A late train. The woman in the opposite seat recrosses her legs, and for a second the muscle of a stocking-clad calf catches the light before the fold hides it again. Some part of the visual system snags on that one second, and some other part of the brain answers it. The desire to chase that one-second bodily memory afterward is the typical firing of fetishism.

Fetishism (French fétichisme, German Fetischismus) is the umbrella term for binding strong and persistent sexual arousal to a particular object, body part, material, or situation. In Japanese the word is clipped to fechi, and derivative compounds are formed endlessly by prefixing the target: ashi-fechi (foot fetish), nioi-fechi (smell fetish), seifuku-fechi (uniform fetish).

Etymology

The word traces to Portuguese feitiço (sorcery, charm, man-made object). In the late fifteenth century, Portuguese navigators on the West African coast used it for the carved objects, teeth, and shells treated locally as objects of veneration. It passed into French fétiche and English fetish as a term of anthropology and religious studies, where its first meaning was “object worship”: attributing divine power to a physical thing.

The eighteenth-century French thinker Charles de Brosses gave the word its first scholarly definition in Du culte des dieux fétiches (1760), opening the field of the study of primitive religion. In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx adapted it in Capital (1867) as “commodity fetishism” (Warenfetischismus), the analysis of how, under capitalism, commodities take on an apparently independent, magical value.

Adoption into sexology

Fetishism as “sexual interest directed at a specific target” was formalised in the later nineteenth century. The French psychologist Alfred Binet (1857–1911), in his 1887 essay Le fétichisme dans l’amour, described obsessive erotic attachment to specific targets (feet, hair, gloves, shoes) as “pathological fetishism”, and this is the starting point.

Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902), in his major work Psychopathia Sexualis (first edition 1886, revised through the twelfth edition of 1903), assembled a large case catalogue and systematised fetishism, sadism, masochism, and homosexuality as principal categories of “sexual perversion”. This institutionalised fetishism as a medical and medico-legal classifier.

Sigmund Freud, in his 1927 essay Fetishism, advanced the psychoanalytic reading that the fetish is a symbolic substitute disavowing the discovery that “the mother has no penis”. The interpretation shaped twentieth-century sexual psychology decisively, whatever its later standing.

Contemporary classification and depathologisation

From the later twentieth century, the position that treats fetishism uniformly as pathology receded as debates on sexual diversity advanced. The DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) defines fetishism as strong sexual arousal to objects or non-genital body parts, and reserves the diagnosis of fetishistic disorder for cases producing distress or functional impairment in the person or harm to others. So long as it is practised among consenting adults, the fetish itself is not an illness.

In contemporary Japanese slang, fechi has thinned further from the medical sense to mean roughly “a strong preference for a specific target”. Subdividing derivatives such as kyonyu-fechi (large-breast fetish), megane-fechi (glasses fetish), and nioi-fechi are countless, and the fine-grained taxonomy of fetishes has become extreme as a system of search tags in adult video and genre names in doujinshi.

Types of target

Scholarship sorts fetish targets into rough categories.

Partialism directs strong erotic attachment to non-genital body parts: feet, hands, hair, neck, ears, navel, armpits.

Object fetishism attaches to things separable from the person: clothing (underwear, stockings, uniforms, cosplay costumes), materials (leather, latex, silk), and accessories (glasses, high heels, gloves).

Situational fetishism attaches arousal to particular situations or relations: cuckoldry, exhibitionism, shame, dominance and submission. This forms a broad field that overlaps almost exactly with the contemporary catalogue of adult-video genres.

Cultural position

Fetishism has been depathologised, moving from pathology toward preference, while inside subculture it has functioned as an engine of subdivision. The distribution infrastructure of contemporary sexual expression (convention catalogues, search tags, social-media hashtags) is built on the premise of fetish-based classification, and the consumer behaviours of “discovering one’s fetish” and “searching for works matching it” have become standard within visual culture.

The extreme subdivision of fetishes is also criticised at points: as a withdrawal from the wider sexual consciousness of society, or as excessive objectification of a particular target. The cultural and ethical debate continues.

See also

• SM Culture
• BDSM
• Paraphilia
• Doujinshi
• Chakuero