KhrióMagazine / Inspire

01/04/2011

A Little Controversy #2

Autore: Ted Polhemus

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Objects of Desire
What’s your fetish?
In the fifteenth century Portuguese explorers travelling down the west coast of Africa saw carvings by local artists which were said to possess magical powers. The Portuguese named these ‘fetishes’ – from feitico meaning ‘charming’, from the Latin carmen, meaning ‘song’ but also denoting the magical power which music can possess.

In more recent times the word fetish is more often used to refer to an object which an individual sees as possessing extraordinary erotic powers. Sigmund Freud – who had several patients who were extremely fetishistic – pondered long and hard on this problem until he found an explanation: if a boy catches sight of a naked women at a particularly crucial stage in his development he will think ‘Oh dear, that woman has lost her penis! Wouldn’t it be awful if that happened to me!’ So, naturally, this boy will latch onto some nearby object and invest it with extraordinary erotic powers so that it can serve as a replacement penis should he ever loose his.

Accordingly, Freud thought that only men could be fetishists. Obviously the good doctor had never accompanied his wife when she went out shopping for shoes. Normally I am inclined toward a nurture rather than a nature explanation of human behaviour but the universality of women’s erotic fixation with their footwear causes me to reconsider. As the human genome project proceeds one expects that it is only a matter of time before science has identified those XX genes which trigger erotic stimulation in the presence of shoes and chocolate.

Of course men also have one X chromosome and this explains why Hip Hop artists like RUN DMC wrote love songs to their sneakers (‘My Adidas’) and Rock & Rollers got so agitated about anyone stepping on their ‘Blue Suede Shoes’. But then it is hardly surprising that a species which succeeded in large part because of its bipedal locomotion (which freed the hands to carry spears and Blackberries) should get excited about footwear.

What do you think?

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