The upper arm extending from a summer short sleeve, pale skin with a slight roundness. Stretch the arm to open a textbook and the skin is pulled a little, the muscle line surfacing. Rest the chin on the hand instead, and the pressed skin ripples in small waves, showing its softness. The person is unaware; it is a part that moves outside their own attention, yet the one watching follows it with the eye. An upper arm fetish (二の腕フェチ, ninoude fetish) is the taste of strong aesthetic and sexual attraction to the skin, shape, and softness of the upper arm.

The visual appeal

The reasons the upper arm functions as a fetish object divide into several layers. One is the texture of the skin. Among the parts of the arm, the upper arm has thin skin, and the amount of subcutaneous fat directly reflects the body type. On a slim build it is thin and smooth; on an average build it carries a slight roundness; on a pocchari build it shows soft flesh. Under the single name “upper arm”, it is one of the parts where individual body differences are most visualised.

A second is the balance of exposure and concealment. Sleeveless tops and short sleeves are worn daily in Japan, while bare-shouldered designs carry a degree of release. Roughly the 20-25 cm from the sleeve cuff to just above the elbow is bared; this is conservative as skin exposure, yet constantly in view in summer. The quality of “skin that is in daily view” grounds the upper arm fetish as one continuous with everyday life.

A third is the change of line with movement. Raising a hand, bending the elbow, carrying something, turning to look back: in these the upper-arm skin stretches and contracts and the muscle line rises and falls. That the part’s expression changes in movements the person barely notices, an “unawareness”, produces a discovery-like visual experience for the observer.

The taste for fleshiness

Japan has a colloquial name for soft flesh on the upper arm: furisode (“long swinging sleeve”). It likens the way fat sways when the hand is waved to the movement of a kimono’s long sleeve, and is used most often of older women’s arms. In diet discourse it is generally treated as a problem (“troublesome furisode flesh”), but in the fetish context it inverts into an object of liking, “I like furisode flesh”, “I like a swaying upper arm”. The taste that permits, or positively enjoys, fat on the upper arm runs continuous with pocchari and muchimuchi tastes, positioned on the side that affirms fullness within a dominant thinness-oriented aesthetic. Conversely, a taste for the toned upper arm also exists: the liking for an athletic, muscular arm where the biceps and deltoid lines surface overlaps with the muscle fetish. The same upper arm carries two opposite directions of taste, one cherishing softness, the other firmness.

The manner of touch

The upper arm holds a distinctive place in sexual contact. Before touching the parts clearly coded as sexual, the breast, the buttocks, the legs, acts such as touching, stroking, lightly gripping, and drawing in by the upper arm are frequent. The reality of “putting an arm around the shoulder” or “pulling by the arm” is in many cases contact with the upper arm. In foreplay, proceeding through stages of contact from the “half-sexual” parts, upper arm, shoulder, nape, rather than touching a sexual part abruptly, is widely practised as a general sequence. The upper arm functions as a principal node on that path, and as a fetish it bonds with the liking for this very gradualness of touch.

Treatment in fiction and live action

In manga, anime, and illustration, the depiction of the upper arm is an important drawing element signalling “softness of body”, “maturity”, and “age”. The slim upper arm of a girl character, the well-fleshed upper arm of a married-woman character, the sturdy upper arm of a mother character: such drawing distinctions function as displays of character attribute. In live-action adult works, projects on the upper arm alone are few, but in pocchari, married-woman, and muchimuchi works the texture of the upper arm functions as an important visual element. Positions that lift the arm, embracing scenes, and angles where the woman’s arm fills the frame in rear-entry positions have settled as scenes where the softness of the upper arm decides the picture’s texture.

Related tastes

The upper arm fetish is continuous with tastes for other soft parts of the body and is consumed bundled with the armpit fetish, the thigh fetish, and the shoulder fetish. On the side of the exposure-and-concealment border, it sits near the collarbone fetish and the neck fetish. When softness is the theme it connects with pocchari and muchimuchi; when firmness is the theme, with the muscle fetish.

See also

• Waki fetish (Armpit fetish)
• Pocchari
• Shirohada fetish (Pale-skin fetish)
• Kinniku (Muscle)