What do we mean when we say the word ‘fetish’, what are the most famous fetishes in the world, how does a fetish tendency even form, how has the treatment system’s attitude changed towards people with such tendencies and at what stage in a relationship is it worth sharing my fetish tendency with my partner?
Many people who have different fetishes are afraid they will not be able to find a partner.
This is not only due to the fear that statistically there are few people who are fetishists, but from another fear of rejection in relationships.
Fetishism is defined as significant, increased, and consistent sexual arousal from an object or body part, which is usually not associated with sexuality.
In the DSM, the American psychiatric diagnostic book, fetishism is still defined as a paraphilia.
That is, an unusual sexual matter, but it is no longer sufficient alone to be considered a disorder.
Every few years there are updates to the book and the definition has certainly changed over the years. Previously, this was enough to actually define the person with some disorder that certainly had consequences.
For example, legal consequences, or when you were sitting in front of, say, a medical staff in some institution, and they would look at you differently.
Obviously, specific sexual interest in an object in itself should not harm anyone or affect anyone.
But this is a slightly more advanced perception today of sexuality that seeks to ask what is correct, good, and healthy sexuality.
Historically, the person who defined fetishism at the end of the 19th century was a Catholic doctor named Krafft Ebing, who wrote a huge catalog of deviations called ‘Psychopathia Sexualis’ and within it he defined various things he saw as deviations, such as homosexuality and masturbation.”
Homosexuality was indeed considered a deviation in the DSM book until not long ago.
And those paraphilias like fetish, sadism, and masochism, remained there for even more years. Actually, only in 2013 did they make this distinction between ‘unusual’ sexual interest in quotes and paraphilic disorder, which includes emotional stress not related to stigma and they also began to address the whole matter of consent and to what extent if at all it affects function and daily life.
The most common are all related to feet, whether it is shoes, the feet themselves, or socks, or various things in those areas.
Then we have all sorts of things related to fabrics leather, lace, latex, the fabric of stockings and then also various body parts maybe and anything you can think of, I suppose, any object around us can become a fetish.”
Someone married the Berlin Wall and someone married the Eiffel Tower.
So there are two women who have a documentary film about them and a woman who fell in love with the Empire State Building, the Twin Towers, but that is not a fetish, it is a separate category called ‘objectum sexual’ and that is already romantic attraction to objects.
There is really a relationship that is felt as mutual with this object.
Zoologist saw that ducks and geese follow him when they hatch if he is near them and because of his boot, they followed his boot.
When they reached sexual maturity, he noticed they tried to copulate with his boot.”
In sexuality we always look with a bio psycho social perspective, so there are many hypotheses and theories from various streams.
One of them comes from the biological layer: if we take a foot fetish, the area in the brain responsible for foot sensation is very close to the area we feel sexual pleasure and the thought is that maybe this developed so that I feel sexuality in the foot and perceive this organ as sexual.”
But this is a bit too simple, too superficial an explanation, it does not explain many other details.
But if we talk about objectum sexual there they found a very prominent distribution of people on the autistic spectrum.
There is a trait called synesthesia, a kind of blending of senses.
These are people who say ‘I can taste colors’.
So people on the autistic spectrum are more likely to anthropomorphize things, like seeing the number eight as a plump woman.
That is giving human traits to words, numbers, and letters.
Let’s try to define the difference between romantic attraction and sexual attraction.
A fetish is primarily sexual in nature.
I do not seek this object for a relationship.
For example, I think high heels are sexy and I may need them for sexual stimulation, maybe I need them to reach sexual satisfaction but I do not necessarily want a specific relationship with that specific shoe.
But sometimes it can come together, I am also attracted and I also want a relationship with the shoe.
If we go back to why people develop a fetish, there is behavioral psychology, where there are two concepts that may relate.
The first is ‘imprinting’.
Imprinting is basically the natural tendency of the offspring to follow the caregiver figure and this later translates into sexual attraction.
A zoologist saw that ducks and geese followed him when they hatched if he was nearby and because of his boot, they followed his boot.
What happened is that when they reached sexual maturity, he noticed they tried to copulate with his boot and from there came this matter of sexual imprinting.
Additional studies dealt with smoking women and pregnant women and saw that children up to age five whose mothers either smoked or were pregnant tended in adulthood to be more attracted to such women.
This also makes sense because this is my caregiver figure.
If I grew up fine and everything worked, it makes sense I would think I should be attracted to that type of women.
It is both a bit simplistic and indeed human sexuality is not one dimensional or unidirectional and many people are attracted precisely to opposite models from their parents.
The second concept in the behavioral approach is ‘conditioning’, which is some pairing between stimulus and response.
We remember Pavlov’s dogs the famous experiment with the bell, they gave the dogs food and rang a bell and later stopped giving food but the mere ringing of the bell already caused them to salivate.
So it is said this can happen to us with sexuality too.
If we return to feet, for a crawling baby what represents the parents?
The foot. He follows their foot.
That is what he sees in his visual range.
Maybe he rubs his penis while crawling and thus this association is created.
Again, very simplistic and it cannot really be tested on humans, but with animals these things were examined.
There are various studies often on rats or quails.
For example, they took male voles, dressed them in a jacket and then introduced them to a female for mating.
Then they saw that after a few such matings, these male voles could not have sex if they did not wear the jacket.
Another experiment was done on quails.
They put on a button that opened a gate through which they could reach a female for mating and then they saw that some of them began to mate with the button, because they associated these things.
Now with humans, they also tried the opposite to eliminate various tendencies, certainly with homosexuals and used for example electric shocks.
Instead of eliminating the tendency, researchers found that some men simply became aroused by the electric shock.
So it is impossible to change sexual tendency, but we do know from various studies that our first sexual encounters may affect our sexuality.
Another theory is the psychoanalytic theory, which says we have a sexual drive, and this drive seeks to go to various places.
If, for example, we were seen masturbating and punished for it or when our parents went and did the thing we could not be part of behind the door and maybe they were angry at us when interested or whatever, then we seek where to direct the drive created within us and the object is a safe place.
It will not be aggressive towards us, it will not blame us.
It reduces anxiety.
Of course, it is a bit more complicated than that, but I think it conveys the psychoanalytic idea.
It is very interesting and also shows that humanity has been interested in the topic over the years, even though it is a trait a few percent in the population.
There are no consistent results, but among men it ranges from 2 to 25 percent.
I suppose that when we talk about something more exclusive, the percentages are smaller.
Among women we are talking about 4 percent, with some studies even mentioning 14.
What is certain is that in every such study, the gap between men and women is significant.
That is, it tends towards men.
By the way, gender wise for example, men are more fetishistic and in objectum sexual we find more women.
I suppose that is because men are more visual, as more men watch pornography
Men tend more to visual stimulation as you said and men are generally exposed early to various sexual stimuli, whether because it is allowed, for example because it is more legitimate for boys to be interested in the topic.
Another explanation is men tend to be more open to casual sex.
The last theory is attachment theory, where the idea is that we basically learn from our caregiver figures how relationships work when we are young and then people who perhaps learned they should avoid people, will go to objects.
The avoidant pattern usually occurs when the caregiver neglected the infant and he learns he must cope on his own.
He learns he can only rely on himself because the caregiver will not take care of him and then I feel it is dangerous for me to enter romantic relationships because I may lose my independence in them.
According to this theory, this can lead to fetishism, because the object as mentioned will not deny them and it is a safe place to direct my desire.
There are also hypotheses that the origin is traumatic, but apart from one or two studies I found, there is no statistical connection between fetish tendency and avoidance or trauma.”
In the therapeutic space all these ‘why’ questions today we already ask less.
We ask why about a disease when we want to know how to heal it, or how to prevent it, but here we do not seek to heal anyone.
On the contrary, acceptance of these tendencies and even joining with other people who are also fetishists is something that greatly improves mental well being.
This brings me to the question of how the treatment attitude has changed over the years, because I know for example that in psychiatry and sexology they only treat if the person declares there is a problem.
If a person lies for example only once a year, but in his view there is no problem with it, then there is no reason to ‘heal it’ in quotes.
So if a person is attracted to objects and manages to cope in life and finds people who go with him on this, then he will not approach the treatment institution in the first place.
Correct, and this is the ideal situation, but unfortunately most therapists are not updated every time on the latest psychiatric catalog updates and read comparative articles, but rely on what they learned in the degree and often also on their moral values.
Often we do have a kind of illusion among therapists, who still see this as problematic.
Therefore, generally speaking we can say the attitude has improved, but it is still not there.
When I lecture to people from the therapeutic field, some still mention these theories or recycle them, instead of looking at the personal distress of the person and even helping him accept his tendencies, because in the end we do know that acceptance of these tendencies and even joining with other people who are also fetishists, is something that greatly improves mental well being.
Unfortunately, many may try to ‘heal’ it, or as it is called help them expand the range.
Not necessarily negative, but also not necessarily positive, because the assumption is that the range is not wide enough or not good enough as it is.
Again, it really depends on the person’s personal definition, but I think in therapeutic work we want to understand together the sources.
That is, why you want to change it.
Sometimes we see that the tendency is mixed with another problem.
We also want to see if there is compulsive or non-consensual behavior.
If the person for example is attracted to cars and goes at night publicly and begins to rub against people’s cars, then there is a problem, okay?
But the problem is not the attraction itself. In behavior it is criminal it is not the fetish that is the problem, it is what I do with it.
It is like with rape, the problem is not that he is attracted to women, but how he behaves and how he sees the other side.
ש lot on the person, and I think our goal should be that this thing can be expressed within relationships, as long as it is consensual and good for both sides.
Sometimes there is very strong stigma about this and this is the focus of the work.
Like, what does it mean about me that I am a fetishist?
Or what does it mean about my partner?
Then the work will be on the relationship dynamics even without relation to sexuality.
At what stage in dating would you recommend someone with such a fetish tendency to tell the other side about it?
I think it is at the stage when we start talking about what we like sexually and by the way if you do not have such a stage then it should start, because sometimes the assumption is automatic that ‘sex looks like this and that’ and we are interested that the other side also experiences things that way.
So I think when starting to talk about sexuality, it is worth gently bringing up these things.
You can for example ask if they would be willing to incorporate this in our sex, or start indirectly.
You can say, ‘By the way, I really like giving foot massages.
But I would not leave things too vague for too long