NO ONE CHOOSES THEIR FETISH. No one wakes up suddenly one day and says, “Today’s a good day to start licking boots as a hobby!” or “Heck yeh, I always knew that when I grew up, I’d still want to wear baby clothes.”
Fetishes arrive uninvited, often bewildering their hosts. They show up in childhood as vague fascinations, intensify at puberty, and by adulthood have become as fundamental to a person’s erotic identity as their fingerprints. You don’t pick them. They pick you.
Today I’m sharing two fetish case studies to illustrate.
Case 1: The School Psychologist and the Gear Shift
Larry was an easy-going school psychologist who drove a vintage Chevy he kept in mint condition. Locals always recognized him by it. They knew it was his pride and joy.
They had no idea that, in private, the car was the center of his erotic life. His fetish was not the whole car, but the gear shift between the front seats. He loved the thick handle with the smooth, rounded top. He loved watching a woman manipulate the stick shift even more. When women admired his vintage car, he’d ask them if they’d like to give it a spin. Many agreed.
Shifting Perspectives
When they shifted gears, something shifted in him, too. He would watch their hand close around the gear shift, work it through its range, feel the resistance, and release. In a perfect scenario, she wore a skirt and pantyhose. Sometimes, just to mix it up, he would put on a skirt and pantyhose, and there, in the dark silence of his garage, he would pretend to be both driver and voyeur.
He was ashamed to have such a bizarre fetish. He was in denial about it, but finally admitted that he was taking advantage of the women. They had no idea that the harmless guy in the passenger seat was so aroused he could barely speak.
He also knew from reading that the fetish would never go away. He had secretly managed his fetish with enormous self-control and discretion his whole life. It was the loneliness of his journey that he could not stand. Not one person knew this about him. Talking to someone who listened respectfully and guided him to a more liveable space in his mind was cathartic for him.
The Work
We worked together on making concrete changes and unpacking the reality of his turn on. His fetish was harmless. The problem was how he tortured himself over it. And, he absolutely had to stop taking advantage of women, even if they never knew he had. It was sneaky and non-consensual. He was doing it out of compulsivity, without even considering how horrified his passengers might be if he told them the truth.
Some wounds are too old and too deep to fully close. But his self-hatred subsided, he felt more relaxed about who he was, and he never invited women to innocently, yet non-consensually, caress his stick shift again. We were pleased with those results. But the shame had been replaced by regret for his previous behavior, and a wistful sadness about how many years he’d wasted.
Case 2: Ruben and the Amazons
Ruben was not your typical shame-saturated client. In his late 50s, he was fit, tan, and fine. His fetish was for powerful women. Not merely confident or tall women, but physically formidable ones. Amazons. Giantesses. Women who could pick him up and throw him around a mat without breaking a sweat. He wanted to wrestle them. What he really loved was losing to them, helplessly pinned by their thighs.
He felt good about himself. He enjoyed the hell out of the sport. What agitated and depressed him was how people kept treating him like a degenerate for enjoying his fetishes.
The World Disagreed
Every time he trusted a woman he loved enough to tell her, the relationship died. Some women laughed. Some got angry. One called him a pervert and meant it. He learned, slowly and painfully, to keep his needs behind a wall.
With women he loved, he was strictly vanilla. With professionals who specialized in domination and wrestling, he got what he needed. It worked. Yet the process cost him something he couldn’t quite name. My clinical experience has shown that, hands-down, most men want the person they LOVE to participate enthusiastically in their fetish. That’s the prize-winning combination for most fetishists. Love + Fetish = Euphoria.
Ruben never found that combo. He was bitter about it, which was out of character for him. So we explored the roots of his anger, and the trauma he felt as a young man when his girlfriend told him he was sick to want what he wanted.
I told him to blame lack of sex education. His fetish was only problematic if you still believed the myths about fetishism. That gave him room to reframe his thoughts. He began to realize that, actually, he was in a good place. Suddenly, he stopped caring so much about what others thought of him. He was doing the best he could in this unfair world, and that was good enough.
Nature Knows Best
Every fetishist I have ever worked with arrived carrying the same set of wounds, regardless of what aroused them. They felt shame, frustration, inadequacy. They had a chronic fear of rejection.
Mother Nature handed them their desires and now they were trapped. Not necessarily because of the fetish itself. Far more often, because other people ostracized or mocked them when they found out they had a fetish.
photo credit: Luke Miller at Pexels.com
If you like my writing, visit the Pleasure Literacy Emporium for free loot and scholarly works.
