'I like to wrap my head in them': Meet the men who get turned on by newspapers
The rise of digital news could threaten one unusual fetish
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Your support makes all the difference.As print newspapers continue their decline and publishers switch to digital-only, one incredibly niche fetish looks to be at risk.
There are thriving online communities of men and women who admit to being turned on by the smell, feel and sight of newspapers, with many fantasising about being wrapped head-to-toe in the stuff.
It appears to stem from early encounters with topless photographs in tabloid newspapers, but those with a fully developed newspaper fetish are turned on by the medium no matter how dry the publication.
One Twitter user from Kent regularly posted pictures of him stuffing up to 10 copies of national newspapers down his trousers.
His bio on the site says he is looking for local women to “wrap me in newspaper”.
On the Experience Project website one man said: “I love the smell and feel of freshly inked newspapers.
“I like to lay them out on my bed and cover myself in them and also wrap my head in them, breathing in the smell.”
Another wrote: “I’ve been away (from the fetish) from a couple of years but I’m back and really into the Telegraph and the FT.”
On one site, a man said he tried to hide his newspaper fetish from his wife, his secret indulgence started to emerge when she found newspapers stacked high in a cupboard.
The development of fetishes is an area of psychology which is particularly understudied, but is thought to be due to the brain making accidental connections between a sexual and non-sexual stimulus.
Many people with fetishes remember them being in place from a relatively young age.
The internet communities of newspaper fetishists seem to have a crossover with BDSM communities, with many people reporting that they like to be wrapped in newspaper sheets by a dominatrix.
As news continues to go digital and more newspapers become digital-only, though, presumably this is a fetish that will become more and more expensive to fulfil.
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