Sexual fetishism, Abu Ghraib and the razor's edge of liberty.......

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Sexual fetishism, Abu Ghraib and the razor's edge of liberty.......

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uploaded by Eliud Martinez

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When I walked through the Folsom Street East XI fetishist street festival entrance, I paid and noticed the well-built leathered-up guy taking my money looking at me with a small knowing smile.

As he gave me a pink stick-on label he said: "I suppose you were waiting for me to ask you where you'd like me to 'stick this'"..... That got a smile out of me, that's for sure :~)> I didn't know what to expect but it turned out to be a painless experience.....in fact, a special "New York City kind of moment".....

The event was sponsored by the Gay Male S&M Activists (GMSMA) organization which bills itself as the world's largest organization of men seriously interested in safe, sane, and consensual s/m. http://gmsma.org/ The festival itself raised monies for various charititable activities including the prevention of homophobic based violence/hate crimes.

While what I saw was not my particular idea of eroticized fun, I did have platonic fun taking photos...... Any arousal I might have experienced was born out of a curiosity about how we humans manage to create and maintain a sense of community around just about anything.....

I felt like a tourist and, in my mind, somewhat complicit. I found myself looking about trying to pick-out the (more or less) obvious posuers from what might be the scary "hard-core" types. As I did this, I free associated to recent events.

I didn't see see any anti-Bush references to torture in the Abu Ghraib prison incident, but those CNN scenes did flash before me.

I mused whether, in this context, such blatant references could possibly be considered in "bad taste" or a show of solidarity with torture? The folks here were clearly having fun and on this New York City Sunday afternoon no one was being threatened or hurt. Liberty is such a razor's edge...... When, if ever, does an alternative lifestyle become complicit with human psychic abuse? 

I wondered: what is it about police work or the context of war that incites "normal" heterosexual men to endulge in homoeroticized power plays in the name of fighting crime and or terror?  What is the existential phenomenon behind eroticizing death and suffering?

Sooo many questions........  So-ooo, here's what the Wikipedia oracle had to say about sexual fetishism........

The basic idea of sexual fetishism is sexual arousal and satisfaction through an inanimate object, the fetish. The concrete definitions are not only differing but even contradictory:

In psychology, fetishism is a paraphilia, a sexual psychological disorder.
The diagnosis of fetishism is justified only if the additional criteria of paraphilia are fulfilled, above all only if the affected person suffers or harms other people.

According to the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD), fetishism is the fixation on an inanimate object, while according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), fetishism is the fixation on an inanimate object or a body part.

In common speech, any fixation on a singular inanimate object, body part, body feature or sexual practice is called fetishism.

For more of my photos see: http://www.flickr.com/photos/artedelares/sets/72157600464007609/