But THIS wasn’t MY dream! Auntie had left her shop to me. I don’t know why. It wasn’t the sort of shop for me. My business plan was a top-end interior decoration shop, offering the best of international style, furnishings, liaison with other ‘top’ bath and kitchen suppliers. A complete service from carpets to curtains, floor to ceiling.
Not this – not a clothes shop. Selling dresses to women. Daft. The whole idea was stupid. But tempting maybe. An existing clientbase with, apparently, enormous goodwill at a fantastic location.
Time to assess, investigate, learn. Why throw away something that’s up and running because I wanted something of my own? I’d seen so many try and fail. This was a runner – and it was making a good profit.
So, to Craydon. The site was even better than I’d been told. The place was busy and buzzing. I wandered in to suss out the staff and ambience.
I’d been in there just a few minutes when one of them came up and asked ‘Do you need help? Are you looking for something special for yourself?”
What did she mean? ‘Something for myself’. I’m six foot 3; an ex-rugby player in my mid-thirties. I went all aggressive “I think not. ‘something for myself?! ….. In a woman’s dress shop!’. Do you say that to any man who comes in here. What if you said that to a man with his wife nearby.”
The lass, Betriz, all of mid-twenties, responded vigorously. “That’d be silly. No – I don’t say that to any typical man – but you were looking at the clothes differently than the typical accompanying husband. I’m sorry if I made a mistake.”
“A mistake, yes. But I was looking differently because I’m the new owner.welcome
A fetish is essentially a substitute for something that the infant required for comfort and reassurance. If the mother is absent then perhaps a shoe will be a substitute, a breast is absent then a particular cuddly toy might fill in the gap. Infants require continuity to make them feel secure and will utilise objects if the comfort figure is unavailable. This predilection then becomes buried, as the person develops and emerges as a fetish in adulthood. It’s very common as a tendency or preference but less common as the primary focus for sexual drive, this may indicate a high level of trauma and distress playing out from an early infantile experience.
The fetish was described by Winnicott as essentially a transitional object. My understanding of this is that the object forms a link between the comfort of the ‘carer’ and the often frightening idea of their absence. As the child develops the once external ‘carer’ needs to be internalised to allow the child gain independence from the mother and this means that it is important that the ‘carer’ is a good and protective entity. If for some reason there is hostility towards this figure due to an absence or a distrust of them then the internalisation process can be compromised. This could explain the persistence and durability of the fetish, the conflict of the need for comfort and repressed aggression make the adoption of a material object a satisfactory compromise.
So why do only men appear to have fetishes? Women do not miss the comfort of the breast or the absence of the carer in the same way as men as they actually become their own mothers and thus are able to resolve that particular development problem. Having said that, the problems and conflicts that women face are just as complex but markedly different from those of men.
THANK YOU