fetishize
/ˈfɛtɪʃʌɪz
/(also fetishise)
verb [with object]
1Make (something) the object of a sexual fetish: women’s bodies are so intensely fetishized...
- After September 11 everyone was talking about masculinity, mostly because any heterosexual woman who hadn't previously fetishized firemen now felt compelled to do so, if only out of gratitude.
- Black women in pornography are keenly aware of how their sexuality is fetishized and marketed in films that are distributed and seen all over the United States and elsewhere in the world.
- I must say I'm extremely surprised that some people have interpreted my flip ‘vulnerability is sexy’ comment to mean that I'm in some way fetishising this boy's condition.
1.1Have an excessive and irrational commitment to (something): an author who fetishizes privacy...
- As such, my own explanation is probably somewhat incomplete: in a culture with little privacy, intimate moments are fetishized.
- While I admire Orwell as a writer greatly, I tire of the way his writing is fetishised by others, as if he were the definitive authority on matters moral and political.
- It's also possible that Miike is satirizing the cyberpunk genre, as payback to Gibson and other cyberpunk authors and filmmakers, for their relentless fetishizing of Japanese culture.
Derivatives
fetishization
- And I'm lecturing him about men's fetishization of breasts and legs.
- The popular belief that Darwin discovered natural selection is one consequence of the fetishization of science, which leads many people to assume they can safely ignore what they take to be nonscientific thought.
- I don't think I'll miss the fragility, but object fetishization has been with us for so long that I have to imagine something else will take its place.