The World According To Fetish: Cultural Fetishism

Sexual fetishes are often developed or triggered by early life experiences, these could be frightening, exhilarating, physically painful or comforting, but all provided intense feelings and memories which later embed onto developing erotic desires.  In turn, these are determined by the external world we have grown up in – giving them a cultural component.  In North America there is far less interest in gas masks and heavy rubber play than Europe; this is because historically gas masks weren’t issued across that continent.  Meanwhile budding post-war young European perves found endless delight in restricted breathing masturbation games.  Yes access to them was one part, however, the gas mask was revered, it held totemic power, embodying the thinly concealed horror of their parents & grandparents memories of the WWI Western Front.  The drama of gasping for breath was thus sublimated from fear to pleasure.

This access to rubber masks is further compounded as in much of Germany, Italy & Belgium it is compulsory to wear a swimming cap in public pools giving many youngsters an affinity with that unique silky, rubbery material from an early age.  We know children are hypersensitive to strong flavours but they are also cognizant of textures finding some extremely comforting.  This young exposure combined with arousal in the teen years, has ushered in a latex loving sex life for many EU second skin enthusiasts.

The USA with its extreme commercialism and capitalism has sexualised its biggest unconscious fear – failure.  Here in Europe we champion the underdog, we love Eddie the Eagle and “it’s the taking part, not the winning that counts,” mentality.  No so for Americans where the ‘Loser’ finds himself mortified daily.  Awkward teenage boys in their first blossoming of sexual attractions and uncontrolled erections find themselves under attack from sexy alpha-female high-school princesses, whose vituperation constantly berates and humiliates them.  Setting up a lifetime of thrills at the thought of sexual shame.  The internet now has a plethora of findom Mean Girls with an L-shaped hand planted on their forehead letting you know how small your penis is, or reminding you how out-of-their-league you are, while attempting to rinse you.  Success and money is the perfect fetish for The Land of Opportunity.

Corporal punishment on minors has been around since antiquity but nowhere in the world has the process of beating school children been so ritualised and obsessed over than Great Britain.  Punishment books, an array of implements, number of strokes, positions, public shaming chastisements, dunce hats, corner time with bare bottoms exposed, not to mention all the uniforms!  From the Victorian era right up to the new millennium there was an explosion of men deriving sexual pleasure from being spanked, strapped and caned. This lifelong predilection for regular epic floggings directly a result of repeated childhood school punishments.  So common and rampant was the need for this sexual treatment that flagellation brothels cropped up and thrived all over English major cities.  These specialist brothels and madams are probably the earliest beginnings of today’s femdom and the modern dominatrix.

So widespread was this British love of corporal punishment that in Europe it was and still is known as ‘Le Vice Anglais’ while the brothels and massage parlours of the world offered English as the argot for sadomasochism and flagellation.  (Interestingly these houses also offered foreign travellers French and Greek to simplify language barriers.  French indicated oral sex, we have French kissing and French polishing for blowjobs, this association may in part have come from the fact the French were the first to allow public displays of affection.  And Greek denoting anal play, a euphemism for homosexual acts until fairly recently was Greek love, connections derived from the ancient Greek texts.  However, these are both historic, generalised terms and not indications of modern cultural preferences.)

It’s not surprising that our culture will have a bearing on our sexual fetishies and cultures change, in today’s more liberal age we no longer physically discipline children resulting in the now dying out of the classic style CP beatings as a fetish.