The Internet, sex-wise, is an amazing and frightening place. Used to be that society's kinkiness stayed pretty much in the shadows; if you didn't frequent strip clubs and dirty book stores, you didn't run into anything that would make you turn nauseous and cover your eyes. But with the web, all that's changed. Every kinky concept in the world is not only out there for you to find, sometimes it visits you uninvited. (Did you get the spam email about barnyard web cams?) Whether you're into feet, leather, vampires or robots, the web is there to provide you with books to buy, photos to snag, online forums and blogs to read.

So, I find it ironic that my fetish gets ignored. Google something as harmless as "high heels” and you'll turn up fetish sites on the very first page of results. You can pretty much bet that all the classic stuff men are into—big bosoms, long legs, shaved...yeah—will have thousands of "graphics rich” pages devoted to them. But we women, with our more "subtle” tastes, are not so lucky.

I like beards. Especially short, blond ones. While my daughters collected a lot of photos of Ewan McGregor clean-shaven, I snagged all the ones with facial hair. Now, I realize everyone has their preferences in the beard department, and it's usually just a matter of taste—but I freely admit this isn't a preference, it's a fetish.

I even have a theory where it came from, although you'll laugh to hear it. When I was a baby I had a tan stuffed rabbit I slept with and took everywhere. I felt cozy and secure with his nice tan fur against my cheek. Snuggling with Bugsy was a part of my nightly routine for years. Even if those years predated puberty, it's just too weird of a coincidence that a guy with a short blond beard automatically seems sexy to me.

Meanwhile, I've been attracted to tons of dark men, and tons of clean-shaven men, so when my rational mind is in charge, the blond beard thing doesn't really make a significant difference. But when I fall back on my subconscious cravings, that's another story. Okay, here's how I know I've got a beard fetish: I've tried to find pictures of completely random blond bearded men on the Internet.

And do you know what you get when you Google "men with blond beards"? A lot of links to pages on men's hair dyeing products! I guess the guys on the packaging are okay, but it's not a very efficient way to indulge a fetish, really. It's certainly a lot more effort than the guys googling "high heels" exert.

Supposing I were to want to read some nice erotica about men with blond beards. Good luck finding that! It's a damn good thing I can write erotica myself.

Long story short, the web is just not meeting my needs in this area. It's very disappointing. I mean, if you can't count on your computer to access everything you need for proper erotic stimulation, what's the world coming to?

Alas, I have been forced to resort to the sort of primitive methods people used back in the day before the World Wide Web was invented: like using my imagination. I have to conjure in my own mind's eye some fair fellow who hasn't shaved in days (sigh), who for whatever reason is in extremely intimate proximity to me (swoon), so that I can't help but give in and kiss his prickly self (oh wow), which may result in him kissing me back all over my various erogenous zones (okay, that's enough for now).

It's not so bad. And of course, being an erotica writer, I do have the option of featuring bearded blond heroes in my stories. I try not to over-indulge in that, knowing that my readers may not have had stuffed rabbits when they were little. Although in my novel, Souls' Embrace, I simply said chuck it, and let myself create the perfect blond, bearded hero of my dreams. (Fellow beard fetishes out there, there are some passages in that book you might really like!)

In all seriousness though, it has been helpful to me as a writer of erotic romance that I have a fetish at all. It's an interesting aspect of human sexuality that people can be conditioned, through such very individual circumstances, to be turned on by something that transcends emotion and rational thought. Experiencing this phenomenon firsthand just helps me understand better the forces that drive us sexually.

And in a way it's kind of fun to have something trip your trigger so easily and effortlessly. If only it was a little easier and more effortless to find those photos....

Diana Laurence is the author of the Soulful Sex anthologies published by Living Beyond Reality Press (www.livingbeyondreality.com). Visit her at www.dianalaurence.com, and read her blog at www.eroticawithsoul.blogspot.com. Download her free fiction from the LBR Press READ FREE Project at www.livingbeyondreality.com/readfree.html.