Throughout my blog, I refer to “male” and “female” in relation to socks. Isn’t this rather strange, you might think? In talking so frankly about the way socks take on a gender that a male either loves or fears, one can see how socks can become sexualized. Is it good to sexualize socks? In fact, as I have noted before, it’s a real source of anxiety.
Even the idea of “celebrating boys in socks”, now what does this mean? Why boys? Isn’t the expression itself a term of endearment that is often uttered by women? Again, even in speaking of a boy, there is an implied onlooker. Socks are not yet uncoupled from an early mother-son bond, so we have this kind of experimentation on how the rapprochement of mother and son is achieved symbolically through the softness of socks.
If one really wants to go beyond the gendered element of socks, they would need to see socks as functioning to provide warmth to one’s feet, without all the symbolic trappings one has related to them. When I stop associating socks with all these loaded, gendered meanings, they quickly cease to be sexualized, because I am no longer seeing the fantasy of a male/female relationship in the form of socks. Is a person ready to take such a step? Well, only if they can learn to empathize or take the narrative of someone who simply has not invested any gendered meaning around wearing socks. This is the real challenge, and perhaps the only way to go beyond a fetish: that is, to start re-narrating socks as objects that are not in the least bit related to the desire of men and women or even sexual desire. This requires a powerful counter narrative. You can see how this evolves in later entries.
boysocks318 