Second Skin by Anastasiia Fedorova

A taboo-bursting, personal and cultural tour through different sexual fetishes that asks: Do we have the courage to look at our desires directly, and express them unapologetically?

The smell of leather. The flash of a harness. The snap of a latex glove. Welcome to the radical, vibrant world of sexual fetishists.

In twenty-first-century commodity culture, we are all intimately involved with objects: we covet a Birkin bag; we keep sneakers box-fresh. We are all, in a sense, all fetishists. But occasionally this desire spills into something more subversive. Second Skin offers a tour through the materials, objects, and power dynamics commonly fetishised, unpacking their histories, their expressive potential, and the communities they give rise to. Drawing from her encounters with fellow fetishists and kinksters, it is also the story of Anastasiia Fedorova’s own journey of what it means to come to terms with one’s sexuality.

Moving between memoir, cultural criticism, reportage, erotic writing, and social history, Second Skin is a researched and topical book that encourages us to rethink how we see not only our own desires, but the world that creates them.