Dealing with a sexual medical fetish

Ever since the term "sexual fetish" was first used over a century ago, there's been a raging scientific debate over what it means. Why does one person get off on shoes, while another gets off on certain large body parts? Are these erotic feelings signs of illness, or simply preferences that are as inexplicable and harmless as liking spaghetti more than sausage? Though sexual fetishism started out as a fairly neutral term over a century ago in early psychiatry, it's become one of the most contested ideas in medicine. Here's why. The term "sexual fetish" was first used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by psychiatrists like Magnus Hirschfeld to describe — in a neutral fashion — the many ways that people experience sexual desire.

Defining normality is extremely difficult and arbitrary , because the definition involves making a value judgment and therefore labelling how we view other people. Sexual variations are also referred to as paraphilias, a neutral term for behaviours formerly called deviant. Sexual variations have existed and been recorded for millennia in different parts of the world. For example, early Buddhist texts contain numerous references to sexually variant behaviours among monastic communities over years ago. These behaviours included sexual activity with animals and sexual interest in corpses. Z began to masturbate at the age of

A reader wrote to me to ask if I thought it was possible to get rid of a fetish. They described their particular fetish and shared that they felt that it was ruining their life. They had lost romantic partners over the fetish, they found it difficult to have the sex they wanted, they were coming to feel as if their life would be better without this thing they called a fetish. I didn't have an easy answer for them, but we began the email exchange with me pointing out that there are two things we needed to clarify before we could get to something resembling an answer.

Though once considered deviant and shameful, today most psychologists lend us an entirely different view. Sexual fetishes are far more common than we think. A recent study published in the Journal of Sex Research, finds that one in three people in the US have taken part in one, at least once in their lives.