Watch fetishes are officially a “thing”. Here’s a list of the most common (and kinky)

Luke Benedictus

When you think about it, this is all thuddingly inevitable. After all, if you can imagine a kink, the chances are that it not only exists, but there are already multiple live web-cams devoted to servicing it in eye-popping detail. And we’re not here to judge. As long as it’s safe and consensual and so on and so forth, well, go ahead and enjoy whatever floats your slightly depraved boat. But it turns out that the phrase “watch porn” – usually taken to refer to a fascination with expensive watches – is taken more literally by some. Yes, watch fetishes are officially a thing (and FYI the safe word is “chronograph”…).

Given that Time+Tide’s editorial remit is to cover watch culture in all its weird and wonderful forms, we naturally felt duty-bound to investigate. It transpires, there are a bunch of websites that cater to this specifc penchant. One of the biggest, that’s largely NSFW, is watchgirlsforum.net where aficionados of this sort of stuff can buy video clips of scantily clad women wearing watches getting up to all sorts. Interestingly, however, the site also has a forum in which community members discuss their rather niche “interests”.

Reading a few posts, you start to wonder if a boggle-eyed fascination with women’s wrists isn’t so odd when one thinks that foot fetishes, for example, are relatively well-documented. But in one illuminating thread on watchgirlsforum, community members speculate on the origin of where their kink began.

Dante33 writes: One of my earliest memories is sitting in kindergarten in my caregivers lap while she read a story and touching her watch. I can probably recall every single watch worn by teachers and classmates since 1st grade. They just always caught my attention.

Another poster nodnerb also traces his interest to a formative experience. I can clearly remember mine staring when I was, round about 8 – 10yrs old. I remember a friend’s birthday party I went to, we were swimming and this girl tried to keep me back in the pool, as I tried to struggle to get out of the pool. She was wearing this fairly mid-size white leather/plastic analogue watch. I think it was been held back by her not letting me out the pool, while I struggle to move, and seeing the watch on her. Other experiences, my school teacher wearing a large watch, and she would bend over me while looking at my work. And now, I find femdom with large steel watches a massive turn-on, but yet so rare to find on the net.

The forum splits into various sub-sections that explore the audience’s more specific watch-related whims. From here, we learn that watch fetishes branch off into several main avenues.

Inside wrist

One of the more peculiar obsessions is towards women who wear their watch inside the wrist, so the dial is flipped inwards not outwards. Apparently this is unbearably sexy for some people. In fact, there’s an entire thread devoted to celebrities in films wearing watches in this way from Sandra Bullock in Speed to Maggie Gyllenhaal in Sherrybaby.

To the uninitiated this seems both baffling and curiously innocent – the clip above from a popcorn advertisement is revered as an absolute classic of the genre. Trying to fathom the appeal is a bit of a head-scratcher, but you’d assume it’s largely voyeuristic. Perhaps the inside watch thrill is all about the allure of the forbidden fruit, catching a tantalising peek of the object of your desire that’s largely concealed from public view.

Big watch, little wrists

Another popular sub-genre seems to be women wearing oversized, masculine watches. This website seems particularly fond of this persuasion. “This girl likes BIG watches on her small wrists!” it exclaims with barely contained excitement while showing images to document exactly this.

The frisson here seems to lie in the contrast between the bulky hardware and the woman’s slender wrists that accentuate her willowy femininity. This is an area where size definitely matters

Horological cross-dressing

Conversely, the opposite also holds sway. Watch diameters may be shrinking back to more classical dimensions, but some men apparently hanker for more. Horological cross-dressing is a definite phenomenon as the one poster admits on watchgirlsforum.net: “Ever since I was probably about 13 or 14 (I’m 24 now), I’ve always loved trying on women’s watches. In the past few years I’ve even been able to even compliment strangers on their watch and sometimes have even tried theirs on!”

What’s at the bottom of this urge?. The School of Life did an interesting article here on “the psychology of cross dressing”. They admit that while it might seem laughable or bizarre on the surface: “Cross-dressing is grounded in a highly logical and universal desire: the wish to be, for a time, the gender one admires, is excited by – and perhaps loves. Dressing like a woman is merely a dramatic, yet essentially reasonable, way of getting closer to the experiences of the sex one is profoundly curious about – and yet has been (somewhat arbitrarily) barred from.”

The way you wear it

Given how watches involve straps and buckles, predictably there’s also a faint whiff of bondage about some of this stuff. The tightness of the way a watch is worn is very much a personal preference. The majority of an admittedly tiny sample group on watchgirlsforum.net prefer to seeing a woman wearing her watch tightly fastened. But some prefer a loosely fitted watch that slides about the wrist to dangle provocatively to and fro.

So what to make of the existence of watch fetishes? All things considered,  they’re perhaps not particularly surprising given the galactic range of sexual peccadilloes that exist. In fact, given the more outré material that is now accessible at the click of a mouse, a watch fetish seems rather vanilla. Unless, of course, it involves grandfather clocks.