According to Freud “I announce that the fetish is a substitute for the penis, I shall create disappointment; so i hasten to add that it is not a substitute for any chance penis.” (Freud 842) He then goes on to say the people with fetishes are substituting the mother’s imaginary penis. When we first discover that our parents have different sexual organs that we refuse to believe that our mother had a penis that had been castrated because as men we would feel in danger of losing our own. He relates this to our own narcissism and how we repress the fact that our mothers do not have a penis and use the fetish as a substitute. In class we were asked about our own fetish and no one wanted to share for what I presume to be fear of judgment, but nevertheless I will share mine. I like big butts and I cannot lie. There I have said it now lets move on to how Freud would analysis me. If I were to sit on a couch and tell Freud about my fetish he might come to his conclusion that at a point during my youth I noticed my mother did not have a penis when she bent over or some weird thing like that. But this theory could not be more wrong. First and foremost both genders are able to have fetishes and this limits fetishism to only males. Second in my personal experience fetishism does not have to substitute for any kind of penis whether it be a mother imaginary penis because it does not fit to the growth of the human mind. What I mean is at a young age I would not have a memory of not seeing my mother not having a penis and repress it until the age where we start having sexual interest and have it manifest. I would think that the manifestation of a fetish would spark around the time of sexual identity.

Another reason why Freud’s thoughts on fetishism does not work is in the read we had for Zizek. Zizek talks about the movie “The Crying Game” where the character Fergus is told to visit a captured British soldier’s girlfriend Dil.  Fergus falls in love with Dil and purses her. After finally accepting his pursing of her Dil gives in and when they are about to have relations it is revealed that Dil is a transvestite as we call it now transsexual. Fergus confused and put off in this moment. Also in this moment Zizek says “This scene of the failed sexual encounter is structured as the exact inversion of the scene referred to by Freud as the primordial trauma of fetishism: the child gaze, sliding down the naked female body towards the sexual organ, is shocked to find nothing where one to expect to see something (a penis) in the case of “The Crying Game”, the shock is caused when the eye finds something where it expected nothing.” (Zizek 2421) This moment is ironic because the repression is no longer repressed. In fact there is “mom’s penis” but it does not bring satisfaction for Fergus. It does not satisfy his sexual needs for the repression to manifest therefore fetishism in Freud’s eyes does not work. Speaking as a heterosexual male I do not see how in fact I would be worried about castration when I noticed my parents have different sexual organs. Could it just be that boys are boy and girls are girls? What I mean is when we categorize people as children we can say mommy is a girl because she does not have a penis and daddy is a boy because he does have one. Instead Freud makes it seem like men with a fetish is trying to substitute for what the mother does not have and that just is not the case.