Briefly, sexual fetishism is the product and result of fortuitous conditioning. This occurs when a person in a state of imprint vulnerability encounters (Is "collides with" too excessive?) a stimulus, which then imprints as a trigger for sexual arousal. Imprint vulnerability, in turn, occurs at the time when the person begins to become sexually awake; in
persons not subject to an excessively repressive environment at the time, this sexual awakening occurs at puberty. (Where repression -- or information-starvation -- is excessive, in the case of a female this can result in rendering her inorgasmic. How much repression is excessive enough to do that? It depends upon the individual person.) Where repression is present but not excessive, even the repression itself can be co-opted as an arousal-trigger; I think we see this in some of the testimony of
aficionados of the male device on your site and on other sites. In any event, classically, fetishism is investment of sexuality into an object or circumstance not itself intrinsically sexual; the investment originates from "without," outside of said object or circumstance, as an import from the person's own mind. Any amount of analysis can flow from this.

Too, more than one fetishism can be present in any person, sometimes of equal power and sometimes in hierarchy of power, again depending upon the individual. Indeed, some fetishisms are stepping-stones to others.

Further, fetishism is not something immune to its possessor's conscious manipulation, though this is not instantaneous or easy. A fetishism is a routine of intrapsychic behavior, and behavior neither practiced nor reinforced will extinct. Where a particular fetishism is one among more than one present in the person, and low on the hierarchy, it can lose its "charge," so to say, through neglect.

Furthermore, valence and intensity of a particular fetish can change in response to reality (though, as some of the more extravagant fiction in our community of interest suggests, it need not do so). Once again, the degree and kind of such changes depend upon the particular individual and his or her circumstances at the time. The changes can be imposition of a
counter-valence (negating what is theretofore positive or rendering what was theretofore negative now positive), although this is radical; or changing the degree of the fetish's power as an arousal-trigger; or changing the individual's perspective thereon.

The problem with so many analytic formulae, is that they are abstract; and, being abstract, they are far simpler to state than they are to apply. Too, simplification for brevity's sake, sometimes results in the distortion of over-simplification. Nonetheless, I hope this is helpful.

Robert Pinkerton

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