In an earlier blog in this series, Fetish 104: Not Choice, Just Mother Nature, I opened by saying that no one chooses their fetish. In this blog, you’ll fully understand how much pain and suffering can accompany fetish, not because people hate their fetish or feel they’ve broken a law, but because the fetish they love makes them objects of ridicule, kink-shaming, and false beliefs.
Shame vs. Guilt
In case you didn’t know, shame and guilt are two different phenomena. Guilt was central to the Freudian model. Freudians treated fetishism and BDSM as mental illness. There are problems with that assumption that I won’t enumerate here. For us, the chief point to remember is that shame implies that a person feels broken, while guilt is connected to wrongdoing.
For most things, the shame/guilt split works cleanly. You can feel guilty about lying without feeling shame about being a liar. The action and the identity stay separate. For a fetishist, it’s more ambiguous. Who you are and what you do are enmeshed.
The Freudians were right that fetishists suffered a profound psychosexual deformity. That deformity was shame.
Letter from an Extreme Fetishist
Dear Gloria,
I’ll be brief, as I’m not expecting a response. I read your article about living with a fetish, and I thought it was a unique perspective for those who live in shame from their fetishes. I personally have an extreme and niche fetish, I don’t know if it has an umbrella term but essentially I find death to be arousing. I don’t live in shame to be clear, I’ve found my people.
I have no shame or guilt or hate for what sexually excites me, but what is a major stressor is the fear that I will never be able to form meaningful relationships with normal people, I’ll always have to hide and conceal my fetish, I can never be honest, and the instant it’s discovered I’ll be rejected for it and my relationships will dissolve. I hate having to be paranoid and hide what I’m into, refuse to let others touch my devices, and ….. Well, I think you get the picture, if you’ve decided to read this. This is starting to run long.
This felt good to get out of my system. As I said, I don’t expect any kind of response, this isn’t really a fixable problem (no amount of working on myself can force other people to react differently to what I like). If you read this, thank you for taking the time to do so.
My Reaction to the Letter
I feel sorrow for this lonely person, whoever they are. In the BDSM world, we know about “terminal” fantasies, the ones that swirl around imaginative ways to take the highest risks while staying inside kink-world safety mechanisms. For people whose fantasies would be immoral to fully live out, hiding feels like the safest path. But is it?
For many extreme fetishists, the BDSM path of informed mutual consent and carefully built simulations may not be enough on its own. What’s missing is emotionally bonded, partnered sex. The simulation can satisfy the body. It cannot, by itself, end the isolation.
That isolation is traumatic. Kinky people and fetishists in hiding often come to believe that something at their core is so wrong it can never be spoken aloud. The hiding does not shrink the shame. It feeds it, sometimes past what a person can bear.
What Shame Actually Does
A 2024 study of more than 2,000 young adults found that shame explained the higher rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidal thinking among LGBTQ participants compared to their heterosexual peers (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11210704/).
While we don’t have any fetish or BDSM studies like this, if you belong to a socially stigmatized group the baiting and shaming can cause invisible trauma. That trauma to your natural identity can make you hate yourself for being who you were born to be.
When Shame Follows You Through Life
When some aspect of your erotic energy is shameful, you may slowly come to believe that you are broken or unworthy of true love. You could be rich, accomplished, or gorgeous, even all three, and still believe you’re just an imposter, inferior to others. Your survival mechanism is to wear a mask of normality.
Underneath the mask, the loneliness deepens into self-insulation and social isolation. The daily grinding work of self-concealment brings pain to the people who do it (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953617305609).
Over time, the body pays the bill. Raised cortisol, inflammation, disrupted sleep, and elevated cardiovascular risk are some of the costs.
Shame was always the pathology. The cure is self-compassion, self-forgiveness, and granting yourself permission to be authentic.
If you’re carrying shame about your desires, you don’t have to carry it alone, and you don’t have to start in a therapist’s office. My Pleasure Literacy Emporium is stocked with adult sex education resources, several of them free, built to help you understand yourself without judgment. It’s a place to begin replacing shame with knowledge.
photo credit: Hanna Zhyhar @ Unsplash
