What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [81]
Females and fetishes. Evidence suggests that women acquire sexual preferences by a subtler process. The major difference between the sexes is that almost all men are “fetishists.” When the preference is frowned upon, intrusive, illegal, or hurts others, we label it a “fetish.” When the preference is socially acceptable, practiced between consenting adults, and legal, it has no name (“behind closed doors”?). But the process is just the same. Both fetishists and “normal” men harbor highly specific erotic images. These images are the core of their masturbatory fantasies and of their actual sexual pursuits. Many of the preferences are acceptable, and so, with reasonable impulse control, men who are turned on by large breasts or sleek buttocks or being spanked or ripping lace panties or wearing rubber underthings don’t get into trouble. Those men whose preferences are socially unacceptable, immoral, illegal, or injurious (or are otherwise acceptable but are pursued by men with little impulse control) get labeled with the nasty name “fetishist.” In my view, these men have the same process of sexual preference as normal men, but they differ in the peculiarity or unacceptability or hurtfulness of their preferences, or in their inability to delay gratification, or in getting caught.
Nearly two-thirds of a random sample of rural Oregon college men admitted (under conditions of anonymity) to sexual misconduct: sex with children, forced sex with women, peeping, or frottage (rubbing up against a stranger in a crowd). Even more of them wanted to commit improper acts.15 These figures testify to the social definition of “fetish” and to the stereotyped, concrete nature of male sexual preferences.
It is not just that almost all men are fetishists that distinguishes male preferences from female ones. Rather, it is that almost no women are fetishists. Clinical lore has it that absolutely no women are fetishists.16 I think this is an overstatement. There are rare reports of fetishism in women in the journals, and at least one systematic exploration.17 In this study, a group of enterprising academics advertised in an S-M magazine, soliciting sadists and masochists. There were 182 responses, 25 percent of them from women—excluding professional dominatrixes. The respondents took a sex questionnaire. Some important average differences emerged between the men and women of the “velvet underground.” The men said they acquired their preference when they were boys; the women said their preference took hold when they were adults. The women said they were introduced to S-M by another person, but the men said it was a natural, spontaneous interest from childhood. The men were heterosexual, while the women tended to be bisexual or homosexual (androgenized women?).
I believe that men and women are vastly different in their erotic preferences and maybe even in the process of getting their preferences. Men easily—perhaps universally—acquire very strong arousal to specific, concrete objects. It is the look, the feel, and the smell of these objects that turns men on. Many a man centers his whole life on pursuing them. The objects of male preference are at a lower level than a whole person (Cher’s legs are more of a turn-on than Cher). This happens rarely—perhaps never—to women. Women, rather, acquire erotic preferences for subtler scenarios, involving plot lines, intimacy, and character. The essence is that female sex objects are not objects at all; they are at the level of the whole person, and they focus on personal relationships.
I don’t know why this is so. The proposed theories are little short of silly. One claims that men know when they are aroused (because the hard penis protrudes), and so they can easily find out that something has turned them on. Women, in contrast, have no external signal to tell them they are aroused, and so they cannot easily be conditioned. This