IF you’re worried about you or your partner having a sexual fetish, I’m going to do my best to help you find a happy compromise.

There are often so many guilty feelings attached to sex, even these days, that it can be very hard to work out what is reasonable and what is not, what is unnecessary inhibition and what is a very understandable need to draw the line.

Basically, fetishism is being hooked on some accessory to love-making, usually particular items of clothing you need yourself or your partner to wear. It’s thought to be more common among men than women, perhaps partly because men respond more strongly to visual sexual triggers than women.

A mild degree of fetishism is very common. Plenty of men find it sexually exciting to see their partner wearing sexy undies. One in 10 men says that their favourite fantasy is of their partner dressed in particular clothes or underwear, anything from silky stockings and suspenders to studded leather and thigh-high boots.

What is the special attraction of leather and rubber, high-heeled shoes, silky fabrics and snapping elastic? To start with, we have been conditioned to see them as particularly sexy.

The underwear seen as signalling, “Come and get me,” dates back to the music-hall era, when for a woman to flash an ankle was daring. In those days, if a man got a glimpse of suspenders and stays, they were probably on a “fallen woman”. So the underwear of the turn of the century has become the uniform of the woman who is interested in sex.

The partner who dresses up in stockings and suspenders is showing the man that she is on the side of his sexuality, willing to rebel against repression. It helps them to throw off their inhibitions.

For some, that’s as far as it goes, but some progress beyond mere sexy underwear into rubber, leather and boots which can be extremely important for them to feel sexual arousal and release. The pattern seems to be laid down in early childhood.

Men are more likely to get hooked on fetishes or sado-masochism if they suffer a cold, unloving childhood, don’t experience many loving cuddles and are too often left to get the physical stimulation they need from their babyhood environment – nappies, waterproof coverings, being left to play around Mum’s feet – rather than from being held close to Mum’s warm body and lovingly cuddled, which is what small babies really need and long for.

They end up hooked on and stimulated by the fabrics and objects instead of a loving woman’s body. Finding release in pain usually stems from only getting attention or simulation when young when it was linked with physical or emotional pain.

Refined and embellished over the years, the fetish objects and clothes become necessary to sexual pleasure, part of the inner programming for sexual arousal, but also may be associated with a woman who dominates and says no, who has total power over him.

There is nothing perverted about something two people both enjoy doing together. If a woman is happy to dress up in the way that pleases her man – or vice versa – and it adds to the excitement and pleasure for both of them, what’s the harm?

However, fetishism does cause problems in a relationship when one partner, and it is usually the woman, gets the feeling that it is not so much her who is turning her partner on but the fetish. Once she gets the feeling that he doesn’t much care who is wearing the boots or whatever, as long as somebody does, she naturally feels very threatened.

How do you solve this dilemma? It’s a terrible mistake for the woman to try to ignore her own feelings and play-act just to please her man. All that will happen is that she will find it all more and more distasteful and it may quickly kill all her love for her partner.

Similarly, if you are a man who is attached to a fetish, don’t try to pressurise your partner into taking part if she doesn’t really like the idea. You will only damage your relationship. She won’t grow to enjoy it.

You may be able to reach a compromise that you vary your love-making, sometimes doing it your way, sometimes hers. If not, and it really is causing serious problems between you, then you should get expert help.

To start with you need a sympathetic and informed outsider to help you decide between you whether the real problem is that one of you is too much of a fetishist, or whether it really is that the other is extremely hidebound and inhibited. Whatever the answer, expert sex therapy can transform your relationship for the better.

Relate provide skilled sex therapy all over the country (0300 100 1234, http://www.relate.org.uk/), or you can contact the British Association of Sexual and Relationship Therapy for details of qualified therapists near you (020 8543 2707, http://www.basrt.org.uk/).

If you would like more help from me, further advice on some specific problem you have, or a free leaflet giving fuller details of where you can obtain help for emotional and sexual problems, please e-mail problems@deardeidre.org.

This article was published:
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/deidre/sextherapy/article2145146.ece