As the title says, how we ended up having fetishes? Is is psychological/physiological/subconscious thing?
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You know how some people love ketchup and hate mustard, because of how their taste buds perceive those tastes and when in their development they tried each, so their brains wired in a way to make them like one and hate the other? Imagine that, but for sexual attraction. A slightly unusual sensitivity to some stimulus, exposure at the right time, neurons wiring “incorrectly,” and suddenly you get hard when you see Ming vases.
Just me?
Sexual attraction is weird and poorly understood and so what causes something to be a turn-on to someone is a mystery. You’ll get various theories, sex negative people tend to say it’s just trauma and our brains take what scares us and makes it horny, which may happen sometimes but truthfully most people aren’t traumatized by butts or boobs or anime characters. Generally the only difference between ‘normal horny thing’ and ‘kink’ is cultural, like how a lot of cultures think cultures that have a normalized kissing kink are disgusting and weird.
Basically our brains are chemical goo full of electricity and “This makes me scared” “This makes me disgusted” “This makes me happy” “This makes me horny” are part nature, part nurture, mysterious and unpredictable.
They are created on the Internet and their lore is detailed by the creator in long, comprehensive FAQs.
/r/Fedlegs
(Pretend you’re five) (I’m an adult explaining)
“Well a long long time ago, there was no internet, no mobile phones, no computers, no exposure to different philosophies (I shouldn’t say “no exposure” as alternative lifestyles and promiscuity totally happened but were taboo and kept secret.) NO PRIVACY. So if you were the type of person who couldn’t find pleasure in the intimate practices your family, friends, coworkers, (pretty much everyone in your entire world) , expected of you- an emptiness forms inside you…. usually the first available alternative experience of intimate pleasure does the trick to fill that emptiness. And this happens to lots of other people too and as communication and society advanced, here we are today with furries and dominatrix. Maybe one day they won’t be viewed as fetish, a lot of acts people do today used to be considered fetish but are now celebrated as something else….but I digress, i don’t want to bore you with politics. And then there are those who think they have fetish but are actually just really wanting to fit in somewhere and are enamoured by the experience. There’s my 2cents on the subject. ✌️
Who told you about fetishes little fellow?
Sometimes it has to do with shame and the freedom of acting in a perceived shameful way. As a kid you are told it is naughty and very bad to look at a woman naked, then as an adult you get a thrill from looking at women naked in part because it is wrong but feels good to do it. Same sort of thing for many fetishes I think. Ever looked at a cousin or family member or teacher or girl next door, police officer, nurse, etc. and thought of having sex with them? Probably. As a guy most women I have come in contact with in my life I have had a sexual thought about. Even if it was gross or weird and I didn’t like it, as guys we think about sex with everyone/thing. Doesn’t mean we actually want that, so sometimes it remains an abstract fetish we only fantasize about. Other times if it is something we feel comfortable and aroused by, we are further aroused by the shamefulness of it. I’m sure it functions in the same way to an extent for women, I just can’t say from personal experience.
Basically you either have a significant experience or repeated experiences with something that your brain ties to sex that turns into a sexual attraction to that experience. The reason for the significance of the experience can be pretty varied; trauma and/or proximity to sexual awakening are more common ones.
Nobody is precisely sure but the likely explanation is going to be a mixture of things.
We are sensory creatures and understand the world in terms of what things look like, what they smell like and so on. We like some things and dislike others. We acquire some tastes over time despite disliking things originally.
So what happens with fetishes? The going idea is that the fetish focus is presented to us at some point during early life and associated with sexual arousal either by coincidence or intentional symbolism or society’s attitudes in general.
Taboo seems to play a part too. If society drums into you that feet are gross, that women should be submissive and chaste etc and you get excitement over some of these things, then attempting to bury those desires tends to cause mixed messaging in the brain and the connections get stronger compared to anyone who has not somehow connected feet or powerful women up to sexual arousal. Violating taboos typically makes people feel something intense, and this includes arousal for fetishists.
So it is likely mostly down to how your brain gets wired when you’re young. Your brain is built to associate sensations, to learn better. Your brain is also built to get aroused and seek out sex. These can get mashed together. Trauma can do this, but so can inadvertently stimulating your junk while feeling constricted and uncomfortable in a raincoat or even just growing up in the 80s and watching aerobic exercise videos.
I’ve not looked into it, but I would predict greater representation of neurodiversity in fetish communities than the average.
Certain experiences can cause them, and in the case of foot fetish, it has been suggested that part of the brain that deals with feet is near the part that deals with arousal. So their is also Pavlov’s dog/whistle (if you’re not familiar with that, it’s basically if event B happens soon after Event A, you can/will experience symptoms of event B just by event A happening before event B does.
“Fetish” used to mean something very different.
In psychology circles, “fetish” used to mean something that a person *could not* orgasm without. Basically, it was a far more serious term than we use it today.
Example: Some guy who simply could not orgasm unless he was sniffing lingerie.
It’s the same category of “a condition” as someone who can’t orgasm because of trauma, or because of some other emotional issue. Psychology considered fetishes something that needed to be treated with therapy, because being *unable* to reach orgasm without sniffing lingerie is not the normal human condition.
Now the term has been co-opted to mean “strong preference”, or even just general “preference”.
So if you’re asking about the classical use of the term “fetish”, I think psychologists and other mental health professionals would say that people develop them because of adverse conditions (take your pick), and should probably be dealt with via therapy.
If you’re instead talking about “a preference”, I don’t think there’s any deep explanation to be had. People prefer different things for different reasons.
But some random guy with a “fetish” for Asian women (for example), merely prefers Asian women, and can probably reach orgasm just fine on his own, or with other ethnicities too.
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