It’s (Probably) Not a Fetish

Reuters reported yesterday on a paper in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology that looked at an unexpected user group for on line image databases for clinical dermatology…people surfing for pornography.

When the curators of the on line database, which includes images of all parts of the human body, including genital images, noticed a surge in requests for images of the genital region, it got the attention of researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

The authors of the article followed requests to the database over a six month period and found that:

of the more than 7800 dermatological images available on the site, 5.5 percent involve genital regions. However, 12 percent of queries for a specific diagnosis involved a genital area. Also, 37 percent of the requests for an anatomic site involved a genital region, and 12 percent of the 10,000 free text queries were for images of genitalia.

Also surprising was the finding that of the top 43 sites that referred traffic to the database, 21 percent were pornographic/fetish sites. Even so, those sites only accounted for 14 percent of the actual referrals to the site.

It’s impossible to know whether fetish/porn sites are merely adding links (and driving traffic) to these databases as another dishonest way of giving users free images to lure them into paying for more, or whether this represents a site of genuine dermatological fetishism.

Either way, researchers, and those who maintain clinical databases are waking up to the multiple and unexpected ways that the internet provides for information sharing and usage.

Read more - Reuters: Clinical web site may be target of porn seekers