Elle Molique, writing at the Kansas City Tribune, offers up this picturesque definition of the “little-known” dressing room fetish.

Not long ago I interviewed some retail clerks for a documentary about people who deal with the public on the job. One woman who worked at the cosmetics counter of a high-end department store told of a man who used to eat the pressed powder right out of the compacts. (I wonder what shade goes best with stomach contents…) Another ate lipstick. One more told of people who mistook a remote corner of the store for a restroom and left a steaming brown present. Then there were the perverts. These guys would hide in the rooms, listening to all the women self-deprecating in the harshly-lit mirrors who were sometimes talking to themselves, sometimes two in a room… If a guy were lucky, he’d find a partitioned area with merchandise still in it, surrounded by hurriedly discarded cloth that had just recently been next to a woman’s naked body. He could imagine all the half naked women who had been in this very room, examining themselves for flaws, struggling to see if maybe a skirt would be better with this shirt, so they must take off the prospective pants and stand there in the mirror with no bottoms contemplating their exoskeletons. Maybe he could even see their nude calves in that coveted rectangle of space under the door. This was just too much to take, amid the warm cloth…and the chatter…release. There is nothing romantic about the aftermath. Some underpaid clerk has to go in and clean up the remains of the day, according to my sources, without even the benefit of a HAZMAT suit. Was this in the job description?! You though you were just supposed to ring up purchases and send people off with a smile and less of their money. No way are you responsible for post-porn offerings on a size twelve camisole, no way! Maybe it’s the thrill of getting caught. Or a more auditory version of the Peeping Tom. Regardless, I look at a pile of clothes in a dressing cubicle like there is a snake in it.

What makes the piece especially interesting is that Molique, the author of an erotic tale or two, sees the fetish from several vantage points. She understands the fetishist’s excitement at the chemise or skirt that has acquired a talismanic power by rubbing against a naked body. She understands the women in the dressing rooms, who are engaged in private debates about their body images and don’t realize that perverts are staring at their ankles and toes. Finally, she understands the folks whose job it is to mop up the mess. Really, what do stores do with cum-stained clothing? Throw it out? Put it on the sales rack?

As for the dressing-room fetish itself, it’s hardly novel. If there is a paucity of information about it online, the reason is probably that this fetish is, relatively speaking, kid stuff, a consumerist variant of voyeurism. It is easy to satisfy (dressing rooms are everywhere) and presents a low risk of apprehension. (Can you see the store detective chasing you down in the parking lot with a cummy pinafore? … “Excuse me, sir, is this yours? Can we take you downtown for a DNA match?”) The fetish only starts to get illegal when it edges over into video voyeurism or pedophilia — and if you google those, you’ll see that plenty of fetish activity occurs in dressing rooms.

Meanwhile, how about that guy who likes to eat the pressed powder from compacts? Now that’s an interesting fetish. Googling it brings up little except the early John Waters film Eat Your Makeup, in which women are obliged to eat makeup and “model themselves to death.” Molique mentions that a “dressing room fetish” doesn’t even have a proper name, but doubtless that is because the fetish disappears into others — voyeurism and so on. But how about a makeup-eating fetish? That’s a kink with no name, so let’s give it one: cosmeticophagia, from the Greek kosmetikos (cosmetics) and -phagia (eating, swallowing, as in coprophagia). You heard it here first.

VideoBox

It's like the iTunes Music Store for Porn. Download unlimited high-quality video for only $9.95/month.