No fetish? Boooring!

In this age of relative sexual openness, wherein people will openly discuss sexual interests, extreme fetishes are the final frontier.

NBC’s gross-out game show, Fear Factor, recently featured a sewage swim meet. By the very nature of the show’s format it’s clear that contestants dog-paddling among the turds didn’t particularly like it. Not so with the boys at Sludgeshit.com, who not only relish dog-paddling through a settling pond, but they sell videos of themselves masturbating while doing it.

Personally, I’m close to fainting at the prospect. The reason I don’t own a pet is that I’m physically sick whenever I see a big hairy dog dropping a steamer on the boulevard. We’re only just entering an era (thanks to the Internet and other mass media) in which bizarre sexual interests that dare not speak their names finally in fact do.

I asked friends about far-out fetishes they’ve encountered. My friend Ryan spoke enigmatically of “an Asian girl, a rim seat and Pachelbel’s Canon.” A man on Gay.com chat confessed he wants guys who chew tobacco to push their wads up his bum and then fuck him. A 29-year-old club kid in West Hollywood intimated that he likes to give himself vodka enemas. And “Wild Love Confessions,” a Compuserve website devoted to creating a better understanding of hetero-sexuality, included a foggy moral dilemma from a young woman who declared, “I had sex with my dog. Do you think I’m cheating on my boyfriend?”

A surprising number of men have sexual feelings about born-again Liberal Belinda Stronach, who is sometimes portrayed as a bitch. My personal trainer used to train Johann Olav Koss. A fetching hunk of Norwegian beef, Koss was Belinda’s second husband. I begged my trainer for lurid details of their marriage but, citing client privilege, he refused to say anything. All my trainer would allow is he personally doesn’t think Belinda is a fetish object – he subscribes to the “cold, ambitious bitch” school. But there are lots of guys (including me) who think she’s a vixen-goddess. Toronto busker and perpetual mayoral candidate Ben Kerr wrote a song about her last year called, “She’s Better Than Viagra.” Bloggers and forum contributors echo his sentiments, including this classy posting: “I certainly will do her if I had a chance to meet her.”

What really makes Belinda a serious fetish object for me was the way she stilettoed all over Peter MacKay. Not only did she leave the party but there was never any doubt that she was leaving him as well, leaving the tomahawk-faced Tory buck to pose for the Globe And Mail’s photographer by squatting in rubber boots next to a really hairy dog. He later absolved his romantic sorrows by walking around his father’s farm with a pitchfork and a bucket.

I got totally hard.

Indeed, clothing, long a mainstream fetish focus, is moving out of the realm of panties and pumps into odder jurisdictions.

Plushophiles are people who are attracted to plush toys such as teddy bears and people dressed up as plush-toy characters. Plushie Schwartz, an on-line fetish site (Plushieschwartz.com) promises “a different kind of bear-backing,” with young men at a Fire Island cottage sucking off a six-foot man dressed up as a bear.

Noel Edmonds, host of an early 1990s British TV series that featured a character called Mr Blobby, recently had his Devon mansion walled in half, literally to separate himself from his wife. She has taken up with a particularly industrious clothing fetishist: a bisexual transvestite Pilates instructor who wore knickers to parties. The Pilates instructor’s former girlfriend vented to the News Of The World about her exasperation with his many-and-varied dressup thrills: “He even had a thing about clingfilm.”

The profile of fetishes has risen so high that it’s come to the attention of multinational Unilever. The sprawling consumer-products giant, makers of Hellmann’s mayonnaise, scored a massive North American hit this year with Axe, a deodorant for young straight men. Available in a number of such scents, including Orion (the racy, adventurous, knot-tying, “saddle-up” side that girls need), Axe was peddled to young guys with a $100-million ad campaign that involved tricks like surreptitiously slipping women’s thong underwear into clothes dryers in laundromats to be found by horny college bucks who would then go berserk and actually want to wash their goaty bodies before looking for thong-owners. As testament to many straight young guys’ limited experience with hygiene, Unilever provides detailed instructions on how to use a deodorant: “Spray it on your underarms…. Avoid spraying in eyes.”

Well, why not? You don’t have to swim in poo to have a healthy bit of kink. If anything, the increasing visibility of extreme fetishes makes the milder ones – spanking, leather and such – comparatively more acceptable. These days, if you don’t have a fetish, you’re a bore.