[NON BLOG] Fetishes
Aug. 22nd, 2005 12:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldAfter CFTAG this afternoon, I headed east to Church and Wellesley, there to find that the Church Street Fetish Fair was in full progress. There were a fair number of people there, fetish aficionados and tourists like myself passing by the booths and the open stores. I ran into ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bitterlawngnome at the booth for his Eighteen Men calendar.
I don't get it. The word "fetish" was originally applied in the 18th century as part of an evolutionary theory of religion which held that "fetishism" was the inevitable first stage of any religion, holding as it did that inanimate objects possessed power over humans. Only later did Freud appropriate the term for his "sexual fetishism", while Marx preceded his fellow German-speaker by expounding upon "commodity fetishism". A fetish, going back to the original Wikipedia article, is an "object created by people that has power over people," perhaps originated from some highly positive sexualized association between an object and some sort of sexual sensation, perhaps not, who knows for certain?
This theory is all purely speculative on my part, I fear, because I just don't get it empirically and first-hand. I certainly don't mind if others like it, but I don't get it. When I first entered the grounds of Northbound Leather back in July 2002, I was able to do so without any particular twinges because it just didn't register with me as anything particularly triggerish. I can still do that, but the assorted garb still doesn't resonate with me, doesn't click. I react to leather, in the Northbound Leather context, in somewhat the way in which I imagine that a man rating 6 on the Kinsey scale would react to a cute woman (or, for that matter, a Kinsey 0 man would react to a cute man): Yes, it's there, what of it? If sexual attraction is predicated on connections being made, the connections just aren't here for me.
A pity, perhaps, though it doesn't keep me from wishing the Fair's aficionados well. We all do share, in common, an attraction to non-obvious objects. When you think about it, the mechanics of sex don't make all that much intuitive sense, do they?
UPDATE (12:02 PM) : Revised to be much clearer. Also, to not sound like an idiot.
bitterlawngnome at the booth for his Eighteen Men calendar.I don't get it. The word "fetish" was originally applied in the 18th century as part of an evolutionary theory of religion which held that "fetishism" was the inevitable first stage of any religion, holding as it did that inanimate objects possessed power over humans. Only later did Freud appropriate the term for his "sexual fetishism", while Marx preceded his fellow German-speaker by expounding upon "commodity fetishism". A fetish, going back to the original Wikipedia article, is an "object created by people that has power over people," perhaps originated from some highly positive sexualized association between an object and some sort of sexual sensation, perhaps not, who knows for certain?
This theory is all purely speculative on my part, I fear, because I just don't get it empirically and first-hand. I certainly don't mind if others like it, but I don't get it. When I first entered the grounds of Northbound Leather back in July 2002, I was able to do so without any particular twinges because it just didn't register with me as anything particularly triggerish. I can still do that, but the assorted garb still doesn't resonate with me, doesn't click. I react to leather, in the Northbound Leather context, in somewhat the way in which I imagine that a man rating 6 on the Kinsey scale would react to a cute woman (or, for that matter, a Kinsey 0 man would react to a cute man): Yes, it's there, what of it? If sexual attraction is predicated on connections being made, the connections just aren't here for me.
A pity, perhaps, though it doesn't keep me from wishing the Fair's aficionados well. We all do share, in common, an attraction to non-obvious objects. When you think about it, the mechanics of sex don't make all that much intuitive sense, do they?
UPDATE (12:02 PM) : Revised to be much clearer. Also, to not sound like an idiot.
