Often when people talk about fetishes, I mentally replace 'fetish' with 'sexual orientation.'
Not cause orientation is a fetish really, but cause the contrast makes it very clear how much we trivialize and judge fetishes.
For example:
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"Life is too rich to just be stuck on being straight"
"Something's wrong with you if you can't get off to straight porn"
"If you unravel your trauma, you'll stop being gay"
This sounds absurd to us, cause we recognize orientation as an immutable, fine part of self.
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But a lot of fetishes are like this too! Some experience them in the exact same way as orientation. I often hear stuff like
"I always remember being into x, even as a child"
"Sexual stuff without x just doesn't arouse me"
"When I did x I finally felt like a normal sexual being"
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I know one person who spent their whole life trying to be "normal" sexually, and then when they finally started engaging with the fetish they reported "I'd felt like something was wrong with me, but now the way everyone else has been talking about sex is starting to make sense."
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I don't know how 'orientation' or 'fetishes' interact, I know they don't overlap fully, but at this point I treat many fetishes as basically subcategories of sexual orientation - and I respect them as such. We shouldn't shame fetishes much like we shouldn't shame being gay.
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the type of labels and arbitrary quantization and dimensionality reduction that we perform for 'orientation' is pretty silly to begin with, and it's becoming increasingly irrelevant/epistemically useless for many very-young and ultra-internet-connected people
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most labels applied to humans/people, sexual or otherwise, are inherently reductive/silly
you'll never understand anyone if you rely on them
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the only difference that comes to mind is that sone fetishes can be 'created' via imprinting, whereas sexual orientation is understood to be inborn.
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this is just my own personal anecdotal experience, but idk about inborn: my sexual orientation and preferences have drifted this way and that for as long as I can remember
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Huh. I have no fetishes so I’m kind of drawing a blank trying to imagine what this would be like. Maybe because it so unrelateable to me, I would think nothing of joking about it; it doesn’t connect to anything I feel or know. But for what it’s worth I’ll avoid fetish jokes.
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