The Hair Fetishist

Possibly one of the strangest of all sexual fetishes is that which draws the afflicted male towards the hair of a woman, and focuses all his sexual interest upon that part of her.

It is a very difficult form of fetishism for the normal male to understand. How can a man be totally uninterested in the warm, soft body of a woman, and concentrate all his sexual attention on that part of her which is most commonplace, most commonly exposed, and the least alive part of her?

According to Freud, the sexual fetishes can all be traced back to early childhood or babyhood. The breast fetishist tries to recapture his babyhood pleasures at the breast of his mother. The rubber and leather fetishists are yearning after those materials with which they would have been most likely to have come in contact while they were babies. But Freud does not mention hair fetishism, and it is a difficult perversion to explain in his terms.

One hair fetishist has described the beginnings of his perversion, and there is no doubt that the events he describes were the cause of his fetishistic fixation rather than the emergence of something which was already implicit in his character.

At the age of thirteen, like many other boys, he conceived a strong romantic attachment to a girl of his own age. His parents had been particularly strict as far as sex was concerned, and up to this time he had never indulged in masturbation. The two children proceeded to see a lot of each other, and he became conscious of strong sexual urges, although so innocent was he at that age he was not sure what these emotions were. Then the girl made the suggestion that they swap locks of hair for keepsakes. He agreed, and received from her (she had very long, dark hair) a substantial piece of hair, about six inches long.

He began the practise of taking this hair to bed with him, and sleeping with it under his pillow. Before going to sleep he would handle it and caress it, and he noticed that every time he did so he would experience a repetition of the physiological changes he experienced when he was with her.

One night, when it was hot, he discarded his pajamas and lay there naked, holding the hair of his little girlfriend. He allowed it to trail across his chest, and he was amazed at the sensations this caused in his body. He examined his erection, and then, on impulse, draped the hair across his erect penis.

Immediately he felt a strange sensation building up inside him, and instinctively he moved his girlfriend's hair from side to side across his tumescent organ. The sensation became stronger second by second, and suddenly, to feelings of extreme pleasure, he ejaculated.

He was amazed at what had happened to him, and by his semen, which had spurted over his body. He found that a short time later, by repeating the same actions, and by winding the hair around his penis, a repetition of his orgasm occurred.

After this, he was to find that his sexual interest in his girlfriend gradually diminished, except for her hair. He still found caressing her hair to be terrifically exciting, and on one occasion experienced an involuntary orgasm while sitting in the cinema with her and stroking her hair.

Eventually he came to concentrate all his sexual interest upon the piece of her hair which was in his possession, and gradually lost all interest in the girl.

He states that from that time on he was only interested in the hair of girls he saw in the street, and their general physical appearance was of complete indifference for him.

This seems to be a perfect example of the cause of a sexual perversion rather than a manifestation of it.

It would be interesting to gather the history of other hair fetishists, to see whether a significant proportion of them had a similar first sexual experience.

Here is the account of a hair fetishist, interviewed in my office. He describes his compulsion, and his own feelings while carrying it out. He is a thirty-year-old man, quite respectable in appearance, although obviously of a nervous disposition. He spoke about himself for some three hours, and here follows an edited transcript of what he told me about one of the acts he had committed.

'I was sitting at home, when I felt it coming over me. It's funny, sometimes I can go for months without any trouble. You know, as I told you, that I've got quite a collection of hair, all wrapped up in paper bags which have on them the way the girl looked and the date and time I got the hair. Mind you, I can always remember the girl. I have only got to look at, handle and sniff the hair, and the picture of her comes immediately into my mind. Well, I take some of the hair and masturbate into it, washing it clean afterwards, and fantasize about the girl while I am masturbating with it. I imagine that she is lying there with me, and that I hold her head as I masturbate into her hair.

'But then, one day, I will feel a real physical need for some new hair. For a while I will fight against the feeling, but it becomes stronger and stronger, and in the end I have to give in to my impulses.

'What I do is to take a carrier bag, sharpen up a pair of scissors, and put them in the bag before I set out.

'I always go to the tube station round about rush hour. It's the only way you can do it without getting caught, and even then I've had some narrow escapes.

'What I do is to travel to the next station up the line, and then come back again on another train. You never have to do this for long, because sooner or later you are going to find yourself next to an attractive girl with lovely hair.

'On this particular occasion I waited on the platform, standing near this nice-looking woman whose hair looked pretty good. As the train came in I made sure I was standing near her, and I got on the train behind her, and was pressed up against her, owing to the crush.

'But I was disappointed. My heart had been thumping but when I got close to her hair my excitement diminished. Her hair was too coarse and not nearly so attractive close up as it had seemed from a distance.

'Impatiently I waited until we drew up at the station, and then I left the train and walked across to the other platform, waiting for a train going back to my local station again.

'The train drew up, the doors opened, and there she was.

'She was, I suppose, about seventeen, wearing school uniform. I always prefer the hair of young girls, because there is something fresh about it. I suppose as they get older they put so much lacquer and junk on it that it eventually destroys the quality of their hair. But hers was lovely, dark brown, glistening with deep and lustrous highlights and hanging down her back in the most erotic manner. I often wonder whether some of these young girls do it for the purpose, knowing there are men like me. They seem to arrange their hair in the sexiest possible way, if you know what I mean.

'Anyway, I quickly stepped inside the train as the doors slid shut. My hands were shaking, and my heart was pounding, although my mind was absolutely clear. I also felt a sexual excitement, my penis becoming engorged. I was not near enough to her. But then there was a fortunate movement of the train as it moved off, which made everyone in the carriage lose balance, and I managed to move myself in such a way that I was standing right behind her.

'I looked at her hair, my penis becoming painfully erect. It was soft, and fell down gracefully, the golden glints moving with each movement of her head. I moved my face closer to her hair, and breathed in. I was pressing up against her, hemmed in by the people, and I was almost touching her hair with my lips. It had a beautiful odour, delicate and fragrant.

'My scissors were sharp. I had spent nearly an hour in honing the blades to razor sharpness. Quickly, feeling the warmth and pressure of her body as the train moved, I reached down into my carrier bag, and lifted out the scissors, taking care that no one was in a position to see me.

'Between the tube stations in London you can reckon on one-and-a-half minutes between stops. Between my station and the next one down the line I had very carefully timed the run, and it came to one minute, forty-five seconds. The train would be stopping in forty seconds. I could hardly breathe, the blood pounding in my head.

'But my hands were steady. I lifted the scissors, putting one of the blades beneath a lock of her hair, adjusting the position of the blade to get the maximum thickness of hair. But she moved, and the hair slipped away. Quickly I lowered my hand, holding the scissors down, panicking, unable to breathe. Had I been discovered? But no, it was all right. She had moved to read one of the advertisements, and her head moved back to its previous position.

'There was no time to collect myself. With painful slowness I raised my hand again, once more positioning one of the blades underneath a lustrous bunch of hair. Then one, two, snip, snip, and the hair fell down, dropping into the carrier bag which I was holding open with the other hand. Then once more, snip, snip, a waterfall of beautiful hair into my bag.

'The train began to slow up. She hadn't noticed a thing. Perhaps she thought that the movements were caused by the lurching of the train. This was always the worst part. I could only wait for the train to stop, could only wait in a misery of suspense until I could escape. All she had to do was to put her hand back to smooth down her hair . . . On one side of her head it fell down as it had before, down past her shoulder in dark ripples. But on the other side it was short, giving a hacked-off appearance. I felt sorry for her, as I always do — but her hair would eventually grow again.

'At last. The train stopped, and doors opened. Quickly, I forced my way between the crowds and stepped onto the platform. Now I was finding it difficult to still the panic. My heart was racing, waiting for the scream to come. But there was no scream, and the doors of the train slid shut.

'Through the streets I ran, my bag clutched tightly to me, in an agony of fear and anticipation. I passed a policeman with a stir of sheer fright. One day I am afraid that a policeman will ask me to show him what I have got in the bag. But eventually I arrived at my own front door, fumbling with the key and letting myself inside.

'I raced up the stairs to my room. I got a thread and spent a long time in arranging her hair, and then binding it into two locks, from time to time unable to resist sniffing it and resting my face on it. It was so soft and warm.

'I lay back on my bed, closed my eyes, and picked up the two locks of hair. They were both very thick, and about six inches long. One of the locks I allowed to trail across my body, caressing myself with her hair. But I was too aroused for much preliminary titillation. I put the other lock over my face, burying my nose into it. The other lock I ran down to my penis, stroking myself with it, in long, slow strokes, from the base of my penis to the tip.

'Then, when I was nearly coming, I put it over the end of my penis, and pushed it back and forth, feeling my orgasm starting, overwhelming me with the most fantastic, almost agonising sensations. I ejaculated, feeling my spurts going into her hair, crying out, my body stiff.

'I knew that this hair would sustain me for a long time. It would be ages before my compulsion returned and I had to slink out again, with my bag and my scissors.'

Harmless, in a sense. But in another sense far from harmless. The kind of assault that this man was carrying out was a highly destructive physical assault, even if no physical pain was involved. At very least it would be highly unpleasant for the girl to find that half her hair had been hacked away, and perhaps even more unpleasant if she knew something about hair fetishism, and knew what would be happening to her hair.

But this particular case is an extreme one. Like most other perversions, there is a whole spectrum of behaviour, and some hair fetishists only have a relatively minor compulsion, compared with this particular man. Such a person is Phil D., a man I spoke to about his fetishistic desires. Undoubtedly a hair fetishist, his behaviour is still unconventional. But it tends to be more acceptable, even if a long-term relationship with a woman would seem to be impossible for him.

'I love women's hair. I think a bird's hair is the most attractive thing about her. When I go out looking for a bird, the first thing I notice is her hair. Whether it's long or short, fine or coarse, what colour it is.

'I have fantasies about women too, involving their hair. I've been to a few strip shows with my mates, but I've always felt frustrated, because they don't show you the girls doing anything with their hair. Imagine a stripper with really long hair, right down to her thighs. She could come out naked under her hair, covering herself with it. She could do a sexy dance, her body writhing against her own hair, gradually showing herself more and more. In the end we could see her in the nude, and she could put her hair between her thighs, and pretend to masturbate with it — or perhaps she could really masturbate. Or you could have a sequence with two naked girls, caressing each other with their hair, or even pretending to whip each other with their long plaits.

'I only go to bed with girls who have fantastic hair. I enjoy their bodies, especially when they are naked, and like playing with their tits and bottoms, and stroking them between the legs. I don't really get turned on by their pubic hair — it's the soft hair of their head that I love.

'I went to bed with this fantastic blonde the other night, and she said that she really enjoyed it. I stroked and played with her body, and her breasts, which were very big, and sucked her nipples. I stroked her between the legs to get her really worked up, until she was all wet and runny down there. She was saying — "Put it in me! Put it in me!"

'Eventually I slid it in her, and started moving, while she was writhing about and sighing and really lapping it up. But although it feels nice to have your prick in a wet vagina, and have a woman carrying on like that with her enjoyment, it never makes me come doing it that way. I expect I could come, but it would take hours, and I've never tried it.

'In the end she had her orgasm, and her body went all shuddery, and she screamed out loud, all breathless like, as though something had got torn out of her.

'Then she was still, and lay there all quiet. Quickly I took my prick, and then turned her on her side. I moved up in the bed towards her head. She didn't ask me what I was doing, because she was too limp after coming. I find when they've come, you can do almost anything with a woman. Quickly I moved so that her head was resting on my thigh, and my prick was buried in the waves of her lovely hair. It's such a subtle, but sexy sensation, your erect prick, throbbing away, getting all intertwined in lovely hair.

'I held her head, and started slowly moving, my prick plunging in and out of the thick mass of her hair. She started to move, wondering what was going on, but I held her head so that she couldn't pull it away.

'And then it started to come, and I moved faster, my prick thrusting in and out of her hair, disappearing in the mass of it, and then appearing again.

'And then I came, holding her head in a vice-like grip, and it was my turn to gasp and make a noise. I felt myself jetting and pulsing, and despite her struggles I had the whole of my orgasm with my prick in her hair.

'When it was over her hair was all stuck up with my spunk, but she didn't mind all that much. I never tell a girl what I want — I always wait until she has come, and then just do it. Some of them get very angry, because of the mess, but this one just laughed.

'For me, coming into a woman's hair is the most fantastic feeling in the world — nothing else can touch it.'

Perhaps — but any person so compelled is obviously in the grip of a serious sexual perversion. In some ways hair fetishism is harmless, and the people who practise it ineffectual. But it does have undercurrents of sadism, and clearly those who are afflicted by it are existing only a short distance this side of mental illness.

We, who can admire, stroke, and generally enjoy the hair of a beautiful woman, should feel only sympathy towards those whose admiration does not stop there. Those who cannot just admire, but who have to possess. Those who do not have intercourse with the woman, but just her hair.

For they are in the grip of a compulsion so bizarre that ordinary people can only guess at the obscure pleasures of their strange aberration.