Erusian writes :. If you take the full evopsych route which this article implicitly does then fetishes are best explained not as misfires of the procreative impulse but as part of the wider definition of sexual activity and display. The idea that sex is literally just PIV intercourse is not true of any complex and social species. In all such species you see social roles and rituals around sex. And these are adaptive in that the competitions increase prosociality and role fitness.
I find it hard to justify the misfire hypothesis actually since so much of sexual and pre-sexual activity is obviously not literally penetrative sex and so much of what's 'normally' attractive is not related to that.
Lingerie, for example, seems completely unjustifiable in such a framework except as a niche fetish. But it's actually pretty universal.
I understand lingerie as a sociosexual signal and that explains it pretty neatly. But if we're being trained on seeking PIV intercourse solely or its directly associated traits then you have to walk a pretty long way to explain such 'universal' fetishes that are common even among virgins. I agree it makes total sense that some things that are closely related to sex eg lingerie can get sexual valence in and of themselves through something like classical conditioning.
Giles English extremely relevant blog writes :. Just to be clear, I'm talking primal monkey stuff here, not modernity, and "natural" isn't the same as moral.
