Sex Lab University Texas

Sexual Paraphilias

FETISHISM

According to the DSM-IV, fetishism involves “recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving the use of nonliving objects” as sexual stimuli (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). Most fetishists are male and nearly one in four are homosexual. Common fetish items include shoes and lingerie and common materials include rubber and leather. Fetishists become aroused by stealing the object, viewing the object, or masturbating with the object. Most fetishists are aroused by a number of different objects. The etiology of fetishism is not known. Two reported cases of fetishism have been associated with abnormalities in the temporal lobe. In one case the patient had temporal lobe epilepsy and in the other the fetish behavior was linked to the development of a temporal lobe tumor (Wise, 1985). Some evidence suggests that fetishism may be a learned behavior that results when a normal sexual stimulus is paired with the fetish item. Seven heterosexual males free from any prior fetish were repeatedly shown erotic stimuli paired with a slide of a black knee-length women’s boot. When the slide of the boot was later shown alone, five of the seven men demonstrated penile erection, indicating that a boot fetish had been conditioned. The conditioned fetish was shown to generalize to other types of shoes in three of the men. That is, the men also became aroused when shown a slide of a high-healed black boot and a low-healed black shoe. They did not become aroused to a slide of a short brown boot, a brown string sandal, or a golden sandal, suggesting that the fetish only generalized to similar types of shoes (Rachman & Hodgson, 1968). A similar study was conducted in women to determine whether women could also be conditioned to become sexually aroused to a stimulus. Subjects were randomly assigned to repeatedly view an erotic film paired with a light stimulus versus an erotic film alone. No significant differences where found in physiological sexual arousal between the experimental and control groups when a light stimulus was later presented alone (Letourneau & O’Donohue, 1997). Meston and Rachman (1994) tried to condition sexual arousal to the sound of a male’s voice. Even after repeated pairings of erotic video clips and the male’s voice, later presentation of the male’s voice alone did not produce sexual arousal. This suggests that sexual arousal is not readily classically conditioned in women and may explain why, like other paraphilias, fetishism occurs almost exclusively in men.