The notes about the impact on your sexuality are interesting. For a while I’ve been modelling fetishes as expressions of needs that’ve been displaced to fantasies and basal drives, unable to manifest in higher-minded consciously orchestrated virtue aspirations. They’re the needs we find hard to admit to, problems we can’t imagine finding a realistic solution to anywhere in the world (like we literally don’t know what it would look like, it seems impossible, or, when we try to imagine it, the solution seems deeply undesirable). But they’re deep needs, deep hungers. They wont go away. So the system shoves them into another place, a place where they can thrive as just fantasies, to keep them alive, to keep our attention on them, to keep us from giving up on them completely, however long it takes us to find our way to a realistic solution.
Your experiences seem to agree with that model. It has an interesting implication: fetishes are supposed to go away once the needs have been fulfilled, as they’re mostly just a reflection of an unhealthy relationship with one’s hungers. We’ve both experienced that. Heal the relationship, learn to perceive the solution in a healthy way, you can no longer exploit the displacement for pleasure. If instead you sustain the indulgence, that may make you very comfortable with retaining the neurosis, staying blind to the solution.
An example of where I would expect that to happen very easily is… Join a large, thriving, relatively long-lived community of people who harbor a memeplex that is exceptionally good at maintaining and amplifying your particular displaced hunger, maintaining the solution’s indulgent, fantastical displacement. That is, join a kink community. It’s not hard to imagine that there’s a risk there, that they will have a cultural parasite for you, a culture that has feeds on and propagates through only people who are profoundly stuck in the neurotic conceptualization, something that will have been optimized to prevent you from getting to a place where you can see the solution in a realistic way. If it didn’t defend its constituents from coming to recognize their cure, they would have spread it around among themselves, and the culture would have died. So, inevitably, we will be left only with...
It’s good to see stories like this.
The notes about the impact on your sexuality are interesting. For a while I’ve been modelling fetishes as expressions of needs that’ve been displaced to fantasies and basal drives, unable to manifest in higher-minded consciously orchestrated virtue aspirations. They’re the needs we find hard to admit to, problems we can’t imagine finding a realistic solution to anywhere in the world (like we literally don’t know what it would look like, it seems impossible, or, when we try to imagine it, the solution seems deeply undesirable). But they’re deep needs, deep hungers. They wont go away. So the system shoves them into another place, a place where they can thrive as just fantasies, to keep them alive, to keep our attention on them, to keep us from giving up on them completely, however long it takes us to find our way to a realistic solution.
Your experiences seem to agree with that model. It has an interesting implication: fetishes are supposed to go away once the needs have been fulfilled, as they’re mostly just a reflection of an unhealthy relationship with one’s hungers. We’ve both experienced that. Heal the relationship, learn to perceive the solution in a healthy way, you can no longer exploit the displacement for pleasure. If instead you sustain the indulgence, that may make you very comfortable with retaining the neurosis, staying blind to the solution.
An example of where I would expect that to happen very easily is… Join a large, thriving, relatively long-lived community of people who harbor a memeplex that is exceptionally good at maintaining and amplifying your particular displaced hunger, maintaining the solution’s indulgent, fantastical displacement. That is, join a kink community. It’s not hard to imagine that there’s a risk there, that they will have a cultural parasite for you, a culture that has feeds on and propagates through only people who are profoundly stuck in the neurotic conceptualization, something that will have been optimized to prevent you from getting to a place where you can see the solution in a realistic way. If it didn’t defend its constituents from coming to recognize their cure, they would have spread it around among themselves, and the culture would have died. So, inevitably, we will be left only with...