“When will people stop feeling shame about fetish?”
The question was raised during a Zoom call I was having late one spring night with a group of graduate students in the Philippines whose graduate thesis was a study of fetishes and social attitudes towards them. They each came equipped with questions about why fetishes exist (no one is exactly sure), whether they can be cured (they cannot because they aren’t “illnesses” or pathologies in the first place), and a multitude of questions about why fetishists are often ashamed to talk about their sexual needs and why people who don’t have fetishes view fetishes as shameful quirks that mean their partner is immoral or needs psychological help.
My answer to the person who asked was a question: “When will people stop feeling shame about sex? As long as there is so much shame around sex, there will be extra shame heaped on people who don’t conform to the stereotype of what “normal” sex is supposed to be.”
“Ahhhh,” they said in unison. “Yes, we get it.”
Yesterday, during a long chat with a sex-worker friend about what drives people to lead secret sexual lives, never admitting what they want to anyone other than sex workers and sex therapists, I commented that shame was behind much of the lying, cheating, deceiving, and dysfunction I saw in private sex lives.
“When will the shame end?!” my friend asked.
I knew the question was rhetorical but I answered anyway. “Probably never. Seeds of shame are sown every day, all around the world. The chief culprit are religions which dictate what types of sex are acceptable, making everyone who strays from their religious model look like a sinner or outcast. Sexual shame is entrenched in global culture, which means your parents, your teachers, even your peers, can make you feel ashamed of being sexually different. Sex is clean. But people’s minds are twisted by myths and ideologies to see it as dirty.”
Shame stifles dreams and ambitions. Shame sucks the juice out of life. Shame makes you doubt your own goodness. Shame makes you feel weak inside. Shame silences you.
All the negative effects of shame ripple through your personal life, your relationships, and even your relationships with the communities you belong to.
No one can end all the sexual shame in the world. What we can do is to end the shame in our own lives.
