Having published what he saw, Meshberger, like Raymond Dart after finding the Taung Child and Gregor Mendel after delivering his report on his garden, waited for someone else to look at the Michelangelo panels and say, “I see what he saw.” He was lucky. It had taken Dart and Mendel half a century each to win the approval of their peers. Meshberger made it in twenty. In May 2010, after two decades of back and forth, yes and no, among art historians and doctors, Johns Hopkins neuroscientists Ian Suk and Rafael Tamargo published a piece in the scientific journal Neurosurgery saying they, too, had seen an image of the brain, brainstem, and spinal cord running up God’s chest and throat in another Sistine panel, The Separation of Light from Darkness.
So, to summarize, history and the various books of the Bible tell us that the human foot (and its antecedent, the invisible foot of God) is a symbol of authority, dominance, subservience, humility, beauty, and bodily functions.
Who would not relish such a body part?
Objects of desire
Unlike our pets, who love us for our inner beauty and the fact that we feed them every day, human beings often have preferences in body parts that dictate who we find attractive and therefore lovable. Women tend to focus on the whole picture (“He’s tall” rather than “He’s got long legs”). Men are more likely to aim for specific areas like breasts or legs or hair, the last a favorite of poets like Oscar Wilde (Requiescat, Serenade, In the Gold Room), who seems particularly taken with the golden variety, as was Dante Gabriel Rosetti describing Adam’s first wife, Lilith, “whose enchanted hair was the first gold” (Body’s Beauty), and James Joyce with his simple, “Lean out of the window, Goldenhair” (Golden Hair). Black is also beautiful: Byron celebrates the “raven tresses” of that woman who “walks in beauty like the night”; Charles Baudelaire, the “Cheveux bleus, pavillon de ténèbres tendues” (“Blue-black hair, a pavilion hung with shadows”) in Fleurs du Mal, and Alfred Noyes, the long black hair of Bess, “the landlord’s black-eyed daughter” in his romantic poem “The Highwayman.”
No wonder some cultures insist that a woman cover her head.
There is no such direct command in the Old Testament, although Isaiah 47:2 does say that the “virgin daughter of Babylon” (that is, the Babylonian empire in the persona of a queen) will be shamed by uncovering her hair. The New Testament seems to offer conflicting advice. First Corinthians 11:5-6 says that “every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoreth her head” (two verses earlier, her husband is designated as her head, Christ as the head of every man, and God as the head of Christ), yet a few lines later at First Corinthians 11:15, we are told that a woman’s long hair is itself a “covering.”
Hair covered or not, some gentlemen do prefer blondes, and some women do opt, like Edna St. Vincent Millay, for the “brown hair that grows around [his] brow and cheek,” but generally we love whom we love, sometimes for and sometimes despite their physical appearance.
Unless something interferes.
A fetish (from the Portuguese feitiço meaning charm or magic) is an object imbued with magical power like a rabbit’s foot that conveys luck or a religious medal that protects against evil. French psychologist Alfred Binet (1857–1911) was the first person to use the terms sexual- and erotic fetishism to describe arousal triggered by a specific body part rather than by a whole person, or by ritualized behavior or costumes such as those gently pornographic scenarios featuring girls dressed in nurses’ uniforms playing a grownup version of Doctor. The problem, if it is a problem, appears to affect many more men than women, although John Bancroft, Director of The Kinsey Institute from 1995 to 2004, a member of the International Academy of Sex Research, and author of Human Sexuality and Its Problems, suggests that the gender difference may be due at least in part simply to the fact that it is easier to identify male reactions to sexual stimuli via the visible erection.
Either way, in 2007, when five researchers from Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, the Group for Interdisciplinary Cultural Research at Stockholm University, the Zoology Institution in Stockholm, and the Department of Experimental Medicine at L’Aquila University (Italy) pooled their resources to see what sexual fetishes are most popular and with whom, you could say they were looking for an answer to the question Freud never asked: “What does a man want?”
They began by compiling a list of potential volunteer subjects, in this case by collecting a list of 2,938 English language online Yahoo! discussion groups whose name or description included the word fetish. After eliminating groups with non-sexual fetishes such as rock bands, they had 381 sites that fit their basic criterion: People “clearly identifiable as discussing a sexual topic.” As for the inevitable questions about the reliability of a project using the Internet as a source when seeking volunteers, they concluded that “[s]ampling biases in Internet studies are often attributed to the higher socio-economical and educational status of Internet users. These, however, are no longer an elite in many countries, and it is estimated that 60% of USA citizens are Internet users. Although it is difficult to ascertain whether the putative 1,500,000 Yahoo! groups subscribers here surveyed represent the general population, it should be acknowledged that most of the research on atypical sexual behavior is based on data sources that are, in all likelihood, even less representative.”
With a final list in hand, the Bologna researchers asked people to pick their pleasure, that is, to choose from the following list the body parts and features they found sexually arousing: feet and toes, body fluids, body size, hair, muscles, decorations such as tattoos, genitals, belly/navel, ethnicity, breasts, legs and buttocks, mouth and lips and teeth, body hair, finger- and toenails, nose, ears, neck, and a seriously drekological candidate, body odor.
The runaway winner, no prompting required, was feet and toes which racked up 44,722 votes, more than five times as many as the next most popular item, body fluids, a category that includes blood, testimony to the sexual power and popularity of vampire tales from Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005).2 Feet and toes were five times as popular as body size, which came in third; nearly seven times as popular as the hair on your head, which came in fourth; and eight times as popular as muscles, a sort of subdivision of body size, which was in fifth place. The surprises were the relatively unexciting genitals at number seven and breasts at number ten, followed by legs and buttocks at number eleven. Body odor was dead last at number eighteen, either because very few people wanted to admit an attraction or because it may be one of the things that makes feet important or because, as noted earlier, the genes in the human VNO receptors really are pretty much useless when it comes to recognizing pheromones.
As expected, most of the respondents in the Bologna study were male, but not as expected, most of them also chose feet and toes. The psychiatric rationale for this is classic Freud: Feet and toes resemble the penis, thus capturing male attention based on the universal and never-forgotten childhood fear of castration. But once again, you can go too far with such analysis—unless the place to which you plan to go is not the human psyche, but the human brain.
Vilayanur Ramachandran is the Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition and Distinguished Professor with the Psychology Department and Neurosciences Program at the University of California, San Diego, and Adjunct Professor of Biology at the Salk Institute. Where Freud saw penises in the relationship between sex and the human foot, Ramachandran sees synapses, connections in the body’s primary locus of erotic response, the brain.
The Sensory Homunculus3 is a drawing in which the size of various parts of your body are shown larger or smaller depending on the relative distribution of sensory nerves. For example, the well-innervated lips and tongue are shown much larger than some other supposedly more sensitive organs, rather like those maps on which New York is twice the size of the rest of the country. The sensory drawing was created by neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield (1891–1976). Like Fortunio Liceti, Penfield was an authe
ntic over-achiever. Born in Spokane, Washington, he majored in literature at Princeton, won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, graduated from Johns Hopkins Medical School, and became a surgeon at Presbyterian Hospital (now New York Presbyterian Hospital-Columbia Presbyterian Center) and the associated Neurological Institute of New York. He then emigrated to Canada in 1928 to join the faculty of McGill University in Montreal and sign on as a neurosurgeon at what is now the Royal Victoria Hospital and the Montreal General Hospital at the McGill University Health Centre. Six years later, armed with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and the support of the governments of Quebec and Montreal, Penfield founded the Montreal Neurological Institute.
Penfield’s specialty was surgery to relieve epileptic seizures. His approach was revolutionary. Rather than sedating the patient, he numbed the skull with a local anesthetic, then cut through and lifted off a piece of bone to expose the tissue underneath. Because the brain itself does not feel pain, Penfield was able to probe gently with the patient fully conscious so that his body responded in real time, enabling the surgeon to identify the exact location of seizure activity and then attempt to destroy or remove only that area. But Penfield didn’t stop there. He began to map the sensory (and later the motor) areas of the brain, probing carefully and at each step asking the conscious patient what he felt or watching what he moved so as to establish the connection between specific areas of the brain and specific body parts. In 1951, he and another emigrant from the American Northwest, Herbert Henri Jasper (1906–1999), a psychologist, physiologist, anatomist, chemist, and neurologist, published their map in Epilepsy and the Functional Anatomy of the Human Brain.
What makes the Penfield/Jasper diagram fascinating—aside from the intelligent curiosity that led to its creation—is where in the brain you find some of the sites that control your various body parts. For example, the controls for the teeth, gums, and jaws are located right next to those for the lips. No surprise there. But the controls for the genitals, which is to say the male genitals—Penfield did not map the vagina—are next to the foot, not the upper leg. Big surprise. But an interesting one in light of (a) the connection between bipedalism and face-to-face sexual intercourse, and (b) Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel portrait of God with a surprise at the top of the body and another at the bottom, visible feet at one end and (for those who knew where to look) a visible brain at the other.
In California in the 1990s, Ramachandran was treating phantom limb syndrome, the phenomenon in which a patient feels pain or itching or simply the presence of a limb no longer attached to his body. Now, forty years after Penfield drew his sensory map by probing an exposed living brain, Ramachandran had a new, noninvasive search tool at his command to tell him why his patients felt what they felt.
The PET scan is an imaging technique that captures the activity of subatomic particles called positrons emitted when your body consumes glucose, the fuel on which you run. The procedure begins with an injection of a mildly radioactive glucose solution that takes about an hour to make its way through your body and to your brain. When the scan is in progress, the image shows brightly lit spots at the sites where your brain is using glucose and releasing positrons. PET images are exceedingly subtle and complex. For example, your organs of hearing, speech, and vision, as well as the neurons associated with thinking, are each linked to a particular area in your brain. Technicians watching a PET scan following a real human brain reacting in real time to the physical act of eating and digesting food can also identify the areas of your brain that light up when you hear, see, say, or even think about the word food.
Neuroscientists use the term plasticity to describe the phenomenon by which sites in your brain adapt to the loss of some neurons or connections by switching their functions to other sites, a situation that can lead to unusual and unexpected couplings, which it turned out, were what Ramachandran’s patients were experiencing.
As Ramachandran explained during an interview in 2011 on the National Public Radio program Fresh Air, when a part of the body, for example, a hand or an arm, is lost, the area of the brain where sensation connected to the missing limb was once recorded is “hungry for new sensations,” which may now be recorded from a different part of the body, most likely one contiguous on the Penfield–Jasper diagram. In fact, he found that touching a patient’s face, which is next to the arm/hand in the Sensory Homunculus, activated the “hand area” of the brain, and the brain, ignoring the physical reality, told the patient the hand was still there. Similarly, several patients had told Ramachandran that they experienced sensations of sexual arousal, up to and including orgasm, in the foot that wasn’t there. The PET scans said they were right. For these patients, the area of the brain that once responded to the foot was picking up signals from an adjacent site on Penfield’s map, the penis. In 2005, a “refined” sensory map from the Brain Imaging Center and Department of Neurology at the University of Hamburg in Germany found a slightly different relationship. Like Penfield’s, this new map failed to include the vagina, but it did conclude that the site for the male genitals is “represented between the legs and the trunk and is thus in accord with the logical somatotrophic sequence.”
But that did not invalidate Ramachandran’s conclusion, summarized in his arguably inelegant, but inarguably intriguing quote from Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (1999): “Maybe even many of us so-called normal people have a bit of cross-wiring, which would explain why we like to have our toes sucked.”
Building the perfect foot
With the exception of breasts, eyes, and sometimes buttocks, “small is beautiful” has always been the rule for women. In one 1996 episode of Seinfeld, Jerry (Jerry Seinfeld) rejects an otherwise attractive woman because she has large “man hands.” In another, five years later, George (Jason Alexander) convinces another otherwise attractive woman to undergo ultimately unsuccessful surgery to reduce her prominent nose. As for large feet, they were so high a bar to romance that ladies in the Court of Louis XV used tape to make them look slimmer and smaller; other women have routinely limped along in shoes smaller than their normal size to achieve the same effect, succeeding only in pushing the bones of the foot back and to the side into the painful lump called a bunion. But no one went further than the Chinese whose glorification of the small foot ignored the Confucian prohibition against mutilating the body and for more than a thousand years encouraged women to break, crush, and bind their feet.
Some accounts say the custom originated with an empress in the Shang dynasty (1700–1027 BCE), born with a clubfoot and determined that her courtiers alter their feet to look like hers. Others blame Li Yu (937-978), the last emperor of the Southern Tang Kingdom on the eastern coast of China, so enchanted by a dancer with bound feet whose exaggerated arches were shaped like the “crescent moon,” that he ordered all the women in his circle to do the same. Either way, bound feet became so fashionable among the upper classes that eventually even peasant women convinced themselves that binding their feet might gain them entry to a life of leisure.
In reality, the bound foot was a golden cage. Physically, it crippled its victims, thus ensuring fidelity as effectively as any medieval chastity belt. Psychologically, Freud described it as a slightly altered bow to the ever-present male fear of castration. “The Chinese custom of mutilating the female foot and them revering it like a fetish after it has been mutilated [is],” he wrote in 1927, “as though the Chinese male wants to thank the woman for having submitted to being castrated.”
For centuries, Chinese regimes up to and including the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalists) of the 1930s and visitors like the American missionaries and British diplomats attempted to discourage foot binding. They all failed. It was not until the Communists seized power in 1949 that the practice was effectively outlawed. Unfortunately, by then, an estimated 2 billion Chinese women had bound their feet into what National Public Radio correspondent Louisa Lim has described as “the ultimate erogenous zone, with pornographic bo
oks during the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) listing forty-eight different ways of playing with women’s bound feet.”
The specific list of forty-eight maneuvers seems to have evaporated, at least in accessible English translation, but some sources suggest that the round opening created by bending the front of the foot down and back toward the heel served as a substitute vagina. It is verifiable that the feet were always wrapped, either because what is hidden is more erotically suggestive, or the sight of the broken and bent bones was unappealing, or the odor of the infections due to binding was seriously unromantic. In any event, the sexual intent was clear to everyone involved. In the 1980s, when American photographer Joseph Rupp, who had lived and worked in Asia, went to China to interview women for a project titled Bound Feet one woman told him, “I am happy to tell you about myself and foot binding, but you may not write about me or take a picture if you plan to publish them in a pornographic magazine.”
The Chinese trace their fascination with the bound female foot to one spectacular dancer or one disfigured empress. Westerners may paradoxically blame their equal fascination with a slim and dainty female extremity on the occasional open display of the female breast.
From time to time, perfectly respectable women in the West (as opposed to those women in other places that Westerners call “primitive”) have worn clothing that emphasized and sometimes uncovered the breast. In Renaissance Europe, the naked breast was a common theme in the arts and so was breast-baring clothing, a fashion statement generally attributed to Agnes Sorel, the mistress of Charles VII who ruled France from 1422 to 1461. Sorel often wore dresses that left not one, but both breasts bare, knowing full well that her position ensured the sincerest form of flattery. By the seventeenth century, the fashion had crossed the Channel to normally stodgy Britain where it was adopted first by Henrietta Maria, the consort of Charles I, and later by Queen Mary II of the team of William and Mary.
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