A personal and cultural tour through different sexual fetishes that asks: Do we have the courage to look at our desires directly, and express them unapologetically?
In a certain sense, Fedorova’s project is of the best kind: it takes our most uncanny attractions and reveals their eminent humanity ... Sexuality can be a 'gateway drug' for playing with our relationships to ourselves and our environments, Fedorova writes. In this, she’s wonderfully persuasive; less convincing is her proposal that fetishists have some kind of empowered relationship to the material world.
Meticulously researched, passionately penned ... Second Skin is more sociological than sexy; more anthropological than animalistic. Its raison d’etre is not simply to convey the history, the mechanics, the meaning or even the sexual pleasures of fetishism. More significantly, in this American era, with basic human rights being violated in our legislature and on our streets; when being 'different' and/or challenging the powers that be is punishable by death, this British-born book advocates for a person’s right to like what they like and to get it consensually.
Enlightening and at times amusing ... The book gathers a cumulative force in shedding light on sexuality more broadly — the power dynamics baked into desire of all kinds ... Second Skin won’t be for everyone on your Christmas list. But it’s a thoughtful and thought-provoking treatise that articulates the uncharted experience of female fetishism and destigmatises fetish by bringing it out of the dungeon and into the light.
