A Quebec study separated two kinds of exhibitionism that the word usually lumps together. The law has been drawing the same line, and the internet followed it.
The word “exhibitionist” still brings up a man in a raincoat. It is a crime, a cliché and a punchline, usually all at once.
The research says that picture describes a small minority. The much larger group wants something else entirely: to be seen by someone who chose to look.
In 2017, psychologists Christian Joyal and Julie Carpentier surveyed 1,040 adults from the general population of Quebec, 475 men and 565 women, about desires and behaviours that clinical manuals list as unusual. Their results, published in The Journal of Sex Research, split exhibitionism in two.
The strict version, being aroused by showing one’s genitals to a stranger who is not expecting it, was rare. About 4.5% of respondents said they wanted to do it, and around 5% said they had.
The second version is the one that changes the picture. The researchers called it “extended exhibitionism”: having sex with a consenting partner while knowing someone is watching or could be watching. Some 30.6% of respondents said they wanted that, and 30.1% said they had done it.
Two different things with one name
Scale that up. In a room of a hundred adults, about five have flashed or wanted to flash someone who did not ask for it. About thirty have wanted, or found, an audience.
Those are not degrees of the same impulse. One depends on the other person not consenting. The other depends on the opposite: on the thrill of being seen while everyone involved is, in some sense, in on it.
The study’s authors made a broader point that applies here. Several interests the clinical literature treats as anomalous, including this couple form of exhibitionism, turned out to be neither rare nor statistically unusual in an ordinary sample of adults. Only the version involving an unsuspecting stranger stayed at the margins.
The law draws the same line
Criminal law already separates the two cases, and in England and Wales it does so explicitly along the line of consent and harm.
Section 66 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 makes it an offence to intentionally expose one’s genitals when the person intends someone to see them and be caused alarm, distress or humiliation, or when they do it for sexual gratification while being reckless about causing that distress. The maximum penalty on indictment is two years in prison.
Read the wording closely and the target is clear. The offence is not nudity, and it is not being watched. It is forcing an audience on someone who did not agree to be one, or not caring whether they did.
The same principle has now been written into law for images. The United States’ TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed on May 19, 2025, criminalises publishing intimate images of a person without consent, real or generated by AI, with penalties of up to two years in prison. Since May 19 this year, covered platforms have also been required to remove such images within 48 hours of a victim’s request.
Why the impulse moved indoors
Put the research and the law side by side and the recent shift makes sense.
A person who wants to be watched has two options. The old one is public: a park, a beach, a window, with all the legal risk that comes with an audience who never agreed to anything. The new one is an audience that opted in, paid, and can leave at any moment.
The second option keeps the part that the 30% are after, the knowledge of being seen, and drops the part that makes it a crime. It also gives the person showing themselves something the street never did: control over who watches, for how long, and on what terms.
That helps explain why the category looks the way it does now. People who enjoy being looked at, and who want to do it legally, can now find an audience that came looking for exactly that. Someone curious about that world can browse exhibitionist models on OnlyFans, grouped by the kind of content they publish, rather than stumbling onto it somewhere it was never meant to be.
A list cannot do everything. It records creators who publish their own material under their own accounts; it cannot vouch for every image that circulates elsewhere under a similar label, and it says nothing about whether third parties in a shot agreed to appear. That check belongs to the creator and to the platform, and the 48-hour rule exists precisely because it sometimes fails.
The difference that matters
The raincoat cliché survives because it is vivid, not because it is common. In the Quebec sample it described around one person in twenty, and men were more likely than women to report even the desire for it.
The more common exhibitionist is someone who wants an audience that wants them back. For most of history, the only way to get one was to risk an audience that did not.
That is no longer the only way. The desire did not change; the venue did.
Exhibitionism did not go away when the law caught up with it. It went where the audience says yes.
