shipping-isnt-morality:

panjakess:

shipping-isnt-morality:

tumblr thinks “fetishize” means “be sexually aroused by” and that is why we need decent sex ed and not a hot mess of a blogging platform

if something besides you having sex or the idea/possibility of you having sex (including the idea of you watching other people have sex or vice versa) sexually arouses you, even if it only does so when combined with the idea/possibility or actuality of you having sex or masturbating but especially if it does all on its own, its considered a fetish/kink

fetishes and kinks arent inherently bad, though. theyre only bad when they sexualise or objectify an unwilling person or (even worse, but much more commonly) an entire group of people (ex.: if gay sex turns you on and youre NOT GAY then youre fetishising gay people by reducing us to sexual objects and thats bad and gross. if watching interracial sex turns you on more than sex between two people of the same race but you treat people of other races as though youre above them and either are unwilling to interact with them whatsoever irl or unwilling to interact with them in a nonsexual way, then youre fetishising people of another race and reducing them to sexual objects, and thats bad and gross. etc.)

what the fuck else would fetishise mean beesides treating something as a fetish

No, holy shit, that’s not what fetish means.

A fetish has to be:

– Not considered sexual by the general population

– Necessary for sexual arousal for the person

A kink is just an “unusual” sexual desire; it’s not a scientific term and mostly self-defined, so I’m gonna talk about fetishes here.

It is normal to get turned on by things and people that you do not want and would never want to have sex with.

It’s really, really upsetting to me that people don’t know this, so I’m going to say it again:

It is normal to get turned on by things and people that you do not want and would never want to have sex with.

If you sit people down in a lab and hook them up to a scan and show them any kind of sexual images, there’s a significant chance that they’ll get aroused. This is true regardless of the sexuality of the viewer and the gender of the performer – or even the species. It’s been repeatedly demonstrated that people experience arousal from watching animals have sex – and not like a small proportion of people. Like, half of people experienced some kind of arousal. While levels of sexual arousal may vary, plenty of people experienced sexual arousal in response to any sexual act.

Fetishization – more properly “objectification”, since fetishes are a narrowly defined category – occurs when a person or a group of people are reduced only to the sexual pleasure they provide (it has non-sexual uses too, but we’re not talking about those right now). Being aroused by someone isn’t objectifying them. Being aroused by someone that you don’t want to actually have sex with isn’t objectification/fetishization, either.

A man being aroused by two women isnt objectifying them, and a straight man watching lesbian porn is not fetishizing lesbians. (Nor the reverse, with women watching gay porn.) It’s fetishization if he treats all real life wlw like objects to be consumed, if he makes their sexuality all about his desires, if he believes that they exist to turn him on and are doing something wrong if they don’t, if he judges real life wlw relationships based on how much they turn him on.

(I’m staying away from the interracial comment, since while just being turned on by someone not of your race is obviously not a fetish, the huuuge majority of porn focusing on race is not that. At all.)

You actually got really close in the end:

“If you’re unwilling to interact with them in a nonsexual way”.

That. That is fetishization, or close enough for us to agree. It’s not just being turned on; it’s turning your arousal into the only way that you interact with a person or group of people.