Why do men have fetishes? What is the biology/ psychology behind them?

[CrazyOldMe]

Has anyone looked into this?

I’m curious as to why humans, especially men, have developed to have sexual fetishes? Like, what’s the advantage to us as a species here?

Or, are such desires nurtured via society and so on?

Any insights appreciated

My guess would be many of them hark back to some sort of phycological scar from their childhood formative years.

Are you using fetish as synonymous with kink here? In psychological terms a fetish is so deep set it becomes a prerequisite for arousal. A kink is more so like a preference but not a requirement. Also women can have fetishes and kinks too!

Sex is an incredibly powerful drive psychologically speaking, but it’s also potentially very destructive so pretty much every culture finds way to regulate it, and with that often comes repression and with it can come feelings of guilt/shame. Danger is when you consign those urges to your shadow. They will come back stronger.

I suspect getting to the root of any particular deep seated psychosexual fetish probably requires a deep dive into each individual male’s psyche and history, but I’ll take a swing at one by way of example. Sexual sadism and/or dominance may well come
from an abject fear of rejection. Fetishising controlling a sexual partner probably comes about as a mechanism to protect a fragile ego. The ego gets
to stay safe as the subject of the fantasy either doesn’t make a choice or has their freedom to choose severely restricted.

Women have fetishes and kinks as well, believe it or not.

Like, what’s the advantage to us as a species here?

Are you for real?
There is no advantage to us as species in gambling, alcohol, drugs, car races, extreme sports, wars etc. and people partake.

We do most shit as spending days at work fully aware you will die at some point is just depressing. You can at least have some fun along the way.

A woman with several fetishes.

I'm watching this thread - nothing to offer, I'm out of my depth, but I was thinking about these questions only the other day and would be very interested to hear from anyone who genuinely engages with your post.

I think more men have them due to testosterone. The hormone that causes most problems
Then add any fucked upness from childhood/teens
Yes women may have a fetish but let’s not pretend it’s not a male thing predominantly.

I have also wondered about this. When is the tipping point, when something someone enjoys during occasional sex become such an obsession they restructure their and their family's lives around it? And why is there not more awareness and help available around this, like there is with addiction, mental health issues?

Ive been wondering this but have been afraid to ask.

It isn't balanced, way more men have fetishes than women.

I think a lot of it is that men usually have a stronger sex drive which lasts for much more of their life than women's (because men can potentially impregnate woman after woman until they are really quite old). Plus it's a desire for novelty, and a desire for the forbidden. And because society is much more permissive and accepting of different sexual preferences these days, they have to pick more and more extreme things in order to still get the thrill of the forbidden.

Do more men than women have kinks/ fetishes? Evidence? Lots of women have kinks too

Biologically speaking, women/females are generally slower to arousal and more selective. Males by and large have an evolutionary advantage if they have more sex. Females have an evolutionary advantage if they are more picky.

It would make sense if there's more easily triggered sexual arousal, there's more chance of that getting misdirected. It's not that there's an evolutionary advantage to getting turned on by shoes, it's that there's an evolutionary advantage to getting turned on easily.

So an individual starts getting turned on by shoes because they remind them of that sexy woman they saw. And then it starts a self-reinforcing mental pattern where shoes = sex. And if that pattern becomes stronger than their natural response to a female, they may become unable to respond to normal stimulus.

See also the pattern of men self-stimulating with increasingly extreme porn so that they can no longer respond to normal sexual situations.

There might not be an evolutionary advantage to these specific behaviours, but there is clearly an evolutionary advantage in (some) people being risk takers, and therefore an evolutionary explanation for these behaviours.

I think it's true that women have fetishes and kinks, odd fantasies or whatever. What seems to me like the bigger difference is that so many men will seek out gratification and enactment of their fetish, even if it harms or upsets others or is generally considered gross. Women don't seem to do that so much. Maybe that's something to do with the male and female body, in that women's sexual experience is harder to force onto others and more discreet, for want of a better word. But it also seems that women are more likely to self-limit and not do something that would draw stigma or cause harm just for selfish reasons of getting off. I'm not sure how much that's biological and how much socialisation.

There are various sexual behaviours/orientations, besides fetishes, that don't seem to benefit survival of the species - like being gay for example. I've sometimes wondered how/why that evolved too.

@CrazyOldMe: "What is the advantage to the species?"

It may well be, for any particular fetish, that it is a byproduct of the evolution of some other characteristic (of sexual behaviour, most likely, but not necessarily) rather than a direct product of adaptive selection.

That is, a fetish may be what is known as a 'spandrel', a coinage of Stephan Jay Gould from the late 70s. (See Gould & Lewontin, The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme.)

This idea of a spandrel is a really useful (albeit possibly controversial) notion in evolutionary biology. Read the Gould & Lewontin paper if you're interested; it's accessible to non-specialists (and easily available online, I think).

I have thought about this, and I think that it is a by-product of the fact that we are not only highly social, we're also very adaptable and also build culture.

People sometimes think we can avoid culture, that it separable from biology, but that's a mistake IMO (as an aside, I think this is why the idea of removing gender as we see in GC perspectives, is wrongheaded - you can't get rid of cultural reflections of material reality, including sex.)

So humans adapt to many kinds of different environments, technologies, and really sometimes it seems almost anything, and while there are continuities in our our reproductive strategies operate, it is also hugely variable. Human men were capable of being sexually aroused and attracted to a female cavewoman with crazy hair and smelly BO and hairy armpits and ticks - or in another time and place, Kim Kardashian. They can be happy to live in a one room soddy and beget six children there surrounded by their offspring, or a long house surrounded by expended family members, or on the other hand become used to total privacy and sex in a night gown to hide the evidence or arousal, or a million other things. They might like women with natural hair, or women in powdered wigs. they seem to be able to adapt to any number of normative sexual practices and positions and conventions to get them warmed up for reproduction.

All this requires a brain that is very sensitive to the surrounding cultural signals and stimuli for what is sexually attractive, and what the cultural signals are for fertile, available women and men, and even what the cultural signs are that they themselves internalize as attractive to the people they are interested in.

This seems to be particular sensitive with men, probably, as a pp said, because their reproductive strategies are a little different. Women don't actually need to be all that sexually motivated to become pregnant, but men really do.

This goes on throughout our life but is most active in youth. I think fetishes and fixations are what happens when the parts of the brain that are looking to attach sexual significance to whatever the cultural norms are around reproduction in that society, somehow get stuck on the wrong thing at a very formative period which can often be quite young - early or even pre-teen. I suspect the prevalence of certain fixations, something like rubber or vinyl outfits, is because that kind of object has some sort of similarity or enhances an otherwise more standard quality that men are sexually receptive to - maybe skin texture, or radiance, or something - it could be abstract as long as it flips the trigger that one time.

I also believe that we have really increased the incidence of this kind of targeting error doe to things like television, pornography, and advertising.

Before we leap to cod-evolutionary theory could we maybe look at the relative freedom men have had in their sexual desires and sexual activities over the past centuries in comparison to women??

i'm not sure much further reasoning is needed.....

women can be just as weird and wonderful in their kinks as men, just less opportunity

Some people eat adventurously, others prefer routine.

Some people like to visit different countries, others just find that a stress.

Some people play lots of sports, others hate all sports.

Some people like dressing to the nines, others have no interest in clothes beyond keeping warm and not being arrested.

There are so many activities that people can engage in with all sorts of variations or they might not choose to do it at all, depending on their interest and enthusiasm. Why should sex be any different, especially now it's more about recreation than procreation?

Like a pp said I think it’s the extremeness of men’s fetishes that’s interesting. How many women do you know who’d leave their partner, harm someone else or break the law in order to pursue their kink or fetish?

I see it as learnt behaviour when men are boys. EG a boy is sitting at storytime with female teacher when he runs his hands on her tights. Teacher smiles at him and boy feels nice and happy. Then he starts associating the feeling of hosiery with feeling nice and happy, then reaches puberty and puts a sexual feeling with it and a fetish is manufactured

Could this be it in layman's terms??? I'm no expert

It's abundantly obvious that men are more prone to sexual fetishes - and, in particular, extreme sexual fetishes - than women.

The reason it's an interesting question in evolutionary terms (which some posters may have missed) is that natural selection means that the characteristics that are perpetuated in a species are those possessed by individuals who live long enough to reproduce. To take an obvious and well-known example, the lions that live long enough to reproduce are those that are fast enough to catch their prey. Over time, lions get faster, because it's the fast lions that live long enough to reproduce, while the slower lions starve to death and don't pass on their genes.

Natural selection therefore favours individuals who have what you might call healthy sexual appetites. Not only does natural selection not favour fetishes, you might surmise that fetishes actively hinder natural selection. A man who can only orgasm in certain restricted circumstances is, one would assume, less likely to have opportunities to reproduce. So it is something of a puzzle why fetishes persist - though perhaps not as much of a puzzle as homosexuality, which really doesn't fit neatly into our understanding of natural selection.

I agree, but I imagine it's very rare among men and women. It could be ten times as common among men but still something that 99.9% of men and 99.99% of women don't do, ie, misleading to say it's a 'man' then specifically.

Maybe one factor in this is that an individual man can father lots of kids with lots of women, and some men never get to reproduce. In some primate societies there are dominant males who do more/most of the impregnating and others are prevented from getting sex. To an extent we still see that in a different form with undesirable men being edged out. Thus the “incel” movement since the internet has enabled these non-chosen men to organise.

Whereas most women can have sex if they want to (and many even if they don’t) and then until recently would be preoccupied with childcare and not free to pursue fetishes. Women do tend to prioritise their children over sexual thrill-seeking, and while that’s strongly socialised, there is a biological element to it.

So whether it’s advantageous or not, society can “carry” a proportion of men with fetishes but less so for women.

Just pondering, not sure of this but maybe the evolutionary angle can shed tone light.

Males are more visually and object oriented than females.

You'll see more males than females fixate on certain body parts: legs, bottom, breasts, feet etc

Strong emotional and associative responses stimulate fetishes.

Yes, this is a good example of what I was talking about.

It also tallies with what Grayson Perry says was the emotional-associative reason for his cross dressing. In his case he wanted to be treated kindly as he imagined a little girl would be. He had a brutal father.

I have kinks and fetishes. I am an adult human female.

Judging by the porn I've happened to come across, some men's are 🤢