Flickr Fetishists

Seth sandwich
Originally uploaded by Mirka23

I can't decide if it's amusing or creepy when someone who clearly has a fetish marks one of my photos as a favorite on flickr. Let me point out that the photos in question are all definitely non-sexual. The first time I noticed this was with this photo I took at a friend's magic show. Three people added this as a favorite, and when I looked at other favorite photos by these users, I found that they were nearly all photos of women wearing boots, or stepping on someone, and sometimes the boot was being licked.

The next one to get this kind of attention was a scanned photo of me and a friend, about 10 years old, wearing shorts and knee socks. This was favorited by two people, one of whom seems to have a fetish about knees and/or shins, the other of whom seems to have a more specific children-wearing-knee-sock fetish. This is definitely more on the side of full blown "creepy." Enough so that I keep trying to tell myself that maybe there's some other explanation for having tagged 122 "favorite" photos of sports teams, class photos, and other little boys and girls wearing knee socks. This one creeps me out enough that I'm not even going to link to the photo.

The latest is kind of the most amusing. I love watches, and I seem to be particularly drawn to watches that are kind of impractical (in other words, hard to read for some reason or another). I took a bunch of photos of them, and created a flickr set. Last year, one watch/wrist fetishist left some comments on one of the photos. That account has since been deleted. But recently another person has taken up the thread. Who knows, maybe it's the same person. All I know for sure is that he (I know, I'm being presumptive here) has 465 favorite photos of women's wrists, arms and hands. Many of them wearing a watch or bracelet.

The weird thing about these watch people (if they are in fact two different people) is that both of them have tried to engage me in participate in their fetish activity. None of the others left comments, but both of these people not only left comments, but also asked me something along the lines of "Do you have any other watches?" The recent one peppers in some innocuous seeming compliments about the beauty of the watch, and the wrist it is on, but I'm not falling for it. If you must fetishize my watches, people, you'll have to do it on your own.