Tao of Kink

Chapter 4

Props and/or story

What’s more attractive - nude body or sexy dress? Are we fascinated by costumes or actors? Do empty sets turn us on without anything happening there? Why can’t we stop collecting items of fetishes? Visual meditation on tension between things and fantasies.

* introduction to the visual blog

Forbidden spaces, unobtainable intimacy.

Odd ways how to come closer.

In what playful ways can you consume the fantasy?

Fetish and Story

Genuinely, it was difficult to name this topics, since the split is quite tricky to grasp. I can’t think of a person, who is not a fetishist in some sense. There’s little difference between those who buy leather or latex to have something sexy for the night out in the club – and those who buy trendy T-shirts, hand-bags, shoes or anything that will make them beautiful, socially appreciated or just plainly attractive. Even Karl Marx already used the term "commodity fetishism": Our repressed non-material needs are transformed into hunger for items (somehow associated with those needs) that we buy in repetitive compulsive way. Inducing the desire is considered standard and expected feature of economy, there is a whole industry dedicated to this task. But how come, that despite knowing it, so little we resist? How come that it still affects us? Did you ever ask - how does the fetish actually work?

Everyone's fetishist:
To look smart, successful, desirable
(Credits): Wikipedia - Rakoon

Everyone's fetishist:
To be enjoy speed, freedom, to impress
(Credits): Wikipedia - Semnoz

Everyone's fetishist:
To be the best, to win, to be famous
(Credits): Wikipedia - Tongshuiscentm

If you own two hundred pairs of sneakers, or a dungeon full of different sizes and styles of whips and other tools, or a collection of sounds or chastity belts or rubber items… you already have a hint. If you’ve submitted to not-so-pleasant 9-to-5 job in order to pay for it all, you might have a clue how the fetish works. You are so close, though still not there.

Once I have read a post from a gay guy, who could not understand the whole jock(strap) obsession. For him, there was just a school-years memory of bad smelling classmates, occasional hazing and humiliation, together with complete dislike for the violent sport. Though, so many of us dream exactly along those lines: Using that piece of cloth to touch the unreachable men in half-forbidden way (who hasn’t sniffed someone else’s underwear or socks or T-shirt?), transforming the fear of the bullies into sexual attraction, replacing the embarrassment on the pitch with different kind of game and skills. Through these items, we infiltrate the environment we were excluded from. Too much of an explanation for the kinky pleasure, that needs just to be enjoyed?

Rooms we could not enter, situations that never happened.

A sniff of a man that we would never be with intimately.
(Credits): Wikipedia - Timmy Truck

Narrowed down to an object, with a price tag of fantasy.

And so you buy your first jockstrap. You have it. It is clean. Smells of nothing particular. You wear it. You look into the mirror. And it’s just you and some jockstrap. Not much has happened. You take selfies. Post them. Couple of cute responses. Thank you. Still nothing happens. You seek the other guys "into jockstraps". You get in touch, you wear jockstraps, take them off and then have sex. Just a regular sex – for better or for worse. Maybe it was not the right one. Guy or jockstrap. You buy another one. And another one. You have become collector. With every item, you feel that you are getting tantalizingly closer to what you want. But still unable to reach it. Whatever it is. It’s frustrating. And you sooth the frustration with pursuing more items. As if it helped before… It is not even possible to recognize, if the items treat or cause that frustration.

Does not matter how many there are if they are all clean.

If not worn, but collected, they feel out of context.
(Credits): Wikipedia - Luis2492

We can always work harder, earn more to buy more.

It feels a bit like a donkey, who follows a carrot tied to a string, tied to a stick, tied to his back. He walks after it and the carrot walks away, since it walks with him. Though fetish is not just Fata Morgana that seduces us and tires us to exhaustion. Every problem contains a hint of solution (as in Tao). Fetish contains the essential explanation of itself. If you are interested at all. That is, you can enjoy your donkey walk, but you may also stop and think: "I might be just hungry – more accessible food may be just under my nose – independent of that vicious runaway carrot." The fetish, as it appears in popular imagery, contains the answers. Those answers are just not the items, they are around those items.

What action can you add ...
(Credits): Wikipedia - Flickr - David Poultney

... to the ownership of your favorite lycra ...
(Credits): Wikipedia - Derzsi Elekes Andor

... how to consume it sensibly?
(Credits): Wikipedia - U.S. Navy

My favorite image comes from movies: A film looks much better, if the tricks are well made, if the sets are breathtaking, props look appropriate, if the masks are stunning, if the costumes are artful. But you cannot make a movie out of sets, props, masks and costumes. Otherwise anyone who’d shoot himself with camera in Hawaii, wearing palm-leaf skirt, would be getting Oscars. You need talented (and in some adequate way attractive) actors. You need good script, moving moments, emotions, intellectual messages perhaps – and of course: a story. Buying jockstraps will not supply you with kinky stories in the locker rooms. Having sliced and sewn tanned cow will not automatically involve you in raunchy BDSM scene. Wearing fashionable smart outfit or using newest gadget seen in movies can make you look cool for a season, but will not pull you in any romantic, dramatic or thrilling sequence of events that you subconsciously enjoyed while watching "the actors".

The artificial scene can be shot from hundred angles,
the model can emerge from the water thousand times,
(Credits): Wikipedia - Flickr - Elmo H. Love

though he won't ever reach erotic quality of a real swimmer,
authentic, unaware of his beauty, his gear in the context,
(Credits): Wikipedia - Matt Stevenson

smell of a situation, story, adventure, connection, friendship,
all those dreams we project on it, even if bare nude at the end.
(Credits): Wikipedia - Flickr - Paxson Woelber

And that is the definition of fetish: being tantalizing close to the objects of desire, without the ability to grasp them really, to reach out to the essence that they connect with.