Where's the Fun in Fetishism?

A distressing new attack on my vestigial innocence is occurring via the Internet. It started a number of years ago with spam. At my old job, the abhorrent subject lines of spam were, in my view, an actionable form of harassment. I mean, you'd get to work at 8:30 am and there in your inbox would be 25 emails that you could not avoid reading if only for a nanosecond, and each one's subject was worse than the last. Really, really, really bad, violent stuff. I assume that the world has not gotten cleaner in the last few years, therefore I must credit Yahoo for doing a better job than our corporate mailserver did in blocking the most awful types of spam. Most of what goes in my spam folder today focuses on a single body part that I neither own nor envy.

Now, with my website stats (and based on the popularity of my videos on YouTube) I can see who comes to my site and why. What may seem to me to be completely innocuous search terms often end up having a dark side. A sexual side. Apparently, some of these things are (euphemistically, so as not to attract the same crowd to this post) being with child, educating one's spouse and the garment you put on a baby to catch his deposits. Yuck!

What is wrong with people? Are there no normal people left? Here's the thing, fetish-heads--isn't the whole point of your weird, pathological fixation and displacement of erotic interest (I'm quoting Webster's, not the DSM III, but still) that it's taboo and hidden? Can't anything be innocent, meaning free from guilt through lack of knowledge of evil (Webster's) or simply lacking guile or self-consciousness? Simply being what it is?

Just yesterday I read our local TV critic lamenting the same problem on prime-time TV. Apparently a recent episode of the show Bones featured a fetish that involved an animal beloved by most 11-year-old girls, making the critic, who'd never thought "censoring" the family hour of TV was a necessity, change her mind. With the CSI franchise, there has been a bit of a fetish war on, with each episode revealing some new underbelly of Vegas (or whatever city you prefer). In general, I like the intelligence of CSI, but it is most definitely not a family show. And I think we do have to get back to basics, here. I heard a song on the radio today that really shocked me. You had to listen closely but the lyrics weren't double entendres, they were pornographic--it's indefinable, perhaps, but you know it when you hear it!

It's a hard line to draw, since now everything is acceptable, or a lifestyle choice to be respected. Meanwhile, sex continues to sell. Nothing wrong with that, but what about leaving something to that most important organ, the imagination? The poor lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls (the hit song, "Dontcha Wish Your Girlfriend was a Freak Like Me") is doing all these sexy poses in Blender magazine, a snarky music mag which I assume is aimed at male readers. And yet in the interview she says she feels shocked about it all, as the (presumably male) interviewer asks "probing" (couldn't resist) questions about her sexuality. How do these girl singers know when it's sexual empowerment to do pinup shots and when it's just sexism? I feel sad when I see it happen, but is it possible to change our visual vocabulary? Is it any better if it's equal opportunity and the men do beefcake shots (although it would take a lot of beefcake to balance out the cheesecake)?