An Unconventional Sexuality

Interestingly, though, add a piercing and somehow it's perceived to be gay by many straight and gay guys alike. I don't see the correlation - it's a very small piece of jewelry on a relatively small body part. Why would that be patently gay? I could see pierced nipples being though more of as being "gay" since women's nipples are considered sexual in America and gay and women's culture have intersections.

Navel tattoos are fairly rare. That is, tattoos that accentuate a bellybutton rather than merely surround it, aren't very common. I recall one gay guy I knew who had a crescent moon around his oval outie navel, the navel sitting between the upper and lower "hooks" of the moon shape's opening.

There are those who consider bellybuttons in general to be unsanitary or disgusting. An innie, especially, is a sort of catch-all receptacle for lint and body fluids. Since it's an afterthought for most people to clean it (and I've seen online articles recommending it) it doesn't get cleaned and can indeed develop an odor.

Then you have those who hate outies, especially the fleshier, more twisty ones. They have a lot of skin in them and perhaps that's the distaste that people have - it's like carrying dead skin on your body.

But I've never had either of those negative perceptions, and my great, deep love and lust for navels is arguably one of my personal life's biggest mysteries. Why would I develop a fascination with something that 99.999% of people on the planet couldn't care the slightest bit about? I mean, sure, women's bellybuttons are thought to be something - the bikini put the female bellybutton on the map forever. But culturally speaking, there is no male equivalent (at least not at the time of this writing). I would say the male crop-top is the closest counterpart to the bikini for showing off the navel.

I once did a diagram about what it's like to have a navel fetish, in a larger community. In essence, this is what it looks like when the average person sees a bellybutton showing, and you'll be able to tell which one is me:

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So that's my peculiar proclivity in a nutshell.

12

This should be a longer memoir but, frankly, I just haven't had that much experience with others. Not that I haven't tried. But I've learned that the male animal is very complicated, and even though I have sexual desires, I've not been willing to throw away my identity or other goals in life just to be a Casanova.

I suppose that here are the lessons I've learned about experiencing my sexuality through the prism of an unusual sexual fetish:

The universe either has a perverse sense of humor, or I'm paying off a karmic debt someone else ran up in another life. Whichever the case, I resent it.

Had I had the same sexual taste as the average gay or straight guy, I could have spent a lot less energy feeling I was a freak. Being different in this way, however, has given me a unique perspective on sexuality in general. Perpetually being an outsider, I can understand how others feel alienation.

There are far more sexual tastes in the world and in life than popular media is willing to acknowledge. If there's one benefit that the Internet and social media have given us, it's showing that the spectrum of sexual expression is nearly infinite. More conservative minded folk have no desire to hear about such variety, of course, but that doesn't mean such variety doesn't exist.

I have a much smaller dating pool than so many others on the planet. I can hope for someone who's open-minded enough to be receptive to my fetish. The odds of me running into other gay guys with a navel fetish are close to zero. And that's with years of dating experience in the can already.

I hope my thoughts and musings here have been informative to you, especially if you have a male navel fetish as a gay man, or if you have some other unusual fetish. That someone else can learn they're not alone might arguably be the biggest reason I passed this way through this life at this time in history.

What else could it be?