.” It’s quite possible that being vilified or told off excited him too. Meanwhile he was running less than a one in five chance of suffering punitive consequences for his behavior. With an eighty percent chance of successfully groping an ass, it’s no wonder he was out there getting his kicks. Most pervs brave far steeper odds and far graver risks for their kicks.

Is this really a fetish, though? The ass is such a common part of sexual behavior that it’s almost redundant to say that a person has an ass fetish. It’s like saying a man has a vagina fetish or a woman has a dick fetish. After the genitalia — and not infrequently before the genitalia — the ass is the most common object of sexual desire. If you fixated on it in some special way or took your ass desires to some extreme length, perhaps your behavior would be fetishistic. But to be out groping? If that’s fetishistic, then half the male commuters in Tokyo suffer from the same affliction.

The pantyhose are “sometimes used, sometimes not.” Naturally we’d all like to know what neighbors mean by “used.” Have the pantyhose been removed from their packaging? Stretched out? Soiled, perhaps?

Certainly neighbors have a right to complain about the man dumping these things at a school-bus stop. Abandoning them in plain view of children puts a nasty spin on a personal fetish that could otherwise be quite harmless. Given that the police don’t want to waste overtime hours on the guy, and given that the locals seem to know who he is anyway, is there any doubt this story is going to end up in some sort of vigilantism? Sooner or later a frustrated parent is going to wig and show up at the guy’s house with a baseball bat or shotgun. Maybe that’s exactly what Mr Queen Size is trying to precipitate — a brawl. Maybe he’s trying to commit suicide by lynch mob. Maybe he’s already made out his will. Most people choose to be buried in their Sunday finest. This guy probably wants to be interred in nylon fishnets.

Meanwhile, the guy must be investing a huge chunk of change in his fetish. If he can abandon as many as 43 pair of pantyhose per night, he could practically supply a small hosiery business. You could do yourself and the community a favor by swinging by the bus stop every morning and scooping up the hose. The kids wouldn’t have to see the “used” things, and you could sell the darn things on ebay — presuming, of course, that they’re not semen-splattered.