I’ve been asked “what’s the weirdest thing you ever heard about?” hundreds of times over the years. I never know how to answer. Everything about sex is a bit weird, isn’t it, from the sounds we make to the positions we take. It’s almost as if we become different people when we have sex, especially when we really give ourselves up to it and enter a trance of lust. Like, who are we when we’re turned on? How does the shy secretary turn into the sex-hungry tiger and how does the buttoned-down businessman turn into the squirming slave at a dom’s feet? Who we become when we have sex is always intriguingly weird when you’re looking at it from the outside.
the weirdest type of sex I know is where two people take their clothes off in the dark, get into bed without looking at each other’s nakedness, have the same exact type of sex night after night, and never talk about it.
I suppose I could say that my client with a poop fetish was kind of weird, but not for the reasons you might think. It was not weird to me that he had this fetish (scheiss videos are a mainstay of the German porn economy after all) but because he was willing to share details about his experiences with me. I know there are millions of people who are into it because of the volume of porn out there — someone’s watching! But it’s such a taboo that, even in a therapist’s office, adults don’t open up about anal and poop obsessions. The fetish itself though is too widely known to qualify as weird, though people who find it gross may judge it that way.
To be honest, the weirdest type of sex I know is where two people take their clothes off in the dark, get into bed without looking at each other’s nakedness, have the same exact type of sex night after night, and never talk about it. To me, that kind of mechanical repetition approach is more than weird — it is counter-intuitive to human nature.
Of course, sex is fascinating and the weirder it is, the more fascinating it gets. But when people ask “what’s the weirdest?” I think they are also seeking confirmation that some people are more sexually twisted than they are. It makes them feel better about themselves and alleviates their own sense of shame about the fantasies they have. It allows them to rationalize, “Well, I may be weird but at least I don’t do that other thing, because that’s just messed up.” From that naive comparison, a lot of unfair judgment flows. Not only do people get snotty about the nature of other people’s kinks but they think a kink explains something about the person, usually negative. As in “wow s/he likes to do that — s/he must be sick in the head.” They jump to that conclusion based on the idea that the more unusual the sex, the less it resembles straight-up sex, the more it implies some kind of mental issue.
What I’ve observed, though, is that the type of fetish doesn’t say anything about a person as long as it is a consensual fetish. (Fetishes involving criminal activities are a whole different ball of forensic wax.) When it’s a consensual act, it is never the fetish itself, but rather how people integrate the fetish into balanced lives that is the crux of the therapeutic work. You can have two different people who share a fetish but whose personal lives are utterly different. For example, Foot Guy 1 loves worshipping his wife’s feet, she enjoys it, and they do it as part of their normal sex life for mutual pleasure. No problems, no conflicts, all his kinky friends know. That kind of couple sees me for new ideas and techniques to spice it up even more. Foot Guy 2 may have the same exact fetish but never found someone who consented to the fetish, feels terrible guilt and shame about the fetish, doesn’t have any peer support, and leads a suffocatingly lonely life with the fetish. He blames the fetish for all his problems. That person sees me because he is in emotional pain and doesn’t see a way out of his suffering.
While you can’t cure a fetish, you can heal people of the shame, self-hatred and bad choices that result from being stressed out over their sexual needs. “Weird” doesn’t even factor into it for me. The bottom line is simple: is your life functional? Are you productive, able to meet goals, feeling good about your choices in love and work? Or are you so anxious or obsessed about your fetish that your relationships are falling apart and your work life is suffering too? Healing comes from getting people to stop beating themselves up over having a fetish in the first place, no matter how rare or unusual that fetish may be. The challenge is to find your authentic center and rebuild your self-esteem knowing that there are other people out there who live out their fetishes with joy and balance and that you can too.
Now, if people asked “what’s the rarest fetish you’ve heard” that would be way easier. I’ve learned from my clients that there are more differences and variations on fetishes than generally documented or discussed. You can label something a foot fetish but that’s just the surface of foot fetishism. In reality, one person wants a specific gender attached to the foot, or perfers a certain size or shape of foot. The fetish may focus on specific styles of shoes or boots, or the fetish could be all about bare feet. Or stocking feet. Or socks. Or pantyhose. The fetishist may enjoy purely sensual pleasure. But if the person likes BDSM with their fetish, they might also be a foot masochist who swoons when wearing overly tight shoes or a foot sadist, who likes ordering her partner into such shoes.
Labels don’t describe the myriad details that make one person’s fetish just a little different from the next person’s. But it’s those details that make me say, “well, wow, that is rare and interesting!” And, over the years, three fetishes really stuck out.
DUNKING DAN
A professional man in his 40s, Dan scheduled an emergency session. His marriage was at the tipping point: he was seriously considering leaving his wife of 10 years. He was incredibly stressed out and his words flew so fast it was hard to piece the story together at first. This was his second marriage; the first one had failed over his fetish as well. It seemed like no one in the world understood his fetish. His second wife knew he had a foot fetish but she didn’t know the details or depth. As far as she knew, all he wanted was to kiss and rub her feet in bed, and she was willing to indulge him occasionally. But what he really hungered for more than anything was to see a woman fall into a pool or lake, her naked feet flying helplessly over her head as she vanished under the water.
Once, on summer vacation, they were wrestling and horsing around, and he ended up pushing her into the swimming pool. She went down exactly as he’d always fantasized and the rest of their vacation he felt like a sex machine. That was years ago and it had never happened again. Whenever he conjured that memory, it was the ultimate brain-trigger that made him cum like a race-horse.
As much as he enjoyed the foot-play, the older he got, the more he obsessed about the dunking fetish. He constantly flashed back on the image of his wife’s pretty feet kicking up over the water and if he could get away with pushing her into another pool. He tried hinting at it, and subtly raising the subject, but he never got very far. He just couldn’t bring himself to tell her the whole truth. He was sure she would be horrified by thought of him being crazy for wanting her to be submerged to get a truly great orgasm. Footplay was one thing — but what if she thought he wanted to drown her? How horrible that would be! He would never harm her! He had too much at stake even to risk her misunderstanding what he wanted. He was well-known in his church and community. What if she revealed his fetish to their friends or mentioned it in a divorce suit? He’d have to move and start a new life! It was too much for him to deal with.
BRAKING BOB
Bob was in a mostly happy marriage with his high-school sweetheart. He had a foot fetish, which she accepted, the kids were grown and gone, and things seemed fine until she started going to a therapist. Now, after 32 years of marriage, she said she was tired of doing the fetish with him. She was done. She had been seeing a therapist for a few months, and it was becoming clear that there was no room in the relationship for all all three of them — him, her and his fetish. She felt one of them had to go and she knew that, in the end, that had to be her, since he would never quit his fetish.
Bob was trying to accept the divorce but felt sad and guilty. He knew she would stay if he promised to give up his fetish, but he couldn’t. He wasn’t ready to sell his classic cars. Even worse, he had trained her to do his fetish exactly the way he wanted it. He didn’t know if he could ever find another woman to do it as well as she had. Then he described his foot fetish to me. To act it out, she was required to wear garters and seamed-stockings, a tight, knee-length skirt, and high-heeled sandals that buckled around the ankle. It was very important that the outfit be right, so Bob thoughtfully had purchased a closet’s worth of outfits for her to choose from, all of them combining seamed stockings, a tight skirt, and open-toed heels that buckled. Once she was dressed, they went to the garage together. This was where the main event took place. He collected classic cars, but only those with a specific brake system. His fetish was for his wife to get behind the wheel, let the engine run while he masturbated, and then, at his cue, step down hard on the brakes and keep standing on it until he came. Sometimes she jerked him off.
He thought it was a beautiful arrangement. He was hurt and a little mystified that his wife wouldn’t indulge him anymore. He blamed the therapist, who he assumed convinced his wife that it was sick. But he largely attributed it to menopause, saying that now that her sex drive was lower, she was never in the mood to stamp on the brakes for him anymore so maybe divorce was for the best anyway.
TOMMY TUNA
Tommy was a nervous guy. Real nervous. He laughed way too much and couldn’t look me in the eyes. He kept telling me was a nice normal guy who just had bad luck with women. He made a decent living, had lots of friends, and was good at sports too. He just couldn’t make it work with women and he wasn’t sure why. He had stopped dating because of his fetish. He was happier alone. He didn’t think his fetish was weird but he didn’t think he could tell a girl about it because she would think he was abnormal. So he had to hide his fetish from everyone. Except sex-workers. He felt very free with them.
Unfortunately, sex-workers didn’t always have “the right equipment” to fulfill his needs, which, he said, were a little particular. I was eager to hear the details, especially curious about what kind of equipment he needed to act it out that most sex-workers didn’t have available. I wondered to myself, “Chastity belts? Some kind of fancy bondage table, maybe?”
Tommy’s fetish started with having the woman take the role of his Aunt Alice, a woman a little younger than his mother, very large and fleshy, and very bossy but also very kind. He brought along large-sized women’s underwear and hung it in the bathroom, then had his playmate pretend to be Aunt Alice and catch him in the bathroom, jerking off as he fondled her underwear. Then he required that the woman scold him, saying things like, “did you touch my 38DD bra? That’s not nice!” and “I hope my big panties hanging there didn’t bother you” while he said, “Oh no, your big panties are beautiful!” And then Auntie would get stern with him and say things like, “did you like looking at my big brassiere?” and “I hope you didn’t touch yourself when you looked at my big panties?” The repetition of “big panties” and “big brassiere” were crucial elements of his fantasy. The fetish scene didn’t work without them. After the scolding, Auntie would close the door and he’d quickly finish himself off. Then he’d come back out where Auntie greeted him as she fussed over the sink. She would take a fresh-made tuna salad out of the fridge, and tell him to sit down at the table while she made him a sandwich. Then they would eat their tuna sandwiches together, while she continued to ask him about whether he like her big panties.
He finally looked me in the eyes. “Why is it so hard to find that?”
I was still waiting to hear about the special equipment he needed for his fetish when understanding suddenly sank in. He was doing his scenes in hotel rooms without kitchens. That was the equipment he was referring to: apparently it was difficult to find sex-workers who could fix him a tuna sandwich since they didn’t have a fridge and kitchen table to complete the last must-be feature of his fetish.
