fetish, n.

In the heat of the moment, my boyfriend won’t let me anywhere near his earlobe. His reflex is so strong, even a sneak attack will send his head veering towards safer territory. I have created a Pavlovian response to a harmless nibble.

To erase my confusion over his aversion to biting, my boyfriend emulated the strength of my bite on my ear. After watching my life flash before my eyes, the issue was less perplexing. My boyfriend’s bottom line: “I don’t want you to ‘Mike Tyson’ me.”

Over many years of enjoying dreadful music, I’ve discovered two sets of pop lyrics that summarize my sexual philosophy in a few kitschy lines. The original melodic standby was 50 Cent’s claim in “Candy Shop” that men, “melt in your mouth, not in your hand.” More relevantly and recent, my bedroom ideology appared in Lady Gaga’s mostly unintelligible hit “Poker Face,” in which she states, “And baby when it’s love if it’s not rough it isn’t fun.” Although it’s somewhat disturbing to share any type of common interest with Lady Gaga, my sexual biography is admittedly more along the romantic plotline of Buffy the Vampire Slayer than the love stories of Boy Meets World.

So, I like things a little rough. Nonetheless, this proclivity for a bit of in-flight turbulence has never translated into an attraction for weapons, dungeons or pleather body suits. When the aforementioned significant other suggested that I discuss fetishes in my upcoming column, however, I couldn’t help but wonder if this was a joke intended to go over my head. I didn’t think my rough-and-tumble approach to sex was fetishistic, but I guess it depends on how one actually defined the term fetish. Across the bland sameness of the collegiate sexual landscape, any less-than-vanilla behavior might be deemed deviant.

The highly credible folks over at Wikipedia define sexual fetishism as arousal caused by “any object, situation or body part not conventionally viewed as being sexual in nature.” With this theoretical litmus test, it’s not surprising that that the medical community labels hybristophilia, a sexual desire for convicted criminals, as a fetish. The same applies to symphorophilia, which is an arousal caused by natural disasters, and chrematistophilia, referring to a person who can only get turned on if they are blackmailed into a sexual act. If balloons make you want to bone like crazy, I won’t judge you. But I will say you have a fetish.

Definitions become trickier and messier as certain behaviors appear closer to the boundary of conventionality. For example, if you end up leaving Devines tonight with a member of the opposite sex, chances are almost certain they are a pictohiliac. I’ll save you a Google search: pictohilia is sexual arousal in response to pornography. If you subscribe to this categorization, the majority of Duke’s male population is as kinky as a garden hose. Then again, the confusing paradox of such a common fetish negates the fetish qualifications of the behavior.

Also, last time I checked, porn was sexual in nature. Just throwing that out there.

Fetishes generally make people uncomfortable. I would be lying if I claimed I was ready to confront an influx of foot-job requests on campus. But it would be worth shedding stigma from the more commonly unconventional.