Fetishists Talk About the First Time They Acted On Their Fetish

(Top photo: Jake Lewis) 

Losing your virginity can be a messy experience. Really, you have no idea what you're doing or how to do it, and there's only so much stuff you can practise on your own. But hey, it's standard, vanilla sex: a widely accepted Thing People Do. So even if you're unsure of yourself, at least there are no taboos to overcome before diving in.

But imagine if you've been harbouring a fetish – one you're uncomfortable discussing with friends or during the early stages of a relationship – and have never acted on it. What happens then? How do you go about exploring your sexual niche for the first time?

I spoke to four fetishists to find out.

VICE: Can you explain your fetish to me?
Goddess Cleo: I have an incarceration fetish, based on the "giving" side. This basically means I really enjoy locking people up who have the same fetish but on the "receiving" side, teasing them about being let out and indulging them with their fetish. There's a bit of a grey area with this fetish as I incorporate bondage and restraint when I play. For me it's about control, and sometimes also about creating a role-play.

At what moment did you realise you had a fetish?
Fairly young. I've always played doctors and nurses, or tied people up, beginning when I was about five or six years old. I remember tying one of my local childhood friends to a tree using vines. We also used to play with big boxes and I'd lock my friends in boxes and pretend they were in jail.

Can you describe the first time you acted on your fetish?
I don't actually remember, aside of ripping windows out of the sides of large boxes and shutting my friends in there, when I was like five or six years old. I locked my brother in the hen house when I was about 11 years old and it felt good. Does that count?

Does your fetish carry over into your real sex life?
That all depends on whether I have a private play partner who is into it, so I would say sometimes yes it does, but not generally speaking. I do get quite a kick out of delivering an amazing experience to someone, so I would say I'm addicted to the feeling I get when I can see someone is completely spaced out and floating so high on endorphins that they can barely string a few words together.

What is your fetish?
Mike*: From among the few, I have a burp fetish, which means I find it sexually arousing when women – as I'm a heterosexual male – burp. This isn't always the case, as it really depends on the physical attractiveness of the woman and the consistency of the burp. A real world example of "consistency" is something akin to singing a song; you'll always sound your best if you practice and have good breath control. If you force it, it comes out all wrong and isn't easy to listen to.

When did you realise you had a fetish?
I think my fetish stems back to women generally behaving contradictory to the loving and gentle nature most of us tend to have received from our mothers. There were a couple of women growing up that liked to roughhouse and gave me some of "the business". Strangely, it was those women who stuck out most for me because they were such characters, and I suppose I found it interesting because you could tell they were different and enjoyed living instead of upholding social norms.

Later on, when I started going through puberty, my strange interests in women who didn't fit the mould became a key part of my sexuality. I can't recall exactly when it became something I actively sought out, but I do recall a girl in ninth grade who would habitually belch after returning to class from lunch. Nowadays, my fetish-related storytelling tends to include belching whenever applicable. Of course, it takes a minor role, as opposed to those who write stories exclusively about belching and include long, drawn-out onomatopoeia like "BUUUUUURRRRPP!", which I find rather silly. But when it makes sense, such as after eating a large meal or after inflation, I make sure to include it.

What sort of scenarios do you imagine your fetish in?
Oddly enough, my fantasies hardly ever deviate into the strictly sexual. It's usually just the thought of two or more women having an impromptu belching contest with both trying to outdo the other by chugging more and more soda, which tends to lead to bloating, and holding it in until the pressure becomes too much and it explodes out, followed by smaller uncontrollable burps. A typical setting is a glass table by a pool with the women in bikinis.

Thanks, Mike.

Can you explain your fetish to me?
Allan*: Tickling; I love it in all its forms. Anything from gentle, sensual, strokey tickling to prolonged, intensive and sadistic tickling. I'm very ticklish myself and am willing to be tickled until I can hardly breathe – I love the intense totally-out-of-control thrilling feeling it generates –it's called "vasomotor shock" by neurophysiologists – and I love seeing the smile on the face of my tormentor. I also love to tickle a woman who is very sensitive, whether she is cooing her appreciation of gentle, strokey tickling, or begging me for mercy from the more intensive sort. I have no desire to tickle men, since I am strictly heterosexual.

When did you realise you had this fetish?
I first encountered tickling in earnest at my all-male secondary school. It seemed to be the favoured method of bullying younger boys there. At that time I hated it – the sensation terrified me – and to this day I don't think practitioners of what might be seen to be more extreme forms of BDSM realise quite how distressing tickling can be to someone who really can't cope with it. In the end I linked up with a similarly ticklish school friend who was also bullied. We spent ages after school tickling each other in a less threatening environment, trying to develop a tolerance to this brutal invasion of our nervous systems. And it worked: we managed to get to the point where we could withstand gang-tickling without reacting for long enough to make the bullies lose interest. But by that time we were both beginning to find it thrilling and pleasurable. As puberty arrived, we both realised that we would rather be tickling girls than tickling each other.
My friend and I became known as the "tickle-twins" by female teenagers. Many girls gave us a wide berth, but others were curious about us and even sought us out. Several times we would fight over the same ticklish girlfriend. Does your fetish carry over into your real sex life?
Most definitely. I've tried getting into relationships with women who definitely aren't interested in, or cannot abide, tickling, and they don't usually last long. But I think the key word is "definitely". I think many people must have a bad experience of tickling when young, but if re-introduced to it later in a more caring way under less threatening circumstances, find, as I did, that it can be amazingly sensual and erotic. I've had three long-term relationships which started out with my partner hating the idea of being tickled, but fairly quickly finding that completely turned around and being as enthusiastic as I am about tickling. I find a good long tickle-fight is the most excellent foreplay, and there is no BDSM activity that begs for a bondage scenario as much as "tickle-torture".

I find both of these scenarios to be compelling and sensually erotic, and charge up eventual lovemaking in a way that a five-minute shag could never hope to do. There is a danger of prolonging this kind of foreplay for so long that you either go off the boil or suffer premature orgasm, but this hasn't happened often, and in my view is well worth the risk for an amazingly stimulating night of passion. I sometimes have fantasies about gang-tickling, too, but since I have never, ever been into orgies and tend to be rather possessive about my lover, these have usually stayed just fantasies.

WATCH: 'Sex + Food: Feederism', our documentary about people who find sexual pleasure in feeding people and being fed.

Can you explain your fetish to me?
Carl*: My friends would explain my fetish simply as "he prefers big girls", but when it comes to sexuality I find few things are as black and white as that. There is no "prefer" about it, for starters. I solely and exclusively like big girls. I actually experience the same level of sexual attraction to another male as I do a slim woman, which is a zero.

When did you realise you had a fetish?
I've always been fascinated with big people, but I guess it wasn't until puberty when the sexual link was made. When classmates would talk about another girl being hot, I didn't even look up because she didn't register on my spectrum, but I became aroused when classmates would talk about the fat girl behind her back, pointing out all of the delicious ways in which she spilled out of her clothes, or how her seat would creak as she sat down. I knew very early on who and what I liked, and it wasn't long after this point that I saw these same tormented girls failing at their diets because the lure of flavour and consumption was too great to resist. I fell in love with the idea that the reason they were so beautiful was because they simply could not stop eating.

Do you remember when you first acted upon your fetish?
Working part-time during college in a coffee and cake shop I would deliberately serve the fatter customers the larger slices of cake, and even sneak them in an extra piece if my boss was on break. I loved doing it and they loved me for it, too. This was really my first time trying to fatten others up for my own enjoyment. I was sexually numb and simply bored without it. This was literally the only thing I had to get off, for better or worse.

Does your fetish carry over into your real sex life?
Yes. My girlfriend has gained eight stone in three years since us meeting, and every mouthful she takes, every minute spent on the sofa slowly outgrowing her clothes and each step less it takes for her to become breathless is recreated in detail in the bedroom. She is still in the infancy of her weight gain, but her apparent addiction to eating fast food and lounging on our sofa is making her more of a goddess and me more of a slave to her demands. Each moment with her is foreplay, and all of that accumulated foreplay ends in a crescendo of deeply intimate and explosive sex.

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