Fandom

It's that Schroedinger's Pervert thing; you never quite know if the person who's exhaustively cataloguing a minor aspect of your show is doing it because they're that huge an obsessive nerd, or because of rule 34 and it's their feiths.  (I don't know how that word came out like that.  I'm leaving it.)  With music at least it's _probably_ not a fetish.  Probably.  Certainly I have a lot of records with women making orgasm noises - this was particularly popular in 1970s India - even though that's not a fetish of mine.

I suspect that it's more that "wholesome" and "fetish" entertainment is a false dichotomy, that there's no bright line, that we pretend there is because a lot of "fetish" culture is creepy and awful and not something ... I, because I can only speak for myself here ...  would want to promote and encourage.  Because being a fetish object is weird and uncomfortable, you're just trying to do an ordinary TV show and some home viewer is jacking off because of the shoes you're wearing or because there's a close-up of your foot pressing the accelerator pedal of a car or any number of other unpredictable, unfathomable reasons.  I can see why that would make people uncomfortable, but practically speaking?  There's nothing I can do about it.  I've seen a lot of it in communities I won't name because they're from the Old Internet and, like many parts of that world, wouldn't hold up well to sustained scrutiny.  When you're not in a place where you can set firm boundaries, you quietly agree to just not talk about certain things.

But one of my fetishes... I grew up reading a lot of PKD, and much of his work probed what he called "reality" but reality as a construct, an accepted agreed upon way of seeing and doing things, and prodding it until it broke down and fell into pieces.  That's what I do with media, that's why I like digital "artifacts" (great word) and technological happenstances that are not part of the text, that alter the nature of the text.

So I keep to myself, I lurk to the extent that I feel safe doing so, I try not to ask too many uncomfortable questions, and I catalogue and observe the behaviour of the people who actively participate in fetish communities with the same curious attitude that I catalogue and observe the raw fetish material itself.

And I sort of half-know a lot of things that I don't talk about.  Myself most of all.