Studies on the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 by Havelock Ellis. - HTML preview

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received, Stanley Hall thus summarizes the main facts ascertained

with reference to the feet: "A special period of noticing the

feet comes somewhat later than that in which the hands are

discovered to consciousness. Our records afford nearly twice as

many cases for feet as for hands. The former are more remote from

the primary psychic focus or position, and are also more often

covered, so that the sight of them is a more marked and

exceptional event. Some children become greatly excited whenever

their feet are exposed. Some infants show signs of fear at the

movement of their own knees and feet covered, and still more

often fright is the first sensation which signalizes the child's

discovery of its feet.... Many are described as playing with them

as if fascinated by strange, newly-discovered toys.

They pick

them up and try to throw them away, or out of the cradle, or

bring them to the mouth, where all things tend to go.... Children

often handle their feet, pat and stroke them, offer them toys and

the bottle, as if they, too, had an independent hunger to

gratify, an _ego_ of their own.... Children often develop [later]

a special interest in the feet of others, and examine, feel them,

etc., sometimes expressing surprise that the pinch of the

mother's toe hurts her and not the child, or comparing their own

and the feet of others point by point. Curious, too, are the

intensifications of foot-consciousness throughout the early years

of childhood, whenever children have the exceptional privilege of

going barefoot, or have new shoes. The feet are often

apostrophized, punished, beaten sometimes to the point of pain

for breaking things, throwing the child down, etc.

Several

children have habits, which reach great intensity, and then

vanish, of touching or tickling the feet, with gales of laughter,

and a few are described as showing an almost morbid reluctance to

wear anything upon the feet, or even to having them touched by

others.... Several almost fall in love with the great toe or the

little one, especially admiring some crease or dimple in it,

dressing it in some rag of silk or bit of ribbon, or cut-off

glove fingers, winding it with string, prolonging it by tying on

bits of wood. Stroking the feet of others, especially if they are

shapely, often becomes almost a passion with young children, and

several adults confess a survival of the same impulse which it is

an exquisite pleasure to gratify. The interest of some mothers in

babies' toes, the expressions of which are ecstatic and almost

incredible, is a factor of great importance." (G.

Stanley Hall,

"Some Aspects of the Early Sense of Self," _American Journal of

Psychology_, April, 1898.) In childhood, Stanley Hall remarks

elsewhere (_Adolescence_, vol. ii, p. 104), "a form of courtship

may consist solely in touching feet under the desk."

It would

seem that even animals have a certain amount of sexual

consciousness in the feet; I have noticed a male donkey, just

before coitus, bite the feet of his partner.

At the same time it is scarcely usual for the normal lover, in most

civilized countries to-day, to attach primary importance to the foot, such

as he very frequently attaches to the eyes, though the feet play a very

conspicuous part in the work of certain novelists.[15]

In a small but not inconsiderable minority of persons, however, the foot

or the boot becomes the most attractive part of a woman, and in some

morbid cases the woman herself is regarded as a comparatively unimportant

appendage to her feet or her boots. The boots under civilized conditions

much more frequently constitute the sexual symbol than do the feet

themselves; this is not surprising since in ordinary life the feet are not

often seen.

It is usually only under exceptionally favoring conditions that

foot-fetichism occurs, as in the case recorded by Marandon de

Montyel of a doctor who had been brought up in the West Indies.

His mother had been insane and he himself was subject to

obsessions, especially of being incapable of urinating; he had

had nocturnal incontinence of urine in childhood.

All the women

of the people in the West Indies go about with naked feet, which

are often beautiful. His puberty evolved under this influence,

and foot-fetichism developed. He especially admired large, fat,

arched feet, with delicate skin and large, regular toes. He

masturbated with images of feet. At 15 he had relations with a

colored chambermaid, but feared to mention his fetichism, though

it was the touch of her feet that chiefly excited him. He now

gave up masturbation, and had a succession of mistresses, but was

always ashamed to confess his fancies until, at the age of 33, in

Paris, a very intelligent woman who had become his mistress

discovered his mania and skillfully enabled him to yield to it

without shock to his modesty. He was devoted to this mistress,

who had very beautiful feet (he had been horrified by the feet of

Europeans generally), until she finally left him.

(_Archives de

Neurologie_, October, 1904.)

Probably the first case of shoe-fetichism ever recorded in any

detail is that of Restif de la Bretonne (1734-1806), publicist

and novelist, one of the most remarkable literary figures of the

later eighteenth century in France. Restif was a neurotic

subject, though not to an extreme degree, and his shoe-fetichism,

though distinctly pronounced, was not pathological; that is to

say, that the shoe was not itself an adequate gratification of

the sexual impulse, but simply a highly important aid to

tumescence, a prelude to the natural climax of detumescence; only

occasionally, and _faute de mieux_, in the absence of the beloved

person, was the shoe used as an adjunct to masturbation. In

Restif's stories and elsewhere the attraction of the shoe is

frequently discussed or used as a motive. His first decided

literary success, _Le Pied de Fanchette_, was suggested by a

vision of a girl with a charming foot, casually seen in the

street. While all such passages in his books are really founded

on his own personal feelings and experiences, in his elaborate

autobiography, _Monsieur Nicolas_, he has frankly set forth the

gradual evolution and cause of his idiosyncrasy. The first

remembered trace dated from the age of 4, when he was able to

recall having remarked the feet of a young girl in his native

place. Restif was a sexually precocious youth, and at the age of

9, though both delicate in health and shy in manners, his

thoughts were already absorbed in the girls around him. "While

little Monsieur Nicolas," he tells us, "passed for a Narcissus,

his thoughts, as soon as he was alone, by night or by day, had no

other object than that sex he seemed to flee from.

The girls most

careful of their persons were naturally those who pleased him

most, and as the part least easy to keep clean is that which

touches the earth it was to the foot-gear that he mechanically

gave his chief attention. Agathe, Reine, and especially

Madeleine, were the most elegant of the girls at that time; their

carefully selected and kept shoes, instead of laces or buckles,

which were not yet worn at Sacy, had blue or rose ribbon,

according to the color of the skirt. I thought of these girls

with emotion; I desired--I knew not what; but I desired

something, if it were only to subdue them." The origin Restif

here assigns to his shoe-fetichism may seem paradoxical; he

admired the girls who were most clean and neat in their dress, he

tells us, and, therefore, paid most attention to that part of

their clothing which was least clean and neat. But, however

paradoxical the remark may seem, it is psychologically sound. All

fetichism is a kind of not necessarily morbid obsession, and as

the careful work of Janet and others in that field has shown, an

obsession is a fascinated attraction to some object or idea

which gives the subject a kind of emotional shock by its

contrast to his habitual moods or ideas. The ordinary morbid

obsession cannot usually be harmoniously co-ordinated with the

other experiences of the subject's daily life, and shows,

therefore, no tendency to become pleasurable. Sexual fetichisms,

on the other hand, have a reservoir of agreeable emotion to draw

on, and are thus able to acquire both stability and harmony. It

will also be seen that no element of masochism is involved in

Restif's fetichism, though the mistake has been frequently made

of supposing that these two manifestations are usually or even

necessarily allied. Restif wishes to subject the girl who

attracts him, he has no wish to be subjected by her.

He was

especially dazzled by a young girl from another town, whose shoes

were of a fashionable cut, with buckles, "and who was a charming

person besides." She was delicate as a fairy, and rendered his

thoughts unfaithful to the robust beauties of his native Sacy.

"No doubt," he remarks, "because, being frail and weak myself, it

seemed to me that it would be easier to subdue her."

"This taste

for the beauty of the feet," he continues, "was so powerful in me

that it unfailingly aroused desire and would have made me

overlook ugliness. It is excessive in all those who have it." He

admired the foot as well as the shoe: "The factitious taste for

the shoe is only a reflection of that for pretty feet. When I

entered a house and saw the boots arranged in a row, as is the

custom, I would tremble with pleasure; I blushed and lowered my

eyes as if in the presence of the girls themselves.

With this

vivacity of feeling and a voluptuousness of ideas inconceivable

at the age of 10 I still fled, with an involuntary impulse of

modesty, from the girls I adored."

We may clearly see how this combination of sensitive and

precocious sexual ardor with extreme shyness, furnished the soil

on which the germ of shoe-fetichism was able to gain a firm root

and persist in some degree throughout a long life very largely

given up to a pursuit of women, abnormal rather by its

excessiveness than its perversity. A few years later, he tells

us, he happened to see a pretty pair of shoes in a bootmaker's

shop, and on hearing that they belonged to a girl whom at that

time he reverently adored at a distance he blushed and nearly

fainted.

In 1749 he was for a time attracted to a young woman very much

older than himself; he secretly carried away one of her slippers

and kept it for a day; a little later he again took away a shoe

of the same woman which had fascinated him when on her foot, and,

he seems to imply, he used it to masturbate with.

Perhaps the chief passion of Restif's life was his love for

Colette Parangon. He was still a boy (1752), she was the young

and virtuous wife of the printer whose apprentice Restif was and

in whose house he lived. Madame Parangon, a charming woman, as

she is described, was not happily married, and she evidently

felt a tender affection for the boy whose excessive love and

reverence for her were not always successfully concealed.

"Madonna Parangon," he tells us, "possessed a charm which I could

never resist, a pretty little foot; it is a charm which arouses

more than tenderness. Her shoes, made in Paris, had that

voluptuous elegance which seems to communicate soul and life.

Sometimes Colette wore shoes of simple white drugget or with

silver flowers; sometimes rose-colored slippers with green heels,

or green with rose heels; her supple feet, far from deforming her

shoes, increased their grace and rendered the form more

exciting." One day, on entering the house, he saw Madame Parangon

elegantly dressed and wearing rose-colored shoes with tongues,

and with green heels and a pretty rosette. They were new and she

took them off to put on green slippers with rose heels and

borders which he thought equally exciting. As soon as she had

left the room, he continues, "carried away by the most impetuous

passion and idolizing Colette, I seemed to see her and touch her

in handling what she had just worn; my lips pressed one of these

jewels, while the other, deceiving the sacred end of nature, from

excess of exaltation replaced the object of sex (I cannot express

myself more clearly). The warmth which she had communicated to

the insensible object which had touched her still remained and

gave a soul to it; a voluptuous cloud covered my eyes." He adds

that he would kiss with rage and transport whatever had come in

close contact with the woman he adored, and on one occasion

eagerly pressed his lips to her cast-off underlinen, _vela

secretiora penetralium_.

At this period Restif's foot-fetichism reached its highest point

of development. It was the aberration of a highly sensitive and

very precocious boy. While the preoccupation with feet and shoes

persisted throughout life, it never became a complete perversion

and never replaced the normal end of sexual desire.

His love for

Madam Parangon, one of the deepest emotions in his whole life,

was also the climax of his shoe-fetichism. She represented his

ideal woman, an ethereal sylph with wasp-waist and a child's

feet; it was always his highest praise for a woman that she

resembled Madame Parangon, and he desired that her slipper should

be buried with him. (Restif de la Bretonne, _Monsieur Nicolas_,

vols. i-iv, vol. xiii, p. 5; id., _Mes Inscriptions_, pp. ci-cv.)

Shoe-fetichism, more especially if we include under this term all

the cases of real or pseudo-masochism in which an attraction to

the boots or slippers is the chief feature, is a not infrequent

phenomenon, and is certainly the most frequently occurring form

of fetichism. Many cases are brought together by Krafft-Ebing in

his _Psychopathia Sexualis_. Every prostitute of any experience

has known men who merely desire to gaze at her shoes, or possibly

to lick them, and who are quite willing to pay for this

privilege. In London such a person is known as a

"bootman," in

Germany as a "Stiefelfrier."

The predominance of the foot as a focus of sexual attraction, while among

us to-day it is a not uncommon phenomenon, is still not sufficiently

common to be called normal; the majority of even ardent lovers do not

experience this attraction in any marked degree. But these manifestations

of foot-fetichism which with us to-day are abnormal, even when they are

not so extreme as to be morbid, may perhaps become more intelligible to us

when we realize that in earlier periods of civilization, and even to-day

in some parts of the world, the foot is generally recognized as a focus of

sexual attraction, so that some degree of foot-fetichism becomes a normal

phenomenon.

The most pronounced and the best known example of such normal

foot-fetichism at the present day is certainly to be found among the

Southern Chinese. For a Chinese husband his wife's foot is more

interesting than her face. A Chinese woman is as shy of showing her feet

to a man as a European woman her breasts; they are reserved for her

husband's eyes alone, and to look at a woman's feet in the street is

highly improper and indelicate. Chinese foot-fetichism is connected with

the custom of compressing the feet. This custom appears to rest on the

fact that Chinese women naturally possess a very small foot and is thus an

example of the universal tendency in the search for beauty to accentuate,

even by deformation, the racial characteristics. But there is more than

this. Beauty is largely a name for sexual attractiveness, and the energy

expended in the effort to make the Chinese woman's small foot still

smaller is a measure of the sexual fascination which it exerts. The

practice arose on the basis of the sexual attractiveness of the foot,

though it has doubtless served to heighten that attractiveness, just as

the small waist, which (if we may follow Stratz) is a characteristic

beauty of the European woman, becomes to the average European man still

more attractive when accentuated, even to the extent of deformity, by the

compression of the corset.

Referring to the sexual fascination exerted by the foot in China,

Matignon writes: "My attention has been drawn to this point by a

large number of pornographic engravings, of which the Chinese are

very fond. In all these lascivious scenes we see the male

voluptuously fondling the woman's foot. When a Celestial takes

into his hand a woman's foot, especially if it is very small, the

effect upon him is precisely the same as is provoked in a

European by the palpation of a young and firm bosom.

All the

Celestials whom I have interrogated on this point have replied

unanimously: 'Oh, a little foot! You Europeans cannot understand

how exquisite, how sweet, how exciting it is!' The contact of the

genital organ with the little foot produces in the male an

indescribable degree of voluptuous feeling, and women skilled in

love know that to arouse the ardor of their lovers a better

method than all Chinese aphrodisiacs--including

'giusen' and

swallows' nests--is to take the penis between their feet. It is

not rare to find Chinese Christians accusing themselves at

confession of having had 'evil thoughts on looking at a woman's

foot.'" (Dr. J. Matignon, "A propos d'un Pied de Chinoise,"

_Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, 1898.) It is said that a Chinese Empress, noted for her vice and having

a congenital club foot, about the year 1100 B.C., desired all

women to resemble her, and that the practice of compressing the

foot thus arose. But this is only tradition, since, in 300 B.C.,

Chinese books were destroyed (Morache, Art. "Chine,"

_Dictionnaire Encyclopédique des Sciences Médicales_, p. 191). It

is also said that the practice owes its origin to the wish to

keep women indoors. But women are not secluded in China, nor does

foot compression usually render a woman unable to walk. Many

intelligent Chinese are of opinion that its object is to promote

the development of the sexual parts and of the thighs, and so to

aid both intercourse and parturition. There is no ground for

believing that it has any such influence, though Morache found

that the mons veneris and labia are largely developed in Chinese

women, and not in Tartar women living in Pekin (who do not

compress the foot). If there is any correlation between the feet

and the pelvic regions, it is more probably congenital than due

to the artificial compression of the feet. The ancients seem to

have believed that a small foot indicated a small vagina. Restif

de la Bretonne, who had ample opportunities for forming an

opinion on a matter in which he took so great an interest,

believed that a small foot, round and short, indicated a large

vagina (_Monsieur Nicolas_, vol. i, reprint of 1883, p. 92).

Even, however, if we admit that there is a real correlation

between the foot and the vagina, that would by no means suffice

to render the foot a focus of sexual attraction.

It remains the most reasonable view that the foot bandage must be

regarded as strictly analogous to the waist bandage or corset

which also tends to produce deformity of the constricted region.

Stratz has ingeniously remarked (_Frauenkleidung_, third edition,

p. 101) that the success of the Chinese in dwarfing trees may

have suggested a similar attempt in regard to women's feet, and

adds that in any case both dwarfed trees and bound feet bear

witness in the Mongolian to the same love for small and elegant,

not to say deformed, things. For a Chinaman the deformed foot is

a "golden water-lily."

Many facts (together with illustrations) bearing on Chinese

deformation of the foot will be found in Ploss, _Das Weib_, vol.

i, Section IV.

The significance of the sexual emotion aroused by the female foot in China

and the origin of its compression begin to become clear when we realize

that this foot-fetichism is merely an extreme development of a tendency

which is fairly well marked among nearly all the peoples of yellow race.

Jacoby, who has brought together a number of interesting facts bearing on

the sexual significance of the foot, states that a similar tendency is to

be found among the Mongol and Turk peoples of Siberia, and in the east and

central parts of European Russia, among the Permiaks, the Wotiaks, etc.

Here the woman, at all events when young, has always her feet, as well as

head, covered, however little clothing she may otherwise wear.

"On hot nights or on baking days," Jacoby states,

"you may see

these women with uncovered breasts, or even entirely naked

without embarrassment, but you will never see them with bare

feet, and no male relations, except the husband, will ever see

the feet and lower part of the legs of the women in the house.

These women have their modesty in their feet, and also their

coquetry; to unbind the feet of a woman is for a man a voluptuous

act, and the touch of the bands produces the same effect as a

corset still warm from a woman's body on a European man. A

woman's beauty, that which attracts and excites a man, lies in

her foot; in Mordvin love poems celebrating the beauty of women

there is much about her attire, especially her embroidered

chemise, but as regards the charms of her person the poet is

content to state that 'her feet are beautiful;' with that

everything is said. The young peasant woman of the central

provinces as part of her holiday raiment puts on great woolen

stockings which come up to the groin and are then folded over to

below the knee. To uncover the feet of a person of the opposite

sex is a sexual act, and has thus become the symbol of sexual

possession, so that the stocking or foot-gear became the emblem

of marriage, as later the ring. (It was so among the Jews, as we

see in the book of _Ruth_, Chapter III, v. 4, and Chapter IV, vv.

7 and 8). St. Vladimir the Great asked in marriage the daughter

of Prince Rogvold; as Vladimir's mother had been a serf, the

princess proudly replied that she 'would not uncover the feet of

a slave.' At the present time in the east of Russia when a young

girl tries to find out by divination whom she will have as a

husband the traditional formula is 'Come and take my stockings

off.' Among the populations of the north and east, it is

sometimes the bride who must do this for her husband on the

wedding night, and sometimes the bridegroom for his wife, not as

a token of love, but as a nuptial ceremony. Among the

professional classes and small nobility in Russia parents place

money in the stocking of their child at marriage as a present for

the other partner, it being supposed that the couple mutually

remove each other's foot raiment, as an act of sexual possession,

the emblem of coitus." (Paul Jacoby, _Archives d'Anthropologie

Criminelle_, December, 1903, p. 793.) The practice among

ourselves of children hanging up their stockings at night for

presents would seem to be a relic of the last-mentioned custom.

While we may witness th