ratbastid

Well, it's interesting. I agree that judgment is inappropriate, but I'm pretty curious about the formation of fetishes. Fetishism is recognized as a disorder in both the DSM and the ICD (both of which have diagnostic guidelines involving it being an impairment to the fetishist's life--job, social contacts, etc--so casual fetishes or things that don't become obsessive aren't classified as disorders).

Freud said that a man's fetish forms as the result of the sexual trauma and castration anxiety arising from discovering that his mother doesn't have a penis--he latches onto some object or behavior as a compensation for the missing wang. Freud never considered female fetishists. Like most of the rest of what Freud said, it's been largely discredited. Guy had mommy issues.

The current theory is that fetish formation is a result of Pavlovian "classical conditioning", where the object of the fetish is associated with sexual stimulation over time, and the association strengthens itself as it is associated.

It makes sense. Orgasm is probably the strongest positive reward you could associate things with. When I was trying to get over a girlfriend once, I noticed that when I masturbated, I thought about her. I saw that I was actually conditioning myself to miss her. Over a matter of a few weeks I trained myself to NOT think about her while masturbating, and before long I found myself over her.

I'm not entirely convinced about it, though, at least as we define "sexual fetish" in practice. I'd be very interested to hear from submissives and masochists (or vomit/urine/scat fetishists, if we have any here) about whether there was some incident they can remember of pain or humiliation (or those fetishized um things) being associated with sexual arousal, and if their sexual development followed the path of classical conditioning.