the "freakshow" - permissible titillation?

“Everyone's a freak. No two bodies are the same; we all have unpleasant, wonderful, shocking and extraordinary features; we are all unique. But for centuries the word 'freak' has been used cruelly to describe people born with 'abnormal' features, or those able to perform extraordinary physical acts by contorting or misshaping their bodies.” (www.bl.uk/learning)

What is the ongoing fascination of the freakshow?
Have we moved away from the exploitation of bodily difference that emerged in the sideshow circuses of the late 1800's, and are we still taking pleasure in looking, disguised as a medical (or academic) gaze?
Is Channel 4's BodyShock series an excuse for a televised version of this voyeurism? How is it disguised? Science? technology? progress? Or blatant spectacle? "You'll be shocked and amazed..."

“Mixed among the disgust, the fear, the horror, was the pleasure. For some, certainly, the pleasure came precisely from the horror, the sense of the forbidden, the unusual and unknown, the gothic intermixing of categories and kinds” (Sharrona Pearl)

What has your research led you to discover about the nature of the freakshow? How have you contextualised it? Please share it here...