Spunkomatic66 wrote:Okay, but if you had no potential to warm up to the fetish at all, that never would have happened. You'd still be grossed out by it. So you did have some disposition to the fetish, it just never manifested until later in your life.
You don't get to choose your subconscious desires and I don't know why you're convinced that you were in control of when you decided to be aroused by various things. It's not like you woke up one day and thought to yourself, "you know what, I am going to be turned on by X from now on". That's not how sexuality works. You can try something new and find that you might like it, you can try something old again and find that you like it now, but you can't just choose to be sexually aroused by anything or to not be sexually aroused by anything.
I honestly don't understand why that bothers you, so maybe an explanation might help me understand where you're coming from, but it seems like fairly basic logic to me. Nobody has ever in the history of the human race been able to decide on their own what they get wet over. Not even when you factor in personal experience. Personal experience might contribute some, but that still doesn't make it a choice that people have conscious control over.
Conditioned Response through Exposure is not only a basic logic but well studied through men like Pavlov. It is not so simplistic as ringing a bell, but a person through exposure (which is what exploration can be) can change what they associate various practices, visuals and activities with. Conditioned Response is not agreed upon by all psychologists, and there is a lot of literature on Nature v Nurture, but ultimately any serious study of the extensive literature opens the subject up to the recognition that both environmental conditions and genetic predisposition are involved, sometimes more in favor of one, sometimes more in favor of another. Nature v Nurture is not some black and white, one-side or another perspective, and we are not merely the product of our inherited thought process or early foundations. If digestion itself can be affected through conditioning, so too can arousal.
It's not as simple as a bell, but maybe my intentional decades of personal exploration is not something I like other people discounting as "You were just predisposed to be that way." I sure didn't react well to the GLBTA in my community when I shifted from a 0 to a 2 during my college years through active exploration and self-exposure to homoerotic material/activity I found repulsive in my younger years. They didn't like it when I said "This was my choice" with pride in my voice, but I've found that other bisexuals like me weren't well received in the GLBTA generally. We don't suit their bottom line as activists well. Just like some gay people don't appreciate being told "It's a choice," I don't appreciate being told "it wasn't a choice." I know people who were born with homosexual urges. It was very much genetic to them. I wasn't born bi. I was born straight, and I openly explored sexuality in college through personal exposure, for personal reasons that are, quite frankly, none of your damned business. But it was my choice. Your subconscious is not hard-coded and hard-wired into your brain. We grew past that viewpoint with Freud's death. Even his students didn't believe that it was as hard-wired as he thought it was as a response.
You want it simply? I'm not a Determinist, and I'm proud of my conscious explorations in my 20s. I don't like being told this wasn't my choice. I never have. personal experience doesn't 'help some.' Personal experience can be drastically life-altering, especially if it is engaged intentionally, with assistance.
But at the beginning of 2017 it was almost 7,5 billion so I guess we're not far from 8 billion till the end of the year. 
