The "why" post

When I was receiving new thread notifications from the Submissive Women and the Comfy Chair groups on fetlife, at least once a week someone'd start a thread to the effect of: "why are we like this?" Here's my take on it.

There is a theory (heard it from the marvelous Dan Savage, I'm not sure if it's his or not) that some fetishes come from an intense fear, and the mind turns it into a sexual obsession in order to cope. I think that theory has some merit, at least for me, because I always have feared losing control or losing bodily autonomy. I hate and am really really terrified of local anesthesia, because I'm awake but I can't make use of whatever body part has been numbed. It's creepy, I'm not in control of my own body, and I hate it. But at the same time... I like being tied up, and I adore having my mind shut down so that I can't help but follow orders. It is an amusing contradiction.

I was mulling this over the other day with Nauzy, and we tried to see if he gets turned on by any of his fears. No such luck. "Maybe it's a matter of correlation rather than causation," he said. Possibly so. "That, and I'm sure the lingerie and high-heels fetishists weren't scared of them as kids," I replied, amused by the idea. "But consider this: the sympathetic nervous system (the fight-or-flight response) is involved in arousal and orgasm.... yet the parasympathetic nervous system (it does the opposite) has a hand in there too."

Who knows? There're probably quite a few different ways people develop fetishes or were born with them. Mine seems to be a fear response, though there's got to be more to it. Maybe the predilection to have fetishes is genetic, but needs to be triggered somehow. Maybe it's a matter of conditioning: someone likes masturbating to a certain kind of porn, and then it becomes the only kind of porn they can get off to (though, the turn-on would've still been there in the first place somehow...).

I think the only conclusion we can make is: human sexuality is immensely complicated, and I don't envy anyone researching it. :p