Boots, penny jars and a brain map: the science behind fetishes
Researchers have trained men to feel aroused by boots, geometric shapes and even jars of pennies simply by pairing those items with ordinary erotic pictures. Yet conditioning like that leaves most people untouched in daily life, which is why scientists still argue over how an unusual fixation takes hold.
Medically, a fetish is a sexual fixation on something not sexual in itself, usually an object or a body part. Diagnostic manuals have redrawn that line several times. The DSM-III of 1980 dropped body parts from its fetishism criteria, and the 1987 revision created a separate label, partialism, for them. Martin Kafka argued the two overlapped too much to keep apart, and the DSM-5 merged them in 2013. It now counts only as a disorder when the interest persists for six months or more and causes real distress or damage to someone's life.
The World Health Organization went further. After a campaign called ReviseF65 pushed to scrap fetish-related diagnoses as stigmatising, ICD-11, published on 18 June 2018, removed fetishism and fetishistic cross-dressing from its list of psychiatric conditions. The WHO describes such fantasies as common and a problem only when they impair functioning.
Explanations vary. John Bancroft holds that conditioning must combine with some other quirk in sexual learning, since most people exposed to such pairings never develop a fetish. Imprinting theories suggest a child may absorb an overly narrow idea of what is desirable during early experiences of arousal. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran noticed that the brain region handling sensation from the feet sits right beside the one handling genital input, and proposed that crossed wiring could explain why feet are such a common focus. A 2013 study found no supporting correlation and concluded the neurology remains poorly understood. In one rare case, surgery removing part of the temporal lobe relieved an epileptic man's fixation on safety pins.
Counts of what people fixate on shift with method. A 1983 review of 48 clinical cases found clothing in 58.3 percent and rubber items in 22.9 percent. A 2007 tally of online discussion groups found feet dominated those devoted to body parts, at 47 percent. Female fetishists are rare, which Roy Baumeister attributes to male sexuality setting early while female sexuality stays fluid for life.
Source: Sexual fetishism
