[Greta Christina] The Learned Fetish
Can fetishes be acquired?
There’s a truism among many people who think and write about sex. It goes roughly like this: Sexual desires, including sexual fetishes, are developed early in life. And they don’t really change much. They can’t be changed by social pressure or changing conditions or the personal wish to get rid of them, and they aren’t subject to the whims of fashion. Not even fashions in porn. Porn caters to existing fetishes and desires — not the other way around.
I’ve been thinking about this truism. And I’m coming to the conclusion that it isn’t necessarily true.
Here’s my problem with this truism:
I have, in recent months and years, acquired some fetishes that I never had before.
Now, these aren’t full-blown fetishes in the standard sense. They aren’t a necessary component of my sexual arousal and satisfaction. I’m perfectly capable of enjoying sex without engaging in them or thinking about them; I’m perfectly capable of enjoying masturbation without fantasizing about them. (I do think that core sexual desires, such as being gay or more deeply rooted fetishes, aren’t very malleable; and unless it’s a fetish that non-consensually hurts other people, I don’t see any reason to try.)
But my new interests are fetishes in the less-standard sense. They occupy a significant portion of my erotic imagination. (Translated: I think about them a lot when I whack off.) I deliberately search for them in my porn, and fixate on them when I’m — ahem — enjoying my porn. And the sight or thought of them often sexually excites me, even if they’re not coming up in a sexual context.
Specifically — I know my readers, you don’t want to hear about this in the abstract, you want the dirty lascivious details, and I’m happy to oblige — I’ve acquired fetishes for many of the classic tropes of modern spanking porn. Hairbrushes. Belts. Schoolgirl uniforms. Helpless victims being spanked by cruel authority figures. Tears; i.e.. people, especially women, being spanked until they cry. (That’s a rich and strange topic, btw: one that deserves its own post and will get one soon.)
I’ve always enjoyed these objects and outfits and tropes. But in the past, they were only a few among many that I eroticized. They weren’t even at the top of the list. Some were high on that list . . . but they weren’t at the top. They are now.
Now, the fetish for spanking itself . . . that’s a lot closer to a classic fetish for me. It’s not an absolutely necessary component of my sexual arousal and pleasure. But while it’s not absolutely necessary, it’s pretty darned central. I think about spanking a lot. If I go for too long without it, I get cranky. A majority of my masturbation fantasies involve spanking to at least some extent. (I switch around a lot in my mind — from bottom to top, from girls to boys, from participant to voyeur, from cruel force to cheerful consent — but it’s a good bet that if I’m having a sex fantasy, somebody somewhere is getting spanked.) When I look for porn — porn purely to get myself off, not porn to expand my erotic horizons or satisfy my yen for literate sex writing — I generally look for spanking porn. And most of this has been true for most of my life.
But these specific spanking tropes? Not so much. They’re definitely an acquired taste. A learned fetish.
There’s little doubt in my mind where these fetishes were acquired. I watch a fair amount of standard modern spanking porn. (Mostly on SpankingTube — it’s free, and I’m broke.) These images are well-worn standards of standard modern spanking porn, cliches even, and I see them a lot. So my lizard hindbrain connects them with sex and orgasm generally; and my more complex and twisted human libido associates them with the erotic imagery it’s already aroused by. Duh.
But it’s still a little puzzling. After all, there are other standard tropes of modern spanking porn that haven’t grabbed my libido at all. I’m obsessed with hairbrushes and belts . . . but I’m pretty “Meh” about leather paddles and floggers that you’d get at a sex shop. (I like them fine in person, mind you; I just don’t fetishize them in my fantasies or my porn.) Schoolgirl uniforms and maidservant costumes send my libido up a tree . . . but trashy tramp-slut outfits just seem obvious and clumsy to me. I’m fascinated by helpless victims getting spanked against their will by cruel authority figures . . . but I’m a lot less interested in smart-mouthed brats getting righteously punished for their own good. I love white panties and black lace panties and boy-cut panties that curve up over the bottom of the butt . . . but I find thongs boring to the point of actual turn-off.
And I am almost entirely uninterested in standard female-dom/ male-submissive spanking porn. (Although part of that may be that femdom porn mostly caters to a male audience, and little attention is paid to seeing that the male submissive is reasonably attractive. If I’m going to fantasize about dominating a guy, and if I’m going to watch porn to spark those fantasies, I want the guy to be easy on the eyes. Or at least, not actually off-putting. But I digress.)
I guess to some extent, even my acquired fetishes still feed into the old ones. My newfound obsession with hairbrushes and belts feeds straight into my long-standing fetish for reality: for porn and fantasies that seem like they could easily be happening in an everyday sex life. My newfound obsession with white panties feeds straight into my long-standing fetish for the moment of the reveal, the moment — drawn out as long as possible — when a clothed erogenous zone is unclothed and put on display. My newfound obsession with shy, frightened schoolgirls caned by a sadistic schoolmaster/ mistress feeds straight into my long-standing fetish for the abuse of power. (Which may explain why the righteous punishment of brats doesn’t do it for me. For a punishment fantasy to work for me, there always has to be a fucked-up element of “I’m using my power over you to satisfy my perverse whims” underlying the pretense of “I’m disciplining you for your own good.”)
I am a bit conflicted about this. (Naturally. I swear, I’m not this conflicted and overthinking about my sex life all the time. I just don’t usually bother to write think pieces about aspects of my sexuality that I’m completely comfortable with. It lacks dramatic tension.) On the one hand, I’m not crazy about my personal libido being shaped to this degree by commercial video porn. Commercial video porn is all too often a quagmire of conventionality, misinformation, body fascism, and cliche piled on cliche piled on cliche. Even in low-budget, micro-marketed niche porn like spanking porn. Sometimes especially so. For the same reasons that I don’t want my tastes in food shaped by the mainstream food industry, I don’t want my tastes in sex shaped by the mainstream porn industry. Like I wrote in my recent piece on the ubiquity of pubic hair shaving, it bugs me no end that commercial porn has become a primary trendsetting influence on sexual culture. It’s just not a very good one.
But I do enjoy the degree to which my libido is malleable. It makes me feel open to new experiences. For the same reasons that I like learning about new music instead of just listening to the stuff I liked in my twenties, I like learning about new sexual fetishes instead of just enjoying the ones I liked in my twenties. And if I decide that I don’t like how my libido is being shaped by conventional spanking porn, I can always turn it off.
Anyway. It doesn’t ultimately matter; I’m fine with this however it turns out. But as always, I’m curious, and I’m nosy. So I’m wondering: Does anyone else have this experience? Has anyone else acquired new sexual fetishes later in life? And if so, have your newly-acquired fetishes mostly fed into existing ones . . . or have they opened up entirely different erotic avenues? Nosy minds want to know.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, 11 November 2009 at 3:56 pm and is filed under Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on Wednesday, 11 November 2009 at 6:29 pm D wrote:
it bugs me no end that commercial porn has become a primary trendsetting influence on sexual culture. It’s just not a very good one.
Neither is television an entirely healthy influence on other aspects of culture.
Me, I’m sometimes fascinated by the trends that suddenly appear out of nowhere. Where did bukkake come from (no pun intended)? When did women gagging while deepthroating become so hot to so many? How about squirting? These and other common themes in commercial porn weren’t always around. Why did they appear? Inquiring minds want to know.
FYI, none of the above particularly do anything for me personally.
on Wednesday, 11 November 2009 at 8:03 pm lia wrote:
I’m a queer femme girl, but have never really been turned on by lesbian porn, even when it’s made by actual queers. Instead, I’ve always been more attracted to the artifice of traditional hetero porn. I’m not really sure why. About a year ago, the hetero porn became a total turn-off and I started fantasizing about gay bears and leathermen. Right now, I’m really into watching amateur bear porn on XTube. This has led to gender fucking in my sex life with other people. It’s fascinating to see how my desires unfold themselves.
on Wednesday, 11 November 2009 at 9:57 pm Ergoat wrote:
Thanks Greta, for sharing your learned fetish. Spanking was an ingrained fetish with me for as long as I can remember, but as I’ve explored more in recent years from fantasy to actuality, some of the other elements of BDSM that I had previously consider ancillary became more and more what you would describe as “learned”.
Like it can be almost as fun to take a spanking as it is to give. Almost.
Anyway, my friend and I started up a project recently… check it out when you have a chance.
on Thursday, 12 November 2009 at 8:17 am Clare wrote:
This makes perfect sense to me because the brain is not set in stone when we hit adulthood. As long as you keep feeding it and stimulating it then the brain keeps learning and assimilating new information. Your point about music is exactly right; the way I see it sexual tastes can be a lot like music, we just like what we like, and while we can recognise elements that we like and patterns it’s hard to predict or explain it. That said, if your system is being flooded with certain images and tropes it makes sense that your brain will start building this into its knowledge or model of sexuality in the world; it may well decide “I like this”, “I hate this” or “I really don’t care about this”. I think a lot of people’s tastes and preferences change as they learn more or try more sexually.
As someone who is surrounded by and appreciative of sexual information, art and culture, it seems like that you would develop a fine and varied appreciation. It is true that things which we learn when we are younger and receive a lot of exposure for tend to be heavily set in our brains but we still have flexibility to learn and develop throughout adulthood. Languages are a good example. We may have one or two primary languages but we can still learn and appreciate other languages as teenagers and adults. I don’t think you can ‘train’ people in and out of sexual preferences and I certainly wouldn’t want to see anyone try, but tastes can develop as the brain and the person develops. What we need and want at different points in our lives are very different and the same may be true for sexual preferences.
on Thursday, 12 November 2009 at 2:48 pm Rabbit wrote:
As a teen, I saw an article advertising pictures of women who were fat, swinging on a swing, wearing a wedding dress, and eating an ice cream cone. This was way before the internet. What struck me about this was the specificity of it. It didn’t do anything for me, but the thought that *someone* was getting off on it was a bit of a comfort because I thought I was weird for being aroused by women’s hair. I was a bit naive. I do remember being 5-6 years old and liking hair. Of course, I didn’t realize at the time what was going on. But as I grew up, I finally was able to put a name on it. And onto other fetishes too. I think that current fetishes grow out of existing ones. I’ve never had an interest in spanking, but I zeroed in on your comment about a hairbrush because of the connection to hair. I would find it surprising to suddenly be “into” a fetish that has no relation to an existing one. But if I like fetish A, then B, and then C it makes more sense. Kind of like branches on a vine.
on Thursday, 12 November 2009 at 3:24 pm V. wrote:
I don’t know whether I’m qualified to answer this at 26. And I don’t have any fetishes in the psychiatric sense, all of them are things I love and am super hot or rather than things I need to get off. But I do definitely have fetishes that I’ve had as long as I can remember, or as long as I’ve been sexual…and some that are much more recent. I’ve been drawn to blades, to their beauty and danger, since I was a child, long before I was a sexual creature. I can date eroticizing blood precisely to when I was 14, and I developed it with a partner. On the other hand, my thing for high heels only goes back a year, and grew from one particular pair of shoes to being a more general fetish. I’ve been in the queer BDSM scene for years, but boots and leather, particularly leather gloves, have only recently begun to leave my libido reeling. So, if anything I’ve done counts as later in life, yes, I’ve definitely developed some of my (strongest) fetishes later in life.
on Friday, 13 November 2009 at 9:24 am Iamcuriousblue wrote:
I don’t know what your thoughts on this are, but I’ve read there is some evidence that there’s a difference between men and women in this regard. (I’ll have to dig for the references for this; one is the highly controversial plasythmograph studies by Meridth Chivers and Michael Bailey, but I’ve seen other social science literature to this effect as well.) The hypothesis I’ve read is that men go through a distinct “critical period” for developing sexual preferences and fetishes, analogous to critical periods for learning of language, reading, music, etc. Women, by contrast, are thought to have a less distinct critical period, which is why you often see radical changes in sexual behavior relatively late in life. A prime example would women like Susie Bright, Rachel Kramer Bussel, Ani DiFranco, etc who identified as lesbian in their 20s and are in long-term heterosexual relationships later in life. There are probably counter-examples of the reverse as well. In post-adolescent men, this kind of change is pretty rare. There’s also some evidence that bisexuality is less common among men than among women.
As far as porn goes, I’ve seen a lot of hand-wringing on this, but I’m not convinced. I tend to think that there’s a pretty wide range of porn out there, and that people pretty quickly congregate toward whatever floats their boat in terms of who they’re attracted to and what sexual fetishes and acts get them off. I’m quite skeptical of the idea that porn “models” sexual preferences and attractions that they wouldn’t have otherwise. Something I’ve been reading a lot of on feminist blogs, and one that I don’t buy at all, is that porn models and reinforces attraction to “conventionally attractive” women. According to this model, if porn just changed the body types it presented, men would eventually be attracted in the same numbers to say, Beth Ditto, as they might now be to somebody like Justine Joli. Basically, this ignores a number of things, notably, very early socialization toward what is and isn’t attractive that for the most part is not malleable later in life (or, perhaps, less so by men than by women if the “critical period” hypothesis is correct), not to mention aspects of physical beauty that may very well be hard-wired – ideal waist to hip ratio, facial symmetry, youthfulness, neoteny, and a number of other things. I’m all for opening up porn to a much greater amount of variety and representation than now exists, but my guess is that even if porn were more opened up, most people, or at least most men, in terms of sheer numbers, would congregate toward something that looked like well-made “mainstream” porn rather than something along the lines of No Fauxx.
One variation of the “causal” argument that I think is demonstrably bullshit is the “rakes progress” or “gateway drug” model of porn – one “starts” with softcore, then need progressively harder hardcore because the softer stuff no longer has any effect, eventually progressing to Max Hardcore, and maybe even snuff and child porn if you fall into it deep enough. While this kind of nonsense is easy to dismiss, it actually is presented seriously by anti-porn “scholars” such as Gail Dines and Judith Reisman. I think its pretty clear that this is simply taking an already-bad model of drug use and retooling it as an argument against porn.
on Sunday, 15 November 2009 at 1:32 am Greta Christina wrote:
Interesting points, Iamcuriousblue. A couple of responses:
First, the type of learned fetish I’m talking about isn’t the “gateway drug” model. Like I said, the fetishes I’ve acquired have all shoehorned nicely into deeper fetishes I already had. And while I do think the body norms in porn can and do perpetuate unhealthy and rigid ideals of female beauty, I also agree that it’s not like those ideals came out of thin air. My point isn’t that porn can create fetishes out of thin air… just that it can reinforce existing preferences, and add interesting details that hadn’t been there before.
Second: I feel compelled to point out that as far as I know, both Susie Bright and Rachel Kramer Bussel identify as bisexual, and have done for a long time. Being “bisexual but more oriented towards women at the moment” and “bisexual but more oriented towards women at the moment” isn’t that radical a switch in orientation… in either direction. Also, if you’re bisexual, the gender of the person you happen to be in a long-term relationship with doesn’t necessarily reflect the gender you’re more generally attracted to.
All that being said: I do think it’s possible that women’s sexual desires are, on average, more malleable than men’s. I’ve seen other research supporting that idea. But if that’s true, it’s probably going to be like every other apparent difference between the genders: not a hard and fast “men are all like this, women are all like that,” but more like overlapping bell curves with somewhat different peaks.
on Thursday, 19 November 2009 at 3:03 am Iamcuriousblue wrote:
A few brief points – from having read Susie Bright and Rachel Kramer Bussel going a ways back, I know that both when they were in their 20s strongly identified as lesbians rather than bisexual. Then again, that could have been an issue of political or community identity rather than underlying sexual preference.
As for the range of male and female behaviors being “overlapping bell curves”, for the most part, I agree. But, as with so much about sexuality, much of the science is still pretty rudimentary.
on Friday, 20 November 2009 at 3:09 am Clare wrote:
A quick response to Iamcuriousblue:
Ani Difranco has always been clear about the fact that she’s bisexual throughout her career - one of her early songs addresses this topic directly (In or Out). As Greta says, just because you settle with a partner of one sex doesn’t mean that you’re not still attracted to the other.
on Saturday, 21 November 2009 at 7:28 pm amhovgaard wrote:
I can’t find the reference ATM, but in at least one study that I know of they managed to teach people (well, male American college students…) to be turned on by something they were not interested in before the experiment (classical conditioning, associating pictures of shoes with porn).
on Wednesday, 25 November 2009 at 12:44 pm [Greta Christina] The Case of the Missing Bisexual | Blowfish Blog wrote:
[…] So I’m not saying “everyone is basically bisexual.” I’m saying that, at least for those of us in the wide sloppy middle of the Kinsey scale, sexual orientation is at least somewhat malleable. Like I wrote in my recent piece here, The Learned Fetish, the finer points of our sexual desires can be shaped by our experiences as adults — even if the basic outlines are set early on. […]
on Tuesday, 8 December 2009 at 12:07 pm Anonymous wrote:
It’s late to post here (I got here on a backtrack), but this fits and I didn’t see anyone else posting it, so…
I’ve started looking at a considerable amount of alternative hentai; because it’s unconstrained by physical reality, people come up with some seriously weird shit to draw. (Here’s an incomplete list. It’s pretty fascinating to see the variety of things that people are into.) I’d never heard of goo girls before, but when I did, I instantly knew that this was my thing.
Does it still count if it’s something that’s physically impossible, that I have no interest whatsoever in simulating or interacting with outside of fantasy?
on Sunday, 10 January 2010 at 11:10 am Quinapalus wrote:
I feel ridiculous coming back here so late, but two months ago I didn’t have time to write and now I do. Plus I just spent days on a long, dirty letter and I’m in a writey mood.
Anyway, depending on the scale, all my fetishes have been relatively recent; I was pretty vanilla until my late twenties. Maybe (recalling V.’s comment above) that’s just a common time for things to start to get interesting. But even on the scale of the last fifteen years, there are still some recent arrivals. Just in the last year or two, I’ve become more attuned to shoes. Shoes! Can you imagine anything more
[wait for it]
pedestrian?
(Come back! I swear I didn’t come here just to set up that cheap gag!) This is an especially surprising development considering how the high-heels-and-nothing-else motif in mainstream hetero porn has always grated on me. I’ve had a thing for boots for much longer, though, and I suspect that that’s just slowly mutated into an appreciation for other sorts of narratively plausible shoes. Because yes, my boot thing leans away from spiky PVC fetish boots and toward biker boots, combat boots, hiking boots, even cowboy boots, and I think it strikes very much the same chord in me that Greta describes her plausibility fetish as striking in her. And now that I think about it, when footwear of any kind figures in a narrative fantasy for me (rather than just being a visual thing), that fantasy is, without exception, about interrupting whatever else we/she was doing to have sex.
So okay, one mystery solved.
As for the standard-fetish, critical-period hypothesis, I’m no expert, but it seems to hinge on experiences that took place before we conceptualize sex, or at least before we conceptualize its role in our own lives: childhood, pubehood [acknowledgment: Sam Hurt for that coinage], whatever. I have a fresher example, once I’m done with a semantic digression on what a “fetish” is: extending the theatrical metaphor of a BDSM “scene”, I think of a traditional “fetish” as describing a prop or costume element (recalling its original anthropological usage, referring strictly to a prop). Is a plot or character element still a “fetish”? At what point am I obliged to stop using the word to describe just a regular old fantasy? Anyway, what I’m getting at is that sometimes real life provides the spark:
We had, a day or so before, made plans to have sex in the near but non-specific future. She was on her computer, I was on mine, and I suddenly decided a Manhattan would really hit the spot, so I made one. I returned from the kitchen with my drink, and with no warning at all, she said, “I thought we were going to have sex.” [Suffice to say, this is customary.]
“I just made a drink.”
“Well, set it down and you can drink it when we’re done.”
“I have a better idea.” I hauled my spare comforter out of the closet and tossed it on the floor in front of one of my living-room easy chairs. “I’ll finish my drink while you suck my cock.”
And this plot, more or less exactly as it happened spontaneously, sailed immediately into the top ranks of my fantasy list. I won’t bore you with what kind of feminist I am, but my subconscious instantly accepted this tableau as the purified essence of shameless masculine privilege — and liked it. I’m pretty sure the transgressive appeal of this one doesn’t lie in finally admitting that I really do want to subjugate women, but in the more abstract layer of relaxing ethics in the name of pleasure. So this one — yeah, it snuck in to an existing door in my psyche, but nothing so easily identifiable as an existing fetish.
I agree that the ability of the human mind to modify itself — sexually, musically, or all those other ways — is totally its coolest feature.
on Monday, 18 January 2010 at 8:57 am Anonymous wrote:
Huh… Confused. I thought all fetishes were learned, the only questions being when and how… But then again not only do I have that experience with myself, but also frequent places online where people frequently pick up new fetishes (e.g. 4chan’s /d/ - http://boards.4chan.org/d/ - though I haven’t visited that particular sub-site regularly for quite some time…)
I can’t refer to it as I forgot the names, but one (american?) study showed that the majority of the people who were spanked as children later on developed a fetish for it as adults.