On a personal note, though, I do feel obliged to clarify that I myself am somewhat atypical of those I know in the SM community, since SM actually plays a fairly small part in my life. Here in Honolulu I don't have opportunities to be actively involved and in any case I don't have the time and energy for SM during the academic year. My actual experiences are limited to a month or two each summer in San Francisco, and even there I am most often a voyeur rather than a participant.

For me personally, it seems that what has been most important has been to find out what certain experiences are actually like. Once I know what they're like, I don't feel a need to repeat them on a frequent basis. (I will say, though, that a few of the experiences I've had have been quite intense.)

I believe that the insights needed to understand fetishes and paraphilias are closely related to those needed to understand such things as sexual molestation and abuse. (Not only the question of why these seem to be so prevalent in our society today, but that of why they are often so devastating to their victims.)

What was most interesting to me in the sexual molestation (false memory syndrome) and sexual harrassment ("stolen spotlight") threads which so plagued sci.psychology a few months ago was not so much the arguments on both sides, but the things which both sides took for granted.

In article <camillaCqyIBt.6Mw@netcom.com> camilla@netcom.com (Camilla Cracchiolo) writes:
>
> I have read in many places that no one knows why anyone has any
> particular sexual orientation, but I had no idea that the research
> on BDSM was as bad as it is. I was unable to uncover anything that
> remotely resembles even a study on BDSM.
>
> .... I'm not even certain, given the lack of
> information on all sexual orientations, that the division of sexual
> orientations into 'primary' orientations on the one hand, and 'para-
> philias' on the other hand has any real validity. I have heard it
> suggested that our primary orientations may have biological roots,
> while early childhood experiences may tell us 'how' those roots get
> expressed. However, there doesn't seem to be any more information
> supporting this position than any other. The one thing that *does*
> seem to be supported by the literature is that, regardless of
> orientation, it appears to be laid down very early in life and not
> amenable to change once this occurs. I have also heard it suggested
> that a mechanism similar to that regulating imprinting in birds
> is involved: that is, that our early childhoods determine what gets
> imprinted, but that once this occurs, it's a biologic condition, set
> for life. Again, this is a theory only.

This is a theory which I very strongly believe, for a number of reasons. For one thing, although it is believable that a predisposition to certain behaviors (such as mounting or being mounted) is biologically determined, it is not believable that our criteria for sexual attraction are, including as they do preferences as to hair styles, styles of dress and make-up and the like (not to mention fetishes).

How does the brain know how to distinguish men from women, for instance? For instance I, a heterosexual male, can remember being in love with little girls since the age of, say, eight. I am unable to believe that this can be explained merely by saying that I had a biological predisposition for mounting rather than being mounted.

Another theory which many subscribe to is that fetishes arise through conditioning. Eysenck in his book The Psychology of Sex, for instance, describes an experiment in which a subject was conditioned to have erotic responses to boots by showing the subject pictures of nude women and then immediately afterwards showing pictures of boots. This theory has never seemed plausible to me and the experiment mentioned does not change my opinion. But without research, the hypothesis cannot be excluded. (The response created by the experiment was a rather feeble imitation of a real fetish. I certainly think the experiment would have been much more persuasive if the subject had been conditioned to erotically respond to, say, eggbeaters rather than to an object which many men find erotic in any case.)

One of the problems with the idea that fetishes function as substitutes for more overt sexual stimuli is that the festishes often evoke far stronger responses. In fact, many people use thoughts of their favorite fetish as a way of becoming aroused when they are actually with a partner and some people are almost incapable of becoming aroused in any other way, even by direct stimulation.

(to be continued)