The Complicated Realities Of Living With A Quicksand Fetish

In 1932, Tarzan The Ape Man introduced the movie-going public to the concept of drowning movie extras in quicksand …

… and to everybody’s surprise, we started masturbating. Quicksand became something of a fetish, though mostly unacknowledged: The next few decades featured endless depictions of people, mostly young women, being slowly sucked down to their demise. Peak Quicksand arrived in the 1960s, with one in 35 Hollywood films featuring a scene like this:

It’s impossible to overstate how pervasive the ‘quicksand’ meme was. Before the Apollo 11 landing, there was widespread fear that the moon’s dust might act like “quicksand.” David Bowie wrote a song called “Quicksand” about Hitler. Quicksand was everywhere, which was bad news for inattentive young women on safari, but great news for thousands of Americans like Carl: A man with a quicksand fetish.

As a millennial, he’s in the minority of his waning ilk. He told us that the bulk of the other fetishists he’s met “are in their 50s and 60s; they grew up watching the old Tarzan movies and TV shows.” They were jerking it to earthporn long before Reddit became a thing.

Pop culture inventing new fetishes wasn’t unprecedented, or brought about by the corrupting influence of Hollywood: The rubber fetish got its start with the invention of rubber Mackintosh rain coats in the 1890s.…