this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2025
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I think I have mixed feelings about artists "subtly" incorporating their fetishes into their work, or just generally about the fetish-smuggling that people often do, whether it be feet or anything else. Because if fetish-smuggling wasn't used as a "shorthand" for men's objectification of and entitlement to women's bodies, then I reckon people would still continue to smuggle their fetishes into their creative works, right? It's just that without misogyny, fetish-smuggling would instead really only be a matter of the boundaries of not bringing other people into one's kink without consent, versus the fact that one cannot actually fully separate one's sexuality from the rest of one's life. My own experience tells me that I personally have a pretty high tolerance for what I call "moshikashite" moments; and my tolerance would probably be even higher if misogyny were a complete non-factor.
…Yet as long as misogynistic culture prevails, it will naturally remain very hard to take its signifiers as anything other than their signifieds, right?
I just don't want to be pulled out of immersion in a story by someone's kink or desire to make women uncomfortable. By all means put kink in that is just blatantly kink in the places where blatant kink might suit the setting or story but when it's in other places it actually ruins media for me.
That is a good point, and it extends beyond kink to just any sexualization for me. Like, show ass, legs, tits, cocks, whatever if you want to and if you feel it is relevant to the story you want to tell / the feelings you want to evoke. But where it gets gross is when there's just a normal completely non-sexualized story being told, but the cameraman is horny and looking up someone's skirt or focusing on an ass or whatever. If your character is horny and staring at someone's ass, sure, whatever. If the camera itself is horny it just makes me feel like I'm a creep staring at someone's ass in an inappropriate situation. They turn the viewer into a creep in a sense, put the viewer into a creep's shoes. Rather than having sex/arousal be within the world itself.
So common in anime too
I wonder if open culture could solve this problem to some extent, because at this point it's mostly just about different preferences, right? That is, I'm fine with fetishes in media because I often take stories as expressions of their creators, how they feel, what they believe, what inspires them, or whatever, and that is going to include their sexualities; on the other hand, you don't like fetishes in media because you find it distracting and immersion-breaking, especially when it feels like it's meant to make half the world feel uncomfortable.
Neither of these are a strictly wrong approach to media, but if stories could be freely changed and adapted, then there could be versions best suited for one approach or the other, right?
I take the media as an expression of its creator and don't like the media because of this particular type of expression of its creators. If you put the foot kink in a strip club or scene where its appropriate or as part of characterising someone who is clearly a sexpest then I'm actually not going to have any problem with it. But the elements where it's just slyly in there because the creator themself is a sexpest are the media equivalent of being catcalled or groped in a club to me, I want it to fuck off.
I think in one implementation the only judgement I can make is that the creators are gooning sexpests whereas in the other implementation due to it being context appropriate I don't have to negatively judge the creator.
I don't disagree, there are things I've dropped or refused to touch because the creator is obviously a sex pest, so I'm absolutely not arguing that people shouldn't feel put off by things that it makes complete sense to feel put off by. I have an unusually high personal tolerance for The Writer's Barely-Disguised Fetish but I don't judge others for having a lower tolerance. The only thing I'm actually trying to argue is that it is possible to put your own fetish in a story in a way that doesn't come across as sex-pest-y, but that those cases will remain very rare and obscure as long as society is controlled by sex pests.