Tag: fetish

A Theory As To The At Least Partial Origin of At Least Some Fetishes

So I have a theory as to the at least partial origin of at least some kinks (I’m not saying this is universally true, or saying there’s anything wrong with this being an origin for a kink, especially as it’s the origin of a lot of my kinks). I thought of it while seeing another leftbook group argue over whether BDSM was inherently reactionary:

So it seems to me that most fetishes are at least partially composed of an anxiety. We already know that sex and fear are linked by their involvement with the sympathetic nervous system, in fact there is an amusing anecdote about WWII fighter pilots having… certain ahem, “Difficulties” upon returning home from the front, and doctors advising their wives to put vacuum cleaners under the bed, so as to mimic the conditions of the cockpit… it apparently worked.

Similarly, as a child I had a very very intense phobia of haircuts. I refused to have my own hair cut and I could not bear to watch others’ hair being cut, I couldn’t even read about it without bursting into tears (incidentally this is why I never saw Mulan as a child) as I got older this anxiety became a fascination and fetish. The thing is, seeing people get their hair cut does still make me deeply anxious, as does getting mine cut… it just also makes me deeply horny.

This, of course, explains most BDSM submissives pretty well, we are afraid of pain, of being helpless and of other such things, and so submissive fantasies are rooted in those anxieties.

But what of dominants? What are they afraid of? Well, I believe it is important to point out that often the most enduring monsters in pop culture and oral tradition are monsters one is at risk of becoming, vampires, werewolves, and zombies to name only a few. We are just as afraid of becoming monsters as we are of being in the monster’s clutches. Though actually, I think one of the reasons there are overall more subs than doms is because “there’s a monster behind that tree” is a more common anxiety than “I am becoming the monster” overall, BUT also heterosexual male doms are more common than other types because they are the most likely to be anxious that their desires are inherently predatory because their desires are the most likely to in fact be predatory.

Additionally, I believe that the desire to be humiliated by being assigned a given trait isn’t always about believing there’s something inherently wrong with being “thing X” so much as it is knowing that being “thing X” is a thing society punishes. Often times these are categories society actually attributes or threatens to attribute to us in one way or another. Existing within a currently stigmatized category is scary, and thus the fetish and sense of humiliation.

And honestly, as someone who inhabits a fair number of “category X”s sometimes hearing the word you live in fear of hearing in a controlled environment is exposure therapy of a kind. I’m not saying fetishes can’t be problematic or are above political scrutiny. I’m not advocating any action at all really, all I’m doing is proposing a model by which some of this bubbles up for us at least some of the time.

I honestly can’t think of one kink I have that isn’t born of an anxiety of some sort, another biggy of mine (bimbofication) comes from anxieties surrounding class and perceived intelligence, along with like having grown up in the “I Am Not A Pretty Girl” “Down with Barbies” era in Western Massachusetts where the “I don’t want to be a stupid girl” rhetoric was in full swing, combined with anxiety over my long history of being willing to do some damned impressively ridiculous stunts in order to get laid by people I thought were hot (including moving to New Jersey and flying to New Zealand… they both worked so… y’ know but still) and like fear of what someone I wanted to bang badly enough could get me to do to myself. Obviously many fetishes have elements of wish fulfillment and so on involved as well, and of course fetishes don’t exist in a vacuum, I just think they’re usually more of a mirror than a projector and what’s under the mirror “in the medicine cabinet” as it were or some forced metaphor like that can be all sorts of things from cotton balls and bandages to a collection of human ears, our motivations for doing things are complex and our sexual desires are rarely a strict 1 to 1 correlation in any direction.

I also think that there are a lot of fetishes born of living in an oppressive society that aren’t necessarily a perpetuation of oppression in and of themselves. In a society where women were never treated badly for being promiscuous the word “slut” probably wouldn’t carry much of an erotic charge for me, but I live in a society that’s pretty shitty to promiscuous women and so I know to be afraid of people calling me that, and fear becomes arousal because human brains are weird and badabingbadaboom I’m masturbating to the thing I’m justifiably frightened of.

Incidentally, I feel like this would be a good time to mention that I once knew a guy who really wanted to bang the Alien Queen from Alien.

But anyway another thing I’ve noticed is a lot of the time anti-BDSM people mention the motivations of the dom, and pro-BDSM people focus on the motivations of the sub, and like I think that leads to problems, because like the power dynamics at play in a BDSM thing are COMPLICATED AS FUCK and the person holding the whip isn’t always the most likely to be the oppressive one, for example, white male cuckolding subs who are obsessed with black guy’s dicks and use slurs to refer to them but claim to be just DESPERATE to submit to a black guy… he’s definitely got the social power, his anxiety is the anxiety of wanting to maintain his social power and privilege and it’s shitty and gross and that is one problematic as hell sub, or for another example dude’s who send dick pics to nonconsenting women in the hopes that they’ll humiliate them. For an example of a top who was in turn not being shitty, was an ex-girlfriend of mine who’d grown up in a homophobic household being told lesbians were predatory and dangerous, which as she was a decent human being who didn’t want to hurt anyone scared her lesbian-y self quite a lot and lead her to worry she was predatory and dangerous which caused her fear of being predatory and dangerous to kick in during sexy times, which lead to thoughts of being predatory and dangerous being associated with sexy times and badabingbadaboom now she likes tying ladies up and the fact that she’s never actually harmed anyone helps her feel sure she’s definitely not actually a monster.

Additionally, roleplaying/depiction/fantasy isn’t inherently advocacy. Sometimes I imagine really terrible shit, sometimes I have trouble getting really terrible shit out of my head, sometimes I write down that terrible shit, or play it out with my partner to get it out of my head. I’m an incredibly guilt-prone person, and although I’m a lifestyle sub, I’m also a nonsexual sadist and I think it’s because I’m incredibly guilt prone. After a lifetime of “what if I stole the cookie and forgot?” and imp of the perverse desire to confess to sins I didn’t commit, there’s actually a sort of relief in spanking the hell out of a sub because it turns out I’m not actually a monster, I stop, I don’t keep going, I don’t harm people. It makes the fantasy less rather than more real in a weird way. Fetishes are often those intrusive “what if I did a really bad thing?” or “What if something really bad happened?” fantasies and of course our ideas of what bad things we might do or have befall us are shaped by our identity and experiences but like in most cases they remain “a really bad thing” even when we’re coming and we don’t need them normalized and cutesified and acceptable, they’d lose their erotic power then, and only when the scary thing ceases to be scary will we get rid of the fetish for the scary thing

So yeah… I think fetishes are often more like that thing where you can’t stop thinking about jumping off when you’re on the edge of a high thing than fantasizing about winning the lottery and buying your dream house.

Incidentally, I think the popularity of the whole CG/lg thing with young women right now has a lot to do with the stagnant economy and lack of ability for the younger generation to move into what we think of as traditional adulthood, so it’s a fear fantasy of “what if I’m forced to remain helpless and dependent forever”

Additionally, no I don’t know why I was scared of haircuts as a kid. I just was.

Who’s Afraid Of The Superfreaks: Why Women With “Gross” Fetishes Are Important

Trigger warning: This article discusses many deeply disturbing fetishes, including play rape, vomit, blood, fantasies of mutilation, murder, incest. Basically if it’s disturbing, it’s in here, so please proceed with caution.

Our society has a lot of stereotypes about female sexuality.  That women don’t like sex as much as men, or don’t like sex at all, or if women do like sex they certainly aren’t into freaky upsetting shit the way men are.  Porn for women is all about gentleness and soft focus and not being too “dirty,” isn’t it?  Women don’t want footjobs, right?  You won’t see ladies watching Hardcore Anal Twinks 6 or having bloody sexual fantasies that aren’t about Edward Cullen, or getting aroused thinking about having bugs crawl over their junk (that’s totally a thing and I’m sorry I told you about that, entomophobes) or wanting to piss on someone or be pissed on or both.

Except these are all things which turn some women on, so in a society where female sexuality is a commodity, why don’t we ever talk about it?  Because female sexuality is treated like a product and a woman telling the world that she gets off on the idea of cooking and eating her sexual partner isn’t a salable product to most people.  Women with fetishes like these, the ones that unsettle and disgust, are occasionally a punchline on some shock-jock’s radio show,  but most of the time these women are invisible.  Male fetishists are something most people are aware of: the foot fetishist, the guy who buys womens’ dirty panties to sniff, the dudes into the darker gorier stuff.  But women’s sexual desire is rarely seen as truly disturbing, truly threatening to men… sure women’s sexuality is often portrayed as a weapon that can be used against men, but women’s actual desires?  Almost never.

See, I’m a fetishist myself, and believe you me, many of my kinks are upsetting to men… or everyone. These range from the “doesn’t work in real life, but we can roleplay it” gore, mutilation, human sacrifice (in the interest of not seeming as awful as I might, I will clarify that I fantasize about being the sacrifice, not doing the sacrificing, and it’s not being killed so much as tied to an altar and fucked a lot during strange arcane rites… okay it’s still pretty bad) and medical fetishes (okay well I got my breast implants partially to satisfy the last one, so yes “It Happened To Me: I Got Elective Surgery Because I Am A Terrible Pervert” there were other reasons, like self expression and not having enough patience to wait for them to come out with implants that allow me to shoot lasers out of my nipples) to the simply upsetting, like the desire to call my husband mama, which to clarify is in a southern way, not an infantile way, my transformation/extreme plastic surgery fetish  (the mommy kink plays well with this one, and the human sacrifice one because there’s a whole death and rebirth angle that works for me… and have I mentioned I have a troubled relationship with my mother?) and my belief that Silent Hill is an ideal setting for romantic trysts, to the ones that merely upset dudes, like my being a big fan of dominant men in lingerie, and my deep love of man on man action, to the simply baffling like hedge mazes, time lapsed videos of flowers blooming, and human head hair (I just really like long hair… in a creepy obsessive way), and I find that being vocal about the wonderfully grotty, exquisitely vile nature of my actual sexual desires, absolutely ruins me as a masturbatory fantasy for a lot of dudes when they’re actually exposed to the grotesque tableaus that form the basis of my actual sexual desires and if there’s anything I love more than viscera and hedge mazes it’s ruining masturbation sessions for men who aren’t paying me.  Talking about it is also a great way to make sure a guy hitting on you leaves with a look of unrelenting mind searing horror in his eyes, having had the veil ripped from his eyes like he protagonist in a Lovecraft story, except that instead of Cthulhu, he saw the nightmare landscape that lurks inside the head of someone he thought he wanted to fuck.

Lest you think me an exception I put out a call to my blog followers and tumblr in general and got an outpouring of responses from enthusiastically helpful ladies and lady-ish people of various genders on their most socially unacceptable personal kinks.  We have feeders, furries, people who want to fuck dudes wearing cat ears in the ass with strapons (actually I have so many friends that want that, I’m pretty sure that it’s on a par with Ryan Gosling in terms of things women think about while jilling off), blood lovers, lactation fetishists, and so many more!

Anne:

“Alrighty, here goes, then. I am all about sex, all kinds of sex, ranging from the most saccharine vanilla to both ends of the BDSM spectrum; but one of my most intimate kinks, the pièce de résistance to my personal gallery of decadence, is – gasp – necrophilia. My necrophilia belongs purely to the realm of fantasy – although I find putrefaction aesthetically pleasing, rotting meat is hardly a turn-on – but I find that there is something deeply romantic about it. To me, it represents the 1/absolute helplessness that comes with falling in love – extended to the physical body. Because of its nature, the sole fact of sharing this fantasy with someone is a deeply bonding experience. I have a bunch of other quirks that can be considered sexual or masturbatory to some extent; emetophilia  [Madeira’s Aside: Emetophilia is a fetish for vomit] porn on my hard drive; a cutting habit that I am rather open and unapologetic about (not encouraging anyone to self-harm here, it is simply a part of my own narrative); that kind of thing  Those have been taken as challenges of some sort by my some of my sexual partners (fortunately not many, but then again this is not something I share before  before a certain level of intimacy). Mostly guys who dabbled into BDSM stuff. Sorry for the shitty metaphor, but – consciously or not – they seemed to see my kinks as a wild stallion in need of taming; something powerful and fascinating that they would take pride in mastering/topping/branding as their own. Obviously, that never happened the way they planned. I have come to realize that’s how it goes for my personal, intimate kinks,”

If you still don’t think women like this are as common as men like this, keep in mind that I got a message from Anne on my blog almost immediately after I put out the call and my blog has about 2,000 followers, which even if they’re self selecting for more kinky than average…suggests that the Annes of the world aren’t exactly super rare.  Anne is awesome.  We love Anne.

Emma:

“Sooo…I’m into gore (especially blood) and playing dead, and also cannibalism role play.  And lots of other things like piss play and doll play and (explicitly non-food-based) slime.  Like, scenarios involving being dead and cut open are super hot to me.  Here’s a blog post I wrote where my partner and I ended up role playing that they were cutting me up: [REDACTED]

I have not been super active in finding community for my weirder kinks.  Partly because my experiences in the “regular” kink community where I live have been so bad.  The scene in my city seems to be especially predatory, and submissive or bottom-type women get chewed up and spit out pretty rapidly.  I have had some really affirming experiences in classes at major BDSM events, though, including [REDACTED]’s class on edgeplay and taboos, and this awesome couple [REDACTED], who teach on topics like doll play and gross-out play.  It makes me really happy to be around kinksters who are really chill about weird kinks as long as they’re practiced ethically and consensually.

My current partner is very relaxed about basically everything I’m into, and we’ve explored lots of stuff together.  Since I knew they were into things like tentacle sex and blood and dollification before we even really got together, it’s been easy to be open about stuff with them.  Previous partners have been a little trickier—my college boyfriend couldn’t even deal with my mentioning I had cramps, so I figured that bringing up period sex because I like blood would not go over well.  And even the first boyfriend I really got to explore kink with was not at all into “weird” stuff…even piss was really pushing it with him.  I brought it up at some point I think, but he was uncomfortable with it so we dropped it.  He was cool with occasional brother/sister roleplay, though, so at least that was something…”

Emma hits a lot of notes I’ve seen a lot of women report.  If I’m going to speculate (and I am) I’d say that on average women are more likely to be desensitized to blood and gore, as even if a woman does not mensturate herself, she is almost certain to be deeply familiar with the process, and thus blood due to its connection with genetalia is more likely to become an erotic fixation.  I have no idea if it’s true, but it’s a fun little idea.

Michelle:

“What would you count as a gross fetish? I have a big breastfeeding/erotic lactation fetish which some might cringe at. Also ageplay/incest play are kind of creepo fetishes I’m into.”

I revel in seeing so many women love so many rich and varied bodily fluids, and no I’m not kidding.  It’s nice to see how diverse and varied human sexuality can be, why just today I had a call from a sub who fantasized about having his balls replaced with bull testicles.

I love how abstract humans can make sex.  I love how varied we are in terms of how we want to have sex, and  I really mean that, it warms my heart to see how unique and individual human sexuality is.  We’re ghastly and beautiful and so very very heart wrenchingly human and honestly I just want to type little hearts in here because humanity is so miraculous ❤ ❤ <3.

Nadia:

“Mine isn’t that bizarre, but my ‘out there’ fetish is undercuts or good haircuts that involve shaved sides. My last partner was into it and reacted by keeping her hair shaved on the sides. I liked thinking of rubbing my genitalia against it, and how it would feel. I got off on it a lot and I’ve kidded with my current partner about the fetish because she’s more vanilla than my past partner. I’ve never understood the fetish but I haven’t come across anyone in the community who shares it.”

Haircut fetishism is actually fairly common, especially either close clipped or very long for the unique tactile opportunities they offer, but the “genetalia on head” aspect puts a fun twist on things.

Most of the women I know who are attracted to men:

“I like fucking dudes in the ass with a strap on while they wear cat ears”

Beth:

“I have some “gross” fetishes! I am very into rape fantasy and play. I love the thought of being forced into sex, and forcible orgasm or orgasm denial. I have fantasies about being killed and/or killing someone at the point of orgasm. I also love extreme humiliation (as in someone yelling very bad, derogatory words at me while fucking me), all sorts of non-con slave/sub play, and being raped with weapons – guns, knives, etc. It is extremely hard to discuss my desires with my partners.”

I almost cut this quote out, frankly because it disturbed me, but that would be to betray the purpose of this article and Beth herself.   I hope she is able to explore her desires in a safe, sane and consensual setting with an understanding partner.

Lindsay:

“Is it odd to fantasise [sexually] about being murdered? Idk it’s probably also something to do with suicidal ideation, because sometimes when I’m making a plan to kill myself, it’s more like fantasy, and I get a little excited, especially if it’s gory, bloody? I dunno if you’re done with your article yet, but if not, you could talk to me about that? Might be interesting. (I’ve been mulling over sending this for hourrrsss, lol).”

Apparently a lot of people are really into having threeways with Eros and Thanatos.  That joke was extremely inappropriate.  I cope with all of my emotions with humor, it’s probably not healthy.  

Elise:

“Well, I tend to like male weight gain, males as prey (and females as predators, it’s the vore thing), male/male furry stuff, force feeding men, men with hiccups (the confusion and weakness they show when pointing that out). I draw commissions of ladies being and doing all of the above, but when I occasionally post a male in the same situation, suddenly I get an influx of interestingly negative feedback about how awful and gross I’m being. I’m a service/fap material provider, but the stuff I draw for not-commissions isn’t exactly welcome in my galleries (my largest follower count is nearing 5k, and I’m in demand enough to charge 180úsd/image)

People generally tend to think I’m male, and if they know I’m female, their first contact is most often outrageous flirting and suggesting I ought to post images of myself (for them to fap to). When I tell them no, they either get aggressive, defensive or act hurt in some way. Usually I only get them to stop by telling them I have a fiance.

Regardless, I still have about 4 people who have continued to message me for years despite me blocking and reporting them at every turn.

So, people tend to objectify me heavily because of the stuff I post for commissions, for stuff other people have paid me to draw.

When I post the stuff I like, people tend to be really grossed out and send messages about how it’s disgusting and stuff. Somehow my own fetishes make them not want to message me… so I guess that means I’m less objectified when drawing my own stuff. Most of my followers are men and seem really insecure about being shown as weak, sexually inexperienced or in any way that is not 100% perfect and macho.”

I don’t think this needs any caption, it sums up everything that I’ve been saying.  Men love their own kinks, but often times when presented with a man as the object of even kinks they themselves like, they get really freaking upset.

All of these women are lovely people.  All of these women have kinks regarded as disturbing by the outside world, and yet when you think about it, when was the last time you heard about a woman keeping men imprisoned as sex slaves in her basement, about a woman committing murder for a sexual thrill (it does happen, but it is very rare)   Sexual violence is not a result of how dark or unsettling your fantasies are, but a result of how easy it is for you to disregard another person’s humanity.  Women are socialized to view men as human, as fully human in a way men are not socialized to view women as fully human.  Women like these are important in part because they shatter patriarchal myths about womanhood and female sexuality, and because they present a model moving forward of how you can have the most disturbing sexual fantasies imaginable and never harm a living soul (or fuck an actual corpse).  This is not to say men with disturbing fantasies always act on them, obviously the vast majority do not, but statistics show that men make up the majority of serial killers, rapists, and other perpetrators of sexually motivated crimes.  This is not because women do not have the same incidence of violent or disturbing sexual fantasies, but because women are more strongly socialized not to act on them, and to view men as human… well lookie there, whole lot fewer horrible sex murders committed.

If after all this you still suspect that women are sexually less perverse and more squeamish than men, go look at Y! Gallery, Fanfiction.Net and anywhere else women look for something to fap to, look into the abyss, who knows, you might find something you like.