“A US man with a hankering for women’s hosiery has been caught stealing socks again, despite being sent to prison three times already for the bizarre fetish. James Dowdy, 36, of St Louis, Illinois, was charged with burglary after allegedly stealing a pair of women’s socks from the laundry of a house. Dowdy has gained a bizarre infamy for stealing woman’s socks and has served several lengthy prison terms for the crime since 1993. A man called police after seeing a burglar crawl out of his basement early on Monday, the Belleville News Democrat online reported. Police tracked the offender to Dowdy’s home where they allegedly found the victim’s socks. In 2004, Dowdy was jailed for seven years after he pleaded guilty to walking into a neighbour’s home and taking her socks. Seven years earlier, he was sentenced to six years for breaking into another woman’s home and stealing her socks. In 1993, Dowdy received a three-year-prison sentence for attempted burglary after police caught him with a bag of stolen socks… His mother, Linda Dowdy, told the Associated Press her son developed his fetish when he clung to a pair of her socks as a keepsake when he was forced to live with his father for a year as a child. ‘He cries to me all the time, ‘mum, I hate myself. I’d rather be dead than live like this’,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t hurt anybody, and he never takes anything of value. He takes nothing but socks.’ Police Captain Don Sax (yes, really) said that while Dowdy is ‘obviously a guy with a problem,’ authorities had run out of patience. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t personally have any sympathy for him any more,’ Capt Sax said. ‘He’s been doing this long enough, he’s been out of jail plenty long enough, that he could have easily gone out and sought help for whatever problem he has.’” — News.com (Australia)

Relatively speaking, a sock fetish — sockophilia? — is harmless enough. There is even a “sockophile” photo set on Flickr. There are some who use “sock fetish” as a cover for pedophilia, but Mr. Dowdy does not seem to be of their ilk. He has not been accused of anything worse than burgling homes for socks. True, he should be duly punished for breaking and entering. Regardless of whether he’s looking for socks or for precious jewels, you wouldn’t want to find him — here is a picture — creeping around in your bedroom. But still, it’s hard to fathom that he has served 13 years in prison for stealing twenty or thirty or fifty dollars worth of hosiery.

In his 1927 paper on fetishism, Freud argued that men develop foot fetishes when they attempt to look up their mothers’ skirts in search of a (missing) penis. “Thus the foot or shoe owes its attraction as a fetish, or part of it, to the circumstance that the inquisitive boy used to peer up the woman’s legs towards her genitals.” The result is that the foot somehow gets mixed up with sex, and vice versa. Is that the case with Mr. Dowdy? If his mother is correct about the origin of his fetish, it would seem to have less to do with her (missing) penis than with her being missing altogether at a critical period in his life. In that sense, you have to wonder if his fetish is even sexual in nature. Was he getting off on all these stolen socks? Or was he simply retaining an infantile behavior, like an adult who sucks his thumb? For that matter, does he even have a foot fetish? Or is it strictly a sock fetish? There’s a big difference, since you can lick a foot but you can’t collect feet the way you can socks…

In the final analysis, how a fetish gets started is not always discernible. “I do not maintain,” Freud also wrote, “that it is always possible to ascertain the determination of every fetish.” But if the origin of a fetish may often be inscrutable, what about the management of a fetish? Clearly lots of people knew about Mr. Dowdy’s compulsive behavior. He even discussed it with his mother. How come no one could help keep him from relapsing? Was he incorrigible, like habitual drug addicts? It half makes you wonder if there’s something he enjoys about jail — perhaps he’s there now, bartering cigarettes for the socks of fellow inmates.

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