This is a text adaptation of an audio message I posted for free on my OnlyFans on Oct 3, 2023.

I’ve heard a lot of speculation about how and why fetishes and kinks develop. People muse about what incident triggered them to have a particular fetish, what elements from childhood contributed to a particular sexual urge, what family tendencies and similarities suggest a hereditary link, you name it. So many of us love having these conversations because they help us build a personal narrative and help us try to gain some understanding of this often strange, paradoxical aspect of ourselves.

However, there’s one theory that comes up fairly frequently that I think we ought to reexamine before we build it into our personal narrative, and that’s the theory that kinks and fetishes are a kind of damage resulting from some form of personal or childhood trauma or neglect. I think this theory is both false and potentially harmful. Now, I’m not a doctor and I’m not a psychologist, but I’ve done a fair amount of research on sexuality and kink, I’ve talked to a lot of people and I have my own experience as a fetishist to draw on.

So, I originally intended this to be just a short piece, but as I started going I found I actually had so much I wanted to say on the subject and I decided to break this into two instalments. In this first piece, I want to talk about: what do we currently know about kink and fetish from the medical and scientific fields?

Well, the short answer is, not much. Right now, at our current point in history, NO ONE knows conclusively why or how fetishes and kinks or sexual preferences in general develop. Not doctors, not psychologists—absolutely no one. All we have is theories, most of them based on very little actual data. 

The kink-as-a-result-of-trauma-and-abuse theory is, sadly, on the shortlist of the more popular theories in this space, and one that shows up a lot in pop culture. Christian Grey from Fifty Shades of Grey is an emotionally distant sadist because he was abused and neglected as a child. Lee Holloway from Secretary thrives as the submissive in a D/s dynamic, but only after a long history of self-harm and a stint in a mental institution. It’s no wonder mainstream society continues to believe kink is the result of trauma when it’s so prevalent in commercial media—but let me repeat: there is no actual legitimate data to support this theory.

The theory that’s currently most popular in the sexual science and cognitive psychology field, and the one I subscribe to, is the idea of “hardwiring.” According to this theory, people with kinks and fetishes have brain structures that are just a little different from vanilla people, which makes us genetically predispositioned to be sexually imprinted at some point before puberty, likely in early childhood. Basically, we’re wired to be susceptible to developing some unusual link in our brains that connects sexual arousal with a particular thing, and that link is pretty much fixed and unchangeable. It could be, say, feeling the texture of your mother’s pantyhose while you hug her leg in a way that happens to provide some indirect genital stimulation, and that causes the brain to wire in some mysterious way that results in a nylon fetish. Interesting side theory: In the case of foot fetish, which is the most common fetish, it may also relate to the architecture of the brain and how the nerve centers for our feet are located very close to the nerve centers for our genitals. 

Part of the reason this hardwiring theory rings true to me is that I know a number of people who know or strongly suspect that a close blood relative of theirs shares the same or related fetish. So that to me suggests that there very likely is some kind of hereditary disposition that makes it more likely for some people to develop fetishes, and perhaps even quite specific fetishes, and I suppose this extends to people who are hardwired to be generally kinky as well. 

But again, at this point, we really don’t actually know. All we have is speculation.

I’m really glad hardwiring is currently the prominent theory, because if you read deeper into the subject, as I have, you may have come across writings by accredited doctors and psychologists that propose truly insulting theories. Theories like: 

• fetishes are a form of antisocial sexual behaviour that redirects what should be a connective human-focused activity into an obsession with an object; or 
• fetishes are the result of traumatic childhood neglect, which results in substituting an object as a soothing device in place of parental love; or 
• fetishes are a kind of delusional self-centeredness, in which the person would rather draw internally into their fantasy life than engage in heteronormative child-producing sex with a loving partner. 

If you come across writings like this, I encourage you to disregard them completely—and better yet, dump them in the nearest trash bin where they belong. No one knows how or why fetishes develop, so I find it irresponsible and deeply troubling when accredited members of science-based fields publish “information” about fetish, when all they really have are speculations based on the anecdotal handful of case-studies they’ve wandered across in their practice. 

If you need further convincing on this, I invite you to consider the beliefs the medical field and mainstream society has held in the past about black people, gay people, trans people, and women / people with vaginas. Sigmund Freud speculated that women suffer from both penis envy and a castration complex, that requiring clitorial stimulation for orgasm was immature, and that properly feminine adult women ought to experience orgasm through vaginal stimulation alone. He was widely respected in the psychological field at the time, and a lot of his speculations on female sexuality were mainstream ideas until Masters and Johnson published their actual study on human sexual response in 1966.

Most of the doctors at that time were men, just like most of the doctors up to now have been vanillas. And harmful, bullshit societal beliefs are what happen when the leading theories about a population are mostly written by people who aren’t part of that population.

Fortunately, there are now a number of kink writers, researchers and educators who are also members of the kink and fetish community. I’m not going to dump a big list on you, but one book I recently read that helped inform my views on this subject is SuperFreaks: Kink, Pleasure and the Pursuit of Happiness by Arielle Greenberg. I highly recommend checking it out.

Next post, I’ll get into more of my own personal beliefs on the relationship between trauma and kink development, but for now, I’d love to hear your thoughts. What’s your personal theory on how your kinks or fetish developed? Do you think it was a matter of heredity or environment or a mix of both?