#and whether his 'hot cheerleader' thing was him being a creep or him being trans

[paellegere]

dean's sexuality is an overwhelming recurring theme throughout the show: his fetishes are prominent, he flaunts his sexuality and sexual behavior freely, he's a relentless flirt, and he has the most sexual encounters in the show. what i want to briefly consider here is how his sexuality and, more importantly, his fetishes may symbolize a freudian eroticization of a fantasized domestic life, particularly in his fetishization of femininity.

so hear me out: dean subconsciously eroticizes his mundane desires because he can't externalize them in a safe or realistic way. the desires are, namely, a longing for a domestic, "apple pie" life, which is a desire that has been explored in the show multiple times. dean routinely covets domesticity, through his desire to raise a child (ben and lisa subplot), the djinn fantasy (2.20), his "nesting" in the bunker (8.14), and his displacement of that desire onto sam (who is the primary subject of his erotic fixation in general and a subconscious extension of himself—if sam acquires a happy domestic life, dean can live vicariously through it).

he also routinely denies himself this domesticity because he's given up on getting out of the hunter life. he was raised in a survival environment and never was given a real opportunity to escape (even sam had to fight tooth and nail to get out, and we all know where that got him). the one time he had a chance to reject john and embrace normality he returned smiling because of sam (9.07). he's the one that vehemently secludes himself (and sam, like in 1.06) from society because connections are a liability. he leaves potential long-term relationships preemptively, always choosing hunting (and sam) over them before anything "real" can happen (1.13, 6.01, 6.21, also consider 8.19, perhaps more abstractly). he's so broken inside that he lacks any real desire at all (5.14). et cetera, et cetera. he denies himself his domestic desires to the point that he lacks desire at all—he's a broken shell of a man.

so the violent repression of the id causes the secret desire to leak out through erotic fantasy, a playground of fiction that is used by, well, most if not all people to explore desire in a safe and controlled medium (see: how many women have rape fantasies, for example—the sexual fantasy is a constructed world for safe exploration of certain desires, often abstracted through erotic symbols).

dean is so repressed as an individual, likely by external pressure to conform and control himself via john, that dean could subconsciously transform his secret desire for domesticity, into an erotic fantasy. he displaces those unacceptable desires from the unattainable mundane onto the safer erotic and they eventually distort into fetishes. the fetishes themselves are then abstractions of the things he covets but can't obtain.

and i want to focus specifically on his desire for domesticity and make an argument for feminization as a fetish (thank you rhonda hurley for your contributions to society) and how that relates back to that base desire.

there are several episodes in the show which suggest that dean fetishizes femininity itself, or rather feminization as it pertains to him (4.07, 5.04, also consider 10.05 in a more abstract sense). in 4.07, dean openly fantasizes about living in a "hot cheerleader's" body (youthfully feminine). in 5.04, dean recounts the time rhonda hurley forced him into her pink, satiny panties, saying that he liked it. 10.05 is a meta episode which additionally posits a plotline where dean becomes a woman through supernatural means, suggesting that fans are invited to draw a connection between dean and feminization. (these are the episodes i can pull off the top of my head; it's probably not comprehensive but i can't remember others atm)

so let's consider this feminization kink: we have dean fantasizing about femininity, womanhood, and especially girlhood, which he notoriously eroticizes (again in 4.07 and also in 4.13 and 10.13, to name specific references, but there are so many examples of this) in relation to himself, specifically. you can layer this in the way his deeper desires are of domesticity, and the home is traditionally (importantly) the domain of the woman. if dean would come to associate domesticity with femininity, then he would subconsciously connect his desire for domesticity with a desire for femininity. therefore, this feminization kink can represent an eroticization of his own (perceived) femininity. dean craves domesticity, but the domestic can only be achieved through womanhood, and therefore his desire for the domestic manifests through femininity, and thus feminization.

this "perceived femininity" of the domestic is important because of how dean conceptualizes the world largely through his consumption of media (see also: his "wild west fetish" via 6.18), which enforces gender roles and the relegating of the woman to the domestic sphere. this additionally aligns with dean's lived experiences: he had a domestic life while mary was alive, and when mary died the domesticity died with her. his only personal experiences with a settled home life are inexorably tied to the presence of femininity (his other excursion is when he lives with lisa, strengthening this association), and the absence of it and subsequent domination of john (the masculine) also took with it that domestic life.

and then you could even go so far as to make the argument that his eroticization of girlhood and his fetish for barely legal girls is a symbol of the domestic life he didn't get to live himself. it can represent a longing for youth in an environment that was inaccessible to him, a stability and domesticity walled off by womanhood. his youth was masculine, and his desire is for the feminine. it would stand to reason that when he yearns for an idealized youth, it would be through the lens of the symbolically feminine. and so this desire manifests through a fetishization of youth (girlhood) and his subsequent creep behavior. it all comes back to the life dean didn't get to live, eroticized and represented through a sexual fantasy born of rigidly enforced gender roles and the loss of femininity in his home life.

#supernatural #dean winchester #this is so long. i know no one is going to read it #but that's okay i'll survive #i've been thinking about this since before i saw a poll going around about 4.07 #and whether his 'hot cheerleader' thing was him being a creep or him being trans #and then i got to thinking about it again because i saw the poll. creep is much closer to my answer but this is my full response to it #i just think he is a mess of psychosexual fixations on everything he wants but can't have #and it manifests in the weirdest and creepiest behavior imaginable #so thanks for coming to my ted talk i guess #.txt #dean #the winchester gospel #spn posting