Secrets of the Sexual Fetish: How Sin Became the New Normal by David Rosen Pleasure is, so to speak, nature’s vengeance... Max Horkkeimer and Theodor Adorno1 Fetish at your fingertips Babeland and New York’s Pleasure Chest have, for decades, offered Fans of Sex and the City may discriminating shoppers, mostly remember when “the Rabbit,” a women and gay men, an opportunity vibrator, made its guest appearance to check out and buy something on HBO in 1998. One of the show’s erotically special. Consumerism has characters, Charlotte, got hooked on caught up with these sex- it, propelling the sex toy from the TV paraphernalia pioneers and more screen into the bedrooms of many hip, mainstream outlets have entered the young women throughout the country. growing “sex-wellness” business. Charlotte and her Rabbit helped Retailers range from high-end legitimize sex toys and female specialty chains Nordstrom and masturbation. The product came from Brookstone to mass-marketers Vibratex, a company founded in 1983 Walgreens and Target, and even that makes erotic products for crusty down-market Wal-Mart. But women.2 the leading sex-products vendor is Amazon, offering an The appearance of the Rabbit estimated 60,000 on a very popular cable series products for those with a was part of the rebranding of credit card and a certain sex paraphernalia as “sexual yen.3 wellness” products, a process that helped mainstream the One of the popular sex toy. As the sex toy was venues to acquire a assimilated into the favorite sex product is a marketplace, the fetish as an “passion party,” a object of perverse erotic desire women-only get-together lost much of its traditionally often held at a suburban illicit character and became an all- home. Toys, lubricants and costumes American erotic indulgence. Welcome are sold; cocktails are often served, to the new normal.* stories are told, secrets are shared and good-cheer is had by all. Like a For decades, shoppers, mostly men Tupperware party, this multi-tier often dubbed the “raincoat crowd,” marketing scheme uses a local “host,” slinked into XXX-rated shops in a “consultant” or “sales rep” to organize down-market part of town to purchase the event who receives a commission a sex-related product, whether a (often 10%) from the night’s sales. vibrator, dildo, porn magazine or flick. The host acquires products from a sex- Those days are over. A handful of toy provider like Athena’s Home sex-affirming retailers like San Novelties, Fantasia Home Parties, For Francisco’s Good Vibration, Seattle’s Ladies Only, Party Gals, Temptations Parties and Pure Romance; the industry even has a trade association, * Image = RabbitVibrators.com. © David Rosen, 2016 page 1 Sex Matters Sexual Fetish Certified Adult Home Party Association. sex practices Americans engaged in, BusinessWeek reported that, in 2012, be they ordinary people or radicals, Pure Romance had 75,000 consultants male or female, gay or straight. Many and may have hit $120 million in sales. of the practices involved a fetish. The A surprise to many, some of the other involved changes in the medical moralists waging today’s faltering diagnosis – as well as the social and “culture war” against abortion and gay legal definitions -- of fetishism, of rights, including fundamentalist what was “normal”; the standard is Christian women, attend such get- formally codified in the American togethers.4 For such moralists, sex Psychiatric Association’s (APA) mental- toys can enhance a wholesome health bible, the Diagnostic and marriage. Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). No one knows the real size of the sex toy market, with estimates all over the The transformation of the fetish into place. Adam & Eve, a leading online the sex toy signifies a new era of sex-products retailer founded in 1970, sexuality in America, one with a pegs Americans annual spending on greater sense of sexual “freedom” sex paraphernalia at $15 billion. Belus than any period in U.S. history. In the Capital Advisors estimate that from early 21st century, anything goes as 2008 to 2013, while the nation long as it’s between “consenting” grappled with a trying recession, sex adults or age-appropriate young paraphernalia sales rose by 12.5 people. Immoral and criminal percent. It projects annual industry practices involve the violation of sales will hit $52 billion by 2020. consent and include rape, pedophile, Dave Levine, the founder of CNV.com, sex slavery, knowingly infecting a sex-products wholesaler, estimates someone with STD/AIDS and an total annual sales at between $750 activity that truly harms a participant. million to $1 billion. And the CBC reports, “Market research company, Today’s concept of the fetish grows IBIS World, estimates the adult store out of the two very different modes of industry in America is now worth $634 analyses -- one originally formulated million, more than doubling sales since by Marx, the economic or social; the 2007.”5 other by Freud, the psychological or personal. For more than a century, In 2010, as Christian conservatives their works articulated -- separately railed against illicit sex, Adam & Eve and distinctly if parallel and released a study claiming that 82 complementarily -- the two primary percent of adults used sex toys, that modes of critical analyses of modern 44 percent of women 18 to 60 years life. Both anchored their respective have used a sex-enhancement product analyses in the notion of the fetish, a and 78 percent of those women were distinguishing feature of capitalist in a relationship when they used the society since the early-19th century. product. In a 2015 survey, it found that two-fifths (41%) of women and In Capital (1867), Marx described the one-third of men (32%) admitted commodity as a fetish, a "mysterious owning one sex toy; just 4.5 percent thing" that serves as the object of of women and 3.8 percent of men capitalist exchange. He noted: “There owned six or more toys.6 is a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the Two factors contributed to the fantastic form of a relation between transformation of the fetish into the things.” He added, “In order, sex toy. One involved changes in the therefore, to find an analogy we must © David Rosen, 2016 page 2 Sex Matters Sexual Fetish take flight into the misty realm of and Freud have addressed the role of religion. There the products of the the fetish and how it’s meaning human brain appear as autonomous changed along with capitalist society.* figures endowed with a life of their Nor has an analysis reflected the new own, which enter into relations both world order, of post-Cold War, with each other and with the human postmodern capitalism marked as an race.” Fetishism was a quasi-religious increasingly globalizing, financialized experience, at once individual yet system. The fetish is an instrument of social; objects of human labor are social praxis; its secrets reveal how sin shorn of their use value, the human became the new normal. aspects of production, and became mystified products of consumption, The sexual fetish embodied exchange value.7 The fetish has long been understood Half a century later, Freud offered a as a mysterious object of human very different interpretation of the existence, an instrument of personal fetish, one equally religiously inspired and social experience. During the 19th but anchored in the deeper mysteries century, it was conceived as an object of self-identity, sexuality and its of mystical identity and a subject of repression. In his essay, “The Sexual rigorous study. William Pietz and Aberrations” (1905), he stated: "No Tomoko Masuzawa, among others, other variation of the sexual instinct have shown that the fetish captivated that borders on the pathological can much of European academic lay so much claim to our interest as scholarship, notably anthropology and [fetishism], such is the peculiarity of Religionswissenschaft, the science of the phenomena to which it gives rise." religion. Charles de Brosses, August He clarified: “What is substituted for Comte, Emile Durkheim and the sexual object is some part of the innumerable now all-but-forgotten body (such as the foot or hair) which scholars saw the fetish as a material is in general very much inappropriate anchor, a talisman, to culturally- for sexual purposes, or some specific forms of spirituality. It was inanimate object which bears an the primitive thing-in-itself, negating assignable relation to the person the transcendence of materiality yet, whom it replaces and preferably to simultaneously, fulfilling its promise. that person's sexuality (i.e., a piece of As Masuzawa observes, “It is this clothing or underlinen).”8 special tie to materiality, or rather, this ineradicable essence of the fetish Efforts have been made to link Marx as materiality, and the alleged absence and Freud, most notably by theorists of any symbolic (or supra-material) associated with the Frankfurt School. dimension, that distinguishes fetishism Their efforts reflected a common from idolatry, or ‘polytheism,’ as historical experience, the quarter- idolatry came to be more commonly century-long crisis of modern called in the course of the nineteenth capitalism. It was a history defined by century.”9 the capitalist West slogging through WW-I, the Depression and WW-II; stabilization came with the prosperity of postwar reconversion and the relative stability of the Cold War. One * Laura Mulvey outlines elements of such unanticipated outcome of the rise of an approach as applied to movies in “Some consumer capitalism was the eclipse of Thoughts on Theories of Fetishism in the Context of Contemporary Culture,” traditional patriarchal authority. To October, vol. 65 (Summer, 1993), pp. 3- date, none of the efforts to link Marx 20.