The Martlet

A month ago, I got my nipples pierced.

Anxiety rushed through me as I sat in the leather chair and watched, heart beating into my ears, as the clamps squeezed into delicate skin. A moment later, plastic gloves, a needle, a sharp pinch, a gasp — then again — and it was all over.

I stared at myself in the mirror, at once horrified and thrilled with my new jewelry. This was no “new me.” But these, my first piercings, marked more than just a newfound courage: they marked a commitment to redefining sexuality.

Under the needle -

When my partner, Cody, first told me he had a fetish for tattoos and piercings, I brushed it off — sure, tattoos were cool, and piercings could look hot on a lot of people, though I’d never had many myself.

It wasn’t until some time later, when I found out that Cody’s fascination with body modification was on a deeply sexual level, that I began to understand the seriousness of his fetish. This was no optical appreciation — it made up the bread and butter of his sex drive.

The more I learned, the less I understood. For me, there was a line where beauty became grotesque. A woman with her face tattooed so deeply you can’t see the skin anymore, or the infamous Internet pictures of people taken over by their piercings — these were the obvious lines where hot is not, weren’t they? Not for Cody.

Finding out your partner is attracted to something you don’t understand can crumple a relationship. And because so many relationships take time to discover these little truths about each other, there’s often a cut-and-run point. You have to decide whether it’s worth staying the course, or getting out while you still can.

But first, you have to have all the information. Trusting your partner to be able to handle that information takes a great deal of courage and honesty — honesty that fetishists are often forced to stifle.

Understanding kink -

The idea of fetishism emerged as a pathological category from the origins of late 19th century sexology.

According to the Deviant’s Dictionary, the term “fetish” in anthropology refers to an object in which powers are attributed that go beyond its natural ones. When the term is extended to sexuality, it indicates an object not naturally connected with sexual reproduction that causes sexual arousal in some people.

So what turns a brain on to see something traditionally non-sexual as sexual, and how does body modification go from art to erotic fetish?

Dr. Stephen Garlick, a human sexuality professor in UVic’s Department of Sociology, believes that “what” may be exactly the wrong question.

“The first thing I would say, would be to resist the tendency to think there is one single explanation that would underlie a diverse group of phenomena,” Garlick says.

Garlick believes that a lot of modern society’s understanding of fetishism still goes back to our beloved old friend, Sigmund Freud.

Freud, bless his soul, thought that fetishism was one of many ways the sexual drive could be sidetracked or held up somewhere. And while Freud can be faulted for exposing his oft-heteronormative goals surrounding sexuality, there is that tension in his writing between seeing fetishism as a problem and as a helpless state. That tension seems to accidentally explain the nature of the fetish, says Garlick.

“[Freud] theorizes the sexual drive as essentially blind — as needing to be directed,” says Garlick. “So, on the one hand, he sees fetishism as a problem, as a stage of delayed development. But, on the other hand, you can take his theory and see that if the sex drive doesn’t have this inherent purpose to it, and needs direction, it’s much easier to see how it could be directed towards different objects rather than a person.”

So, sexy is in the eye of the beholder; it makes sense. But how do we get there? Freud saw the fetish object as a safe alternative, or an outlet, where something more disturbing about sexuality could be dealt with, or repressed. In typical Freud fashion, this means another dose of penis envy, but with a twist.

Freud believed that, as a little boy grows up, he thinks his mother has a penis. When he finds out that she doesn’t, he grows anxiety over the thought of losing his as well and, there you have it, instills his sexuality into a safety object as opposed to a real live human — especially a woman who would only re-exemplify this castration fear.

Good one, Freud. So, my partner likes tattoos and piercings because his mother didn’t have a penis. Now I get it.

“If you read Freud literally, his arguments are more likely to not make for a very convincing story,” says Garlick. “But, if you read it more at a symbolic level in terms of the fetish object representing something about social relations, relations of sexuality, relations of sexual difference, then you can start to build a theory that would make more sense.”

Garlick says the real translation comes down to dominance. If we interpret Freud’s penis as a metaphor for power, we can assume that when a person feels their power has been taken away, they retreat into a safe hole. Sometimes, their sexuality goes with them. The results: symbols represent the new sex.

“If one was to look at this sociologically, the question would be why certain objects are selected as fetishes, and how does that relate to the construction of normative forms of sexuality?” says Garlick. “The sort of stereotypical fetishized objects often relate to sexual difference. Shoes, for example, are markers of sexual difference — women wear high heels, so [a man] with a shoe fetish may realign his attraction [to a woman] there.”

But Garlick emphasizes the importance of not affixing one singular explanation to every situation. Sub-culture, for example, now plays a huge role in sociology’s understanding of fetishes. Actions previously classified as pathological are now being reinterpreted as forms of resistance against the heteronormative reproductive ideals of sexuality. Take that, Freud.

Certainly, body modification itself symbolizes resistance, and growing up in a family that cast disparaging glances on such acts ­— as Cody did ­— could add to that power draw. The chains begin to link.

“We have this idea that sexuality is something that is supposed to play itself out in these very specified ways, so we still often see difference as very puzzling or troubling,” Garlick says. “And so the question comes back to why we emphasize being normal in terms of sexuality.”

French philosopher and sociologist Michel Foucault seized the question of “normal” in his book, History of Sexuality. Foucault argues that, as science rose over religion, sex has become our identity. Because, according to Foucault, we live in a society that encourages us to define ourselves by our sexualities, diversity is seen as perversity if we don’t want to affix ourselves with it.

“In [Foucault’s] context, fetishism becomes something that needs explaining,” says Garlick. “We separate ourselves from it by treating it like a problem, and need to ask ‘What happens to make these people end up like this?’ But what happens to the person who became heterosexual? How do we explain that?”

Many prominent academics have been battling the notions of sexuality having a right answer, including British sociologist Jeffrey Weeks, who believed that society has to move away from a morality that focuses specifically on “good” and “bad” sexual acts.

In Weeks’ text, Sexuality, he grapples with the question of how society can begin to understand what certain sexual acts mean to the people who are engaged in them, and how people can be endowed with rights to address their sexuality in whatever way they want — as long as others’ rights are also respected.

Weeks may not have had the answer, but that hasn’t stopped other people from trying to stimulate that understanding on their own.

Ladyfish to the rescue -

Sam Quinn, also know as “Ladyfish,” is the creator of Sagacity Victoria, an alternative community that celebrates lifestyles of kink, fetishism and Bondage, Domination and Sadomasochism (BDSM).

Sagacity started over 10 years ago, and has grown from eight members to nearly 1,000. With these numbers, it’s little wonder that sexuality is finally opening into a new light.

Quinn’s mission with the society is not only to offer a support group to those interested, but also to try to undo some of the misconceptions surrounding kink and fetish that keep those elements of sexuality viewed as a problem.

“There are so many psychological reasons [for fetishes] that you can’t define them for any one person, because you can’t live in someone else’s head,” says Quinn. “So a little boy, for example, loves to put on his mother’s shoes. It makes him feel special. Then he grows up, and he’s a banker. And there’s still a place where he finds contentment if he can put on women’s shoes. But, of course, society isn’t going to go for that. They’re going to say, ‘You’re the president of the bank. You can’t be running around in high heels.’ So what does he do? He goes in the closet and he does it in the dark, all by himself.”

Quinn says the shame that many people are made to feel surrounding their fetishes are why support communities like Sagacity exist. They remove the negative stigmas that make people hide (even from themselves and from their partners), and promote a safe environment where people can feel at peace with their desires.

But what about after those fetishes do come out? How do secret desires play out in a relationship when the fetish isn’t shared? Honesty and respect are the frontrunners, says Quinn.

“No two people feel the same way about any fetish. So the only thing you can do, if you care enough about each other, is respect that in each other,” she says. “Because you put it on the table, and because you talk openly about it, you establish a trust level there, where you’re not threatened by it.”

The next step, she says, is building upon the bonds you do have together.

“Separate fetishes aside, you still need to have something in there you share that is so good and so strong, that the other things are really just sidebars that you can be comfortable with,” Quinn says. “When you start playing around with fetish and fantasy, you’re playing around with the mind. So you need to find something that you do both get excited about, and you need to build on that. Because once you do, you start finding that there are always other unexplored areas out there.”

One of the quickest ways to explore the unknown is to start by educating yourself, Quinn says. Sagacity offers the “Desires Checklist,” an eight-page thoroughfare of potential fetish play options. On the list, you’ll find everything from gentle kissing to extreme blood play. But it’s not meant to convince you — it’s meant to get you thinking, and hopefully talking.

Quinn says the ideal setup is for partners to fill out the list separately, then pick a time, like a romantic dinner, to share the lists with each other.

“You will be amazed by each other’s responses, and it will start the conversation. So, you circle the ones you both rate high on, and you go from there,” says Quinn. “You can start small, go slow and savour it. And what you’ll find over time is, you’ll change. And six months from now, if you both do the questionnaire again, you will be amazed by the evolution. The things that you said ‘No fucking way, I would never do that,’ you may come back to think about.”

Quinn, 56, says she herself went through most of her middle age as a self-described vanilla. It wasn’t until she realized her sexual life “needed an upgrade” that she started experimenting in the world of kink.

“I came from a time when you didn’t even talk about this stuff,” she says. “So I was pretty repressed, and very, very insecure about my sexuality and about sex. I mean, if it wasn’t missionary, I couldn’t imagine doing it.”

Now, Quinn and her partner dabble in all forms of fetish play — something that she describes as a freedom, and as a chance to box up society long enough to put away the “supposed to’s” and play with the “want to’s.”

Quinn says often relationships that play with kink and fetishes are remarkably better adjusted then ones that don’t.

“The amount of honesty you have to have with each other to experiment in this lifestyle, and the dark secrets you share (because that is what this is all about), is intense,” she says. “You have to talk about your feelings, and your fantasies and your desires in order to reach that level. When you give that to somebody, and when they give that back to you, you’re bonded in a trust that most people can’t even imagine. How many vanilla relationships go that way?”

The bonds that tie -

Something enchanting starts to happen when two people jump into an unexplored world together. The more you give, the more you learn about yourself.

I doubt that body modification will ever hold the same draw for me that it does for Cody, but his shock and pleasure upon seeing my decision was enough to inspire me to stay open. The more open I was, the more we talked. Slowly, that talking turned into sharing deep and exciting secrets for both of us.

A few weeks ago, Cody and I attended a local tattoo festival, just to see what was out there. He never asked me to consider one, and he didn’t gawk at the women who surrounded us with beautiful murals on their bodies. He held me close as we walked through the isles, glancing at me every now and then with a new look of reverence.

“You’re a beautiful woman, you know that?” he said.

We left, hand-in-hand.