Senzuri San

Senzuri San

About this essay

This piece of writing originally appeared under the title "Serious Stuff" as part of the "Senzuri san" website. As one or two people seemed to find it quite interesting, I saved it from the wreckage when the management at Xoom kindly - and without any warning - trashed my site in August 2000.

Senzuri san, September 2000.

What are we talking about?

When I began thinking about putting this website together, my first thought about this page was that it would briefly outline some of the theories about why some people get a sexual turn-on from the kind of gear and situations which I planned to feature. Although I recognised that there would probably be no definitive answer, the basic task seemed quite straightforward. Having spent some time looking at a cross-section of the literature, though, I realised that there was a whole range of issues raised by this phenomenon and that writing this page wasn't going to be so straightforward after all.

Paraphilia, fetishism or what?

When I began my research, I had what you might call an outline knowledge of the concepts I would be dealing with; namely that paraphilia was a general term for "unusual" types of sexuality (in Greek "para" means "beyond" and "philia" means "love") and fetishism a term which described a specific paraphilia where someone got a sexual turn-on from some inanimate object.

You'll find the words fetishism and fetish used quite widely on this site because they are words which most of us feel familiar with. When I got to work with the textbooks, however, I found that the definitions of these terms weren't quite what I had been expecting. While different authors put forward slightly different definitions for both paraphilia and fetishism, a point which kept on emerging was that to fall within the definitions, the individual has to have a preference for this type of sex. Another definition says that ordinary sex - presumably meaning with an adult member of the opposite sex - must be available but be rejected for a diagnosis to be made.

As my own ideal form of sex is with a woman, between (cotton) sheets and without any clothes on, I don't seem to fit in with this scheme at all. Despite the impression that parts of this site may give, fooling around with wetsuits and so on is really just an optional extra which I could live without - and have done from time to time - though I would prefer not to. What's more, a look around the Web reveals others like me.

Reinisch and Beasley (The Kinsey Institute New Report on Sex, 1990, p.160) provide a slightly different angle, suggesting that you can have fetishism without it constituting a paraphilia. The key test in their eyes is that, "the fetish must be 'necessary', (for orgasm) not just preferred, for it to be classified as a paraphilia."

Elsewhere I found another intriguing point, whereby one expert warned against a diagnosis of fetishism where the object concerned was involved in sexual arousal on the basis of its physical properties. Since I like the feel of neoprene around my sensitive parts and the warm wet feeling of enclosure that I get from wearing the gear for a few hours, where does this leave me?

What is normal?

As I looked through various textbooks, I kept on coming up against the phrase "abnormal psychology". It hardly came as a surprise that a check through the books generally showed that the sort of sex featured in this site falls into this "abnormal" category in some respects (although see above).

But when applied to human sexuality, what precisely does the word "normal" mean? A superficial glance at these books would imply that there exists a set of objective criteria to decide just that, but closer reading shows that none in fact exists; indeed as one looks into the subject more deeply, it becomes clear that "normal" really is a kind of shorthand for "conforms to present fashions in society".

This can be appreciated better when one considers how sexual fashions have changed through time. In ancient Greece, no distinction was made between heterosexual and homosexual activity; from the fall or Rome to the 15th century, Christian Church leaders considered sex of any kind to be a sin; in 19th century Western thought, masturbation was held to be a mental illness requiring treatment - indeed if you take a look at one of the Web's handcuff sites you'll see a device specially designed to stop such "self pollution"! In the last few decades, homosexual activity between men has gone from being a punishable offence in many places to an accepted part of everyday life.

Some psychologists have recognised this subjectivity themselves, but most have still gone on to ignore its implications. One psychologist who was prepared to face up to the problem in the early 1950s was Kinsey:

"The prominence given to the classification of behaviour as normal or abnormal, and the long list of special terms used for classifying such behaviour, usually represent moralistic classifications rather than any serious attempt to discover the origin of such behaviour, or to determine their real scientific significance." - Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female, Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin, Gebhard, 1953, pp645-646.

In an admission which is all too rare in psychological literature, Kendall and Hammen (Abnormal Psychology - Understanding Human Problems) admit that "normality changes". To illustrate this point they observe that until 1973 homosexuality was classified as a disorder by the American Psychiatric Association - now it has become a "normal variation".

With regard to the homosexual issue, there is an intriguing "sting in the tail" too. According to one author, the reason that homosexuality is no longer considered a mental illness is that homosexuals were found to be able to function normally (that word again!) in society and have normal (!) relationships with people.

At the same time, another author tells us that where a person has a paraphilia - of which fetishism of course is one - their capacity for relations with people is impaired. Does this mean (putting aside those problems of definition for a moment) that those of us who get a buzz form wearing rubber etc can't relate to anybody and should book in for a course of therapy right away or face meltdown? And what is the prognosis for the homosexual who also likes to wear rubber and PVC...?

There is something else, too that is worth a mention. That is the way that fetishism is generally lumped together in the paraphilias with such objectionable practices as sex with non-consensual partners and paedophilia. The fact that psychologists have got away with this says a lot about the way this area of study appears to be driven more by social trends than science. They wouldn't dare do this with homosexuality these days.

So what causes fetishism?

"there are a number of different theoretical explanations...most with little or no supporting data." (popular undergraduate text.)

So far I have taken a look at the terms used and questioned one or two assumptions which are often implicit in the literature. Now it's about time I turned to the issue which prompted me to write this piece in the first place.

Although there a various schools of thought, there seems to be general agreement on three questions at least. The first is that fetishism - and by that I mean actions rather than thoughts - appears to begin during adolescence. Certainly from fellow fetishists that I know and my own experience, it usually seems to begin at around 12 or 13 years of age. A predisposition towards this behaviour seems to be established before this, Reinsich and Beasley noting that, "these behaviour patterns are thought to become part of an individual's lovemap very early in childhood." (Reinisch and Beasley, 1990)

The second is that the vast majority of fetishists are male, although that said, one doesn't have to surf around the web for that long to come across a female who gets a kick out of wearing rubber. One theory for the preponderance of males is that they are sexually stimulated more by sight and smell, whereas for females touch is more important.

The third one is that fetishism appears to be a phenomenon of the highly industrialised societies found in Western Europe, Japan and North America. Even allowing for much lower Internet access rates in other societies, a look at the distribution of fetish websites seems to bear this out.

There is also a further point on which some but by no means all the psychologists agree on: if you are a fetishist, it is likely that you will stay one. "The condition is likely to be chronic", as they say.

From there on, opinions diverge rather dramatically, there being at least four differing theories. In no particular order these are:

1) An altered brain state: caused by brain lesions, with similarities to epilepsy. Don't worry, nobody has found the slightest evidence for this one.

2) Psychoanalytic theories: involving variously fears of castration - the fetish item becoming a substitute for the penis which a girl lacks, oedipal concepts - the body being seen as a phallus itself and inserted into the desired clothing and so on. Once again there is no evidence whatsoever for any of this.

3) Cultural diversity: an intriguing theory, which whilst rejecting the psychoanalytical approach emphasises the way in which developed (i.e. "Western") societies use symbols to stand for a variety of concepts. In this theory the fetish object becomes a sexual symbol. In support of this approach it is noted that fetishism appears to be confined to well developed complex cultures and largely to literate imaginative people within these.

It has also been argued that a social climate characterised by the inhibition of adolescent sexuality plays a part in this, so too the indirect sexual symbolism so often found in advertising.

4) Conditioning: perhaps the theory which I find most convincing, this approach emphasises the way in which the fetish is learnt, probably by the object being present during an early sexual experience and then subsequently reinforced through repetition.

One psychologist carried out an interesting experiment in the late 1960s with three male colleagues, all of whom were heterosexuals with no history of fetishism. Measuring their sexual responses by monitors fitted to their penises, he first showed them photos of women's knee length boots - nothing happened. Then he showed them erotic pictures of women, interspersed with images of the boot. By the end of a series of conditioning experiments they all got erections from pictures of the boots alone. Subsequently he conducted further conditioning to return them to their initial state.(Experimentally Induced Sexual Fetishism,Rachman and Hodgson, in the Psychological Record,1968)

Conclusion

In an area of psychology shrouded in mystery what conclusions can be reached? Most obviously, it is clear that the is no generally accepted theory explaining fetishism.

It is also rather obvious that despite the frequent utterances to the effect that "there are no taboos these days", a great deal of thought about sexuality is still influenced by moralistic ideas of how we "ought" to behave. Sometimes these ideas are explicit, but more often they are implicit, lying disguised under "objective" sounding scientific phrases.

There is also something else which is very easily ignored when one reads through the various texts available and which only surfaces infrequently. Kendall and Hammen (see above) display a rare candour when they go to the heart of the problem in admitting that the extent of the various paraphilias (a highly relative concept in any case) may be unknown. In other words what psychologists think is a typical person who gets turned on by rubber, nylon or whatever might not be typical at all.

The reason for this is not hard to see. The people who write psychology textbooks have based their work on what they have learnt from worried and distressed individuals who have sought help. This might very well be at the heart of what I have found so unsatisfying about so much of the literature I have come across with its descriptions of the fetishist as an introverted person with low self esteem, unable to form relationships etc etc...Surely this is a bit like profiling the "typical" driver on the basis of accident victims at the local hospital casualty department.

This would explain findings which would otherwise seem hard to accept, such as a breakdown of statistics on a group of fetishists published in the early '80s which found that 37.5% of them regularly stole the item which turned them on.

Though I cannot offer much evidence - and in that it looks as though I might be in good company - it is beginning to look to me as though the typical fetishist might just be a lot more "normal" than people think.

This concludes the excellent observation of Senzuri San. Unfortunately the accompanying text from his site was lost, the only material remaining was this essay and the pictures that I downloaded from his site. They can be found in this archive.

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