A to Z of Sexual History: D – Disability Attraction is older than Crash

Throughout history there have been large groups of people for whom having one limb short of a full set is pretty hot, and for whom a limp is way more lust-inducing than a catwalk swagger.

These days, the contingent of the population with this sexual preference is pretty organised. The disability fetish world is broken down into three groups:

1. Devotees, who find a particular disability attractive.
2. Pretenders, who find play-acting at been disabled irresistibly erotic.
3. Wannabes, who actually set out to disable themselves. This last group can have what is called apotemnophilia, or Body Integrity Identity Disorder, the uncontrollable urge to hack off one of their limbs or similar. On wannabe websites, they will compare their efforts, some starting with snipping off their little toes, and others taking it a step too far, like 79-year-old New Yorker Phil Bundy, who died in 1999 of gangrene after a botched double leg amputation.

This affection for affliction goes way back. Amazonians – the ancient female warrior tribe of sexy black stereotypes – preferred their lovers lame. Anitanira, Queen of the Amazons, was so into cripples that she ordered all male babies born to have a leg or foot removed, declaring, "The lame best perform the acts of love." The women would also pinch off one breast so it wouldn’t get in the way of throwing a spear.

In 16th-century France, all the men fancied Queen Anne of Brittany, who had one leg significantly shorter than the other. Ipso facto, all the women of court imitated her limp to get some male attention. With the limp so in fashion in French courts, one writer of the time, Michel de Montaigne, wrote an essay about the subject, entitled "On Cripples". He said, "It's said as a common proverb in Italy that the person who hasn't slept with the cripple doesn't know Venus in her perfect sweetness." Though he also had a deranged scientific theory to explain this phenomenon: "The legs and thighs of crippled women, because of their imperfection, don't get the nourishment that is due them. It follows that the genitals, which are right about them, are fuller, more nourished and more vigorous."

Amputations became medically safe in the 1800s, which coincided with the birth of the first organised contingent of amputee devotees. The group exchanged letters with stories or articles about amputees, or best of all, photographs where the missing limb was not hidden.

By the 70s, a group in LA had cottoned on to the fact that there was a large market for this brand of erotica and launched Ampix, a service that exclusively provided semi-pornographic pictures of female amputees at a price. And then the internet happened and now everybody’s a pervert jerking off over hair-lipped Russian amputees.

The majority of devotees favour a single leg, above-the-knee amputation, but preferred disabilities range from blindness to cognitive disabilities. A corresponding fetish is for the equipment used by the disbaled: wheelchairs, casts, crutches and so on.

The disabled community is pretty divided on these so-called devotees, but no one ever really listens to them, do they?