What are the ways that enjoying wearing socks can become a form of resistance? And resistance to “what”? I would like to explore this topic in today’s entry.
First of all, it’s about resisting the idea of making socks into a fetish. That sounds contradictory, but in fact it is not. The goal of writing about socks and enjoying their visualization is not to eroticize socks, but in fact, to de-eroticize them, and to essentially revert them back to something that is everyday. In other words, to de-fetishize socks requires a resistance to their “exotification”. I am tired of making socks into a fetish, and I don’t want to be a prisoner to a fetish any longer. I am standing up to that by asking the question, what is it about wearing socks that is such a source of “mysticism”, “shame”, “othering” and “desire”? Can these dynamics be reversed through a new constructed narrative about socks?
Many, many things that we fear the most need to be addressed by directly investigating them, rather than running away from them. When you are able to engage something sincerely with your whole heart and not react to it in an automatic way, you start to change reactions into responses and choices.
I have two distinct principles when I am exploring this idea. The first is that someone else’s socks is not really my business, since I have no idea what the other person experiences happen to be while wearing socks or seeing others in socks. In this way, the “party” that another person has is not my party, and I have no business frequenting that party. The second principle is that whatever I am admiring in the appearance of others can be performed through my own body and subjectivity. In fact, it can only be in this way. Knowing this, I no longer become a prisoner to a mystification of another person’s experience, or trying to “guess” or elaborate on someone else’s experience and thus creating a desire or striving to embrace that mysterious other. Instead, I recreate the experience from my own view without mystifying the experience by adding other layers to it.
Writing about socks, talking about being in stocking feet, and exploring a male’s way to be in socks, is one way that I can resist my fetishistic ideas about socks and stocking feet which have kept me a prisoner for so long. It is also my way of saying that I cannot step into someone else’s experiences (or “step into their socks”), and doing so only creates more strange “mind reading” behaviors which don’t reflect anyone’s reality, much less impacts my experience.
boysocks318 