Again, I am returning back to the image of simply wearing white socks and seeing myself in the mirror–as well as recognizing my own acceptance, regardless of gender. I am not sure why these ideas (gender, acceptance, socks) somehow get conflated, but recently it occurs to me that many of my ideas and associations are delusional. They tie into early affectionate or intimate patterns that simply no longer apply to my life anymore. And I am delighted to be able to see that I am not reacting as much as I used to toward socks. I hope that someday I can even say that I am no longer that attached to socks, and I am able to allow the weird craving I have to subside.
To know this fetish is also to historically trace the patterns of gender and desire. It’s only in resisting my habitual ways of craving that I can see how it is formed, or at least speculate on how genders develop unique attractions for one another. The start of it is a kind of symbolic cleaving of genders, followed by the assignment of images and objects to specific genders or gender performance. “Performing” socked feet can start to look different across genders, for example, from the dangling of feet and so on, and this solidifies concepts of male and female, which then creates a differential of desire: someone performs something in ways that I am forbidden to perform, thus creating a projection and sense of deficiency. I then start to exotify the Other by making that Other have a unique “essence” that does not belong to me. In fact that essence is a particular pattern of performed behavior that I was never allowed to perform due to social demands to conform to “gender ideal” behaviors.
Only when I can know for certain that I am also free to perform “feminized” patterns of socked feet can I overcome the sense that it is exotic or somehow essentially different from who I am. In fact, the differences come down to behavioral conditioning that is socially and even politically sanctioned.
Eventually, the goal in all of this is to see through it as well as develop a more dispassionate awareness of people’s behavior as performed, not “essential” to the person at all.
boysocks318 