Fetish theory of sexuality, reprint

[alephnul]

This is a post I wrote on Alas back in April of 2003. I post it here because a discussion about radical feminist analysis of BDSM practice and desire that I just entered on Alas made me think of it, and I discovered the google cache was its only remaining home.Since Amp has brought up my fetish theory of sexuality, I thought I would try to explain

Comments

[andrewducker]

I largely agree. While I think that people start off with predispositions, these are (so far as I can tell) very broad and basic, and will then be twisted, shifted, confused and constructed into the actual specific likes and dislikes we all have later on. The equivalent to being born liking curved shapes and ending up with a liking for Art Deco. So anything you end up liking is a 'fetish' based on the cultural influences and direct experiences, mediated any original preferences you might naturally have had. We're all twisted, and thus twistedness can't possibly be a bad thing :->

[alephnul]

I'm not convinced that the fact we're all twisted means that being twisted can't be a bad thing. Although, I suppose that how you deal with being twisted is always the important question.

[andrewducker]

Well, it means that twistedness isn't _itself_ a bad thing - not meaning that certain kinds of twistiness can't be bad.

[amberite]

I would not say that's true so much for sexuality, but I'll agree 100% that it's true for sexual attraction, or more specifically sexual object-attraction.

As someone who finds genitalia only minimally interesting, aside from their obvious pleasure function -- whose sexual object-attraction is focused on a variety of other fetishes, most of them having to do with reactiveness -- I'll say that my sexuality is probably composed in equal parts of this attraction, and of the enjoyment of intimacy with another person.

The first of these qualities is entirely composed of fetishes. The second is loosely predicated on bodies, but only, I suspect, because I am in one, and am subject to its conditions for sensory awareness and neurotransmitter releases: should I, say, be a sentient speck of omnipresent light, I would find other conditions for intimacy with another sentient speck (...) or whatever else I sought intimacy with.

[alephnul]

Yeah, I'd agree that my terminology was muddy there. Sexual attraction (of which sexual orientation is a facet) is a much better term. Sexuality certainly usually has a lot of unfetishized components, and I'd agree that enjoyment of intimacy is not usefully viewed as a fetish. Likewise, enjoyment of contact with one's own genitals is not in and of itself a fetish. On the other hand, if particular activities provide a sense of intimacy, or if contact of specific things with one's own genitals provides particular pleasure, then either of those reactions suggests a fetish.

Also, I don't think I know what you mean by reactiveness in that context.