SEXIS WRONG

My First Fetish
Or, How I Fought Mediocrity
Audacia Ray
I’ve spent the last few years as a professional appreciator
of sexual perversion: first as a researcher and curator at the
then-nascent Museum of Sex, then as a marketing researcher
for a smut company. It’s been an interesting journey because
research on sex is something that I’m capable of being overly
intense and academically serious about, but it is also a topic
that—ahem—arouses my prurient interest. I pride myself on
being able to talk nerdy about dirty things.
In both of these jobs, I met people of all sexual stripes. I interviewed
many of them about their perversions and lifestyles,
and I borrowed heaps of well-loved pornography from all kinds
of people, for research purposes, of course. In the course of
these adventures, I often was asked questions that would
qualify as sexual harassment in any other work environment,
or at the very least an invasion of privacy. “Do you prefer
girls or boys?” “How big are your tits, anyway?” “Have you
ever been gangbanged?” However, of all the personal questions
thrown my way, the most challenging has always been:
“What’s your fetish?”
I’ve never had an answer to this question that
satisfies the inquirer. Quite simply, the reason
is that I don’t have one special item or act that
I fixate on and get pleasure from. In the world
of radical sex, this seems to indicate to people that there is
something lacking in me, that I’m somehow unenlightened
and unfulfilled because of this shortcoming. Either that or I’ve
landed in a world of sexual deviants where sexual one-upmanship
is the name of the game. People with fetishes have
Unique Perspective and have a Community and are Heroically
Marginalized. I am none of these things; I’m just a girl who
saw the opportunity to combine my love for research and museums
with my love for sex. But after many withering looks
upon the admission of my un-deviance, I decided that it was
high time for me to look into getting myself a fetish.
So I did what I always do before I actually act on anything: I
researched. I wanted to find an edgy fetish, something daring
and provocative that I could still be rather blasé about,
because I’m so jaded and worldly.
I discovered a few things in the R&D phase, which mostly
consisted of looking at porn and reading the blogs and Live-
Journals of various perverts. To be convincing, a fetish needs
to fall into at least one of three categories:
1.Many fetishes are largely irrelevant to one’s daily life (well,
you know, except as a jerk-off fantasy). Balloon fetishism
is a perfect example of irrelevance. There is a community
of people (usually men) who like to see girls with balloons.
Not nekkid girls getting wild with each other while balloons
float by, but usually clothed girls dancing with balloons, sitting
on them, and popping them.
After many withering looks upon
the admission of my un-deviance,
I decided that it was high time for me
to look into getting myself a fetish.
2.Traditionally, a fetish is thought of as being somehow taboo,
though there are varying degrees of this. There is no better
or more extreme example of a taboo fixation than the
fetish for shit play—watching people shit, eating shit, and
masturbating with shit. This is so taboo that it kindles the
kind of revulsion that you, dear reader, are probably feeling
right now.
3.Since fetishists are often closeted and secretive about their
fixations, they sometimes incorporate fetishes into their
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