Throughout the scientific investigation of fetishes, there has been a gender myth. Men were viewed as the only truly lusty and sexually complex creatures. Women were viewed as vessels or playthings for men, without special interest in sex of their own. Fetishism was gendered: it was a male flaw. It’s often seen that way today too.
Fetishistic Women Are Normal
I am a fetishist. That was what drew me to the world of BDSM, where I encountered so many sex games, play-styles, and fetishes that I’d never imagined possible. Knowing some men craved the kind of forbidden fantasies I’d indulged in since my teens sent my hormones into overdrive. You have perhaps heard of “submissive frenzy,” a period when subs are so relieved and thrilled to start their journey, they obsess. I had what I think of as “dominant frenzy.” Seriously. The first taste of it changed my life: that was a moment of epiphany and intense lust.
Connecting to fetish communities put me in touch with many women who enjoyed a wide range of fetish play, from boots and shoes, leather and lace, enemas and golden showers, to posture collars, corsets, and chastity belts. Men, especially submissive men, outnumbered women at the clubs. But the women who did show up weren’t there to please a partner. They were seriously kinky, same as me.
No matter how many people seemed to think that fetishism was a “man thing” in the outside world, people in the kink communities always knew of women with fetishes. Some of them did it occasionally, and others led a lifestyle centered on their fetish.
The belief that fetishism belonged to men has a traceable origin. Sigmund Freud enshrined it into the clinical record in his 1927 essay “Fetishism,” tying the phenomenon to castration anxiety, a mechanism that by definition could only apply to men. Later theorists challenged plenty of Freud’s other ideas, from penis envy to the Oedipus complex, both now widely discredited. But the assumption that fetishism was male stuck. It went unquestioned even as the rest of the framework around it got picked apart.
She Was Horney
It’s often women who end up pointing out how their own gender gets misclassified by the very profession meant to understand them.
Karen Horney challenged the male-centered model directly in 1935, arguing that so-called feminine masochism was shaped by culture, not by female nature, and rejecting the idea that it traced back to penis envy. Decades later, psychoanalyst Louise Kaplan made a similar point in her 1991 book Female Perversions, arguing that the predominantly male medical profession had helped create and perpetuate many of the myths surrounding female perversion and fetishism in the first place.
Women who didn’t fit that model got left out of most scholarly research.
Women Who Shaped Fetish History
Last week I wrote about Hannah Cullwick and Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, two women who documented boot fetishism decades before anyone thought to ask whether women had fetishes at all. If you missed that piece, it’s worth a look.
Nativa Richard’s Fetish Boutique
Creator, designer, and model Nativa Richard deserves an important place in the history of fetish. Active from the 1920s into the early 1940s, she and her husband ran a company called Yva Richard, selling through a mail-order catalog called La Lingerie Moderne. Nativa designed and sewed the pieces herself, modeled everything herself, and her husband photographed it all. Together they sold lingerie, hats, and shoes, and by the 1930s their catalog expanded into leather corsets, high-heeled boots, masks, shackles, dog collars, and rubber whips. You might enjoy this blog, which compiled photos and more information about Nativa.
from Yva Richard’s mail-order catalog, 1920s
Women in the Kink Canon
Is it a mere coincidence that two of the most significant erotic SM novels were written by women in the 1950s? In their day, these two novels were how kinky people around the world found language for what they wanted. Kinky readers kept passing them hand to hand for decades.
Anne Desclos
Story of O was published in 1954 under the pseudonym Pauline Réage. For forty years, critics assumed a man had written it, because they couldn’t imagine a woman authoring that level of explicit dominance and submission. The real author, Anne Desclos, finally confirmed it in 1994. She wrote it after her lover, an admirer of the Marquis de Sade, told her no female could write with that same explicit intensity. Obviously, she exceeded all expectations! Story of O broke out far beyond the underground kink world and into genuine literary scandal.
Catherine Robbe-Grillet
Catherine Robbe-Grillet married the French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet in 1957. Their open marriage lasted just over fifty years, until he died in 2008. She published the sadomasochistic novel L’Image in 1956 under the pseudonym Jean de Berg, later filmed as The Punishment of Anne. Now 95, she still lives as a dominant. Her submissive partner, the South African actress and director Beverly Charpentier, pledged herself to Catherine in 2005. They married in 2018.
Fetish Women Are Real
A few years back, I was solicited to contribute to a textbook on fetishism. When I saw their outline, every category was built around men. I talked to my contact about this, and asked how, in the 21st century, it was so phallo-centric. They were flustered by the question and offered a weak excuse. I declined to contribute.
The Myth is Toxic to All Genders
I’m writing this blog for women. Men can learn something important from it too.
One of the most frequent comments I hear from kinky men (submissives in particular) is that they find it hard to believe women are really into fetishes. They seem to think that when women perform fetish acts, that’s all it is: performative. In other words, they do it for the men, because they know that’s what their man wants from them.
This flips the script on Femdom/malesub relationships: he has the power, because she is serving his needs. Misogynistic? It can be. Lonely and depressed? Usually. Men who have not (yet) met fetish women are probably not hooked up with kinky communities. That’s where we abound because it’s often the only place we can wear our fetish gear and feel safe and often admired for our eye-catching outfits.
We Learn Through Community Experience
Within the first few months of joining a kinky bulletin board in 1985, I read about and met women with fetishes. They didn’t necessarily have the fetishes men did, either. My generation of femdoms loved to wear corsets and fetishized leather boots. Submissive women talked openly about urine fetishes, enemas, love of the whip, spankings, chastity belts, and more. At the Dressing for Pleasure Ball in 1990, I saw women bedecked in fantastic fetish outfits. Outrageous latex creations with capes and shiny boots, a European Mistress wearing a complete Victorian outfit, from a long dress with bustle to button-up leather boots. No one put them in those outfits. The women flaunted their fetishes openly.
Ava Taurel
Ava Taurel (1944 – 2006) is featured in Different Loving. Her fascinating life story is too complex to get into, but this Norwegian-born woman had an entire earlier career as an actress in Mexican films. She later moved to New York, studied human sexuality and film at NYU, and became one of the city’s most famous professional dominatrices, running a well-known S&M dungeon.
Eve Howard
My long-time friend Eve Howard (also a Different Loving interviewee) built her entire career around her spanking fetish. A lifelong enthusiast, she became editor of the fetish magazine Spank Hard in 1984, then began selling her own Shadow Lane stories by mail order in 1986. Eve founded Shadow Lane Productions and Publishing with her late husband Tony Elka and art director Butch Simms in 1990. By the following year, legendary Grove Press founder Barney Rosset was publishing her work under his Blue Moon imprint. She went on to write thirteen Shadow Lane novels, publish the magazine Stand Corrected, produce 240 films, and host gala spanking events for twenty-eight years.
Bust the Fetish Myths
Women are continuously misrepresented and distorted in culture. On one hand, women have all the sexual power because they can deny access to their bodies. On the other, if they use that power, men get outraged. Then there is the rampant notion that women aren’t kinky because women are (or should be) pure. At the same time, women are man-hungry Jezebels who must be controlled.
The hell with all those ludicrous patriarchal paradoxes and stereotypes. All genders share the same emotions. All genders are humans first. The gender myth itself is a logical fallacy.
If you have questions about fetishism, or think you may have a fetish and need to talk to someone who gets it, that’s what my practice is about.
Photo History: Today’s banner image is an original 1920s catalog page from Yva Richard, “Dernières Créations” (Latest Creations), showcasing five high-heeled shoe styles including the Cothurne, Salammbô, and Charles IX, hand-labeled and signed by the company.
