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