Fetishes on the Threshold of Society

     The "forbidden" has always played a role in sexual fantasies. People are excited and titillated by whatever society deems inappropriate or illegal; therefore, fetishes can be said to exist at the threshold of society. According to the laws of a society fetishes do not exist; they're banished. To tie this into a previous post, one could say that the "abject" are fetishes. Whatever society wishes to keep separate from the  status quo often times tends to creep back in the form of a forbidden sexual desire. Take a look at the industrial revolution, for instance, when many working class women started taking jobs in manual labor. Since they did not fit into the established fabric of society, they were often written about as being of a different race, often times characterized as similar to child-like African slaves or the Irish. As the ruling class used their rhetoric and inventions like photography to show and explain how these classes of people were separate from what was considered acceptable, there are many diary entries from men of the ruling class of that time expressing a certain curiosity or libidinal interest in these groups. Arthur Munby, a British man of letters who lived from 1828-1910, for example was obsessed with working class women, a group of people that a person of his stature should not have been associating with. While his stated intention was the study of these women, his diary hints at other motivations. He ultimately would explain that he found the manliness of these women to be "delicious" as he would reflect on their coarse, calloused, red hands. In one entry he even compares his hands to the hands of the women and hints at the idea that his soft, genteel, scholarly hands appear far more feminine. There is a sense that Munby, to a certain extent, got off on this gender reversal. Munby had no question about his own masculinity since as a professor in Britain his was responsible for empire building, but he was able to act out a fantasy in a British Bizarro world on the threshold of that society. At the same time Munby had nothing to worry about because he essentially controlled this class of people. If he was interested in a certain lady, he could have paid her for a picture, he could  have paid her to sketch her. Munby justified his curiosities because he was able to turn them into a commodity; he was buying and therefore controlling this group of people just as the empire was doing on a far more epic scale. In other words, Munby fit right in with the ruling class of society.
    These types of interactions also happened in America, especially with the slave trade where masters would often times have sexual relations with their servants, but what about in modern times? As I explained in a previous post, homosexuals are one of the last large groups on the threshold of society, and as such they become a fetish for the ruling elite. Remember Mark Foley? He was a Republican who was caught in 2006 for sending sexually charged e-mails to young teenage boys in the congressional page program for over ten years. He was the one who was quoted with saying, "well, get a ruler out and measure it for me." How about Ted Haggard, leader of the National Association of Evangelicals, who was shacking up with male prostitutes to snort meth and have sex. The list goes on with the likes of Larry Craig, the senator in the bathroom scandal; Bob Allen, public park bathroom scandal; Glen Murphy, Jr., National Chairman of the Young Republicans who was caught giving head to an underage, sleeping boy at a party (there are many more examples but this should suffice). If you notice, the sexual scandals of the homosexual variety tends to occur mostly with the conservatives, so in a sense it is the same type of power relationship that I discussed with Munby. These politicians who feel that they, in a sense, control the homosexual community by enacting laws against them feel that they control them in every arena, so why not dominate them in the bedroom also to feel complete and utter control? Fetish to the extreme.
      Friedrich Nietzsche, a German determinist from the 19th century, discusses this skewed relationship between morality and the makers of morality in society in his book Twilight of the Idols. He argues that the people who are the most outspoken on moral issues are usually the one's who have the most trouble restraining themselves. This would certainly make sense when looking at certain segments of society like priests, perhaps they are preach so harshly against certain desires because they are trying so hard to quell those desires in themselves. Or look at George W. Bush, he used to be a coke snorting, whiskey drinking, car crashing, house destroying party monster from Texas where they do everything big. Then, all of the sudden he finds god and he wants to impose his newly found morality on everybody else, maybe because if he could force everyone to act like him, it would be easier to stay on the straight and narrow.
    What if there is a different relationship here though than what Nietzsche suggests? What if these men, these politicians, who for the most part have had power all their lives are keeping their fetishes alive? Maybe they decided to be a god-fearing, homosexual hating republican not because they want to quell their homosexual desires, but because they want to keep it on the threshold of society; they want to keep it exciting, keep it titillating, keep it a fetish. Once homosexuality is acceptable, there is no power dynamic, there is no fetish. Maybe Dubya couldn't get his rocks off with booze and blow anymore, so he preached against it and turned it into a fetish for himself. Maybe he didn't choke on a pretzel. Maybe he took too huge of a line and gagged so hard that he hit his head ; at least then it would make sense why his head was so close to the coffee table.