Book Review: Second Skin by Anastasiia Fedorova
Anastasiia Fedorova is a writer and fetishist. In her debut book, Second Skin: Inside the Worlds of Fetish, Kink and Deviant Desire, she writes about the visual cultures, embodied experiences, and socio-political histories of kinks and fetishes. She doesn’t do so by pulling back a metaphorical veil in an attempt to “uncover” dark truths for rubbernecking readers and she doesn’t spotlight these (supposed) “deviant desires” in a way that illuminates anything which isn’t, to some degree, already there in the popular cultural imagination. Instead, with vulnerable confidence, she uses her own personal experiences and insightful understandings to bring readers to “deeper” understandings of “non-normative erotic practice[s].” The way she achieves that depth of understanding is through submersion, by sinking the reader into subcultural worlds and carefully directing their attention.
The effect is achieved by the use of common archetypes of fetish, which are readily (and often ham-fistedly) aestheticised and commodified—latex, leather, the gimp, feet, and so on—and are shown to have more complex dimensions, as she repeatedly makes clear that the realities and fantasies of sex, politics, and fetishes are undeniably entangled. For Fedorova, leather is at once a material that is “treated, softened, tanned, dyed” but it is also something else: “In the deepest erotic sense, leather is a community practice”. By articulating this more complex makeup of relations between objects, the fetishists, and the cultural contexts they express themselves in, Second Skin, as Fedorova says, “is an invitation to think about fetish beyond the iconography”.
The book comes at a time when the broader public are more aware (but perhaps no more understanding) of the diverse, evolving cultures of sexuality thanks to popular media. Fittingly, and without any sense of friction, from one page to the next Fedorova is able to make references to Hollywood films, memes, pop songs, online forums, contemporary art, as well as theorists, philosophers and sociologists. Such eclectic references show that fetishistic cultural practices are prevalent (perhaps ubiquitous) but also that they have nested and expanding complexities.
Fedorova is forthcoming about the limits of Second Skin: it is not an exhaustive study, and she makes no claims to be a commanding authority on the topics she writes about beyond her own experiences. It’s worth noting that she is relatively new to all of this. Despite the fact that she has “always known [she] was into power play” and that she thinks her “fetishistic drives rest as deep within [her] as [her] anxiety” , as she writes. She purchased her first piece of fetish wear in 2020 and first walked into an East London fetish club in her early thirties. Maybe this novelty of a newly piqued interest is what brings out such generous and well-tuned descriptions, which range from the smells of rubber latex as something “earthy and chemical” to the careful logistics of hook-ups and hotel room play dates.
The language Fedorova uses is crisp and evocative, but not lurid. It is well informed and diligently composed in the ways you would expect from a Granta publication. It is a commendable challenge to bring such clear language to situations that are often unspoken, as Fedorova mentions: it is “the nature of sex that cannot be fully verbalised.” The book reads like a formalisation of many conversations about fetishes, kinks and sexuality that Fedorova has likely had with herself and then with others as her confidence and community have grown. She notes, “[w]riting about something is an excuse to spend more time with it, to find the words, to tinker with ideas, to immerse yourself in the complexity.” Her warm tone draws an aperture around these cultures and practices, which brings them into a modest, if not sharp, focus.
In terms of what is given and how it is given, Fedorova shows a legitimate concern for the reader; in a chapter on medical gloves, she interviews leatherdyke and artist Jean Cleverley, who describes this kind of sensitive care in fetish communities as “access intimacy.” This attitude of care runs through Second Skin in its entirety; rather than explaining or decoding the fetishes and kinks, Fedorova gives the reader close-tethered access, she counsels but rarely offers answers and doesn’t insist on the reader’s full comprehension of what she investigates either.
In the introduction, fetish is presented in broad terms as a common cultural phenomenon that “redefines our relationships with intimate objects and all the things we inadvertently objectify.” Framed in this more abstract way, Fedorova locates her fascination with the “special powers we assign to objects” in her post-Soviet 1990s childhood in Russia; she recalls that things were “craved” and “desired,” that “everything was novelty.” She goes on to offer a stunted history of this kind of fetishism in a more global context. Beginning from Karl Marx’s political and economic thoughts on “commodity fetishism”—which is when an object takes on a mysterious surplus (exchange value) far beyond its base, material qualities (use value)—she then moves on to Thorstein Veblen’s well-known sociological thoughts on the development of cultural identity through the consumption of goods and services. Fedorova ends with Jean Baudrillard’s philosophical theory of “symbolic value.”
A more general return to that “object-oriented mode of desire” would have been an engaging way to further explore Baudrillard's theory of “symbolic value,” especially when Fedorova is writing about AI and deepfakes. Also, perhaps puppeting Roland Barthes’ semiotics of fashion when writing about shoes, boots, and sneakers would have pulled more from her thoughts about the differences between “sneakerheads” and fetishists. Even considering more contemporary theories of semiotics, like James Williams’ “process signs”, would have given a more resilient structure to Fedorova’s thoughts on the confusing dynamics of seemingly common understandings of “objects”. Though there are only a few in-text references, there is a brief, lean list of publications for further reading organised by chapter theme at the end of the book, they range from well-established works like Julia Kristeva’s 1984 Powers of Horror and J. G. Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash to newer works like Michelle Tea's SLUTS.
This theoretical contextualisation of fetish is very brief, perhaps only a couple of pages, it feels like Fedorova has deliberately restrained herself from having this as her main point of entry into fetish for the sake of a more personable perspective. Whilst that makes for a more tactile connection to the worlds she writes about, there are times when a critical (more detached) voice could offer a complimentary breadth to the book's depth. Broadly, there are three registers of writing in Second Skin: reflective vignettes of personal experiences; anonymised interviews and candid conversations; and socio-historical contextualisations; none of which are particularly informed by these more discursively academic modes of thought but all of them are centred around something tangible—an object, a community, a practice, an experience, etc.—and Fedorova writes about them with an upright, proud posture and a sense of responsibility.
Fedorova wonders: “[w]hile our preferred sexual gratification and erotic inclinations have to be analysed, dissected and explained, our non-sexual pleasures, from a pair of shoes to a corner-shop chocolate bar, are often treated as simply natural.” With this initial sense of fetish as something quotidian, it is not clear why the book never returns in earnest to that banal level of the fetish. Instead, more predictably, Fedorova moves at pace to write about human hounds, gimps, leatherdykes (and leatherfolk), self-described perverts, kinksters, and subs that variably meet in leather bars, dungeons, bath houses, private homes and online chatrooms wearing latex hoods, opera gloves, spiked heels, wrist straps, gas masks, and chains. It feels that the shift from the cultural normality of something fetish-adjacent (let’s call it consumerism) to the erotic is an undeveloped connection in Second Skin and it is not returned to in the book with any sincere interest. Explicitly, Fedorova writes “[i]n many ways, sexual fetishes are one iteration of a broader cultural phenomenon relating to object-oriented desire: our commercial impulses and the symbolic values we give to commodities.”
Second Skin is most grounded and relatable when Fedorova writes tantalisingly about her private experiences. From the opening, in an almost POV-like description, Fedorova places her reader in a hotel room, looking at herself in a mirror as she zips up a black latex catsuit “from [her] crotch, over [her] stomach, between [her] breasts.” These moments read differently from the interviews (despite their candour, an interview will always have a sheen of contrivance) and they have a different texture to the socio-cultural histories, which tend to read as something more dutiful and less zesty.
When Fedorova surfaces from the depths of her investigations—rising through the interviews, the archives, the textbooks, the artworks—to the level of her own personal, everyday fetishes, the reader is left as a bystander, albeit a curious one. If we believe Fedorova when she writes that “[a]ccording to the laws of this world, we are supposed to desire objects, acquire objects, sometimes become objectified”, then the reader is left without much understanding of their own place in this fetishistic logic of meaning, desire, and pleasure. If Second Skin is about the intimacies and intensities of relationships between people and objects and the “fantasies and world-building these objects enable,” it would be curious to know how else the world could be if we derived our sense of personhood and perspective from what has historically been thought of as the deviant, disreputable, indecent practices of fetish and kink. Pleasure in daily life might then become more, as Fedorova suggests, “cultural, creative, mindful, strange, unforeseen—with a unique blueprint for every person.” Perhaps this is the kind of discomforting, non-conformist way of being that we most need now in our bizarre times. While Second Skin doesn’t totally advise on how to achieve that, it certainly makes Fedorova’s blueprint an alluring one to follow.