✾ Aura, a Lady.

1,000%. People are still going to be horny and when it gets pushed into stuff that doesn't "count" by the rules it gets weird

Kinda, in the sense that specific kinks may already have existed in a nonsexual or not necessarily sexual space — but they certainly have gotten a boost by being able to bypass the great sex filter.

I think some of it is also personal commissions for lifestilers (so not nec. sex) becoming genre, remember the 1990s and 2000s? aeon flux, the matrix, queer artists were hella into fetish gear and then it just, stopped, as the counterculture got subsumed or something, idek.

the 2000s are fucked up and we are only now seeing the ripples

Imo, yes! But also, imo, this isn't necessarily new or unique -- I think you could point to the ubiquity of people who can trace fetishes back to 80s or 90s children's cartoons as another generation's take on this, right? inflation, flattening, squashing, even feet stuff to some extent are these sort of "non-sexual, sexual" fetish materials.

yep. wonder bread.

The big original theory of fetish formation was that it happens when someone first experiences sexual feelings but is ashamed or for whatever reason unable to be comfortable attaching those feelings to the normal body part sources so they look at something else and put it there.

Someone sees a beautiful woman and gets embarrassed so they look down and see her feet and then attach that arousal association to her feet instead of her breasts. Or is aroused by a sexy nurse and attaches that to her uniform instead of the woman. Or someone is uncomfortable with sexual attraction to specific other human beings and instead attaches to fictional drawings. Etc etc

I don't think this is possible to verify with scientific evidence, it's purely psychoanalytic. But people have always speculated sexual repression and sexual fetishes to be linked, at least for Classic Fetishes where the fetish is so much bigger than regular sexual stimuli for someone that it replaces sex for them or they can't get off without thinking about it. I think these days we know that there are so many kinks in the world that it couldn't possibly be the case for all people and all of their kinks.

But for Classical Fetishists there's never been any need for Actual Sex to exist in proximity to the Fetish as the Fetish is sex to them. If you have a Balloon Fetish in that classical sense and not just a common kink then you have never needed anyone to be naked or having sex around the balloons. The balloons were always enough on their own.

It's also at this point being increasingly recognized that kink communities are generally very disproportionately filled with ND people to the extent that sometimes you'll have one that's outright majority ND. And what the internet is very very good at is connecting isolated ND individuals together into large communities, thereby growing them through exposure. Often these communities online and offline are full of the quite common Asexual Kinkster who has no interest in sex but a lot of interest in kink. To these people, especially the sex repulsed ones, there has never been appeal in there being sex in proximity to the kink content. There is great appeal in the focus being on the fetish.

I like this take. It also reminds me of Holly Black's curseworkers series, where in a world where everyone wears gloves because of fear over people applying curses via touch, when porn is referred to it involves the removal of gloves. Taboo is the universal kink, and now it's double-taboo.