Let’s Talk About Sex; Some Brief Notes on Foot and Shoe Fetishes

 

Sexologists, the ‘scientists’ of sex, agree that foot and shoe fetishism is the commonest kind. The sexologist Havelock Ellis, considered by some to be the most significant ‘prophet of sex’ in the twentieth century, identified men’s foot and shoe ‘erotic symbolism,’ as he called fetishism, as the ‘most frequent’ form of fetishism. Fetishism is mainly a behavior of men, though the sexologists rarely make this plain. They explain that fetishists choose some part of a woman or article of apparel as the focus of their sexual excitement rather than a whole woman. There are various explanation for why this should be. Some say that the male child first experiences arousal whilst aware of this body part or item of clothing and thus associates it with sex all his life. This does not explain why women are so rarely fetishists. Another form of explanation relates fetishism to the fear of castration in which case the fetish stands in for the penis. This might explain why fetishism is male, but only for those who want to place any credence in psychoanalysis.

Ellis, like other male commentators on fetishism, routinely uses engendered language that conceals the fact that fetishism is male. There are clues, such as when he says, “It would seem that even for the normal lover the foot is one of the most attractive parts of the body.” Women readers will understand that they are not ‘normal lovers,’ since they are unlikely to have found their partners’ feet the most attractive part of them. When he says, “In a small but not inconsiderable minority of persons, however, the foot or the boot becomes the most attractive part of a woman”, we realize that by “persons” he means men. In “some morbid cases” he tells us, “the woman herself is regarded as a comparatively unimportant appendage to ther feet or her boots. Ellis says that fetishism is quite normal, since “fetichism [sic] and the other forms of erotic symbolism are but the development and the isolation of the crystallization which normally arise on the basis of sexual selection (oedipal stage of development). Women, by this reckoning, must be abnormal. Rossi, too, says that foot fetishism, is normal because “The human species prefers itself a little bent out of natural shape.” It hardly needs saying that there does not seem to have been a great demand by women for men to be bent out of shape.

Ellis goes so far as to attach very positive value to fetishism by suggesting that it is a practice of superior lovers (men). Thus he says of fetishes: “While the average insensitive person may fail to perceive them at all, for the more alert and imaginative lovers they are a fascinating part of the highly charged crystallization of passion.” The implication is that men without the ability to fixate on women’s feet are “insensitive.” Ellis’ enthusiasm for fetishism is likely to relate to his own practice of urolagnia, or love of watching/listening to women urinate. This seems to have been very important and may even have supplanted what he, along with other sexologists, tells us is normal sex (example: sexual intercourse). He includes urolagnia in erotic symbolism, says it is “not extremely uncommon” and attributes it to men, like himself, who are superior intellectuals, “it has been noted in men of high intellectual distinction. It is, he says, “within normal limits of variation of sexual emotion.” Though he tells us that it occurs in women as well as men,” there is not much evidence of this. In gay male sexual culture it is quite common with a considerable pornography and practice of what are called “water sports,” but amongst lesbians and heterosexual women it would seem to be very unusual.