Sockboy came home after a long day of teaching, pulled on his long white socks, and settled into the comfort of home. He felt the warmth of socked feet, and even playfully entertained the idea of teaching in stockinged feet. Even though it felt like something he shouldn’t do since he is not a girl, it still felt nice to feel the softness and gentleness of sock feet on the floor, and to realize that he could do it even though he is biologically born as a male. “Well,” he mused to himself, “why do I need to be bound by such categories?”
When he at last settled into the comfort of sleep, sockboy suddenly realized how silly it was to make a fetish out of comfortable socks. Was it necessary to turn all this into desire for the opposite gender? How did desire get created in the first place? Why all the difference, and does difference itself constitute desire? At that point, he started to say goodbye to the more violent aspects of his desires,which demeaned and alienated him by separating him into a “self” (male) and “other” (female). He challenged himself not to separate, and not even to romanticize this process.
He drifted into a comforable sleep
The narrative above represents a kind of rethinking about a fetish that I am actively working on. It starts with the Robert Stoller psychotherapeutic hypothesis that all humans are born with one gender (more akin to female) and some (biological males) are pressured to assume a different gender in order to develop appropriate (healthy) desire for the opposite gender.. If a boy is unable to do so, he is considered a deviant who is not using libidinous energy in a proper way.
Fetishes constitute both a paradoxically simultaneous mis-grafting and perpetuation of heteronormative sexual desire. “Misgrafting” means that is somehow misses the mark of going beyond an infantile holding onto a symbolic object. Fetishes are manifestations of primitive “hold-overs”, especially inappropriate or forbidden childhood longings. “Perpetuation” in the sense that it still produces a painful separation of male/female binary by assigning socks to the simultaneously forbidden and yet desired for “other” (the female or feminine assignment and performance of socks). When this fetish is indulged in through genital arousal and stimulation (“heteronormative”), it creates a painful and inappropriate desire for an object that is somehow not intended to elicit desire (“abnormal” or “perverse”). Resisting the heteronormative aspect of the fetish allows me to overcome the dualism or the binary of male/female that perpetuates desire and suffering. But keeping the non-heteronormative sensuality of socks allows me to continue to challenge my own inner gender identification and boundaries.
boysocks318 