My liberal wife thinks all TVs are gay

[ReineD]

The answer is that there is no essential difference. All sexual arousal is fetishistic. It works the same way whether you are aroused by shoes, balloons, a man or woman, or the idea of yourself as a woman. That which turns you on is your fetish.

So people can go on to have emotional relationships with shoes, then?

Sexual attraction to and emotional relationships with people are indeed intertwined and they are infinitely more complex than object or situational fetish. The fetish type relationships are one sided … obviously the object or the situation cannot respond in a human way, except in the initiator's imagination.

While there are indeed people who are only interested in seeking sexual pleasure for pleasure's sake like they might be interested in a shoe, (with no prospect for intimacy or potential for love and emotional connection), it would be interesting to compare their quality of life to someone who is capable of forming emotional bonds with others.

And if you or anyone else has experienced primary relationship(s) where you either chose partners who were not compatible or the two of you were not able to develop relationship skills, or your relationships failed because you did have a fetish and your partners could not compete with it, then please don't make this an excuse for the justification that living life without experiencing intimacy is preferable. Your personal backgrounds do not place you in a position where you can compare, plus you are potentially robbing yourselves of meaningful human connections. You CAN say that experiencing sexual pleasure for pleasure's sake works for you, that sex with men and women is fetish for you, but you cannot say that this applies to most people.