Some types of BDSM play include, but are not limited to:

- Animal roleplay

- Bondage

- Breast torture

- Cock and ball torture (CBT)

- Erotic electrostimulation

- Edgeplay

- Flogging

- Golden showers (urinating)

- Human furniture

- Japanese bondage

- Medical play

- Paraphilic infantilism

- Predicament bondage

- Pussy torture

- Sexual roleplay

- Spanking

- Suspension

- Torture

- Tickle torture

- Wax play

In 2009 Amy Marsh, a clinical sexologist, surveyed the twenty-one English-speaking members of Erika Eiffel's 40-strong OS Internationale about their experiences. About half reported autism spectrum disorders: six had been diagnosed, four were affected but not diagnosed, and three of the remaining nine reported having "some traits." According to Marsh, "The emotions and experiences reported by OS people correspond to general definitions of sexual orientation," such as that in an APA article "on sexual orientation and homosexuality ... [which] refers to sexual orientation as involving 'feelings and self concept.'"

Object sexuality or objectophilia is a form of sexuality focused on particular inanimate objects. Those individuals with this expressed preference may feel strong feelings of attraction, love, and commitment to certain items or structures of their fixation. For some, sexual or even close emotional relationships with humans are incomprehensible. Some object-sexual individuals also often believe in animism, and sense reciprocation based on the belief that objects have souls, intelligence, and feelings, and are able to communicate.

Research has shown that paraphilias are rarely observed in women. However, there have been some studies on females with paraphilias. Sexual masochism has been found to be the most commonly observed paraphilia in women, with approximately 1 in 20 cases of sexual masochism being female.

Many acknowledge the scarcity of research on female paraphilias. The majority of paraphilia studies are conducted on people who have been convicted of sex crimes. Since the number of male convicted sex offenders far exceeds the number of female convicted sex offenders, research on paraphilic behavior in women is consequently lacking. Some researchers argue that an underrepresentation exists concerning pedophilia in females. Due to the low number of women in studies on pedophilia, most studies are based from "exclusively male samples". This likely underrepresentation may also be attributable to a "societal tendency to dismiss the negative impact of sexual relationships between young boys and adult women". Michele Elliott has done extensive research on child sexual abuse committed by females, publishing the book "Female Sexual Abuse of Children: The Last Taboo" in an attempt to challenge the gender-biased discourse surrounding sex crimes. John Hunsley states that physiological limitations in the study of female sexuality must also be acknowledged when considering research on paraphilias. He states that while a man's sexual arousal can be directly measured from his erection (see penile plethysmograph), a woman's sexual arousal cannot be measured as clearly (see vaginal photoplethysmograph), and therefore research concerning female sexuality is rarely as conclusive as research on men.

Sigmund Freud has footnoted the possibility that this fear may be derived from a lack of ingenuity allowing one to ornamentally distance the copulatory organs from the excretory organs. Such a condition can affect both men and women. For others, symptoms include what characterizes a panic attack. It does not necessarily have to be induced by an uncovered penis, but may also result from seeing the manbulging outline or curvature of the penis, perhaps through clothes consisting of thin fabric. In more extreme cases it has been likened to the fight or flight response ingrained within the human body wherein an individual ceases to be intimate with their male partner and is unable to visit mixed gender establishments where people are likely to wear more revealing clothing, such as a gym, beach, cinema or livingrooms with a switched on monitor. The fear can recur through any of the senses including accidental touch, sight, hearing the word penis or thinking about an erection. The phobia may have developed from a condition such as dyspareunia, a trauma (usually sexual) that occurred during childhood, but can also have a fortuitous origin. In literature covering human sexuality, it is used as an adjective only to negatively allude to penetrative sex acts. Men who have the phobia may try to avoid wearing jeans and other light fabrics, especially in public. Some analysts have purported that the condition may be inherited or may be a combination of genetic inheritance and life experiences. For men with the condition, one of the byproducts is difficulty consummating with a partner due to a sense of vulnerability. This vulnerability may have developed during childhood because they grew up being told by their parents that sex and its physiological functions were evil, sinful and dirty, but were subsequently unable to detach such shameful feelings nor reverse it upon reaching adulthood, even when romantic initiatives were subsequently approved of or encouraged by their parents.

Biphobia is aversion toward bisexuality and toward bisexual people as a social group or as individuals. It can take the form of denial that bisexuality is a genuine sexual orientation, or of negative stereotypes about people who are bisexual (such as the beliefs that they are promiscuous or dishonest). People of any sexual orientation can experience or perpetuate biphobia, and it is a source of social discrimination against bisexual people.

Fetishism usually becomes evident during puberty, and may develop prior to that. No cause for fetishism has been conclusively established.

Some explanations invoke classical conditioning. In several experiments, men have been conditioned to show arousal to stimuli like boots, geometric shapes or penny jars by pairing these cues with conventional erotica. According to John Bancroft, conditioning alone cannot explain fetishism, because it does not result in fetishism for most people. He suggests that conditioning combines with some other factor, such as an abnormality in the sexual learning process.

Theories of sexual imprinting propose that humans learn to recognize sexually desirable features and activities during childhood. Fetishism could result when a child is imprinted with an overly narrow or "incorrect" concept of a sex object. Imprinting seems to occur during the child's earliest experiences with arousal and desire, and is based on "an egocentric evaluation of salient reward- or pleasure-related characteristics that differ from one individual to another."

Neurological differences may play a role in some cases. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran observed that the region processing sensory input from the feet lies immediately next to the region processing genital stimulation, and suggested an accidental link between these regions could explain the prevalence of foot fetishism. In one unusual case, an anterior temporal lobectomy relieved an epileptic man's fetish for safety pins.

Various explanations have been put forth for the rarity of female fetishists. Most fetishes are visual in nature, and males are thought to be more sexually sensitive to visual stimuli. Roy Baumeister suggests that male sexuality is unchangeable, except for a brief period in childhood during which fetishism could become established, while female sexuality is fluid throughout life.

Homophobic attitudes and behaviors may be linked to sexophobia: doctor Martin Kantor describes many homophobes as being basically sexophobes, who fear and loathe sexual relationships both between partners of the same sex and between heterosexual partners.

Agalmatophilia (from the Greek "agalma" 'statue', and -philia φιλία = love) is a paraphilia involving sexual attraction to a statue, doll, mannequin or other similar figurative object. The attraction may include a desire for actual sexual contact with the object, a fantasy of having sexual (or non-sexual) encounters with an animate or inanimate instance of the preferred object, the act of watching encounters between such objects, or sexual pleasure gained from thoughts of being transformed or transforming another into the preferred object. Agalmatophilia may also encompass "Pygmalionism" (from the myth of Pygmalion), which denotes love for an object of one's own creation.

Vorarephilia (often shortened to vore) is a paraphilia characterized by the erotic desire to be consumed by, or sometimes to personally consume, another person or creature, or an erotic attraction to the process of eating in general. Since vorarephilic fantasies cannot usually be acted out in reality, they are often expressed in stories or drawings shared on the Internet. The word "vorarephilia" is derived from the Latin "vorare" (to "swallow" or "devour"), and Ancient Greek φιλία ("philía", "love").

The fantasy usually involves the victim being swallowed whole, though occasionally the victims are chewed up, and digestion may or may not be included. Vore fantasies are separated from sexual cannibalism because the living victim is normally swallowed whole. Sometimes the consumers are human, but anthropormorphized animals, dragons, and enormous snakes also appear frequently in these fantasies. After consumption, the enlarged belly of the consumer is often described with great care. Vorarephiles sometimes prefer to differentiate between "soft vore" and "hard vore"; soft vore means the victim is swallowed whole and alive, and may possibly come back out in the case of a "non-fatal" scenario, while in hard vore the victim goes through a more gruesome, realistic digestion process, often getting chewed up beforehand.

Vore is most often enjoyed through pictures, stories, videos, and video games, and it can appear in mainstream media. In some cases, vorarephilia may be described as a variation of macrophilia and may combine with other paraphilias. Apart from macrophilia, vore fantasies often have themes of BDSM, microphilia, pregnancy fetishism, furry fetishism, "unbirthing" (a desire to be swallowed whole into the vagina and returned to the uterus), and sexual cannibalism.

One case study analysis connected the fantasy with sexual masochism, and suggested that it could be motivated by a desire to merge with a powerful other or permanently escape loneliness. With "no known treatment" for vorarephiles who feel ill at ease with their sexuality, psychologists at Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health have recommended trying to "adjust to, rather than change or suppress" the sexual interest. Medication for sex drive reduction could be used if deemed necessary.

The prevalence of fetishism is not known with certainty. The majority of fetishists are male. In a 2011 study, 30% of men reported fetishistic fantasies, and 24.5% had engaged in fetishistic acts. Of those reporting fantasies, 45% said the fetish was intensely sexually arousing. In a 2014 study, 26.3% of women and 27.8% of men acknowledged any fantasies about "having sex with a fetish or non-sexual object". A content analysis of the sample's favorite fantasies found that 14% of the male fantasies involved fetishism (including feet, nonsexual objects, and specific clothing), and 4.7% focused on a specific body part other than feet. None of the women's favorite fantasies had fetishistic themes. Another study found that 28% of men and 11% of women reported fetishistic arousal (including feet, fabrics, and objects "like shoes, gloves, or plush toys"). 18% of men in a 1980 study reported fetishistic fantasies.

Fetishism to the extent that it becomes a disorder appears to be rare, with less than 1% of general psychiatric patients presenting fetishism as their primary problem. It is also uncommon in forensic populations.

Sexophobia in clinical talk has an effect on the way patients speak to their doctors, as it manifests itself in the communication strategies that are employed to speak about private health problems. In that sense, the use of neutral and veiled vocabulary by doctors can discourage patients to speak openly about their sexual issues.

Otherwise, historian and sociologist Cindy Patton has identified sexophobia as one of the main trends that characterised the development of the second phase of the VIH epidemics in Great Britain, along with homophobia and germophobia.

Until the 1990s, it tended to be described mostly as acrotomophilia, at the expense of other disabilities, or of the wish by some to pretend or acquire disability. Bruno (1997) systematised the attraction as factitious disability disorder. A decade on, others argue that erotic target location error is at play, classifying the attraction as an identity disorder. In the standard psychiatric reference "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders", text revision (DSM-IV-tr), the fetish falls under the general category of "Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders" and the more specific category of paraphilia, or sexual fetishes; this classification is preserved in DSM-5.

Attraction to disability or devotism is a sexualised interest in the appearance, sensation and experience of disability. It may extend from normal human sexuality into a type of sexual fetishism. Sexologically, the pathological end of the attraction tends to be classified as a paraphilia. (Note, however, that the very concept "paraphilia" continues to elude satisfactory definition and remains a subject of ongoing debate in both professional and lay communities) Other researchers have approached it as a form of identity disorder. The most common interests are towards amputations, prosthesis, and crutches.

Gender identity is a concept, specifically psychological, that refers to one's sense of being a male or female in regards to sexual orientation. Individuals who are diagnosed with gender identity disorder are classified as being dissatisfied with their anatomically determined gender.

Erotophobia is a term coined by a number of researchers in the late 1970s and early 1980s to describe one pole on a continuum of attitudes and beliefs about sexuality. The model of the continuum is a basic polarized line, with erotophobia (fear of sex or negative attitudes about sex) at one end and erotophilia (positive feelings or attitudes about sex) at the other end.

The word erotophobia is derived from the name of Eros, the Greek god of erotic love, and Phobos, Greek (φόβος) for "fear".

A fetish (derived from the French "fétiche"; which comes from the Portuguese "feitiço"; and this in turn from Latin "facticius", "artificial" and "facere", "to make") is an object believed to have supernatural powers, or in particular, a human-made object that has power over others. Essentially, fetishism is the emic attribution of inherent value or powers to an object.

Psychosexual disorder is a term which may simply refer to a sexual problem that is psychological, rather than physiological in origin. "Psychosexual disorder" was a term used in . The term of psychosexual disorder (Turkish: "Psikoseksüel bozukluk") used by the TAF for homosexuality as a reason to ban the LGBT people from military service.

Bondage pornography is the depiction of sexual bondage or other BDSM activities using photographs, stories, movies or drawings. Though often described as pornography, the genre involves the presentation of bondage fetishism or BDSM scenarios and does not necessarily involve the commonly understood pornographic styles. In fact, the genre is primarily interested with the presentation of a bondage scene and less with depictions of sexuality, such as nudity or sex scenes, which may be viewed as a distraction from the aesthetics and eroticism of the bondage scenario itself.

Historically, most subjects of bondage imagery have been women, and the genre has been criticized for promoting misogynistic attitudes and violence against women.

Acrotomophiles may be attracted to amputees because they like the way they look or they may view the amputee’s stump as a phallic object which can be used for sexual pleasure.A small number of Acrotomophiles may enjoy the idea of dominating the amputee during couples play and they may also become aroused with the thought of having to take care of an amputee.

In the United States, following a series of landmark cases in the Supreme Court of the United States, persons diagnosed with paraphilias, particularly pedophilia ("Kansas v. Hendricks", 1997) and exhibitionism ("Kansas v. Crane", 2002), with a history of anti-social behavior and related criminal history, can be held indefinitely in civil confinement under various state legislation generically known as sexually violent predator laws and the federal Adam Walsh Act ("United States v. Comstock", 2010).

Acrotomophilia (from the Greek ἀκρότομος "having the top cut off" (from ἄκρον "akron" "extremity" and -τομος "-tomos" from τέμνω "temno" "I cut") and φιλία "philia" "love") is a paraphilia in which an individual expresses strong sexual interest in amputees. It is a counterpart to "apotemnophilia", the sexual interest in "being" an amputee.

Sometimes the word is used in a sense wherein it is metaphorical and unrelated to its etymological origins, as in for instance when a man sees another man as a rival and a potential source of infidelity for his spouse. Other reviews have applied the term as a euphemism or allegory to indicate that society is in contemporary times less willing to be objective and straighforward in discussions of the physiological aspects of the young male body in general due to prudery, or a celibacist and puritan standpoint that in particular targets men and boys. For instance, Ken Corbett has theorized the fact of widespread absence of the penis as an object of discussion in children's books and parenting books as evidencing that ""a kind of phallophobia has crept into our cultural theorizing"". In other writings it has been used as an epithet to describe the lesbian or female asexual aversion to male sexuality. Author Fawzi Boubia defines phallophobia as a hostility towards the stronger male gender. The term has also been used as a substitute to indirectly express an aversion to procreation. Phallophobia has also been used as an algorithm in studies of heuristics in robotic decision making in themes related to sexual temperance. In criticisms of anti-male sexism, phallophobia is used as an epithet to deride double standards and hypocrisy in the legal system, all down to the set of genitalia one possesses. One of the byproducts of this phobia among women is that it may result in them faking an orgasm to mask their feeling of revulsion around their male spouse. Forms of treatment may include intensive counselling and therapy sessions.

Sadomasochism is the giving or receiving pleasure from acts involving the receipt or infliction of pain or humiliation. Practitioners of sadomasochism may seek sexual gratification from their acts. While the terms sadist and masochist refer respectively to one who enjoys giving or receiving pain, practitioners of sadomasochism may switch between activity and passivity.

The abbreviation S&M is often used for sadomasochism, although practitioners themselves normally remove the ampersand and use the acronym S-M or SM or S/M when written throughout the literature. Sadomasochism is not considered a clinical paraphilia unless such practices lead to clinically significant distress or impairment for a diagnosis. Similarly, sexual sadism within the context of mutual consent, generally known under the heading BDSM, is distinguished from non-consensual acts of sexual violence or aggression.

Erotophobia has many manifestations. An individual or culture can have one or multiple erotophobic attitudes. Some types of erotophobia include fear of nudity, fear of sexual images, homophobia, fear of sex education, fear of sexual discourse.