The papers now and then tell the story of some man who was caught in the act of clipping a little girl's braid of hair. That man is what is called technically a hair fetishist. Hair is his fetish, that is the part of a woman's body which attracts him more powerfully than any other part. A search of the living quarters of that variety of "delinquents" generally reveals that they are in the habit of collecting women's tresses acquired in that fashion. The tresses are almost always of the same color.
=The Hair Fetishist= whose unlawful activities bring him sooner or later into the clutches of the police is a neurotic who presents to an exaggerated, abnormal extent, a trait we find in all normal human beings.
Every one of us is especially attracted by some part of the human body. The young man who raves over his sweetheart's hair, the young woman who blissfully runs her fingers thru her lover's hair are also hair fetishists. But their craving is not strong enough to lead them into committing unlawful, perverse, socially inacceptable acts.
Another widely spread type of abnormal fetishist described by novelists and psychiatrists, but which very seldom gains newspaper notoriety, is the foot and shoe fetishist, who buys or steals all sorts of shoes. He too is merely the exaggeration of the man who is delighted by the sight of a Cinderella foot or a slim ankle.
With hair and shoe fetishists, the fetish is more than a mere attraction; it is generally a powerful sexual stimulant. Such fetishists experience, while kissing or caressing their fetish, sexual gratification of the autoerotic or of the involuntary type.
=Everybody a Fetishist.= There are hundreds of varieties of fetishism, normal or abnormal. There is no person living who is not more or less subject to the compulsive attraction of some fetish. There is in every man or every woman something which catches the onlooker's eye first and retains his attention longest.
This varies with every human being. Ask ten men to describe one pretty woman. Every one of them will probably head the list of physical qualities he has observed in her with a different fetish. One will describe her as a blonde with a beautiful skin, rather tall and well shaped; another will state that she is a well-shaped woman, rather tall and with blonde hair; another will characterise her as a tall woman with an abundance of blonde hair, etc. I knew a man, in no way abnormal, who could not describe a pretty woman, regardless of whatever her build was, without making a gesture of the hand outlining ample breast curves.