By: Daniel Stokes
Leather, PVC, rubber, and plastic. Whips, chains, ropes, and riding crops. Sexual toys with more variance in size, shape, and use than stars in the sky. Fetishism, as the walls of social taboos are razed to the ground, is entering into a light it had never seen. Although expressive fetishism frightens the general public, fetish culture and an understanding of broad fetishism are growing and becoming more tolerable to society.
Fetishism has always been an underground movement, from its psychological inception in the late 18th century when Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing coined the phrases “sadism” and “masochism” to describe patients who enjoyed giving or receiving pain in a sexual context, to now with few fetish clubs actively operating and private functions existing constantly. Clubs didn’t even reach public status at all until the 1980’s in America; in the United Kingdom, they existed a few years earlier. This was due primarily to British punk music which featured fetishist paraphernalia like whips, chains, and dog collars, as stage dress.
The term fetish itself bears such a negative connotation that it is regularly omitted from conversation, justifiably so. “Fetitiços”, as the Portuguese called them, were small charms or dolls worshipped and glorified by the various African tribes they encountered as they continued their economic conquest of the known world in the 1600’s. The fetishists were worshipping false idols to the Portuguese Christians, and the term became a term of ridicule from the explorers to the African tribesmen.
Before the derogatory term of fetish was applied to those with psycho-sexual fixations, their so-called ailments were referred to as heretitodegenerascene disorders that should be cured through therapy, like any psychological disorder should be. Both Krafft-Ebing and Sigmund Freud, who were the major researchers of the subject, concluded that a sexual fetish was a sexual object or experience a male patient obsessed over to the point that the obsession interfered with daily life. It was a great definition for a psycho-sexual disorder, but a fetish generally isn’t as extreme.
A typical fetish is merely an object or situation that is prevalent in all or most sexual fantasies of said patient, male or female. These fetishes can range anywhere from sexual intercourse in a bed, to fantasies of a particular race of sexual mate, schoolgirls or –boys, as far down as bondage, sadomasochism, and animal play. The stereotype for a podophilist, foot fetishist, or mysophilist, used-panty fetishist, is of a male figure grotesquely obsessed with engaging either object to the point of legal misfortune, like stealing used panties or shoes, but for most, this isn’t true.
The average foot or panty fetishist just likes to have them around in a sexual context. A foot fetishist might enjoy his sexual mate engaging foreplay wearing a pair of stilettos, or the fetishist has a special preference to giving his mate foot massages, or flirtatiously playing with their mates feet with their own. The panty fetishist may keep said article of clothing after a sexual encounter as a trophy, or take part in panty frottaging, mutual rubbing over the clothes.
Psychologists made use of bell curve graphs to help explain various psychological ranges between two extremes. The graph is shaped like a bell with its apex in the centre of the graph and the bottom of the bell at both sides, the extremes. Famously used to describe population-IQ references, the lowest IQ ratings started at the left and progressed to the highest ratings on the right side. The y-axis was given a population quantity, and psychologists discovered that the largest number of people were in the middle of the two extremes with numbers diminishing as they moved further to the right or left of the middle. As they experimented with other population graphs, they noticed that most of them were about the same, with those facing extreme traits existing in limited numbers and those who show a kind of middle ground between the two extremes with the highest population. The bell curve theory has been applied to sexual fetishes also.
A particular fetish, like pterophilia, the feather fetish, could be split into extremes: those who use feathers in their fantasies, but do not actively pursue the fetish in sexual situations on the left, and those who are unable to achieve sexual stimulation without, at least, the presence of a feather of any kind. One would find that after surveying a given population of fetishists that the largest number of people would be in the moderate fetishism range, having a defined fetish for feathers, having feathers prevalent in most or all sexual fantasies, and having a desire to engage in sexual conduct with use feathers in some way. This can be repeated for fetishists of all kinds, infantiliphilia, macrophilia, doraphilia, odontophilia, pygophilia, urophilia, and melcryptovestimentaphilia, or baby talk, big people, fur-skin, teeth, butt, urine, and black panties respectively. The results would be almost the same for all tests.
As social taboos are broken down and slowly accepted, fetishism in all forms will become more commonplace, but acceptance starts with understanding. Once the public understands that fetishes are naturally occurring phenomena, progress can begin. Whether the fetish of choice is feet, panties, riding crops, being whipped, whipping others, wearing latex uniforms, or Latinos, consensual sex with fetishes is just good sex.
--Dan
No comments:
Post a Comment