I don’t know. Why do people have fetishes anyway? They rather hinder sensible procreation. But on the other hand,… it would be rather boring without them.
Well said. Why is anybody aroused by anything that isn’t genitalia? Evolution is a complicated thing.
I have A Theory. (Note: this is based on undergrad anthropology classes talking about human evolution–place take with large grains of salt).Basically, lots of animals are aroused by traits or behaviors that aren’t actually useful for anything, but they’re a way for an organism to announce “Hey, I am available and healthy (and, if our species is social, high status in the herd), and we would have healthy offspring together.” Insects have stuff like pheromones and firefly butts, deer have antlers, peacocks have their tail feathers, baboons have bright or blue red naked butts, etc., etc.
How do humans do sexual signaling?
We flirt. We talk. We show off. We tease.
In other words, we play complex social games to say “I am smart and skilled at navigating social situations, clearly I must have high status in the herd community.”.
But wait! The thing about sexual selection is that it tends to go massively overboard. Natural selection is about surviving to have offspring, so it tends to give up as soon as it hits “good enough to not die.” But sexual selection is about competing with other members of your own species, so the bar is constantly being raised. So you get stuff like deer with antlers so big and complicated they get tangled in low-hanging branches, peacocks whose tails scream “HELLO PREDATORS I AM HERE PLEASE EAT ME,” and so on.
And then there’s humans, who after several million years of more and more complex social games making our social structures more and more complex, requiring more and more and more complex social games to demonstrate how good you are at navigating those social structures, have ended up with the frontal-lobe equivalent of deer antlers and peacock tails: language.
So human sexuality is completely wrapped up in our ridiculous ability to make abstract symbolic connections between literally anything. We can use arbitrary shapes to represent arbitrary sounds that represent complex ideas about where language came from! We can use them to represent things that never existed outside our own heads! (Fiction, obviously, but also stuff like money, nations, politics, math…)
Is it any surprise that this overpowered symbol-matching ability sometimes connects stuff that maybe it’d be easier if it didn’t? It’s the equivalent of a deer getting its antlers stuck! Things like conspiracy theories and, yeah, fetishes are just the natural consequence of our ability to make anything mean anything.
I don’t disagree with you, but this does seem to ultimately come down on the “nurture” side of the debate. Just as devil’s advocate, it could also be physical evolution. Perhaps the traits that produce people who are inclined to kinks are genetically more hardy. Which is to say, maybe the gene for dominence is dominant. (I just really wanted to write that sentence.)
Or mayhaps, fetishes are a genetic dead-end and we are reaching a point of technologically-enhanced population explosion that aberrant traits are proliferating, like myopia.
Naturally, of course, cultural and physical evolution occurs concurrently, so it’s impossible to tell.
midorikonton raises an excellent point in that sexual selection is A Thing That Humans Do, but specifically for fetishes it’s a bit more complicated than that. We need to look at conditioning and, for foot fetishism specifically, neurology.
So everybody remembers good ol’ Ivan Pavlov, right? Ring bell, dog drools, Pavlov gets angry because he’s a biologist studying other things besides dog drool and meticulously documents it all anyway. We also remember good ol’ Thorndike, right? Reward people for behaviors you want to see more of. Big Forehead Skinner expanded on this, demonstrating that punishing behaviors you don’t want to see makes them go away if there’s something else for them to do instead.
Now, how does this apply to fetishes?
NURTURE
Yes, this is the nurture argument in a nutshell. People get conditioned to find certain things arousing due to either pairing them with SexyTimes (Pavlov) or perceiving Thing as a preclude to SexyTimes (Skinner, Thorndike) mentally. How do we know this? Well, to use a personal anecdote, I once accidentally conditioned myself to get aroused by my biology text book. One day, I got really horny while reading it back in college, so I did when college age girls do when horny and unable to focus. After that and a nap, I got up and went back to studying.
Every time thereafter, the book made me aroused. Shamefully so.
Now, why is this the case and why does it happen and set in so fast? Because sexual selection is extremely powerful and necessary for the adaptation and genetic legacy of humans. You can even do this with mice, pigeons, and literally any other animal if you’re so inclined. Skinner used food with his pigeons, but you do you. The bottom line is that sexual selection based conditioning often is subject to One Trial Learning, a principle that is exactly what it sounds like: one instance is all it takes for us to learn a new behavior.
I know I mentioned neurology, so let’s get into that for foot fetishism specifically. In the brain, there’s a specific part that deals in the sensations, textures, and so on for every part of ourselves. I don’t remember the name, but that isn’t especially relevant. What is relevant is that the “wiring” for sex organs is literally a hair’s breadth away from the feet, so it’s very easy, neurobiologically speaking, for these two parts to get quote unquote “cross-wired” and thus support foot-fetishism.
Therefore, we can reasonably conclude that most fetishes are based on both conditioning (nurture) and a neurological component that is sometimes clear but not always.
I hope that helps!
I have nothing to add, but I simply wish to share as as an example of why I love Tumblr.
Ooh, thank you @bannableoffense! Very enlightening!
