What Makes an Object Sexy?
“I cannot say of any consumer product I have bought that it ‘gets me here,’ if here is someplace new,” the novelist Sheila Heti wrote in a 2018 essay on consumerism. Therein lies the inherent tragedy of shopping: the candle or sweater that throbs with our power to purchase it becomes “inert with being owned.” My friends and I, still relatively new to the world of material adulthood when we encountered Heti’s analysis, were so struck by it that we distributed a batch of postcards printed with her cycle of material entrapment: Buying > Waiting > Limbo > Unreality > Magical thinking > Disappointment > Need > Buying.
I remembered these postcards with force while reading Anastasiia Fedorova’s “Second Skin,” a book of personal reportage from the world of fetish cultures. Fetish, as Fedorova describes it, is a realm of sexual attraction orbiting around objects: leather masks that transform their wearers into nonhuman personae, a classic BMW that invites passionate, secretive encounters. A sneaker fetishist named Miss Gold describes the erotic thrill of Nikes, which emanates from the shopping process: “Selecting a pair, purchasing them, their arrival in the mail, the opening of the box, first spying the fresh trainers as she unwraps them.” Far from becoming inert upon purchase, the Nike Air Max 95s to which Miss Gold is partial grow only more transgressively powerful when she walks through a pool of piss in a public bathroom. For the fetishist, Fedorova argues, the magic of a chosen item never has to wear off.
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Fedorova’s childhood in post-Soviet Russia introduced her early on to the “spiritual aura” of branded commodities. Now a writer and curator based in London, she writes shrewdly about how we imbue objects with meaning and status. “Second Skin,” her first book, is in part an assertion that we all might learn something from fetishists, who exist in playful surrender to the things that they covet. A foot fetishist and leatherman she calls D, who is partial to skeletal feet with “large, strong nail beds and toes that look like talons,” emphasizes the existence of a physical quality that is immediately recognizable to the fetishist but remains otherwise indescribable. This quality is clearly sexual but distinct from beauty. “I look at some people’s feet,” D says, “and think, ‘They can save my life.’ ”
Fedorova, who herself is enmeshed in London’s kink communities, historicizes these pursuits as a form of resistance for sexual minorities whose desires extend beyond the “state-sanctioned imagination.” The opening chapter finds her and a partner both dressed in full-body latex. In Fedorova’s slightly grandiose construction, they “fuck in the intersection of sexuality, consumption, pop culture, and senseless lust”; really, they are in a carpeted hotel room that smells richly of rubber. The latex catsuit clings to every crevice of Fedorova’s body. She feels freed from gender and transformed into a “thick pulsing vortex.” This scene is a nice introduction to her world, in which feeling like an object isn’t a calamitous side effect of sex but, in some cases, the point. Fedorova asks herself whether she would ever want to have sex naked again.
The pandemic—a period of isolation, stifled desire, and spare cash that would usually have been spent on night life—provided Fedorova with the opportunity for an introduction into fetish gear. When she finally ordered a pair of over-the-elbow latex gloves, after following the antics of latex fetishists online, she was enthralled by the sensation of the material, which traps moisture and body heat. The mix of sweat and silicone lubricant trapped between her skin and the latex fused into a “slow and ambient, continuous high.”
But Fedorova is an equal-opportunity fetishist, an evangelist of the very concept. She ventures with a sense of personal providence into nearly every arena that she encounters, from donning a gimp mask—snug over the head, with holes at the eyes and mouth—to adventures with leather, cars, and medical equipment. She is neither a skeptical tourist, in the vein of Emily Witt in “Future Sex,” nor an encouraging expert, in the mold of Emily Nagoski in “Come as You Are,” but a true, avid connoisseur. She takes a historian’s pleasure in handling obscure ephemera and a kinkster’s delight in the scent of the Dettol spray used to clean fetish clubs. Observing herself through a bondage hood, she thinks approvingly, feels like “looking down at my own body in a video game.”
Fedorova knows that her enthusiasms will not be shared by everyone. In fact, she expresses a sincere hope that her readers will “feel repulsed at least once or twice” while reading her book. (I obliged her.) As if to counter this presumed skepticism, she is determinedly cheerful: “Second Skin” teems with loving descriptions of foreboding and occasionally cartoonish fetish accessories. A dog mask that resembles the face of a Doberman is “imposing yet elegant,” latex has the “endearing” gleam of a “freshly polished sports car,” and a leather daddy’s biker ensemble is deemed “immaculate.” It would seem that there is no costume too hackneyed for Fedorova’s rapturous gaze, which is a shame; her feeling for objects as subtle and simple as a white shirt suggests almost that she’s suppressing an excellent aesthetic critique. In the rare moment when Fedorova admits to feeling personally disgusted—her lover has a medical fantasy involving latex gloves and catheters—she gamely turns it into an opportunity for arousal and healing.
At times, Fedorova’s valiantly open-minded kinksters can seem blinkered in their own way. In the nineteen-seventies, when a British erotic magazine called AtomAge depicted a middle-class couple donning rubber clothing and thick waders at home, as if heading out for a traditional country walk, the American B.D.S.M. writer Patrick Califia seemed perplexed that such ordinary-seeming people could be fetishists, too. He mused that the English must be “especially good at rationalising sexual deviation as if it were a logical extension of everyday life.” Yet Fedorova seems to understand that sexual deviation is an extension of everyday life: the most moving passages in “Second Skin” aren’t the scenes of masked ravers in clubs but those in which eroticism shades the gap between the banal and the intimate. On a walk through a car park in London’s Barbican Estate, on her way to the apartment of a hookup, Fedorova notices in striking detail the sound of the ventilation system, the fluorescent light patterns, and the scent of damp concrete. In childhood, she’d wondered at the secrecy and masculinity of a nearby row of garages; she’s always loved the tension created by the warmth and stale air of cars underground. For her, walking underneath the Barbican, “the sex has already begun.” Who among us hasn’t experienced some dense and nostalgic atmosphere as an aphrodisiac? And who among us isn’t thrilled, like the rubber enthusiasts in AtomAge, by the absurd convergence of the pedestrian and the perverse?
The difference is that Fedorova isn’t merely half aware of the obscure sources of her own thrills but obsessed by them. For her, fetish is “a slippery darkness which has always resisted language,” a premise she finds inviting rather than daunting. She ventures with compassion into the thorny predilections of trans chasers and the invasive desire of connoisseurs like D, who declares that some women’s feet were simply “made to be fetishised.” Though she pays frequent lip service to the battle against sexual shame which wearies all of our contemporary queer writing, Fedorova’s more intriguing conviction is that the interplay between desire and aversion is “an essential part of erotic discovery.” Picture Tom of Finland, as she conjures him, drawing his famously brawny policemen and Nazi officers while sporting a hard-on.
In a certain sense, Fedorova’s project is of the best kind: it takes our most uncanny attractions and reveals their eminent humanity. “When you can’t recognise yourself, all of a sudden you feel free to do things you normally wouldn’t do,” a gimp who goes by the alias Bloodshrimp tells her. Many people in “Second Skin” report associating a profound sense of safety with their chosen fetish objects, from the anonymity enshrined by a gimp costume to the protective armor of the dominatrix’s heels and gloves. They claim that the artifice and physical barriers of kinky sex allow them access to a deeper and more complex connection. Early in the book, Fedorova declares, “Naked is too plain, too easy, too mundane.”
But in the story that “Second Skin” bears out it can seem that naked is often too demanding, too undefended, too threatening. In latex, “you’re safe, as nothing can penetrate its membrane,” Fedorova writes. “You’re alone, as the sum total of your sensory experience is confined to your body.” To be safe and alone can certainly be a comfort, but this vigilant, solitary approach to sex is one of the more alienating details in a book full of them. For all the warmth and camaraderie in Fedorova’s writing, “Second Skin” also captures some of our culture’s antisocial drifts: it would be hard to summon a more apt metaphor for our age of isolation and hyper-specific consumer preference than two people fucking alone together, shielded from each other by a full-body membrane. These kinky scenes, in spite of their palette of leather and metallics, have a whiff of the personal-growth romancing you see in the flavorless “Love Is Blind” pods: there, too, fantasy is the ultimate meeting place, an anonymizing barrier allows unprecedented honesty, and the participants almost always find that the person they’ve gotten to know isn’t their partner but themselves.
Sexuality can be a “gateway drug” for playing with our relationships to ourselves and our environments, Fedorova writes. In this, she’s wonderfully persuasive; less convincing is her proposal that fetishists have some kind of empowered relationship to the material world. At the antipode is Heti, who tries to make peace with the fact that our purchases inevitably disappoint us. When we buy something new, we hope it will transform us, Heti writes, yet it turns out that our presence instead transforms it. “Whenever anything becomes mine, it becomes like me,” she writes. “And what is me but this chaos, this meaninglessness, this sloppiness and imperfection.” Compared to the absolving gleam of latex, sloppy imperfection isn’t especially sexy. Then again, I know what I’d choose. ♦