Prediction:
In the near future, it will emerge that there was an expansive, unifying logic to it all along.
An ancient sequence of DNA is identified in the human genome (Neanderthal), say the scientists. It’s perhaps a genetic inheritance from the past, and those that carry it seem to enjoy a hidden, hypersensory attunement to their environment.
With heightened perception, shapes and colours are electric; sounds and music intoxicate; fur and silks play like a complex narrative on the skin. But, above all, it’s smells that are exhilarating and transportative, even to the point of rapture.
This is at its most evident when it comes to love-making. Instinctively, the hyperattuned seek out an authentic human scent to match and pair with, only to find themselves in a post-industrial world that has long since rinsed, scrubbed and deodourised itself, virtually to the point of non-existence.
Hungrily, they lean in closer, and finally discover tiny glimmers of what they’ve been searching for, scattered over the human body. It’s diluted and also camouflaged, to be sure, behind a flatline of synthetic citrus, menthol, and vanilla. But, unmistakably, it’s there.
It’s on the nape, the wrists, the lattice of blue-green veins that play on the temples—all pulse points that more effectively disperse rare, bodily scents into the air with their heat.
It’s on the face, dewy with sebaceous oils that fix a person’s scent onto the skin, alternately buttery; bready; faintly sweet like walnuts, or the odd, precious ambergris of a perfumer’s repertoire.
It’s in armpits, where heady, already powerful notes are amplified by the greater surface area afforded by their hair; it’s on the Montgomery glands of areolae that smell, to babies, like the womb; it’s in the body’s most intimate folds.
Clothing, worn close to the body, can be revealing too. Gloves, scarves, panties, tights, all take up the scent of their wearers, yielding an even more meaningful olfactory encounter than their freshly washed, newly laundered bodies could offer.
And all of the above are further transformed, elevated, and rarefied with attention from a mouth, a kiss. An involuntary moan of pleasure vibrates the skin or fabric, shaking its dormant load of scent to life. A trickle of spit becomes a carrier-solvent that activates these suppressed notes, the whole thing held close to the nose as it glistens upon the lips.
40,000 years ago, with the trained and practiced senses needed as hunter-gatherers, we might have been able to discern highly specific information about physical health, fertility, diet from these moreish sensations. Now, with dulled, modern senses, they elude analysis, and forever teeter on the brink of conscious thought.
And all this before we get to the odourless chemical signals, called pheromones, that trigger specific behaviours, the very production and detection of which, in humans, remains vigorously contested.
Foetuses in utero have the necessary vomeronasal organ for their detection but it shrinks away at birth. Perhaps something vestigial lingers on. Perhaps fear has a scent, which is why the energy in a room seems to change when a disliked boss walks in; or why old people’s homes so often feel slightly metallic to breathe, as if redolent of death. And, if fear is palpable with just a minute concentration of unseen molecules hung in the air, perhaps excitement, attraction, care, even love, work similarly.
Restraint and release, pain and surrender, all stir up these for-now-debated, invisible signals. High-porosity materials, like leather or rubber, soak up these volatile compounds, ferment and increase their potency, edge them a fraction closer to consciousness.
It’s a phenomenon perhaps most clearly explored in the kink scene.
Kink intensifies the body through pressure, repetition, restraint, drawing sensation out to its limits, building a charged atmosphere of anticipation that fills the scene behind closed doors.
The same phenomenon is found in the quotidian too. It distils the decisive, competent hands of the nurse or dentist behind nitrile gloves, as they press, hold, and assess the throat, or start to probe the already-pinned-back mouth. It catches a summer’s day shift of sweat on the neck strap of a barista’s apron, as they tirelessly operate their giant espresso machine, spluttering with steam and milk. And everyone wears shoes, made from animal skins, beeswax-buffed to a lustrous sheen: a strong proxy for the emotional, social and professional restraint of the workplace where they may not be removed, but must be worn for eight, ten, fifteen hours daily.
Those attuned to these smells find the world in a grain of sand. They discern and connect with the other, most completely, via a very small and exquisite conduit: a handspan of warm skin; a trace caught in a tissue; a flimsy triangle of cotton, salt-laden.
This is how we used to love.
In the medieval collection, the Mabinogion, we read about ‘Indeg, the daughter of Garwy the Tall … so fair that when she drank red wine, it could be seen cascading down her throat’. In the legends of King Arthur, Thomas Malory recounts how Lancelot receives, from Guinevere, ‘a red sleeve of mine, of scarlet, well embroidered with great pearls’ to wear at a jousting tournament: ‘And so Sir Launcelot … bound the red sleeve upon his helmet and at that time had never worn a token of any lady before’. The dynamics of such exchanges is immediately understood, as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, when the beautiful Lady Bertilak tempts Gawain, ‘reaching for a lace that fastened her waist, a girdle of green silk with a golden hem […] ‘Take this,’ she said, ‘it is a token of little value,’ though it seemed to him a prize beyond price’.
For centuries, parts of a woman’s body and intimate items of clothing, held in reverence, played an essential role in connecting lover with beloved.
Yet attitudes would suddenly shift. Shakespeare’s Othello (1603) hinges on a spotted handkerchief, whose apparent loss – masterminded by the devious Iago – becomes false proof of Othello’s wife’s infidelity, with tragic and devastating consequences. Iago’s plan to destroy Othello relies, of course, entirely on the extreme value with which these objects have long been imbued: ‘Trifles light as air / Are to the jealous confirmations strong / As proofs of holy writ’.
By the Renaissance, these ‘trifles’ can no longer be trusted, must be summarily downgraded from ‘prize beyond price’ to frivolous and without substance. And it’s no coincidence that this sweeping change takes place just as early-modern Europe gives rise to a new idea and a new word. That idea, that word is: FETISH.
Fetish (II)
Modern fetish has its most unlikely origins in trade relations, forged in the sixteenth century as fleets of Portuguese caravels explored the west coast of Africa, prospecting for gold and trading partners.
Those early explorers soon found themselves confronted with a vast cultural divide. The very appearance of the indigenous people they encountered proved challenging. They wore strange, intimidating objects or gris-gris around the neck, carried in small pouches (‘Some have a Lion’s Tail, some a Bird’s Feather’, noted contemporary traveller, Nicholas Villault); more gris-gris hung from a sash slung across the body (‘some a Pebble, a Bit of Rag, a Dog’s Leg; or, in short, any Thing they fancy’). Teeth and bones were braided into the hair, while warriors wore leather bands around their arms or lizard-skin belts around their waists, variously impregnated with pungent substances. Sometimes, patterns would be cut into the skin, and objects, burnt to ashes in ritual, would be rubbed into them, permanently bonding with the resulting scar tissue.
In reality, what the explorers saw was a myriad of complex social practices in play. Some of these objects, like the hair-teeth, designated social position, while others leveraged knowledge of local botany to deter biting insects, burrowing parasites, and even animal predation. Others, still, took on spiritual meaning: tangible symbols of protection from current adversity, carvings denoting mourning and loss; bodily marks proudly evidencing rites of passage.
Unaware of any of this, the Portuguese scrabbled for a word in their own language to use as a catch-all for all these objects, and quickly settled on feitiços (pronounced fay-TEE-soos), the enchanted objects or incantations that had long since been banned, in Christian Europe, declared superstitious and backwards by the Catholic Church. As the concept gained traction, feitiços would become fetiche in French and, finally, ‘fetish’ in English. ‘Fetiches are inanimate [dead/soulless] things’, a translation of Villault would tell contemporary readers, ‘[…] so filthy and vile that one would not wish to touch them’.
If it wasn’t enough that the notion of fetish was used to denigrate and dismiss the social practices of indigenous cultures, the same was also used to dominate and take control over their physical bodies. European readers were captivated by reports of alternate sexual practices, lapping up descriptions of the all-seeing ‘mumbo-jumbo’ idol of the Mandingo people that allegedly killed wives when they were unfaithful. Stories such as these pandered to fantasies of a fevered, wanton lust, so irrepressible that it required such extreme measures to hold it in check. ‘The Women are fondest of what they call Fetishing, setting themselves out to attract the good Graces of the Men’, wrote John Atkins; ‘They are always at their mirror,’ wrote Godfrey Loyer, ‘and all this to give pleasure and to inspire love, especially from the whites, to whom they abandon themselves willingly’.
By the eighteenth century, the wearer of fetish, the woman who fetished, all were ripe for exploitation. Charles de Brosses’ On the Cult of the Fetish Gods (1760) coined the idea of fétichisme, which transformed African fetish into a cautionary tale. Without her higher reason, laws, religion, and social code, all of Europe would be as base as these degenerate primitives, argued de Bosses, dirty, depraved, wallowing in filth, and incapable of logic, morality, or anything truly human.
De Brosses’ fétichisme was widely deployed as a justification for slavery. Still in its infancy, nineteenth-century psychiatry gladly assisted with that terrible project, diagnosing Drapetomania, a mental health condition that caused slaves to run away that, thankfully, could be treated with whipping. When slavery was finally abolished, only fetish remained for psychiatry to censure and pathologise.
Buoyed by Cesare Lombroso’s work on atavism (the study of genetic reversion to earlier, more primitive forms), Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s clinical handbook, Psychopathia Sexualis (1889), came down hard on fetish, laying down an exhaustive taxonomy that described how fetishism might play out in clinic, before compiling case studies, involving petty crime whenever possible.
The variations come thick and fast, each more full of shame and judgement than the next: the man who ‘once stole the combings of a lady’s hair, put it in his mouth, and masturbated’; the shoe-fetishist who ‘goes about it at night in the corridors of hotels, seeking elegant ladies’ shoes which he kisses and presses against his face and neck, but principally his penis’. The procession is unending, gleaned from decades of notes and publications: here’s a fifteen-year-old boy whose ‘attention was attracted by aprons hung out to dry. He bound them about himself and masturbated behind the fence’; here’s a ‘baker’s assistant, aged 32, single [who] confessed that he had stolen from eighty to ninety handkerchiefs’; here’s another petty crook, discovered with ‘about three hundred articles of the female toilet … when arrested he was wearing a chemise’.
Hundreds of years in the making, first coined to dismiss entire indigenous cultures, and used, next, as a pretext for colonialism, slavery, and racism, fetishism would, under modern psychiatry’s watchful eye, remain depraved, perverted, pathological, and something to be guarded against with extreme prejudice.
Sadly, little has changed.
To this day, fetishism continues to be regarded as an illness, listed in the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR) where it’s defined, rather crudely, as ‘the persistent and repetitive use of or dependence on nonliving objects or a highly specific focus on a (typically nongenital) body part as a primary element associated with sexual arousal’. Recommended treatment pathways include behavioural therapy and psychotropic medication.
It can only be hoped that, in the near future, it will emerge that there was an expansive, unifying logic to it all along…