My latest book Fetish Sex: An Erotic Guide for Couples is here! Hoo-ray!!!!
I worked really hard on this book — I think I succeeded in creating a book that is the most thorough resource on the entire topic. For reals; a complete fetish compendium and sexual how-to, unafraid to address the most extreme fetishes alongside the ‘tame’ ones, and with oodles of links in the resource chapter. And I truly believe that it’s deeply compassionate, snarkily funny, warm, welcoming, resepctful, extremely informative and practical — and also bizarrely titillating and arousing enough to inspire. Plus, it’s filled with explicit, super-hot fetish erotica by Thomas Roche — pieces he wrote specifically under my instructions.
Read the table of contents here. Read the introduction after the jump. Tonight, I’m celebrating with strong sweet cocktails, vegan chocolate cake, and my favorite pair of fetish heels…!
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Introduction:
Confessions of a Fetishist
About ten years ago I worked at a vintage clothing resale store in Upper Haight at Ashbury, in San Francisco. I loved clothes and fashion, and fetish fashion, with all its shiny, tight fabrics and slightly sinister overtones, was one of my favorite genres. Perhaps this is where my corset fetish came from — to this day, I’m still not sure.
Maybe it was the day when my gay male coworker, a sexy well-muscled drag queen who did the best Cher I’ve ever seen, put on a black patent leather corset during our shift and asked me to lace him up. It was around noon and the store was quiet, though he giggled, got on all fours behind the check-in area and looked over his shoulder at me with a wicked, wicked smile. I was instantly flushed and excited, aroused. It got even more intense when, while I had both knees on his ass and was pulling the laces as tight as we could make them go, I looked up to see another, very attractive man in a business suit waiting to use the dressing rooms — and he’d been watching with a devious smile the whole time.
It was just a matter of time before I stole my first corset from the store. My boyfriend at the time had no interest in fetish, in corsets or in anything even remotely kinky — he thought people who did S/M and dressed in fetish clothes were weird and “kinda sick”. At the store we received a new sale of vintage items, including a big, old-fashioned peach-colored corset, with about a million laces all up the back and even the sides. I stashed it in my bag when no one was looking, and hid it in my closet at home, when my boyfriend wasn’t looking.
One night, he went out with the guys for beer and I stayed home to work on some artwork. But the minute I knew he was gone, I pulled the corset out from under my shoes and hatboxes and… admired it. I looked it over, closer now that I was alone with it. I wanted to see how it felt on; I was out of my clothes in a second, though struggled to learn how the corset worked as I sweat, cursed and wiggled into it.
I hooked the front hooks, and they kept popping out as I tried to finish the bottom or top hooks; I was frustrated, but then once I got the hooks finished I had the back laces to contend with. I literally used my bedroom doorknob to tighten them. And then, tighten them again. It was a wholly new sensation, being so tightly wrapped. I could hardly breathe.
My figure looked amazing in the mirror, though my breath was labored. I flopped back on my bed, lying back to relax and feel the sensations that now flooded my body. The feeling of constriction somehow made my pussy feel hot, swollen, and alive. It was literally like a light switch flipped form the “off” to the “on” position in my libido; I had for the first time what I’d describe as an “instant hard-on”. Within a just few minutes of getting the corset on, I had to masturbate immediately to release. And once I came, off came the corset.
I grew up in the 1980s San Francisco Bay Area, a time and place when no one wore corsets… I don’t even think that I actually saw a corset until I worked in Upper Haight. But what a joyful obsession and a terrific sex toy corsets are for me; corsetry and tight-lacing is my fetish. I’m lucky to be in a place, and to have now surrounded myself with fetish-positive people (the kink-negative boyfriend is long gone). But as we’ll see in the following pages, fetish isn’t always easy and fun, though it is a delightful aspect of sexuality — nowhere do our sexual imaginations become more devious or playful than in the world of fetish.
Unfortunately, until now, fetish for the most part has been stigmatized; sexually it’s the last frontier, for the mainstream media it’s right out there with circus freaks and criminals, and worse. It’s sensationalized when people want to sell books or ratings — trot out the human ponies, look at the fat people. But most everyone has a fetish, and while sensationalizations are fun to watch, they often get their facts wrong, and miss the point that lots of people have really hot sex with their fetishes, and with lovers who share that fetish. No one’s necessarily “sick”, they’re just having more fun than most.
Take porn for instance. Typically many people see porn as where you can watch every twisted, bizarre fetish or activity you can imagine, when the truth is that if you take a look at porn, really look at what’s out there, you’ll see that the selection is really limited and fetish porn usually sucks (and not in a good way). Porn doesn’t even “get” fetish (actually I think most porn doesn’t even “get” sex, but that’s another matter entirely).
Smoking fetish is a good example; I never quite understood smoking fetish. I have a sex worker friend who has a smoker for a client: they meet, she smokes in her underwear and he watches and masturbates. He’s her favorite client — he’s polite, clean, and never pushes her boundaries, and pays her well. I rented a smoking video, and watched a series of very bored women smoke while wearing porn underwear and berating the viewer for being a “sick fuck”. (Hey, that’s me!)
But then I stumbled across the films of Andrew Blake; an erotic photographer who very clearly has a smoking fetish– or if he doesn’t, he’s got a very sensual, sexy appreciation for it. In his films I watched gorgeous European models smoke, blowing it into each others’ mouths, between their legs, through the crotch of nylons, and just plain sit around looking extremely sexy while smoking. Smoking fetish made more sense, but only because of this rare instance where a filmmaker made the fetish come alive — he didn’t stigmatize it like in the other video as something “wrong”. He got it, and so did I.
Hopefully this book will shine a sexier light on the world of sexual fetishes than has been done in the past; this book is written for the fetishist, for their lovers and for anyone who wants to make a fetish into a sex toy. Or, to maximize a fetish, figure out if you have a fetish, how to talk about it with a lover, “come out” about your fetish, or find community — or just hot porn. Not every single fetish is included here, and if your fetish is not represented (or given as much attention as you’d like), then I apologize, but know that there are plenty of fetish sex nuggets throughout these pages that can add a little something extra to your fetish pursuits. Enjoy.
