In the course of reporting this story, I’ve watched Bunny Ratchet fart dozens of times. She lets them slip while strolling through the grocery aisle, creates bubbles with them in the bath, squeezes them through thongs, jeans, and leather leggings, lands them on her boyfriend’s dick. I am almost to the point of smell-o-vision, I’ve seen and heard so many farts by now—more than I have heard in the whole rest of my life up until this week.

Welcome to Rule 34, a series in which Motherboard’s Samantha Cole lovingly explores the highly specific fetishes that can be found on the web.

To get to the bottom of this highly taboo fetish, I spoke with enthusiasts, therapists, and practitioners of the fart arts.

For those that love them, there are a hundred ways to enjoy a fart, but most of the fetishists I spoke with said it was more than the gas. It’s the intimacy of a carefree toot between lovers. It’s watching the juxtaposition of a beautiful woman cutting a huge nasty one, groaning and orgasming as she does. Some say it’s a BDSM thing: the thought of someone farting on their face, with no escape.

Known clinically as eproctophilia, fart fetishism involves sexual arousal from passing gas. That’s the broad definition; it gets more complicated. It can mean the submissive act of being farted on, or the dominance of farting on someone else. Some enthusiasts say that the smell turns them on, while others enjoy the sound. There are enthusiasts that cross over into scat porn, or farting on food (but we’re not here to speak of “cakefarts.com” the early aughts prank website —this is much more serious than cake farts).

Ratchet is one of a rare breed of performers who specialize in fart porn. She’s only been making porn for a month, but within that month, she’s posted 15 videos to Pornhub and has accumulated more than 100,000 views—mostly from people seeking her gas-passing content. A search for “fart” on the platform returns nearly 10,000 videos, mostly of women, alone, asses pointed at the camera, letting them rip.

“My earliest memory of a farting video was a lady who lit her fart on fire,” Ratchet’s boyfriend, a film student with whom she collaborates, and sometimes co-stars, told me in an email. “I saw it while watching porn on the internet at a young age, probably around 12 years old... To intensify the experience of viewing porn, I would touch my butt and smell my finger. It felt like I was smelling the dirtiness of the video. The smell really did intensify the experience for me, and I think eventually watching a girl fart was the perfect translation to that smell.”

It’s not known what started the fetish for Joyce, or if he was a fan of all farts or Nora’s alone. But for modern-day fart lovers, the allure often begins in their formative years. And being online certainly helps that self-discovery.

You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. It is a rather girlish noise not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have. It is sudden and dry and dirty like what a bold girl would let off in fun in a school dormitory at night. I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also.

It would be wrong not to begin with a classic example of one well-documented fart fetishist: Novelist, poet, and author of Ulysses, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce. He penned these words in a letter to his darling wife Nora in 1909 :

"To intensify the experience of viewing porn, I would touch my butt and smell my finger. It felt like I was smelling the dirtiness of the video"

Unlike some of the other kinks we’ve explored in Rule 34— slime girls , blueberries , Lego sex —this fetish didn’t evolve from popular culture or the internet. Getting horny for farts goes way back—at least to the early 1900s.

Reddit user Throwaway_101101_, who moderates the subreddit r/girlsfarting, told me in a message that it’s “quite difficult” to pinpoint where his kink started. “I think growing up with children's cartoons that feature a lot of fart humour and stuff like that definitely contributed to the fetish, then one day I found a video of a girl farting on YouTube and I've had the fetish ever since.”

u/NoNoItsTotallyNormal, who moderates the subreddit r/eproctophilia, told me in a message that even before he learned about sex, he knew farts were special to him.

“The concept of farting gave me this weird feeling as far back as I can remember,” he said. "So far back, in fact, that it was years before I knew what sex or arousal were.” He believes he was “born this way,” and that fart fetishism isn’t a choice but more of an awakening.

“An expectation of beauty—ironically”

Personally, I’m inclined to buy this: The sounds of my schoolmates cracking farts in class never did anything for me. But for others, perhaps they found themselves confused and aroused when their childhood crush laughingly floated an air biscuit their way. I asked Debra Laino, board certified clinical sexologist and relationship therapist, what would make a person find farts attractive. While she told me in an email that she’s never had a client come to her for help with coping with a fart fetish, she has a few theories.

“If you’re around the person you love and can’t fart, that is really a shame"

“Fetishes, in general, can start for many reasons, such as an early crush who farts and the anxiety/embarrassment can transform into arousal (which is called sexual imprinting), or during sex if someone farts and it’s connected to high arousal (such as right before orgasm) it can become fetishistic as well,” she said. “Another idea is that a beautiful female having a ‘disgusting’ side makes it mysterious and arousing at the same time and can attract a man who has an expectation of beauty—ironically.”