“Looking for single, free-spirited female. Must like long walks on the beach and candlelit dinners.” That, in a nutshell, is what most men want.
Then there are those who look dull on the outside, but inside they’re harbouring fantasies of secret trysts with prostitutes or wanting to be called “daddy”.
Lucky for them, it’s the age of anonymity in which social media and forums give users free rein and a platform to relate their deepest, darkest fetishes.
It’s no wonder confession websites and forums are proving popular as non-judgmental spaces, such as anonymous discussion app, Whisper.
On one of its discussion forums, men were asked which traits they longed for in a girlfriend and it had nothing to do with the colour of her hair or sense of humour.
No, their desires were a bit more out of the ordinary.
Cross-dressing is a big turn on for this guy:
“I want a girlfriend who will dress me in her clothes.”
He obviously has no issues with trust... or STDs.
“I want a girlfriend who sleeps around and tells me about it.”
Living the Pretty Woman fantasy:
“I want a girlfriend who works in the sex industry. I think that would be so hot.”
The ego has landed:
“I know it’s messed up but I want a girl who only wants me for my money.”
Dump the razors, girls:
“I like girls that are hairy.”
The secret lives of five suburban couples living in Sydney reveal both the fetishes and the repercussions that come with sharing them in 2014 movie The Little Death.
Confessions to weird fetishes are nothing new to the online world.
Viralthread.com ran a thread of people confessing to weird sexual fetishes their exes had and things spiralled from weird to ratchet.
And then there was the UCT confessions page that was created as a public Facebook page in 2013.
Students were invited to anonymously confess their inner thoughts and what followed from a steady stream of confession pages from varsities across the country.
But before you go scoffing at the idea of weird preferences, the exceptional seems to be the new kind of normal.
In 2016 a study by Quebec researchers found that a number of sexual fetishes considered anomalous in psychiatry are actually common in the general population.
The findings, published in The Journal of Sex Research, established people were more likely to acknowledge their interests in fetishes in an online, rather than telephone, survey, and that levels of fetishism and masochism were not significantly different between men and women.
However, it did conclude that men are more interested in paraphilic behaviours than women.
“This doesn’t mean that women don’t have these interests at all.
“In fact, women who report an interest in sexual submission have more varied sexual interests and report greater satisfaction with their sex lives,” concluded study author Professor Christian Joyal.