What Are Your Kinks? - The Rise of Fetishism in Pop Culture

Written by Dr.Natthakhet Yaemim (Dr.Deyn) Founding Director.
Last update: 23 March 2021

Fetishes in Modern World

 From "Californication" to "Sex and the City," poking fun at fetishes has become part of the mainstream. But doctors say unusual arousal patterns are nothing to laugh at and could be indicators of a person's history with traumatic sexual experiences.

According to ABC News, about 2 to 4 percent of men are prone to fetishes and the rate of women seeking treatment for fetishes is growing. The nature of these sexual habits can range from the Texas man who was arrested last month for blowing pepper in women's faces to satisfy his fetish for female sneezes, to the Malaysian man who was arrested earlier this year for stealing 70 pairs of women's underwear.

And with the large number of chat rooms catering to every type of sexual fantasy, it's no surprise that these unusual desires, also known as paraphilia, become more easily encouraged.

Dr. Deyn Natthakhet Yaemim, a sexologist and a founder of PULSE CLINIC, informed that, "I had many European patients who would try to strangle somebody younger in order to get aroused; he meets guys from online and everyday there are guys came back to his playroom and shared pictures of themselves doing the same thing and the fetish became more normative."

But the root of these fetishes often comes on earlier in life. "Usually, when someone has a bizarre arousal pattern, there has been something in their past that has made them susceptible to something deviant, or something unusual occurred," Dr. Deyn said. People, for instance, who were raped in childhood and had their mouths covered during the act will be more likely to develop asphyxiation fetishes.

"In the first 10 years of someone's life, there is hardwiring of sexual arousals and then, at puberty, it sort of turns on, then, over time, the fetish gets cemented through the repetition of masturbation to the arousing object and it becomes relatively permanent."

Not surprisingly, such fetishes can pose a problem when it comes to forming committed relationships, but Dr. Deyn says people can overcome them.

"By reactivating that original trauma and getting in that high susceptible state, we are able to change some of the core arousal patterns. You can begin to see where the arousal came in and, in the future, when it comes to your conscious mind, you think back to the traumatic event."

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Fetishism and sexuality

 The area in which there is the most substantial sustained body of literature on fetishism is undoubtedly Freudian psychoanalytic theory. It is also the area in which the term has been applied with the most benefi cial results. Th e clinical usage of fetishism has its basis in Freud’s theory of ego development and infantile sexuality, especially as concerns the phallic-genital-oedipal stage

Fetishism is regarded as a ‘perversion’—an abnormal development of the sexual instinct. As such it is useful to consider what is normal within this theoretical context. Freud (1953) posits an intimate connection between infantile sexuality and the development of normal sexuality at, or following puberty. Infantile sexuality is the
transformation of an instinct through various developmental stages in the first four or five years of life. The particular instinct that Freud is discussing can be labelled ‘libido’, which in the early years is connected with other functions of life. The first occurrence of this is breast feeding, the need for nourishment. However, the infant repeats this when there is no need for nourishment and this ‘pleasure sucking’ is the first form
of sexual satisfaction. The second stage is the anal stage and is connected with the process of excretion. The third period is called the phallic stage and it is here that the first diff erentiation between the sexes occurs. For the male in this period, the sexual urge towards his mother increases and the boy’s love for her becomes incestuous. As a result, he becomes afraid of his rival, the father. This Oedipal stage is characterized by castration anxiety whereby the fear is that the father will remove the off ending sex organ of the boy. Consequently, the boy represses his incestuous desires for his mother and his hostility to his father and the Oedipus complex disappears. For the female, the girl’s first love object is also the mother, but when she notices that she does not possess the noticeable external genitals of the male, she feels castrated and blames the mother. The girl begins to prefer the father but this is mixed with envy because he possesses something she does not have and leads to penis envy

Gillespie (1964, p.127–8) sums this up as follows:
During the fi rst few years of the child normally undergoes a process of psychological development which differs in many ways from the normal adult sexuality, and especially in its earlier phases, possesses a number of characteristics which, when they occur in adults are regarded as perverse …
There is a gradual increase in genital interests which culminates in the oedipal stage of development. This is followed by the rather puzzling ‘latency period’ when there is recession of sexual activity during which the ‘shades of the prisonhouse begin to close upon the growing boy’; a period when the instinctual pressures and inner defences against impulses. The onset of puberty upsets the equilibrium established in the instinctual forces, aggressive as well as sexual. The stormy period of adolescence normally leads to transformations of psychosexuality of such a kind that the sexual impulse becomes concentrated in a Heterosexual, genital drive directed towards non-incestuous objects.

During the 1970s, fetishism was a key concept for the political aesthetics of modernist-influenced anti-Hollywood cinema and psychoanalytically influenced feminist theory. As fetishism answered a number of conceptual needs, the ideas it provoked appeared on the contemporary agenda of debate in writing, discussion, film making. 

I believe that there are so many curious people browsing the internet to learn more about their sexuality and intimate or hidden desires because fetishism has long been considered a taboo subject, so I thought I’d offer them a guide from my own experience. Fetish and kinky sex are more widespread now in the world than most people realize. This trend was marked officially at the beginning of 2000s, when the many countries removed Fetishism, Transvestism, and Sadomasochism from lists of symptoms and sicknesses.

“There are people who like to suck toes, it's not abnormal."

SARAH FERGUSON was caught up in scandal in 1992 in her now-infamous “toe-sucking” scandal – and the Duchess of York held Princess Diana responsible for tipping the paparazzi off about her.

Armie Hammer 2-year-old son sucking on his father's toes

“There are men who feel like going to work dressed in women clothes, and that should not be regarded as sick or illegal,” from a legal point of view, private parties enable people to enjoy their sexual preferences without breaking the law – for example, being dressed in German SS Army uniforms, or flashing sexual organs to people who appreciate that kind of “classical exhibitionism.”