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In our culture of consumption, we are all, in a sense, fetishists, whether we covet a Birkin bag or a Bugatti, argues Anastasiia Fedorova in her debut book. In Second Skin, Fedorova seeks to illuminate the fetishes usually kept in the dark. “Have we amassed enough courage to look at these allegedly deviant desires directly?” she asks. “And what might we gain by expressing them openly and unapologetically?”
We open with the author clad in a catsuit in a hotel room with a “play partner”. A fetish garment “transforms how you view and inhabit your body,” she explains; it allows one to step out of oneself. The physical sensation of the latex encasing her body creates a “slow and ambient, continuous high”. It’s not just the material that forms a second skin, however, but the scenario played out while wearing it.
Originally denoting a talisman worshipped for its magical properties, the word “fetish” took on its psychosexual meaning in the 19th century. The theory now “constitutes an intricate dance between Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Thorstein Veblen and Jean Baudrillard, among other notable minds,” Fedorova writes. Although it is often used interchangeably with “kink”, the latter is in fact a broader umbrella term, a shortcut for any non-normative sexual preference or practice.
In chapters organised by object, such as latex, leather and cars (think JG Ballard’s Crash), in addition to articulating her own experience, Fedorova interviews artists, artisans and members of the kink community, including a dominatrix with a £10,000 day rate. Having previously worked as a fashion critic, Fedorova traces the origin of her fascination with the power of objects to being a “post-Soviet child of the 1990s”, in which scarcity was followed by a “turbocharged consumer culture”. She also delves into archives to recount the history of certain fetishes. In the way of any cultural history, it’s a curated selection that provides a framework for the author to lead the reader to greater understanding.
The individual anecdotes are enlightening and at times amusing: rubber fetish, we learn, originated in Britain with the mackintosh raincoat. Wading frequently featured in 1970s and 1980s rubber erotica, “as if fetish was merely an extension of Britons’ love of the great outdoors and general ability to withstand the damp”. The book gathers a cumulative force in shedding light on sexuality more broadly — the power dynamics baked into desire of all kinds. Fetishists are not a homogenous community, of course, and Fedorova is nuanced in her consideration of tensions such as Pride marchers worried about unfamily-friendly displays of fetish gear and racial stereotypes of Black masculinity seen in some homoerotic art.
As the signifiers of fetish have gone more mainstream — from Madonna’s 1992 coffee-table book Sex to Kim Kardashian’s bespoke Balenciaga gimp suit — Fedorova asks whether “the aesthetics and politics [of kink, fetish and queerness] ever actually converge”. Although “kink-positive raves and fetish events” have flourished post-pandemic, sexual and reproductive rights are being rolled back in places including the US and Fedorova’s native Russia, where any depiction of same-sex relations is now forbidden.
With its provocative subtitle and cover imagery, Second Skin won’t be for everyone on your Christmas list. But it’s a thoughtful and thought-provoking treatise that articulates the uncharted experience of female fetishism and destigmatises fetish by bringing it out of the dungeon and into the light.
Second Skin: Inside the Worlds of Fetish, Kink and Deviant Desire by Anastasiia Fedorova Granta £16.99, 240 pages
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