Vampirism and Blood Fetishes

Very often I see topics about fetishes, questions about if vampirism is a blood fetish, or accusations from people primarily outside of the real vampire community that vampires are simply blood fetishists.

The automatic reaction from the community is to deny any connection with the fetish world and vehemently reject any possible connection with vampirism to fetishism, but rarely is the issue considered in much detail.

First, definitions. Probably one of the better definition sets I've seen for the term fetish is as follows:

1. something nonsexual, such as an object or a part of the body which arouses sexual desire or is necessary for one to reach full sexual satisfaction.

2. something which is believed to possess, contain, or cause spiritual or magical powers; an amulet or a talisman.

3. an irrational, or abnormal, fixation or preoccupation.
[Source: http://www.allwords.com/word-fetish.html]

Now, societally speaking, definition #1 is the one most commonly (to the point of being almost exclusively) used for the word fetish anymore. Using that definition, there is a huge difference between vampirism and blood fetishism--vampirism is the drinking of blood (or other substance) or absorbing psychic or metaphysical energy/prana/chi with the belief that it is needed to maintain one's physical, psychological, and/or metaphysical well-being. Blood fetishism would be drinking blood for sexual gratification.

However...if we adopt definition #2, the belief that blood or other bodily fluids (or metaphysical energy, even, though fetishes are usually of physical items) contain spiritual or magical powers, then vampirism would very squarely fit into the category of a fetish.

And, of course, using the 3rd definition, most vampires would say they are quite preoccupied or fixated on feeding, and thus it would still qualify as a fetish.

Finally, there comes the bit about community cross-over. While it's often shied away from in the vampire community as a discussion topic, though is fairly well known and realized, a healthy portion of the community crosses over into other communities, including the BDSM/kink communities and fetish communities. As such, there are a number of people in the community who, while perhaps not overly vocally due to the stigma against the term fetish being used in the vampire community, would identify themselves both as real vampires and as blood fetishists. When identifying that way, most are still probably using the first of the definitions, and maintain that there is a difference between their vampirism and their self-described label as a fetishist--namely that they need the blood/energy for vampiric reasons, but they also find gratification in bloodplay.

It's all in the definitions. For the purpose of mainstream society, definition #1 is used, and vampires are not typically fetishists.