For a long time I wasn’t sure whether I was a fetishist or a partialist. This is an important distinction. A partialist is someone who likes, who is attracted to a nice pair of feet or shoes; he enjoys them and they add to his sexual pleasure, but they are not necessary for that pleasure, whereas a true fetishist needs the shoes or feet in order to derive any sexual pleasure at all. The presence of the fetish object is a necessary precondition before sexual activity can even take place.
Personally I’m quite sure that I could make love to a woman who had ordinary or even unattractive feet, or to a woman who was wearing dreary or ugly shoes (so in that sense it might be argued that I’m not a true fetishist at all); but why should I? The bottom line is I really don’t think I could be bothered to make love to a woman whose feet I didn’t find attractive. There are enough pairs of attractive feet and shoes in the world that you simply don’t need to force yourself to make love to someone who doesn’t possess them.
I didn’t always feel this way. I wasn’t always like this. It has all been slide and slippage, a slow ascent or descent, I’m not sure which, on some sexual escalator, or a rudderless drift downstream over treacherous waters, a path of least resistance, not that I would ever have wanted to resist.
I was once more or less orthodox in my relations with women. I went out on dates. I went to parties. I met women in the course of my work and my social life. I talked to them, went out with them, enjoyed their company, went to bed with them, had fun sometimes, was serious about them sometimes. It was OK, but it was rarely more than OK. It was usually not quite right. I never found exactly what I was looking for, because for a long time I didn’t know what I was looking for, and even when I did know there was a time when I wasn’t prepared to admit it.
I had always known that I was attracted to women who had good feet. I knew I liked women who wore good shoes. I knew I liked them a lot, a lot more than I liked women who didn’t have good feet, who didn’t wear good shoes. But I tried to pretend that feet and shoes weren’t my only interests. And to some extent that wasn’t entirely a pretence. I liked women with good breasts and good legs and good minds too. These things were attractive and appealing. I could even see that they were desirable, but they were never necessary. And if anyone had asked me how I felt about feet and shoes I would have said I felt fine about them. I would have been prepared to admit to being a partialist, even though a part of me always wanted to admit to something more.
There was no road to Damascus experience about it, no crucial moment, no trauma. I simply decided to concentrate and focus. I gradually realized I’d had enough of all that relationship nonsense. I knew I couldn’t go on the way I had been, seeing women who didn’t quite hit the spot, so I decided to take the plunge. I decided to go to hell in a shoe box. I would stop pretending. I would stop being a partialist. I’d go the whole hog and throw myself into proper foot and shoe fetishism. I would stop looking for a woman with a good personality or a good complexion. I would not be averse to these things, but they would be only peripheral pleasures. Feet were what really mattered.
You might think that in doing this I had abandoned a part of my humanity, that being a fetishist involved some kind of demeaning bondage. Wrong. What I felt I had abandoned was all the dead wood, the window dressing. I was getting down to essentials, and for me it was a supreme liberation. When I met a woman, a prospective sexual partner, there would be no more conversations about what films we’d seen, what music we liked, what hopes and plans we had for the future, where we liked to spend our holidays. There would be no more worries about where the relationship was ‘going’. All I needed was a woman with a great pair of feet. She didn’t even need to have great shoes. I’d be only too happy to provide those for her. It seemed to me that my decision, my admission, would make life much easier for all concerned.
I continued to lead what I considered to be a normal life, the only difference being that I now knew what I wanted. I looked unashamedly at women and their feet. I started to amass material for my archive. And every so often I’d do something a little bit eccentric. I’d hang around outside women’s shoe shops, looking at the shoes in the window and looking through into the store at the women putting shoes on and taking them off. And once in a while I’d spot a great-looking pair of feet walking along the street and I’d follow them for a couple of miles. And just once in a while I’d go out on the streets with a clipboard and ask women questions about their feet and shoes.
The problem remained, however, that, even given my concentration on finding the one thing I needed, tracking down a woman who possessed a pair of feet that measured up to the erotic model in my head was always going to be extremely difficult. There were a number of near misses, a number of occasions when I made do with feet that were less than my ideal, that were good but not great. But I never got depressed, and I never doubted that sooner or later I would find what I was looking for. It had been a long hard search that had brought me to Catherine, but that only added to my satisfaction, to my determination not to lose her.
I let two whole days pass before I telephoned her, a feat that required considerable restraint, self-discipline and self-denial, not resources that I normally have in any abundance. Even when I decided it was time to phone I had no confidence that it would be easy to make contact with her again. She did not look like the sort of woman who sat by her phone waiting for it to ring. But I called and she was there and she answered.
‘I wondered if and when you’d call,’ she said.
‘Did you want me to?’
‘I don’t know.’
That was not the answer I was looking for. I wanted her to know. I wanted her to say that she’d been waiting impatiently, counting the hours, willing me to call. I knew that was too much to expect, but even so I had hoped for more warmth in her voice, more of an indication that she was glad to hear from me.
‘So, how are you?’ I asked.
‘I’m fine, I guess.’
‘And how are those feet of yours?’
A pause before she said, ‘I guess they’re fine too.’
There was a hint of amusement in her voice. I hoped that was a good sign. I hoped it didn’t mean that she found my enquiry absurd.
‘Don’t they need stroking?’ I asked. ‘Or massaging or kissing or fondling?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘Don’t you?’
‘No. I really don’t.’
‘I could come over and do all that for you now,’ I said, trying to make it sound like a generous and harmless offer, trying not to sound too adolescently eager.
‘I know you could,’ she replied.
‘I want to.’
‘I expect you do. But I’m not sure.’
There was no point in pressing too hard, in scaring her off. I waited and said nothing, hoping that would force her to speak. The silence that followed was confusing and uncommitted. I knew she didn’t want to give me a straight answer, that she didn’t simply want to say yes, but I was encouraged by the fact that she said nothing at all, since that meant at least she wasn’t saying no.
‘I just don’t know,’ was what she finally said.
‘OK then, just meet me for a drink.’
I thought a drink sounded uncomplicated enough, but she still wouldn’t say yes. Another oblique silence ensued and I was determined not to break it.
At last she was forced to say something. She said, ‘Look, I try to live in the real world. It’s not always easy but I’m not dumb. I’m not looking for true love. I know what it’s like out there. I know some relationships are about sex and nothing else. That’s OK. I’ve had relationships like that, they’re fine, they make sense to me. I like the excitement. I like men who are different, unusual. I just wonder if maybe you’re a little too unusual for me.’
This was difficult to deal with. If I said I wasn’t unusual at all, which was how I felt about myself, then that was apparently no recommendation. However, if I insisted that I really was wil
dly unusual, then I was in danger of confirming her fears.
Lamely I said, ‘The more you get to know me, the less unusual I’ll seem.’
‘I don’t know that I want to get to know you.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s too complicated.’
‘If getting to know me is too complicated then don’t get to know me. Just meet me. Just have a drink. Just have sex.’
She laughed. ‘I’m not trying to be difficult,’ she said, and I could almost believe her. ‘But I think I have a problem. When you were here the other morning, in the hall just before you left, when you knelt at my feet and kissed them, when I felt your tongue on my skin, your saliva on my toes, it felt very strange indeed. It felt crazy and stupid and absurd. And it also felt horny as hell.’
I kept silent but I knew that something had changed, that she had said something important, something she had perhaps not wanted to say. She had made a confession.
‘I’ve been thinking about it ever since,’ she added. ‘I’ve been masturbating about it ever since.’
‘So what are you telling me?’
‘I don’t know. I guess I’m telling you, OK, I’ll meet you for a drink.’
We met in a dark, subterranean wine bar. There were gnarled candles in bottles, sawdust on the floor, pieces of archaic wine-making equipment mounted on the hessian walls. It was hot, dark and crowded, and the noise of other people’s conversation was intrusive. We sat in a brick arch, at a small, unstable circular table, and got quietly drunk, and we talked in a way that didn’t threaten us with the dangers of getting to know each other too well. We found each other easy enough to talk to, but the conversation was all subtext, the real exchange of language was going on below the level of the table.
Catherine was wearing the Maud Frizon, open-backed, suede court shoes. The heels were slender and tapered and there was one black strip of suede that ran across the top of the foot. From time to time I reached down and held her feet, ran my finger slowly along the lines where flesh and suede met. In return she occasionally ran her foot up the inside of my thigh to my genitals where she applied a firm but teasing pressure with the sole of her shoe. The pleasure was honeyed and restricted and tense, and I was gradually losing control. The next time her right foot came within reach I closed my hand round the black suede shoe and pulled it off. I stroked the ball of Catherine’s foot and she smiled in feline pleasure, but after a moment or two I stopped, and she was surprised to see me slip the shoe into my pocket and get up from the table. I crossed the wine bar purposefully, performing body swerves around the backs of chairs and gaggles of drinkers, and when I was clear I entered the toilets, but I was not gone long. When I returned, I handed the shoe back to Catherine. I did it quite openly across the table and there was a possibility that the people around us might have seen me do it.
Perplexed, she took the shoe from me and looked inside. She could see that it was wet. A long, thick, lacy trail of semen ran down the slope of the leather inner sole. In a cubicle in the toilet I had masturbated into her shoe. She stared at the strange, indecent juxtaposition of suede, leather lining and bodily fluid. She looked at me, and it was a look I could not wholly interpret. It would have been easy to read anger and distaste into her gaze, but there was also excitement and pleasure. She shook her head, showed disbelief, at me, and the situation and at herself. She pulled a sharp snort of breath in through her nostrils, and then she reached down and slid her foot into the shoe again.
I watched her face, imagining the sensations she must be experiencing; the warm, dense semen pressed beneath her heel, on her sole, spreading, seeping into the crevices between her toes, creating a thin adhesion. And then I saw her slide a hand under her dress and I watched as she touched herself for the briefest moment before her features tightened and her eyes looked away to signal a brief, fierce orgasm.
Almost immediately she regained her composure, straightened herself and said, ‘I’m not sure that I know what the fuck I’m doing here.’
I said, ‘It looked like you were having a very good time.’
That made no impression. Ignoring me, she continued, ‘I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing letting you masturbate into my shoe, playing with myself in public. I don’t know what this is all about.’
‘I could try to explain,’ I said.
‘Could you? I’m not sure that you could.’
‘I could try.’
So we ordered another drink and I tried.
Six
I have never been much of a student, certainly never much of a scholar. The world of learning, of libraries and texts, of specialized knowledge, of references and cross-references, of bibliographies and databases, has in general meant very little to me. The world of Theory means even less. Yet, partly through force of circumstances, partly through choice, I have become a scholar of my own condition. I have read the required texts. I have tried to cover the material. I have annotated. I have set up my archive. (Of which, more later.) I have tried to keep up to date. I have become an authority, if not a wholly reliable one. Above all, I have tried to understand myself.
I believe it was Krafft-Ebing who first used the term fetishism in the sense that we understand it today. His Psychopathia Sexualis is full of stories about foot and shoe fetishism and I have read them with some pleasure; stories of men forced to keep pairs of boots hidden in bed so they can fondle them and become aroused enough to get an erection with their wives, stories of men who take chickens along to their favourite prostitutes and get them to trample the birds to death in their high-heeled boots.
Krafft-Ebing is always a good read, but unfortunately he was a forensic psychologist, so he only ever became involved when a crime was committed. He may well have come across healthy, well-adjusted fetishists who led sane, normal lives, but they weren’t part of his work and they didn’t really interest him. What, I wonder, would he have made of me? Of course, I like to think he would have made nothing at all. He would have looked at me, looked at my behaviour and seen no problem. Freud, however, might have seen it very differently.
Freud, of course, has a theory about fetishism and it’s a cracker. He says that the young male child believes that everyone, male and female, has a penis, just like him. That sounds fair enough. How would he know any different? But, says Freud, a moment comes when he finally sees a naked woman, and straight away he spots that she doesn’t have a penis after all. The little boy is shocked and appalled. Someone seems to have lopped off the woman’s penis. And he realizes the same thing could happen to him. So, symbolically, he needs to provide her with a phallus, or at least a phallic substitute, a fetish object. In this traumatic moment he looks frantically around him, sees a pair of shoes lying on the floor or sees the woman’s naked feet, and thinks that’ll do nicely. A fetishist is born.
Can Freud really mean it? Can he really believe this explains anything? I mean, I fear castration as much as the next man but I don’t see how that results in a desire to attach penises to people who never had them in the first place. And I’m especially worried about the part that says the fetish object is something the patient saw at the same moment that he saw his first female genitals.
My guess is that a fair percentage of males must get their first glimpse of the female genitals either in a bedroom or a bathroom. I will admit that shoes may well be present in these places, and they’re conveniently situated, they are (arguably) more or less phallic shaped. But it’s easy to think of plenty of other things that would be present too; loofahs, bath taps, shower heads, bars of soap, all of which seem every bit as phallic as shoes, all of which would be equally good (or bad) phallic substitutes, and yet one doesn’t hear of too many soap or loofah fetishists.
Now, not even Freud’s worst enemies would say that he really thought this whole business through. But I think the clear implication of his ideas is that when I’m lusting after a woman’s foot, I’m actually lusting after a penis. As I have said before, I do like feet that are large, v
einy and rippled, that have an appearance that might, I suppose, be regarded as quasi-phallic. And it’s true that I sometimes suck a woman’s big toe in much the same way that some people suck a penis. But both these are imperfect analogies. The foot is only somewhat like a penis. Neither foot nor big toe is erectile, neither is a similar size or shape to an actual penis, neither is capable of ejaculation.
More to the point, what tells me that Freud didn’t get it quite right is the fact that when I’m fondling or kissing a foot, I have no desire to be fondling a penis. And if, by some chance, I was presented with a penis, and if I sucked it, this would not be at all the same thing as sucking a woman’s foot. It would not be nearly so pleasurable. It would not satisfy any of my sexual desires. Freud thinks the foot may be a substitute for the penis, but I am here to tell him that the penis is no substitute for the foot.
Another, equally unconvincing theory is that fetishism is all about weaning. The baby is torn unwillingly from the breast. Denied what he wants, the baby is set down on the floor, down where the shoes and feet are. He looks about him for a substitute, and lo and behold he discovers feet. I find this an ingenious theory but I’m even less inclined to believe it than I am Freud. The foot and shoe seem even less convincing as a surrogate breast than they do as a surrogate penis.
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