What a crock!
"Clinically, we know what pathological sexual fantasies are: they involve non-consenting partners, they induce pain"
ORLY? So the thousands of customers who have bought floggers, canes, paddles, nipple clamps and many more such items from my Affordable Leather Products business are all suffering from "pathological sexual fantasies" are they?
And, not only that, but adults who are into consensual BDSM activities get lumped in with rapists and child abusers etc.
Or maybe they're just into a different sort of kink from the narrow minded individuals who write for the Journal of Sexual Medicine and who have decided that *they* are the ones who can decide what is or isn't "abnormal"?
(BTW you may not know it wasn't until 1992 that the World Health Organization removed its categorisation of homosexuality as a mental illness)
"what exactly are abnormal or atypical fantasies? To find out, we asked people in the general population, as simple as that"
And they think that, thereby, they can use that information to define what is "normal" and what isn't? Bullshit!
They got what people *wanted* them to hear. Even if it is anonymised etc, I bet a lot of people had a lot of fantasies which they didn't tell the researchers because the subjects thought they were too extreme or didn't want to admit to them or they just decided to gloss things up a bit.
What they didn't get was factual evidence.
"these findings allow us to shed light on certain social phenomena, such as the popularity of the book "Fifty Shades of Grey" with women"
Oh gods! Not Fifty Shades of Drivel! The book that mistakes coercion for consent, that has a main character whose behaviour is stalkerish (verging on predatory), that has some extremely bad and risky examples of BDSM which are *really* not good to engage in (cable ties? No, just *NO*, ok?!)
As for Lewis' conclusion, he misses the point. "Research" like this does not push back the frontiers of human knowledge, that's true, but that's because it simply informs the bigotry of those who want to tell others what they can do and read and see and think that because *they* don't like something, others should be forbidden from doing it.