Here is another chapter from Dr. Eustace Chesser’s book, ‘The Human Aspects of Sexual Deviation'. There are nine sections.

In the introduction Dr. Chesser writes:

It is easy to see why the sight of a woman’s breasts should arouse sexual desire, but is it more puzzling when to gaze on her breasts or to fondle them is all a man wants. It seems still more curious if he has no interest in the breasts themselves but only in some object of feminine attire that comes into contact with them.

A shoplifter was caught red-handed in a department store thrusting a bra into his pocket. That the thief should have been a man seemed remarkable to the store detective. Still more extraordinary was the discovery of a pile of stolen bras in a wardrobe in his bedroom. He was unmarried and to all appearances led a respectable, uneventful life. He could offer no explanation for his behaviour except that he was seized by an uncontrollable impulse. He was bound over on condition he underwent treatment.

It transpired that at the age of nine he used to spy on his sister. He remembered feeling a tingle of excitement when she removed her bra. The further stages of disrobing made no special impression on him. Frequently she would move out of the line of vision and he never saw her completely unclothed. His curiosity was completely satisfied, however, when she uncovered her breasts. Sometimes he would sneak into her bedroom and take a bra from her drawer. As he gazed at it he mentally rehearsed the scene when she undressed. Once she found him rummaging among her underclothes and she was furious though she hadn’t the faintest comprehension of his purpose.

At school he was initiated into masturbation and it was always accompanied by the same fantasy – his sister standing in front of a mirror, taking off her bra. He managed to gain possession of a bra and experienced a most intense pleasure by masturbating while wearing it.

He was shy with other girls and his one and only attempt at intercourse was with a prostitute. All he really wanted was to watch her undress. He ejaculated when she removed her bra and was incapable of going further. The sight of the genital region actually repelled him. He also had a fear that he might catch venereal disease. The inhibition was so strong that he did not repeat the experiment. He withdrew into a private world of fantasy, and the strange compulsion became overwhelming. It wasn’t enough to buy a bra, he had to steal it. In other words the stimulus was more powerful when it was invested with the aura of the illicit – it was like rape.

One explanation of his condition is that his sister was a forbidden object. Although the whole of his awakening interest in sex at that stage was a prohibited area, the taboo was reinforced by the fact of his special relationship. Consequently any gratification had to be obtained by stealth. It was a case of a stolen fruit being the sweetest. And it was so thrilling that he had an insatiable craving to repeat the experience. But this does not explain why one individual should be so strongly influenced by an early memory and so many others can recall childish experiences of a similar type, yet absorb them as they develop. Binet’s theory that when a fixation occurs there must be some genetic predisposition does not tell us much. The predisposition itself is left unexplained.

Everyone responds to some extent to a variety of objects which symbolise an emotional situation. We do not usually call these objects ‘fetishes’ unless they have a sexual reference. A national flag, a school tie, a regimental badge are in fact not unlike fetishes. They are indispensable to the normal life of a community. The symbol serves to mobilise sentiments of group loyalty and patriotism instantaneously and without the use of words. The swastika, the hammer and sickle and the cross are obvious examples of symbols which on sight arouse a sense of solidarity with the group and predispose the members to submit to its authority. These symbols operate as a stimulus to action much like the partial sexual fetishes. More rarely, however, they acquire an abnormal significance and cease to be merely symbolic. In primitive religions the fetish is not simply a representation of the good; it becomes a god. The idol is no longer regarded as a piece of wood or stone; it is felt to have a life of its own.

This process is part of a universal psychological mechanism. The child talks to its dolls as though they were human. To a slighter degree we do the same when, for example, a famous ship is personified as ‘she’ and her last voyage is mourned like a death. The wearing of talismans and lucky charms is another example of fetishism. We smile at it as a harmless superstition. It is only when the fetish relates to sex that we are shocked. So once again sex is torn out of the context of ordinary experience and a wildly distorted emphasis is given to some odd manifestation.

We do not condemn a man for collecting stamps or seashells. The hobby may become a mania which absorbs the whole of his leisure. No one condemns it as grossly immoral. But if a man has a mania for collecting ladies’ handkerchiefs he has to keep the fact secret, as though it were some outrageous vice. The knowledge that discovery might make him a social outcast intensifies his need for privacy. He realises that he can expect little sympathy, still less understanding. He dare not marry and reveal his compulsion to his wife. A normal family life is barred to him. All that remains is a fantasy life.

In a sense, then, this predicament is manufactured by society. The seeds of it are implanted in childhood because of the existence of social conventions that prohibit a frank acknowledgment of the existence of sex. If the naked body can only be glimpsed through a keyhole it is enveloped in an artificial mystery. The first experience of masturbation comes like an almost mystical illumination. This, the boy feels, is what sex is all about – this is the great secret. But it is also a guilty secret. By an association of ideas the emotion is displaced on some quite neutral object that by chance is present when the magical discovery is made. It could be shoes, stockings, gloves, even a cigarette.

I know of a man who was so powerfully stimulated by the sight of a girl smoking while she pulled on her stockings that he insisted on his wife lighting a cigarette while preparing for bed. He was fortunate enough to find a complaisant partner. Otherwise he might have become a total fetishist and cigarettes a substitute for intercourse.

The plight of the total fetishist is very real. Before he reaches the final stage he nearly always attempts to find a partner who will accept him for what he is. If the fear of ridicule – which is essentially a fear of society – makes him withdraw into isolation he is not to be blamed. It is as though society condemns him to solitary confinement and disclaims any further responsibility. It is no wonder that in extreme cases he is driven to anti-social acts.

The principle of liberal morality which is beginning to gain ground is that any conduct that gives pleasure to consenting adults without harming society is permissible. It is not the business of the law to impose standards of private morals. The law should only intervene when an act affects other people against their will. We have yet to carry this a stage further and not only deny the right of the law to intervene but also the right of public opinion to prevent an individual from living as he pleases, again provided he injures no one else. To expose a man to ridicule and contempt because of some harmless idiosyncrasy may be a worse punishment than a prison sentence.

The vast majority of fetishists do no harm to others. Even at its most bizarre their behaviour has less social consequences than, say, adultery. There are innumerable cases, for example, of a compulsion to collect lingerie. This only crosses the frontier into anti-social behaviour when a man steals lingerie. We are entitled to restrict his liberty. Even so it is a mistake to regard compulsive stealing in the same way as larceny. The fetishist is not an ordinary thief. He may steal a woman’s handkerchief but he is not interested in her purse or jewellery. The act of stealing is an integral part of the sexual satisfaction. The fetish – underwear, stockings, shoes – is identified with the sex-object, the person who owns it, and becomes a substitute. It is a kind of vicarious intercourse.

Karpman reports the case of a man aged forty-one who had several times been charged with housebreaking. Because he only took silk underwear he was suspected of being a sexual psychopath and allowed to go after a warning. He repeated the offence a third time and was arrested. Interviewed by a psychiatrist, who asked him why he took such a risk instead of buying silk underwear, he said, ‘Because I want to feel it belongs to a particular woman.’ (The Sexual Offender and his Offences, Benjamin Karpman, 1963.)

The fetish was not a permanent substitute. He had been married for seven years and had two children. But he had sexual difficulties and frequently suffered from premature ejaculation. Sometimes he was unable to get an erection at all. When he did succeed three or four strokes brought the performance to an end. On the other hand an erection during masturbation was more lasting and satisfying.

He never told his wife about his predilection for silk. We can but surmise how far it would have helped if she had been willing to co-operate. The trouble seems to have had its roots in an incident when he was seven or eight years of age. The little girl he had been keeping company with jilted him. He reacted by stealing her underwear, not out of revenge but merely to have something belonging to her – all he could then get. For a year he played with it, rubbing it against his genitals.

Two years later he asked another little girl to give him some of her underwear. She refused, so he stole some. At the age of fourteen he stole silk underwear from a hamper. Thereafter, apart from a lapse while in the Army, the fixation fell in abeyance. He married and claimed that his sex life was normal. Inquiry showed that it was always inadequate. Yet he was not, as the police thought, a psychopath. He had never behaved aggressively and his only legal offence was technical stealing.

A similar pattern is found in all the early literature on the subject. One could give scores of examples of thefts committed to satisfy a sexual fantasy. We are bound to regard them as anti-social acts because no one has the right to take someone else’s property. They must also claim our sympathy. They are almost invariably the result of an irresistible impulse imprinted in childhood. There is a deep craving to recapture that early experience. Unless some other outlet is found it can gradually dominate all the fetishist’s interest in sex.

Shoe and boot fetishism is just as common as garment fetishism. Some psychoanalysts believe that the shape of a woman’s shoe is symbolic of the vagina. There are some instances, however, of men’s shoes proving to be just as stimulating. There are homosexual as well as heterosexual fetishists. Women, too, have confessed to being stimulated to the point of orgasm by the sight of heavy boots worn by marching soldiers. The peculiar fascination with which some women as well as men find in high boots may also be connected with the evocative power of leather.

Sometimes the mere sight of shoes being cleaned is stimulating. Hirschfeld had a patient who prowled the corridors of a hotel in search of male and female footwear left outside the bedroom doors. He would take them away and smell and kiss them. After placing them together lovingly he would masturbate. He even repeatedly bribed hotel staff to allow him to clean shoes in the morning. The fetish had become a substitute for intercourse which was forbidden to him as he was a celibate priest.

Another man who stole shoes from hotels was found to have dozens of pairs hidden in his room. They were all ladies’ shoes with high heels. Each pair represented an imaginary conquest. He was not interested in attempting real conquests. When he walked the streets he would follow a woman if she were wearing attractive, high-heeled shoes. He hardly looked at her face. When he masturbated he concentrated even in fantasy on the stolen shoes. He would even give them names. He was actually in love with them and wanted nothing else.

He remembered as a child crawling on the floor and touching the shoes of any woman who happened to be sitting on a chair. He felt he was in some mysterious underworld which held strange secrets. Once, greatly daring, he tried to peer into the forbidden region under the skirt. He was detected and severely punished. He never forgot the horrified expression on his mother’s face and the caning that he was given. Although he still treasured his fantasy world underneath the chairs he was too frightened to show any further curiosity in the closely guarded territory which was taboo.

Most children would have outgrown such an experience. Otherwise nearly everyone would be a fetishist. For a few sensitive individuals, however, it can be traumatic. Their lives have been distorted by an adult attitude that is itself distorted. A natural curiosity is forced into a deviant channel by an unwholesome mystification about the human body. To create a sense of guilt in a small child when he has done nothing to be guilty about can only be excused by ignorance. I make no apology for repeating that society is ultimately responsible for the false modesty of the parents and its unhappy and unforeseen consequences.

There is a masochistic element in some forms of fetishism. There are men who long for a shoe to touch their genitals. In one case the fetishist visited prostitutes and preferred this to intercourse. He lay on his back, and at the sight of a naked woman wearing high-heeled shoes he had a strong erection. As soon as the heel of the shoe dug painfully into his groin and the narrow sole pressed hard on his penis he ejaculated. Nothing else satisfied him.

In some societies the foot has special erotic significance. Kissing the female foot is as much a part of preliminary love-play as kissing the mouth or breasts and is probably a symbol of submission. No country has paid so much attention to the foot as old China. For centuries the feet of Chinese girl babies were tightly bandaged and almost crippled because a small, dainty foot was highly esteemed. In Japanese erotic art curled toes have always been one of the stylised symbols of sexual response. Moreover, this expresses a physiological reality, since the toes of most women are cured or spread during orgasm.

Stekel reports that a technologist, aged twenty-six, was impotent when he attempted ordinary intercourse. Not unless the woman touched his penis with her bare foot did he get an erection. He therefore abandoned the idea of coitus and usually lay on the bed with the woman in an opposite position so that her head was at the foot of the bed. In this posture it was easy for her to rest her feet on his penis. He then experienced complete gratification. Unfortunately it was one-sided as there was little satisfaction in this for his partner. It seems that as a child he slept in the same bed as his sister and that she repeatedly let her feet touch his penis. The early experience was half forgotten and had no conscious effect on his adult behaviour. It was recalled during questioning.

There are other instances of an obsession to press the male foot against an erogenous zone of the partner’s body, again as a substitute for intercourse. One man had an urge to place his feet on his partner’s breasts. It gave him total satisfaction. The origin of the impulse could not be traced. It may well have a mildly sadistic component and express a desire to dominate – the master-slave relationship which we find in bondage fetishism.

So, too, is the sexual pleasure derived by merely stamping on a female foot. Some people have been known to mingle with a crowd solely for this purpose. It is usually followed by profuse apologies and to all appearances is accidental.

Plainly this crosses the line between social and anti-social deviation. Even more so is the behaviour of the hair-snipper. A case occasionally comes up at the magistrates’ court which may baffle the magistrate by its apparent purposelessness. The defendant is charged with assault, though there is no question of open violence, and wherever possible he takes care that is action passes unobserved. He chooses a public place such as the top of a bus or a cinema and sits behind a girl with tresses flowing down her back. He cuts off a piece of the hair and takes it home. His room may resemble a museum with trophies of previous hunts carefully labelled and dated. Sometimes they are tied with silk ribbons. There may be a preference for a particular type of hair, say blonde, and he remains faithful to the type. The stimulus to contemplating the stolen hair is often so great that manual masturbation is unnecessary. Ejaculation occurs merely by looking at the hair.

What can account for this overmastering impulse? The risk is well understood and the action is accompanied by fear and guilt. Unlike some forms of fetishism, the pleasure it yields is far from unmixed. Very often the fetishist would like to be able to control the urge but he cannot do so. He is in the grip of some strange compulsion.

It is not enough to uncover some incident in the remote past which caused the sight and feel of hair to be associated with the onset of sexuality. This can usually be found, but there is also an aggressive component.

Hair is just one of the many possible objects that have an overwhelming lure. One man made a practice of entering cloakrooms surreptitiously to slash women’s coats. Nothing was stolen. It seemed, on the face of it, utterly senseless. Another fetishist had a passion for fur. The woman was always a total stranger, so there was no possibility of satisfying a grudge. In so far as he was revenging himself it was revenge on all women rather than a particular one. This is more strongly suggested by those cases in which more dangerous methods are used than cutting a hole in clothes. There are examples of acid being flung, not to injure the person but to damage the garment. The fetishist character of the obsession is shown by this choice of an inanimate object, with sexual associations, as a substitute.

Arson is quite rightly treated as a crime. It may cause tremendous damage and endanger life. There are cases in which a disgruntled employee sets fire to a factory because he resents the way he has been treated. His motive is revenge, pure and simple, and there is no need to look for a sexual component. On the other hand when there are mysterious outbreaks of fire in a place without any connection we may suspect that an arsonist has been at work. It does not matter to him which building he sets on fire. The important thing is that he can watch the blaze from a distance and derive the only form of sexual gratification open to him by the spectacle of destruction.

A number of hayricks were set on fire for no apparent reason. A trap was laid and the culprit turned out to be a fireman. He confessed that he originally joined the fire brigade because from childhood he had been fascinated by fire. While watching the leaping flames he experienced intense sexual excitement. The sudden blaze was a symbol of orgasm. How the displacement originated is not known. He was married, but his sexual life was unsatisfactory and intercourse occurred less frequently than average.

Karpman records that a married woman, age thirty-one, set fire to her brother’s bed when he came to stay with her. Previously she had had compulsive thoughts of setting beds on fire. She had an impulse to burn down her sister’s home out of revenge, but the real cause of her resentment went deeper. She had been seduced at sixteen by an army officer. Two years later she made a loveless marriage and although there were children she felt no affection for them. She was sexually frigid with her husband.

An early sexual episode with her brother and a homosexual attachment with her sister explained why these two lurked at the back of her fantasies. Superficially revenge might seem a sufficient reason for her pyromania. But what she unconsciously craved was a repetition on her early experiences. Fire served symbolically to reactivate them.

From time immemorial fire has been a symbol of sexuality. In many religious marriage ceremonies the bridal pair hold candles or walk around a fire. Often the wedding is celebrated by a display of fireworks. There is an irrational factor in such symbolism which is not wholly accounted for by the mechanism of simple conditioning.

It must be frankly admitted that we do not yet completely understand what causes one individual to take an object with sexual associations so completely out of its context that it retains its original power whereas other objects in the neighbourhood have no special significance. For example, a woman’s shoe becomes a fetish for one person, her gloves or her petticoat for another. All these objects could well be present during the first taste of sexual excitement. Yet the shoe fetishist remains fixated on shoes, the glove fetishist on gloves, the petticoat fetishist on petticoats. Taken by themselves, none of these items are uniquely sexual – no more than a rubber apron, or a mackintosh. There seems no reason why a motor car or an aeroplane should not become a fetish, though I have not come across a case.

Partiality for parts of the body is more explicable. The whole of the body is a potentially sexual object. A special interest in the breast or buttocks or hair is compatible with an ordinary sex life. It seems quite natural for a man to treasure a lock of hair, or a handkerchief belonging to the woman he loves. The question is why the simple fetish-objects of every close relationship should become substitutes instead of stimuli.

There is never an all-embracing explanation of the multifarious types of human behaviour that covers every case. It does appear, however, that most extreme forms of sexual behaviour are at least partly due to sexual inadequacy. Satisfactory coitus is often either impossible or difficult. And this may be so because the early awakening of sex made such a vivid impression that there is a longing to recapture it. The avenue to adult sexuality is open, but it does not seem so attractive as the first experience.

Sexual substitution is not a peculiarity of human beings. It has been observed in captive animals. Doves, hand-reared and kept apart from their own species, have been known to try to copulate with the hand that fed them. The hand may become a permanent fetish.

Dr. Desmond Morris relates a curious experience with a panda: ‘I myself was once the embarrassed recipient of sexual advances by a giant panda. It occurred in Moscow where I had arranged for her to be taken to be mated with the only giant panda outside China. She ignored his persistent sexual attentions, but when I put my hand through the bars and patted her on the back, she responded by raising her tail and directing a full sexual invitation posture at me, with the male panda only a few feet away. The difference between the two animals was that she had been isolated from other pandas at a much earlier age than the male. He had matured as a panda’s panda, but she was now a people’s panda.’ (The Human Zoo)

The early imprint on the panda was indelible. The same is undoubtedly true of many human deviations of an anti-social character. They are what they are because of a repressive mystification which gave them a sense of guilt. The forbidden thrill could only be recaptured secretly and in fantasy. This drove them to solitary gratifications through masturbation, using, for example, a fetish which acts as a release to carry them back in time. Just as Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection, so in the more extreme instances the fetishist no longer attempts contact with a real man or woman and turns inward on himself. A further reason why he withdraws from a human relationship and projects his feelings on an inanimate object may sometimes be the presence of latent homosexuality.

Although we do not as yet understand everything about the causation of fetishism we know enough to realise that except in its anti-social forms it is harmless and not worth making a fuss about.

Of course, if the fetishist finds his situation disturbing to his peace of mind – and creates to severe a sense of guilt – that is another matter. He should, of course, seek aid.

One thing is certain – as long as society fails to take a rational and understanding attitude towards sex, sexual deviations are inevitable.

The end

a long but fascinating marathon of posts-(not trying to be snide), indeed most of what is said sounds quite plausible

Gillian,

Thank you very much for posting the chapter on fetishism.

A few people, such as you and Pseudonym/Dean, go to a lot of trouble to find interesting pieces for us. You deserve to get more feedback than you do.