In this article I will attempt to un-muddy the waters that surround the word fetish and its various meanings and explore the relationships between those meanings with reference to not only my research but also my own personal experience.

The Concise Oxford English dictionary defines the word fetish’ as follows:

1. an inanimate object worshipped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit.
2. a form of sexual desire in which gratification is linked to an abnormal degree to a particular object, part of the body, etc.
3. an excessive and irrational commitment to a particular thing.

The English word fetish has it’s origins in the Portuguese word feitico’ meaning obsessive fascination’. The earliest historical reference to the concept of fetishism can be found in celebrated French scholar Charles de Brosses study of religion in 1757. He argued that fetishism was the most primitive stage of all religions, defining it as the imbuing of magical powers upon a static object. The term was also used in 1887 by French psychologist Alfred Binet in relation to the sexual admiration of an inanimate object’. It was more famously used in 1927 by Sigmund Freud in relation to his redefining of human sexual desire and his ground breaking work in the field of social psychology. Freud essentially established the now widely accepted view that human sexual desire can be directed at a wide variety of objects, not just people.
Consequently, when we think of fetishism more often than not we think of it in sexual terms. Most people immediately picture men in gimp masks and varying degrees of sado-masochistic sex, depending on the depth of their imagination. A fetish, as in the obsessive fixation upon an object or part of the body, was and still can be considered a psychiatric disorder. In sexual terms this is known as a paraphilia': a disorder that is characterised by sexual arousal in response to sexual objects or situations which may interfere with the capacity for reciprocal affectionate sexual activity’. These days sexual fetishes are only considered to be psychological disorders if the fixation is so great that normal’ sexual behaviour is impossible without the presence of the fetish item. The list of known paraphilias is endlessly fascinating and can be perused at length here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphilia. Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 film Troy must be a dream come true for those afflicted with Celebriphilia (the pathological desire to have sex with a celebrity), not to mention Greek mythology loving masochists. My favourite philias, in terms of sheer bizarreness (as opposed to my personal kinks of choice), are Plushophilia: a sexual attraction to stuffed toys or people in animal costume, such as theme park characters’ and Vorarephilia: a sexual attraction to being eaten by, and/or eating, another person or creature’. There’s none so queer as folk, as they say. More common examples include podophilia (foot fetishism), transvestism (dressing in the opposite gender’s clothes), necrophilia (a sexual interest in corpses) and paedophilia (a sexual interest in children). Clearly, while an excessive sexual fetish of any kind can be detrimental to ones well being and therefore diagnosed as a disorder, in extreme cases it can also be criminal and dangerous to others. It is, however, generally accepted in modern society that most people have a mild sexual fetish of some kind and that it is normal to incorporate this into ones sexual relationships. Interestingly, there is much evidence to suggest that in times of sexually transmitted disease epidemics, such as the European syphilis epidemics of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries and the ongoing AIDS epidemic, an increased interest in non penetrative sexual fetishes such as foot fetishism can occur which could go some way to explaining the proliferation of the fetish in modern times.
So commonplace in our society is the concept of the fetish that it is almost impossible to walk down the street without being bombarded with fetish related imagery and references. Advertising, fashion, film, television and pop music all draw heavily upon our permissive attitude towards people’s kinks and preferences. Whether it’s Girls Aloud (aimed at 8 to 15 year olds) dressed in rubber and fishnets in videos that would’ve been considered soft porn twenty years ago or men dressed up as women to advertise Flash kitchen cleaner, it seems that nothing is taboo in 2007. It is arguably a chicken and egg scenario as its fair to say virtually everything in the internet age could be deemed a fetish. Do Tesco’s consciously pander to the Sitophile market (those aroused by food)? It’s unlikely. Does Disney cater for Schediaphiles (cartoon character botherers)? Quite possibly… I mean, no, of course not. I shall never look at Donald Duck the same way again… Are people just weird and perverted and the world around us mirrors that? Or are we that way because of a bombardment of sexual imagery in marketing and its deliberate fetishistic associations? I would suggest there is an altogether more logical explanation.
To my mind, all of these ideas of the fetish can be linked together by the work and theories of one man: German philosopher, economist and revolutionary Karl Marx. In 1867’s Das Kapital Marx coined the phrase Commodity Fetishism’, arguably the most culturally significant use of the word fetishism to date. In a nutshell commodity fetishism, according to Marx, is the illusory social state that occurs in capitalist societies in which social relationships are defined by the values that are placed on commodities as opposed to any actual, tangible social values. Marx argued that a person’s labour is as much a commodity as the produce that person’s labour creates. In capitalist societies there is a necessary gap between the value of this labour and that of the resulting produce in order for the owners of the capital assets, or employers, to turn a profit and propagate the system. This leads to vast economic growth of society as a whole at the expense of the workforce, creating an unbridgeable poverty gap between the exploited (workers) and the exploiters (employers). Workers exchange their labour for the commodity of money in order to purchase other commodities but the exchange value of a commodity bares no relation to its use value, hence diamonds are more valuable than coal. The result is that, by relying on the market forces of the exchange of commodities alone to shape society with no concern for the usefulness of those exchanges, the illusion of commodity fetishism arises. Society attributes a power and value to the commodities that is only really inherent in the labour expanded to create them. Consequently social relationships are defined in terms of commodity exchanges and neither the exploited or exploiters are aware of the political, moral and social ramifications. Eventually we all, unless we consciously reject it, succumb to conspicuous consumption’ (the purchasing of commodities for the sole purpose of displaying ones wealth) effectively spending most of our hard earned cash on things we have absolutely no use for (if we can afford to) or envying those who do (if we can’t). In Marxist thinking this situation inevitably leads to revolution by the workers and social meltdown. Far from being a rallying cry to the exploited masses to revolt, Das Kapital is merely a clinical and persuasive study of capitalism and its logical progression.
All other uses and meanings of the word fetishism can be seen in Marx’s use of it: the religious aspect of irrationally attributing meaning, power and value to that which essentially has none; the sexual aspect of pathologically desiring something inanimate and non reciprocal. Chuck Palahniuk’s cult 1996 book Fight Club and David Fincher’s 1999 film adaptation of it are a conceptual metaphor not only for the psychological disorder that is inherent in the commodity fetishist but also for the organic revolution that Marx speaks of in Das Kapital. In Fight Club our sectionable narrator and his friend’ Tyler Durden inadvertently provide a release from the spiritual bondage of commodity fetishism and conspicuous consumption to the emasculated men of modern America in the form of a string of underground boxing clubs which subsequently evolve into a full blown army of revolutionaries hell bent on bringing down the system and creating a new dark age from which society can start again. Necessarily, plot wise and philosophically speaking, there is an unconscious element to this uprising throughout: it just is. This existentialist premise is one of many philosophical concepts touched upon in Fight Club, all of which are closely related to the work of famous philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
There are numerous other references to Marx, commodity fetishism and conspicuous consumption throughout the story. Upon realising that his Ikea furniture filled condo has exploded the narrator states: “how embarrassing a house full of condiments and no real food”. He later says: “I used to clean my condo when I was depressed”. After revealing how he often wills the plane he is on to crash he smirks: “Life insurance pays triple if you die on a business trip” as if that makes dying worthwhile somehow. These quotes allude to the disproportionate value the narrator attaches to his possessions and how linked they have become to his sense of well being. Tyler references this commodity fetishism and the damage it does repeatedly: “The things you own end up owning you”; “Reject the basic assumption of civilisation, particularly the importance of material possessions”; “We’ve got no great war, no great depressionour great war is spiritual, our depression is our lives”. As with Nietzsche, whose ideas were cynically manipulated by the Nazi’s in the early 1900’s, Tyler’s philosophy ultimately becomes a backdrop to an emerging much darker, fascistic agenda.
In 2007, global capitalism is rife with the likes of Esso and the Bush and Blair brigade literally on the warpath. The commodity fetishism that accompanies this kind of society is demonstrably unhinged. We live in an age where sexual fetishism is so commonplace and accepted that it permeates much of our visual consumption: in the media, in art, even in pop music. While the existence of fetishes in people often amounts to nothing more than harmless fun between consenting adults, it can also be symptomatic of very serious emotional and psychiatric problems. Hardcore BDSM enthusiasts take sexual arousal from inflicting and receiving pain to ever more psychopathic heights often incorporating bloodletting, rape and even murder into their fantasies. Are these things unconnected? I rather think not. In the opinion of this modest, forward thinking musical prodigy (who goes out of his way to consume only that which he needs to survive i.e.: beer, food, clothes and shelter in that order; and who endeavours not to succumb to ever more acceptable sexual deviancy in an increasingly pathological world) society as we know it is utterly unsustainable. In the hope that meaningful and real connections with others are still possible in life I will save my views on what the future may have in store for another time. Needless to say, I do, as always, live in hope.

Bibliography:

The Concise Oxford English Online Dictionary, Edition 11
The Online Literary Encyclopaedia
Das Kapital - Karl Marx, 1867.
Troy - Wolfgang Petersen, 2004, Warner Bros.
Fight Club (book) - Chuck Palahniuk, 1996, Hyperion Books.
Fight Club (film) - David Fincher, 1999, 20th Century Fox.
www.wikepedia.org
www.answers.com
www.depression-guide.com
www.reference.com
www.psychologytoday.com
www.curtin.edu
www.polseguera.com
www.chuckpalahniuk.net
www.project-mayhem.ndo.co.uk (no longer in operation)
The contents of my relentless, irksome, occasionally inspired head.