Posted by D(i)L(bert) on October 18, 2003 at 15:20 [64.12.97.7]
In Reply to: Re: Can I ask something? posted by Dave on October 16, 2003 at 17:58
If you want to be more sophisticated:
1) Read a lot, and with a lot of variety, both on the web and off.
2) Hang out around sophisticated people, in real life as well as well as on the web. Being around smart people makes you smarter.
3) Ask "stupid" questions, so you understand the whys of what you see.
As for smarts versus education, unfortuneately, the smart don't always get a good eduction. The lead technician who works for me could have graduated from university alongside me, except that his parents didn't know it was important enough and lacked the funds.
Do fetishes appear more often among the heavily educated?? I think the answer is probably not, since the programming mechanisms in early childhood are fairly independent of parental education. I would expect a very high level in those sent to boarding school.
However, I do think that acting out on fetishes may well occur more often among the heavily eductated, since that correlates well with the economic opportunity to do so. It also correlates well with awareness of the psychological perspective on fetishes, which is mainly concerned with functioning in the rest of your life and not getting hurt.
I agree with the earlier posters who said that introspection has a lot to do with becoming aware of such fetishes; the shallower bigmouths I know are basically defined by whatever they heard in the locker room when they were growing up and whatever their crowd is telling them now. They *might* like diapers, or be homo, but their public feelings are too much in the way to allow for that possibility.
A classical example of this sort of phenomenon was mentioned in connection with the catholic seminaries during their recent scandals: The discussion was who was gay, who was gay and didn't know it, and who was straight. Fetishes might run the same way among the less self-aware, that is the bigmouths.