Why Am I Kinky? The Psychology Behind Your Fetish

Fetishes are a genuinely marvellous facet of the human psyche, and a subject that fascinates me considerably is why we have specific fetishes. I'm particularly interested in cases where the roots of these kinks were formed long ago, usually in childhood.

While psychology is a past-time of mine, I'm certainly no professional psychologist and by no means an expert, so take my theory with a pinch of salt if you will.

The Psychology of Fetishes

Freud believed that when a young boy first witnessed a woman's vagina for the first time, the lack of a penis was an experience so traumatic that the psyche's only way to deal with it was to create a substitute.

For the boy who apprehends his mother's (and other women's) "lack" of a penis as the representation of his own possible castration, the woman's genitalia generate a "fright" (p. 154), which, Freud surmised, is universal. The woman's genitalia are henceforth an object of horror and fear for the boy, although the "normal" adult man learns to transform it into an object of desire. For some individuals, such adjustment is impossible, the trauma is too great; in the effort to overcome it, the male psyche finds a substitute, which then constitutes a "permanent memorial" to the boy's initial experience of horror.

I don't necessarily believe this is entirely the case as it doesn't account of fetishism in women which although is less common, does still occur.

I think the key word here is trauma. My own belief is that fetishes are the result of some psychological trauma that occurs at a point in our lives, usually in our formative years.

When something horrible happens to us that we struggle to deal with internally, the mind turns this into something that we can derive pleasure from.

Some schools of thought consider a fetish to be the opposite of a phobia. In both cases, a traumatic experience causes us to either to love or fear an object.

Many of these traumatic experiences happen in childhood and are repressed deep within the psyche, so we may never be aware of the experiences that form the roots of a fetish.

If you were to discover them, through hypnosis perhaps, you might be shocked to find that the experiences are not all that traumatic to your adult mind, but you have to remember that what you considered traumatic at two years old is very different to what you may consider traumatic now.

There are of course lots of other theories on how fetishes form; I don't believe we'll ever know for sure but tracing your kinks back and trying to uncover the roots can be fun!

My Own Experience

Everyone is unique regarding their fetishes and what caused them, but I thought I'd share my experiences of how I came to love Femdom and my other kinks to give you some insight into the psychology behind them – the roots of which date right back to my early childhood!

I've given this a lot of thought over the years, and I think I have a good understanding of when most of my kinks formed and what the triggers were.

Disclaimer: the experiences I'm about to share happened when I was a child, not when I was an adult. Nothing illegal or immoral ever took place and I'm sharing these accounts purely for educational purposes only.

The Birth of My Foot Fetish

Of all my fetishes, my foot fetish is the longest standing and the only one that I can't pinpoint an exact experience as the cause.

Based on the trauma theory, perhaps I had an early traumatic experience involving feet as a baby. Maybe I was accidentally kicked by a woman or possibly Freud is right and the foot symbolises the penis and sucking toes is symbolic of sucking ten tiny little cocks.

My earliest memory of my foot fetish was a growing excitement watching women's feet on television at age 4. I loved watching TV shows where the women would have to take off her shoes. Fortunately, this was quite common, usually on game shows or when women would remove their socks and shoes to get slimed.

Obviously, I wasn't deriving any sexual pleasure from this during childhood, but it did make me feel happy and excited.

It was around the same time that I'd made my first good childhood friend – Charlotte – the girl next door. Every day after school we'd play together and spend long summers together.

It was with Charlotte that I played the classic childhood game of "doctors", only my version was called chiropodist. We'd role-play different hospital scenes in which I'd have to take off Charlotte's socks and shoes and examine her feet.

She often wondered why I kept doing this and at four years old I had no inhibitions or shyness about what I was doing.

Cops, Robbers & Bondage

As I grew older, my "games" with Charlotte has escalated from chiropodist to tying her up and stealing her shoes while leaving her helplessly bound to lampposts. Sometimes I'd even throw wet sponges at her or squirt her with my water pistol.

Karma eventually caught up with me one day when I was eight years old when two older girls decided to tie me up as part of a game.

As innocent as it was, I FREAKED OUT. They tied me up so tight that I couldn't escape and I panicked. I hated the helpless feeling combined with the humiliation and the fact these girls had this power over me and I couldn't do anything about it.

The experience was so traumatic to me that I can still remember it to this day, including the emotions I felt. I'm pretty sure that this formed the foundation of my Femdom fetish and my mild interest in bondage.

Hello, Internet Porn!

At age 11, I experienced my first voyage into the world wide web in 1997. My interest in feet had expanded into a full-blown addiction. I'd seek my fix anywhere I could: TV, the shoe section in catalogue magazines and of course by perving on women's feet in the street. I even had a VHS video full of clips that I'd recorded from TV shows with barefoot women. My very first "porno" tape!

One of the first internet tasks I set myself was to uncover why I was so fascinated by women's feet. A quick Altavista search later and I now understood that I had a "Foot Fetish".

I decided to explore further and search for the term "Foot Fetish" and to my amazement, an entire world of foot-related porn opened up to me at that moment. I spent hours looking through the previews on the classic 90's fetish sites like Footbabes and Trample.com.

It was much harder to find videos in those days because of bandwidth limitations, so I mostly read stories and looked at free pictures.

Needless to say, I discovered masturbation around this time as well.

High school Bitches, Femdom & Humiliation

During my high school years, I had serious self-esteem and self-confidence issues. I was bullied for two years and everyone knew me as the shy, unpopular kid with low self-confidence.

Girls laughed at me and the whole experience was incredibly stressful; added to this my love for female feet and feeling like I couldn't date girls like the normal guys, high school was a pretty lonely and traumatic experience for me.

The only way for my mind to deal with this was to sexualise it and I quickly started to fantasise about many of the girls in school dominating and humiliating me. I grew quite fond of my English teacher too, who was quite a domineering and demanding women with beautiful feet.

Thanks to the internet and the hundreds of girls in school, I was able to masturbate to endless fantasies about foot worship, Femdom and humiliation to gain pleasure from my uncomfortable high school experience and unusual sexuality.

It was these experiences that cemented my love for Femdom, which is still with me to this day.

The Bark Side of Femdom

After my ruff high school experience driving me mutts, I developed pawsibly my strangest kink yet.

I just love it when a woman puts a collar and leash on me, walks me around like a dog and feeds me from a bowl.

I can trace this back to an experience in childhood when I was chased by a dog which then caught me and bit my leg.

I grew up with a fear of dogs, but it wasn't fetishised until I was around 27 years old. A few years prior my friend's dog bit me on the hand playfully and this must have triggered it.

A few years later and I'm crawling around Mistress's floor in a pink collar and leash and eating dinner from a dog bowl.

I'm still afraid of dogs, so the fetishisation hasn't helped with my fear!

A Happy Ending

In spite of my struggles in high school where I was bullied, humiliated and felt deep shame about my fetishes. I grew into a healthy adult with self-esteem and confidence. I even learned to accept my fetishes and be open about them – which has led me to countless great experiences!