Hokusai's "The Dream Of The Fisherman's Wife" is speculated to be the first instance of tentacle erotica, so by all means don't click that link if you're at work, there are children present or you have a soul.

But before you go calling Japan a nation of psychotic fish diddlers, check out "Tentacles of Desire: The Man Who Loved Cephalopods." Contained within is the story of Joshua Handley, an English artist in the late 19th century whose travels to Japan resulted in an obsession with tentacle erotica.

Handley attempted multiple times to publish some of it in England, even coming up with some of his own to add to the table. People were appalled--not by the tentacles, but at the notion that the women in the stories were actually enjoying themselves, because for some reason rape would make it much less disgusting.

Autoerotic asphyxiation is just a big-city scientist term for "masturbating while strangling yourself." And it's more common than you'd think: according to ABC News and the FBI, roughly 500 to 1000 young men accidently die each year during autoerotic asphyxiation, though we're curious why the FBI is involved in this figure.

If you were thinking the practice was accidentally discovered in some 1980s S & M club, you're wrong. Erotic asphyxiation goes back to the 1600s, when it was used as a treatment for erectile dysfunction, presumably because the patient in question would rather be dead than go on living.

If you're wondering how in the hell they connected "strangling" with "boners," the answer is every bit as terrifying as you're probably guessing. The practice started when observers at public hangings noticed that male victims often sported an erection after death, sometimes even ejaculating at the moment of. Wikipedia even has an article on "death erections," which the editors at Cracked have already claimed as the name of their upcoming metal band side project.

"Ghost Boner" was already taken.

Put simply, the foot fetish is a sexual attraction to feet, be they wrapped up in stockings or bare in all their sweat-pruned glory.

Try to picture all the boners we just created.

Foot fetishism has many forms, and can range from simple kissing and licking to full on penis massages. Many celebrities are self-confessed foot fetishists, including Jay Leno, so if you want to take a moment and ponder that, we'll wait.

And while there are many, many websites and lots of YouTube videos supplying wank material for foot lovers, you probably could make a good living selling the same material a thousand years ago.

These aren't for the beach.

The first mention of foot fetishism we can find dates back to 1220 AD. Experts think the fetish got its start due to fear of STDs (history records show a lot more foot lovers during syphilis epidemics, like those of the 16th and 19th centuries). Keep in mind that back then, pretty much everything in the world gave you some version of the plague, let alone the festering bog of some peasant's vagina. Clearly, blistered gangrenous feet were the refined solution, because you can't get AIDS from a foot. (Or can you? We really have no idea).

Some foot porn, circa 1926.

As it turns out, the list of historical foot fetishists reads like the A-Team of literature. F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom you may remember as the author of that one book that you pretended to read in high school, had a foot fetish, as did Thomas Hardy, who wrote that other book we didn't read. Know who else is on the list? Fucking Casanova, a man whose name has literally become a phrase meaning "guy who spends more time inside vaginas than outside of them".

Herodotus (the Greek historian who lived in the fifth century BC) wrote in his Histories that, in order to stop people from having sex with corpses before mummification, the ancient Egyptians left them to decay for three or four days before handing them off to the embalmers. That's right: Necrophilia was such a problem for these guys that they had to take active preventative measures against it.

But that's not all: One legend says that after killing his wife in jealousy, King Herod the Great continued to have sex with her body for, wait for it, seven years. Considering that this wasn't really the worst thing he ever did in his life, it's painfully apparent that his title of "The Great" might have been handed out a little early.

Furthermore, the ancient Romans' flirtations with the animal kingdom are near-legendary. Donkeys, baboons, geese, dogs� you'd be hard-pressed to find a species that the Romans didn't defile at some point. This reaches epic levels of insanity when you learn that Roman women would often masturbate with live fucking snakes, which were trained to "suckle the nipples."

The Roman attitude towards bestiality was so relaxed that many Roman citizens indulged in it, up to and including their goddamn emperor. But they met their match with the Egyptians, who according to the Greek historian Herodotus "mastered the art of sexual congress with a crocodile." They didn't just fuck crocodiles, they fucking mastered it.

"You'll find my Ph.D. wedged in his asshole."