Fetish Thursday May 5, 2005
Like public school neuroses, grey skies, warm beer and Blackpool, sexual fetishism is peculiarly British. The French are different, and so are the Germans, Spanish and Swedes. And I blame the weather. It’s difficult to be relaxed and comfortable in your own body when you are punished by rain, cold and interminable grey skies. And for some people, their urges go in strange directions. To escape bromide-tea Britain, DH Lawrence found solace in the sunny Mediterranean, EM Forster was fascinated with Italy and India, and in 2005 thousands of Brits go sexually wild on tacky Spanish islands, enjoying two weeks of packaged hedonistic release from shelf stacking, typing, or the dole queue.
Black leather and spiky high heels are the well-known examples of fetishism. But there’s a lot more, which you occasionally hear about and wonder, uncomprehending, what is going on inside those people’s heads? And yet fetishism is more widespread than you may realise, and the sexual examples are just the dramatic specialised extreme. Commodity fetishism is so embedded in society no one notices it. The iPod, the designer frock or suit, the shoes – of course – or the digital camera and the car. In the seventies and eighties Charles Saatchi, David Putnam and their advertising contemporaries changed the face of marketing for good. Early television commercials assumed that you might be interested in buying a vacuum cleaner because you wanted a cheap and reliable product to clean your carpets: demonstrated by a cheerful housewife, while her pipe smoking husband relaxes in the armchair with the newspaper. Saatchi, Putnam and co. began to realise that you could link products to powerful psychological factors, instantly making them desirable and sexy. They didn’t invent fetish marketing, and Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays analysed mass psychological manipulation in his ground-breaking 1923 book Crystallising Public Opinion, but they did permanently alter the way products are sold. A middle class friend once conveyed to me the details of her divorce, at one point wailing “and he took the Dyson!” Yes honey, a vacuum cleaner. Buy a new one, buy a cheaper Panasonic, hire a cleaner because your BBC job pays more than adequately. But don’t fall into this cool-marketing trap. These products are embedded into our lives, carrying projected psychological meaning which is pure marketing psychology.
We all fetishise: it’s an innate part of normal psychology, beyond the strange sexual lives of the latex and leather brigade. Although I do assert that my own attractions are heavily circumscribed and thoroughly limited, because I have a sharply rebellious attitude to commercial manipulations. I prefer unbranded clothing, because I am not a walking advertisement. Pay me for it, and I might consider doing it. I’ve not bought an iPod because I’d rarely use it, but if I did want a music player I’d research the market and suspect I could find another product that is just as good, possibly better, and inevitably cheaper. I’m not convinced the iPod is the best, coolest, must-have thing that everyone talks about. That is psychological manipulation, carefully nurtured by Apple. Much as I dislike the Microsoft empire I find Windows XP just as stable and functional as Apple OS, and the PC is significantly better value. Apple products have a fetish value that I don’t wish to pay for.
Even my photographic ‘fetishism’ is strictly limited. I get slightly annoyed the way the Leica is regarded, because apart from their undeniable quality their ergonomics are clunky and unfriendly, not the way modern cameras are made. Nor do I like the Lomo, the cheap Russian camera that was fetish-marketed a few years ago, the price of which then increased by several hundred percent. It’s nonsense. In another area of life, a Chinese friend once said to me that back home, he ate out all the time because it was so cheap it wasn’t worth cooking. I would love to be able to do that; it would be liberating. In England, he said, it was completely impossible and I agree. Why? Because it’s made into an expensively trendy, lifestyle, be-cool-to-be-seen pleasure that’s correspondingly over-priced. Most bulk purchased food is very cheap, but you have to pay extortionate prices for the packaging. In other words, as with the Lomo camera, food eating has been embedded into a vicious capitalist economy intent on maximum profit, where you no longer pay honest prices for an honest product or meal but also reimburse the sellers for the marketing they call ‘overheads’, so the result is an upward spiral of capitalism. The artistic arrangement of lettuce leaf and cous cous that barely serves as a snack in the latest trendy restaurant is fetish food: I want tasty, satisfying grub and not an art-work that leaves me heading for the chip shop to fill my stomach.
As another example, I am delighted to see free and illegal music on the internet. I’m personally not interested but I enjoy seeing the rich, powerful, fat cat executives complain about lost revenue, because for many years, their fetish CDs were massively overpriced. When the CD first appeared, we were told the price would drop and it never did. When the economies of mass production kicked in, the proportionately increased profits were ploughed into increasingly bloated enterprise, into fat cat salaries and the wealth of people like Elton John and Britney fucking Spears. Capitalism + greed, and it is the honest consumer who always suffers – typically, the teenager with a Saturday job who couldn’t afford to buy their favourite music. It was capitalist hubris, and file sharing is now like internet karma. A CD probably costs about 50p to create. So the remaining £15.50, whatever (and admittedly prices have recently dropped but only because they had to), funds the salaries and the fetish adverts: the gyrating babes, the sing-song boys, all of whom are just pretty puppets representing vacuous computer tunes.
Fetishism is an integral part of ‘normal’ psychology, and it is exploited by capitalist operations. A Britney Spears CD is fetishised, valued as a physical item as part of a greater collection. In some respects, the iPod cleverly takes the place of the collectors CD because the storage/packaging is different but equally desirable, in the mind of the music lover.
The fetish is related to image and fantasy. It has to look cool, and it has to link with feelings and impulses and thus be suitable for a psychological projection. It’s a partial, miniaturised or abbreviated thing, suggesting something greater. The high heel shoe was presumably an image that seared into the mind of little Johnny when he was first having sexual feelings. And at twelve years old, it had an impact which in later life civil servant Johnny tries to recapture. Photographer Helmut Newton explored fetishised images, and Bill Brandt’s nude details – the curve of the thigh, the seductively suggested cleavage – also have a fetishistic function.
Critic Victor Burgin famously wrote about photography and fetish, an analysis that goes to the heart of the psychology of image making:
The photograph affirms a fact it denies; and particularly when it pictures a disturbing event it serves, like the fetish, as a reassuring and pleasurable substitute: ‘such things exist’, it admits, ‘but not here, where all there is the beauty of the print’.
The photograph is intrinsically ambivalent, and this ties in with the psychology of fetishism. It’s cool, it’s fascinating to be able to capture the situation you are witnessing. The content and dynamics are radically different, but this psychological attachment is similar to the high heel fetish, which is effectively a frozen psychological moment from Johnny’s childhood. The photograph suggests appropriation and control, but also tantalises us with permanent unavailability. We know it’s just an irrelevant 2D image, but it contains and expresses all the psychological meaning of the real scenario (and in the private life of civil servant Johnny, he also enjoys role-play games of dominance and submission, power and control).
Sexual fetishism is how we normally construe the word ‘fetish’, but it doesn’t have to be sexual. Nor is fetishism psychologically strange in itself, although clearly some forms of it are. When you combine sex, technology and photography the fetish value is made even greater, and you start to consider the psychology of voyeurism and its potential pathologies as seen in movies like Peeping Tom, Sex, Lies And Videotape and the Japanese Tesis. But the fetish effect is a widespread part of normal life. We form psychological attachments to objects and images, which are neither intrinsic nor automatic. Technology and photography are especially suitable for this, in relation to desirable hardware. More subtle and interesting though is the fetish effect related to the photographic image itself, traditionally the beautiful silver halide print, although that’s being increasingly replaced with digital files that exist only on hard drives. It’s poignant: the photograph simultaneously excites affective interaction, and prevents it. You have control, but also have none. You capture, knowing that it always eludes you.
We have a psychological investment in the photograph, which is both fetishistic and an isolated fragment or frozen moment, from which derives much of its fascination.
(Note 1: further to the idea of escaping the confines of normal Western society – as with Lawrence and Forster – photographer Edward Weston found Mexico attractively bohemian, with a cheaper and easier lifestyle compared to the rigours of the American city, and it provided him with a photographic stimulus from which some of his most famous work derives)
(Note 2: well, I suppose I might have anticipated this – apparently someone arrived at this page via a search for “vacuum cleaner fetish”! 24.7.05)
Comment
