/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.8559895]

Any good books giving overview on fetishes? Theories on why/how they come about, their relation and distinction from seemingly non-fetish desires and so on?

[Anonymous No.8560371]

A Billion Wicked Thoughts isn't exactly what you're looking for but it's pretty close. It's a book on the hows and whys of human sexuality, using internet pornography and AOL as the prime data sources.

[Anonymous No.8560595]

>>8559895

A classic book on this topic (which I hope to read someday) is Psychopathia Sexualis, a late 19th century clinical text which acts as a catalogue of deviant sexuality and fetishes, which was written by one Doctor whose name is Krafft-Ebing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_von_Krafft-Ebing#Principal_work

https://archive.org/details/psychopathiasexu00krafuoft

For a catalogue of the book's actual content, see especially pages XII-XIII in the front matter of the lower link. Krafft-Ebing's book seems to have popularized (if not coined) the modern meanings of sadism and masochism, as well as presenting a clinical exposition of homosexuality. Add to these the fetishes for missing body parts (amputees), shoe and foot fetishism, "material/texture" fetishism (fur, gloves, etc), zoosadism, necrophilia, bestiality and bondage, and you have a pretty good survey of deviant human sexuality, which includes certain common fetishes.

The sex columnist Dan Savage has suggested (and this is something that I agree with) that /some/ fetishes are cultural, but things like the foot fetish are just so common that they seem to pervade human culture. For example (this is an example that Savage once cited), there was a big 19th-century fetish about handkerchiefs. Women using them, carrying them around, things like that. The transgressive part is apparently where the fetishist would steal a young woman's handkerchief as a trophy of conquest, or piece of fap-material (not unlike a panty-raid)- see the contents, again, for mention of this. One doesn't really hear of such a fetish nowadays, as the kerchief is not nearly as common an instrument in everyday life.

Per wiki, Krafft-Ebing apparently chose the latin title and kept things just as dry and clinical in his treatment as possible, in order to actively discourage the possibility of any lay readers of his text - Krafft-Ebing still lived in 19th century Europe, after all, where one could easily get in trouble for writing such material if in the wrong place and at the wrong time. But, perhaps he also had his own sincere moral sensibilities about controlling such work. Let us therefore cause the good doctor to spin in his grave, by reading his work for entertainment and general education on the topic itself, as well as for historical insight on the quaint 19th century mind.

[Anonymous No.8560664]

>genetic variation makes you susceptible to enjoy X
>gets positive feedback when exposed to X
>repeat a few times
>fetish acquired