Sexual Fetishism: An Experiemental Analogue [Study]

I just read a 1966 paper by S. Rachman called "Sexual Fetishism: An Experimental Analogue", and thought I would share a brief summary for those who are interested.

The experiment was to see if men without a shoe fetish could be conditioned to become aroused by shoes.

The criteria for successful conditioning was that a subject should become erect in some measureable way 5 times in a row in response to images of shoes.

Conditioning was achieved through "trials". A trial involved showing an images of a shoe or boot for 15 seconds, followed by a nude woman for 30 seconds. There was then a 1-3 minute rest period.

The subjects A, B, and C, achieved successful conditioning after 30, 65, and 24 trials repectively. All were then given 12 reinforcement trials.

Extinction trials were then run to try to undo the conditioning. The criteria for successful extinction was that a subject should not become erect in a measureable way 5 times in a row in response to images of shoes.

The subjects A, B, and C, achieved extinction after 19, 39, and 13 trials repectively.

All subjects were assessed a week later and were found to have experienced "spontaneous recovery". I have interpreted this as meaning the unexpected return of the effects of the conditioning.

Following spontaneous recovery, subject A, B, and C took 14, 32, and 10 trials to achive extinction again respectively.



Intestering takeaway points and questions:

• The subject who took longer to condition, took longer to achieve extinction.
• What is spontaneous recovery, and why did it happen? Perhaps once the neural pathway is created, it will always be there. Maybe reminders of the non-sexual nature of the paraphila have to be regularly repeated to bypass the triggering of the pathway.
  
• What would this experiment look like if conditioning was performed over multiple session for several weeks? Would extinction take even longer?

 

Not only that, but topics of significance at a given time seem to have an impact of the type of fetishism that takes hold of people.

It's interesting to see, given the gender discourse going on at the minute, how prevalent sissy and trans P seems to be at the present time.

It reminds of an exhibition I saw about German art during the post WWI depression times. Due to high suicide rates, there was a massive increase in "suicide fetishism", which was reflected in the art of the time.

This particular study I guess backs up claims on here about porn induced fetishism, as opposed to more deep routed fetishism that comes from childhood experiences or cultural circumstances.

 

Epic thread. Thank you so much OP.

 

The thing that made this study interesting to me was the spontaneous recovery, where it seemed that even after deconditioning, the arousal pathway was still there and was active again after a week.

Surely that would have some relevance to specific forms of P induced fetishism.

If you view P regularly, and begin to view things which wouldn't normally arouse you at the same time, you condition yourself.

The study obviously doesn't prove anything, but this spontaneous recovery thing implies that the conditioning is potentially rooted quite deep, and that deconditioning is not easy. Following the conditioning, unless you are deconditioned regularly you are hardwired to be aroused by these new stimuli.

There's supposedly another study from 1999 where they achieved something similar with a jar of pennies instead of shoes. I don't know if they made the same spontaneous recovery observation. I haven't yet found a PDF I can access for free.