A big part of that is that the “romantic-industrial complex that nets billions of dollars from Valentine’s Day and weddings, and it needs you to ‘buy into’ outdated ideas of love and marriage,” she wrote in a recent Op-Ed for the Nation. “The more you express your love through candies, chocolates, diamonds, rentals and registries, the more the RIC makes!” (Indeed, it’s estimated that consumers will spend roughly $17.6 billion on cards, chocolates, flowers, jewelry and the like this Feb. 14.) But instead of just trashing V-Day — or VD (i.e., venereal disease) Day, as its biggest haters like to call it — she wants to honor “the different ways we engage in loving relationships.”

A less political alternative is one introduced by everyone’s favorite fictional mid-level bureaucrat, Leslie Knope of NBC’s “Parks and Recreation.” She celebrates “Galentine’s Day” every Feb. 13 by getting together with her lady friends for a brunch of her signature dish, whipped-cream with a side of waffle, to celebrate female friendship. Leslie doles out quirky gifts (sculptures of everyone’s spirit animal or mosaics of their faces made out of crushed diet soda cans, for example). She compares the celebration to Lilith Fair — “minus the angst and plus frittatas.”

Granted, Galentine’s Day started as a comedy punch line, but the concept was popular enough in the real world that this year NBC put together a guide on how to create your own Galentine’s Brunch. Bon Appetit even cooked up a special waffle recipe for the occasion. It’s also inspired DIY-ers to make Galentine’s Day e-cards and re-create some of Leslie’s more memorable gifts, like crochet flower pens.

Of course, “Parks and Recreation” didn’t invent the idea of single friends getting together on Valentine’s Day — that’s no doubt been around as long as the holiday itself — it just popularized a cute term for it. Let’s not forget the gender-inclusive Palentine’s Day, Singles Awareness Day or the concept of having a friendly “anti-valentine.” Greeting card companies are increasingly cashing in on anti-Valentine’s Day card for friends, including — gasp! — Hallmark itself.

A similarly heartwarming option is Quirkyalone Day, founded by Sasha Cagen, author of “Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics,” a book about people who “prefer being single to dating for the sake of being in a relationship.” She tells me, “I’m not against Valentine’s Day, but I have never been particularly inspired by it. The aim of International Quirkyalone Day is to offer a fresh alternative where you get to create your own day free of all cliches.” It’s an excuse to “celebrate yourself and your whole life,” she says, and that can manifest in a number of different ways: “take a long walk alone (leave behind your cell phone), buy yourself daisies, start a neglected creative project, buy yourself hot lingerie, get a massage, host a dinner party.”

Of course, not all Valentine’s Day alternatives are so charmingly earnest. Anti-V-Day events across the country call on bitter singles to bring a photo of their ex to put through a paper-shredder or pin to a dart board, or exact some other form of questionable revenge. And make no mistake, while it’s nowhere near a $16 billion industry, there is a market for Cupid-hating goods — from cards reading “Love stinks” to T-shirts featuring upside-down hearts to candy hearts with sayings like, “U left seat up” and “Dog is cuter.” The social network game Farmville even has virtual anti-Valentine’s Day items for purchase, like a barbed heart and a black flower. The truth is this isn’t anything new: Long before there were pithy e-cards, there were Victorian-era vinegar valentines, insulting cards sent to one’s enemies.

Why has the holiday generated such cynicism and, sometimes, downright hatred? Cagen says, “Valentine’s Day has this way of making people feel bad, whether they are single or in a relationship. If you are single, you feel left out. If you are dating or in a relationship, you feel pressure and expectation to have a romantic evening.” She’s all for “a pure celebration of love in all its forms,” but “the problem is when we narrow that definition of love to a romantic connection.” Cagen explains, “Almost 50 percent of American adults are single, so people are bound to feel left out. It’s sort of like a Thanksgiving that only 50 percent of the population feels invited to.”

After the night was over, having lost in the Best Transsexual Performer category, St. Jordan took to the Web to protest her treatment. Her story inspired Kelly Pierce, a female trans performer who didn’t attend the ceremony, to write a lengthy blog post titled “AVN’s Inequality & Segregation Needs to Stop!” Soon, industry blogs and message boards picked up on the controversy.

It was an explosion of long-building resentment over their treatment within the industry. Beyond the red carpet delay this year, which AVN says was not limited to transsexual performers, the company has never allowed the Transsexual Performer of the Year award to be presented on stage. Instead, it has been announced on a JumboTron as the audience starts to filter out of the auditorium. As one star told me, “We’re the black sheep.”

That is despite the genre’s tremendous popularity: “T-girl sites are the fourth most popular category of adult Web site,” according to “A Billion Wicked Thoughts,” a book that crunches the numbers behind Internet porn. (Although female-to-male transsexual stars are on the rise in queer porn, what we’re talking about here are trans women — more specifically, people assigned as male at birth who have transitioned to being female but still have a penis.) There are more frequent Web searches for this genre — often through terms like “shemale” and “chicks with dicks” — than for basic X-rated categories like “butts” or “blowjobs.” Authors Sai Gaddam and Ogi Ogas found that the genre’s average viewer is a straight-identified male (and, based on their analysis, passing curiosity doesn’t explain its popularity).

After St. Jordan’s outcry gathered virtual steam, AVN called a meeting last week with a handful of concerned trans women. On Tuesday, the company published a press release announcing that the transsexual winner would be announced on stage in the future. AVN also promised to allow more trans performers to walk the red carpet and talk to the press, and to present awards during the ceremony.

St. Jordan, who says she put her career on the line by speaking out, is thrilled. “Whether or not I ever get nominated again or get invited to anything with AVN again, the fact that the Transsexual Performer of the Year will be on stage and seen by everybody? That’s huge.” Tomcat, director of Kink.com’s TS Seduction site, agrees: “Not sharing the stage with Ts performers has allowed the majority of non-trans performers to dismiss them as outsiders and perpetuated discrimination against a group who should be equally praised for the work they do and the revenue they generate for the industry.”

While AVN’s decision marks serious progress, St. Jordan says that recent commentary on industry message boards reveals just how far there is to go. “Some of the hate and ignorance that came spewing from people was unbelievable, and this was people in, or associated with, the industry. You saw where a lot of people stood.”

Not that it wasn’t already apparent. There’s a huge stigma against mainstream straight stars working with transsexual female performers — they’re stereotyped as gay and therefore at higher risk for transmitting HIV. Tomcat, a trans man, told me in an email, “I still encounter many non-trans performers who will not work with [female] Ts performers because they consider [them] to be more of a STI risk to do a scene with — this is bullshit. In a industry where everyone is tested and everyone makes choices, the same risks are present regardless of gender identity.”

It perhaps goes without saying that the marketing of transsexual porn is often problematic. “People still search for Ts porn using ‘shemale,’” Tomcat says. “To me, this is like searching online for a cab company by typing in ‘stagecoach.’ It’s an antiquated term that is ignorant, incorrect and no longer OK to use.”

Some performers, like Wendy Williams, aren’t so concerned about the lingo. “I don’t live in a utopia, it’s what it is,” she says with her Southern lilt (she’s from Eastern Kentucky). “I’m not trying to be a transsexual activist.” Plus, “It’s a porn term that describes a genre. That way, some country, straight-ass guy in the corner is going to understand,” says Williams. “You say ‘transsexual’ and they’re confused, you say ‘shemale’ and they know what that is.”

A major struggle for the transsexual female niche is to get recognition within the straight side of the business as opposed to the gay side. “This is one of my biggest pet peeves, when I go into a store to do research to see if they’re carrying my DVDs or product lines and you have the transsexual stuff mixed in with the gay stuff,” says Williams. “Putting it next to ‘Harry Men Volume 1,’ it’s just not a good idea,” she says, since the vast majority of their fans identify as hetero. “My gay friends squeal at the idea of having sex with anything but a masculine male — the breasts and all that is just a huge turnoff.”

For most fans of transsexual porn, the genre is just one of many categories that they’re interested in. “A Billion Wicked Thoughts” argues that T-girl porn has such a significant straight male following because it combines the key sexual cue of female anatomy with that other fixture of heterosexual porn: a big, hard cock. Madison Montag, a nominee for Transsexual Performer of the Year, says, “They get tired of just the same old thing. Transsexuals are more feminine, they’re like hyper-feminine. To me, it’s kind of get the best of both worlds.”

The mis-categorization of Ts female porn has been painfully evident at the AVN awards in the past, Williams says: Buck Angel, the first recognized FTM trans performer, won the Best Transsexual Performer award in 2007. “It was a huge scandal in our community,” she says. “How do you judge his porn against our porn? His fan base is totally different. That’s just one example of how ignorant the porn community is.” (In an aside, she mentions the scene she filmed with him in 2005: “Actually, Buck was the very first, quote, vagina I had ever been in.”)

Many female transsexuals feel like they’re rejected from both the straight and gay world. “Even if you go into the [gay] clubs, transsexuals and drag queens are primarily there for entertainment,” says Williams. “It’s not really inclusive. We’re kind of in limbo, we’re in between both worlds.” In the straight world, men are often timid about revealing their interest in the genre. Most sales happen online, says Williams, who has a line of signature toys, including a $240 cyberskin mold of her ass. She says, “We’re the taboo, and where does taboo usually happen? Behind closed doors.”

Then again, Pierce, a blond with pixy features, says that when she signed autographs in a booth at the AVN Expo in 2008, she was allowed in the “female section” and had a line longer than some non-trans girls. “They were kind of upset with me,” she laughs.

In terms of fans’ willingness to announce their interest in public, it all has to do with a performer’s “passability,” according to Pierce: “Some men feel like they’re more straight if they’re attracted to more feminine looking transsexuals who bottom” — because topping is seen as masculine. Passability is also a factor in how girls are treated within the industry, she says: “If you look like a woman, they’re more accepting of you. And if you don’t look like a woman, they’re less accepting.”

Montag, a 19-year-old, doe-eyed brunette who calls me “sweetie,” says she got stellar treatment at this year’s AVN awards — she rubbed elbows with Ron Jeremy on the red carpet and scored a seat in the second row — and attributes it in part to her passability. “I’m very young. I’m only 5’1″ and 81 pounds. I’m very petite.” She adds, “I started hormone therapy earlier than other girls.”

St. Jordan agrees: “When it comes down to it,” she says matter-of-factly, “this is business, and it’s a beauty contest every day.”

Williams, who is 6-feet-tall with red, va-va-voom hair, says the pressure to pass as a porn star is even greater than in everyday life. Normally, she says, “I pull my hair up into ponytail and throw on some lip gloss and people just think I’m a tall girl with big boobs.” On camera, everything is different: “You need to seem extremely feminine, but if you want to seem feminine, then you need to be on hormones — but if you’re on hormones, you can’t stay hard and come, and if you can’t stay hard and come, you’re a bad performer.” On top of that, she says, the same viewers who expect this expensive nipped and tucked aesthetic “want to pirate my videos and not sign up for my website and have it for free.”

The irony is that many female trans performers get into the sex industry to pay for their transitions. Well, that and because it can be difficult to get a job anywhere else: “I interviewed for a job that I should have got,” says Williams about her pre-porn days, “and the guy told me, ‘I just don’t know how the cohesion in the office would be if people knew that you were a transsexual woman.’” Things have improved in the decade since then, but the same issues persist: “I couldn’t get a job, not even at Burger King,” says Montag, who lives in a small town in Texas where “people get beat up just for being punk and emo.”

She may be sexually outgoing on the Internet, but it’s not so in real life. Montag says she gets far more action on-screen and doesn’t pursue men in real life, for fear of them having a bad reaction to the discovery that she’s trans. Instead, she sticks to the Web: “[You get] a better reaction and it’s safer, too,” she explains. “It’s not like they’re gonna beat you and leave you in a cornfield to die.”

Courtney Trouble, a queer porn star and director who has worked with many trans performers, hopes that porn might actually help reduce transphobia in society at large. “Porn, while seemingly a private, frivolous luxury, has the immense power to gently create an awareness for trans issues in the audience,” she says. “If porn can create a change in the minds of people outside the industry, that’s where the real rewards are.”

Tobi Hill-Meyer, director of “Doing It Ourselves: The Trans Women Porn Project,” left the mainstream business “to create an alternative that allowed trans women to be represented the way each performer wanted to see herself represented,” she says. “I had to leave the mainstream industry in order to accomplish that, but I’ve seen a similar thing happening within it. More and more performers are speaking out about changes they’d like to see and setting up their own websites or productions.” Trouble believes that independently produced porn will do away with terms like “shemale,” “tranny” and “chick with a dick.”

Others predict transsexual porn will explode within mainstream straight porn. That’s in part because “so many transsexual stars are transitioning younger and getting more beautiful,” says Pierce. But she adds, “Sexuality in general is becoming more open-minded and the new generation is really pushing the limits on sexuality, and I think it’s going to push the transsexual market.”

St. Jordan agrees: “I think there’s gonna be some great crossover stuff real soon, within the next year or so,” she says. That means transsexuals performing not only with non-trans girls but also with straight male performers. This is partly because of growing acceptance and interest on the part of porn viewers, and partly because the up and coming generation of young performers have increasingly liberal attitudes. She says, “As new minds and ideas are coming into the industry, there are more people willing and open to work with us.”

I remember trying to voice my discontent about it to some female and male friends who said, basically, “That’s terrible, but hey, she’s making you look good!” Furthermore, there was an assumption (mainly by the girls, oddly) that being a “manwhore” was acceptable and brag-worthy whereas being a slut was not. I found that curious too.

It’s true, women are the typical targets of slut-shaming, but your experience proves that it can happen to men too. (For the uninitiated, the term “slut-shaming” describes any behavior meant to punish someone for their sexual appearance, behavior or reputation.) Your ex-girlfriend was hurt by your decision to break up with her and, possibly reflecting her own feelings about herself and her recent infidelity, she tried to use your sexual behavior (real or imagined) to insult your moral character and humiliate you. (You sure you wanted to end that? I kid.)

This isn’t to say that it’s the same for men as it is for women. Jaclyn Friedman, a feminist author and activist, told me in an email, “The difference is that the slut-shaming he experienced didn’t come with an inherent threat, the way it does when it’s targeted at women. It didn’t mean that anyone can do anything they want to his body without his permission, or even over his objection,” she says, referencing the classic use for slut-shaming: excusing sexual assault. “It didn’t come with the long history with which most women are intimately familiar, of friends, family, police, courts, churches, doctors, schools and reporters blaming any woman to which the word ‘slut’ can be even tenuously attached for felony violent crimes perpetrated against her body.”

Hugo Schwyzer, a gender studies professor, agrees. “Men can’t be slut-shamed the way women are slut-shamed simply because the word doesn’t have the same pejorative power in men’s lives,” he says. “If we want a word that shames men with the same force as ‘slut’ can shame some women, we have to look to terms like ‘fag.’ Accusing a man of being promiscuous just doesn’t have the same corrosive impact.” He’s most likely to be seen as a stud, a playboy, a ladies’ man — the flattering adjectives quickly pile up, and that’s just not the case for women who get around.

That said, “It doesn’t mean men always hear it as a compliment on their sexual prowess,” he says. “We live in a culture that sees male promiscuity as a developmental phase. The older a man gets, the more he’s expected by his peers to become discriminating in terms of whom he sleeps with.” After a certain point, it’s seen less as a passing phase and more as a personality flaw or romantic liability. “Just as men were said to do in the past, women today are likely to distinguish between the hot guys with whom they might hook up and the men with whom they might risk an enduring commitment,” Schwyzer says. “A woman who might be happy to go to bed with a ‘man-whore’ would never take him seriously as boyfriend material, as the presumed risk of infidelity is just too high.”

I guess you could call it the husband-manwhore dichotomy. Oh, equality.

It isn’t the sexiest directive, but it might actually get you somewhere. Klein has drawn on more than 30 years of counseling experience for this smart handbook on how to develop what he calls “Sexual Intelligence,” which he describes as the thing that “gets you from hormone-driven sex to sex you choose,” “from ‘sex has to validate me’ to ‘I validate my sexuality.’” The challenge here is to let go of notions of what “successful” and “normal” sex looks and feels like. The reward is a sex life where “failure” is virtually impossible.

Salon spoke to Klein by phone from his office in Palo Alto, Calif., about why so many sexual problems can be blamed on idealizing sex and our bodies as they were in our youth.

What is it, based on your experience with clients, that people most want from sex?

Well, if you ask people what they want from sex, they say some vague thing — some combination of “pleasure” and “closeness.” But while a lot of people say that, I find from my practice that what a lot of people really want is emotional satisfaction; sometimes it has to do with the connection with their partner and sometimes it has to do with their own sense of themselves. What a lot of people want from sex is to feel youthful, graceful, manly, normal, adequate or competent.

What should we expect from sex? What expectations are more realistic and more likely to bring actual satisfaction?

Well, partly that depends on what people are willing to put into it. You could say, “What’s realistic to expect from a meal?” and if you have very little in the refrigerator and you only spend five minutes cooking and you don’t have a decent pot or pan and you’re talking on the phone while you’re doing it and not paying attention, it’s unrealistic to expect a gourmet or satisfying meal. On the other hand, if you put enough time and effort and care into it, it’s not unrealistic to expect a good dining experience.

So, when it comes to sex, clearly it’s unrealistic in long-term relationships to expect the kind of heat and desire and passion that we typically experience in the early days of a relationship and in our youth. One of the reasons that grown-ups in long-term relationships don’t have much sex is they’re waiting to feel incredibly horny. What’s more realistic to expect from sex, if you put some effort into it, is to feel connected with somebody, to feel a sense of ownership of your body, a sense of a vacation from real life for half an hour. What’s not reasonable to expect is that sex at 45, with the same person you’ve been with for 10 years is the same as sex was at 25 when you were first getting to know somebody.

Why is it so hard to move away from that ideal of sex as it was in our 20s?

I have a few answers for that. One is that we live in a youth-obsessed culture where whatever our experience is in young adulthood, we assume that’s the best experience. So, we don’t prepare for a different experience and we don’t envision a different experience and we don’t want a different experience. If we experience the transition from adolescence to young adulthood as a dreadful loss of the best that life has to offer, then we’re not going to ask ourselves, “OK, how do I make sex at 35 the best sex of my life?” Most people are saying, “How do I make sex at 35 as near to what it was at 20?”

Most of us develop our vision of sexuality between 15 and 20. At that time we have a very particular kind of body: it’s young, it’s healthy, it’s flexible, it’s conventionally attractive. And so we associate that body and that body’s abilities with good sex. We say that good sex is the kind of sex you can have if you’ve had five margaritas, or you can have good sex when someone has a face without any lines on it.

The model of sexuality that we develop between 15 and 20, it just doesn’t work for us when we have the body of a 47-year-old, when you have to take ibuprofen an hour before you have sex. There’s also a different emotional and psychological context. There’s a different ecology. You have responsibilities, you don’t have a lot of time to kill, you have to wake up early the next morning, you have children you don’t want to wake up when you’re having sex. When we’re young, we don’t have to develop the skill of planning for sex, of being patient, of waiting for when it’s going to be the right time.

They want spontaneity.

Well, you know? You can’t have that. How many 40-year-olds who have any sort of a life do anything spontaneously? I mean, look at you and I, we wanted to have a conversation and we had to plan it. We didn’t say, you know, when you’re in the mood, give me a call.

This yearning for spontaneity is so poignant, because what people are really saying is, ” I yearn for the uncomplicated life that I used to have where sexuality was at my disposal 24 hours a day, rain or shine.”

You also write about how a lack of desire is a major concern for most of your clients —

Most couples, when one or both of them don’t feel incredibly horny, they think of that as something that only one of them is going to fix. “You lose weight and that will make me more horny” or “I’ll have fantasies or come up with a new position and that will make me more horny.” They don’t talk about it as a couple. The couple needs to sign up for it together — but that requires them to talk honestly about sex. Most couples would rather chew glass than talk honestly with each other about sex. They’re willing to say things like, “I wish you’d lose weight, I wish you didn’t bring work home, you’re always on the phone with your mother,” but most are not willing to say, “I used to have more desire for you than I have now, do you want to work with me to do something about that?”

Why is that? Obviously, there’s the desire to not hurt your partner’s feelings, but it also seems there’s more there.

I wouldn’t be quite so generous. I think it’s more like, “I don’t want to say these things to you because I don’t want to hear them from you.”

So, we’re afraid of having these conversations because if we start being honest with our partner, they might start being honest with us, and that might validate our deepest insecurities?

I think that’s part of it. I think people are afraid that if they start talking honestly about sex, they’re going to be opening Pandora’s box. I also think that not everybody has the vocabulary, not everybody can say exactly what they want or how they feel. A lot of people find it easier to say, “You did something wrong,” rather than to say, “Let me tell you how that felt to me.” Instead of saying, “You’re frigid” or “You’re too kinky,” you say, “I feel unattractive” or “it’s not that I don’t like oral sex, it’s just that whenever you’re going down on me I feel so exposed, I feel so foolish.” If only people would talk more about feeling foolish in bed, rather than what the other person is doing wrong. A lot of people talk about what’s wrong with sex, like sex did something wrong. When people say that in the office, I say, “Well, rather than telling me what’s wrong with sex, why don’t you tell me how you feel?”

Why is it that the typical self-help approaches don’t work when it come to sex? Why isn’t it as simply as the ten hot new moves you need to try tonight?

Let’s compare it to something else — say you want to take care of your health. What we know is that articles like “five ways to burn fat better” just don’t work. There’s a step before that and that’s creating the emotional environment in which people can take advantage of that information. For most people, the emotional environment for taking advantage of those “hot new moves” just isn’t there. People aren’t up to what moves they should do, they’re stuck thinking, “I’m afraid that if we have sex with the lights on he’s gonna think that my butt is too big.” If someone is stuck on “My penis is the most important thing that I bring to sex,” then talking to them about what to do with this finger or that hand or this foot is just pointless. But that’s what self-help books focus on constantly when it comes to sex: what to do with your body.

Obviously, there is so much bodily insecurity going around — how do you even start toward that point of feeling sexy in your own skin?

Part of it is getting the idea that it is possible to detach how you look from how you feel and that sexiness is not a product of what your body looks like from the outside, that sexiness is a product of how you feel on the inside. Part of it is acknowledging that somebody somewhere has the ability to feel sexy independent of how they look on the outside. We have to get the concept that it’s possible for some people to feel sexy based on what’s on the inside rather than what’s on the outside. From there it’s a question of a person tuning into what do I have to offer somebody else sexually, and what do I have to offer myself sexually? If a person enjoys kissing a lot, regardless of what they look like they could say to themselves, well, that’s part of what makes me sexy.

You write so much in the book about how people worry about being sexual normal. What is sexually normal?

Most people who want to know what’s sexually normal, they’re not going to use that information in a wholesome way. Most people want to know what’s sexually normal so that they can compare themselves or their mate to that standard. If I say 80 percent of 30-year-olds have oral sex at least once a month, somebody’s gonna compare themselves to that and say, “What’s wrong with me that I don’t do that?” Or they’re going to look at their mate and say, “What’s wrong with you?”

Now if you want to know what’s statistically common when it come to sex, as I say in the book, it’s that people have sex when they’re tired and when they feel self-conscious about their bodies.

ABC’s Terry Moran introduced the segment by warning, “For any parent concerned about what their teen does online, the huge popularity of the young man you’re about to meet may be deeply disturbing.” We’re then introduced to a handful of young women – all well over 18 – who think 25-year-old Deen is totally hot and, like, “the Ryan Gosling of porn.” Then reporter Cecilia Vega announces that the adult business “has now targeted and reached a new demographic: teenage girls.”

That’s right, pornographers are “targeting” your little girls with the help of young porn hunks like Deen and luring them into watching Internet smut! YouPorn must be advertising on Justin Bieber message boards now, I guess? At one point, Vega grills Deen about his teenage fans: “Are you encouraging them in any way to watch your films or read your blog?” It’s not like teenage girls would ever happen across this X-rated material because they want to watch porn — there must be some cute “boy next door” tricking them into it.

It isn’t that parents have no good reason to be concerned about their kids — male or female — using porn as sex-ed. It’s not even that the segment is a total rip-off of Amanda Hess’ piece about Deen and his female teenage fans in GOOD magazine (and it is). My real criticism is that even while reporting on teenage girls who admittedly like porn and seek it out, “Nightline” manages to make it sound like they’re being taken advantage of by porn the predator.

I would embed the video below, except ABC has disabled embedding. Maybe they distrust how their fear-mongering will be received in the the wild west of the Internet. You can find the clip here.

I’d be interested in knowing two things: First, how common do you think this is? Equally important, do most women know about this attraction, or do they simply think “yuck” when they think about their underarms?

Underarm Fetishist

My first question about armpit attraction — and I’m wearing a sleeveless shirt, how serendipitous!

As you already know, you’re not alone. There are collections of hundreds of shots on Flickr and Tumblr of women in bras or tank tops with one arm (or, in the raunchiest cases, both!) raised above their heads. (Many of these are re-appropriated fashion shots, but I’m dubious of your theory that the models were posed this way just to display your favored body part.) Forums like Girlpits allow connoisseurs to debate the qualities of a good underarm (there appears to be a great partisan divide between smooth-ocrats and hair-publicans). Porn hubs across the Web feature countless lingering closeups of pits — hairy, smooth, sweaty, take your pick — and clips of underarm “licking,” “sniffing” and more.

It’s unclear whether you, sir, like your armpits PG or X-rated. You simply say, “I can be sexually aroused by the sight of a woman’s uncovered, clean-shaven underarms.” Well, now, the capacity to be turned on by the sight of a particular body part isn’t unusual in the least. “That he has an area of the body of a woman that he focuses on is not surprising,” says Chris Kraft, a psychologist and director of the Johns Hopkins Sexual Behaviors Consultations Unit. “It’s actually called partialism when you’re fixated or specifically aroused by a very specific part of the body — typically, we see things like the feet, buttocks, breasts.”

Richard B. Krueger, a psychiatrist and medical director of the Sexual Behavior Clinic at New York State Psychiatric Institute, tells me, “I don’t even think it’s a fetish in his case. I would say it’s in the range of typical sexual behavior,” he says. “It isn’t deviant, it’s just a variant of normal — or within normal.”

You don’t indicate that you’re only turned on by armpits, after all — and even if you were, Kraft would be hesitant to pathologize it. “There are plenty of men who only like to ejaculate with their penis in a vagina,” he says. “Should we call that a problem?”

Basically, these guys are super-unimpressed by your armpit attraction. There’s nothing like talking to someone who routinely deals with patients who have all-consuming fetishes that ruin their professional and personal lives to feel normal, eh? It puts things in extreme perspective.

As for the “why” of such an attraction, I can really only offer you speculation. Kraft suggests, “The thing about the underarm area, similar to the genital area of women, it’s usually a covered, private area. To have it groomed and presented, historically, it would have been considered a taboo.” He adds that it’s possible hairlessness gives you a sense of cleanliness; maybe there’s a spark there for you.

Finally, getting to your two main questions: How common is this attraction and what do women think about it? It’s impossible to put a number on it. “We don’t have a lot of people presenting in the clinical areas of sexuality just to talk about it because most people are functioning fine with these types of things,” says Kraft. “That’s why we don’t get a real accurate number of the commonness of different types of fetishes.” In other words, people don’t talk to an expert about their armpit fixation unless it’s problematic for them. “It’s hard to study the happy,” he says.

As for women’s awareness of this kink, “I don’t think for many women it crosses their mind that this is an area of attraction,” says Kraft. “It’s not something that people acknowledge, since it’s taboo.” There are always exceptions, though: Any woman who spends enough time browsing online porn, or reading this column, will be aware of the extreme variation in human sexual interests and practices. And of course there are women who share similar desires, either for other people’s armpits or for others to worship their own.

I’m going to borrow the typical therapist move here and say: The real question is, “How do you feel about your kink?”

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Send your question to tracy@salon.com.