by Nancy Friday
“She said, ‘I find this disgusting. This is really disgusting.’
“I said, ‘I’m sorry it’s disgusting, but what I’m telling you is true. I could well be that man because I saw that picture of you earlier and I think you’re very arousing. And if I had any sexual energy left, I could easily be that guy. Not only am I that guy, but I am millions of guys like that guy.’
“So let me tell you what happened. This woman complained to Hefner, and he called me in the next day and said, ‘Gay, I think you behaved badly last night, talking to her that way.’ I said, ‘I didn’t behave badly at all. In fact, I’m insulted to have you talk to me that way. You are a man who has made millions out of masturbation. You are the first man in the history of the commerce of this capitalist country to make a million out of masturbation. This is where your fortune is made, not in those philosophic interviews you do.’ He didn’t want to hear it.
“I don’t think women who pose today are any different. Even men don’t know about men. There isn’t an authority on the sexual lives of men. Henry Miller, John Updike, Philip Roth, they are literary pornographers. But they write fiction. They are hiding behind characters. ‘This ain’t me, ladies and gents in literary land, this ain’t me.’ But men? Men just don’t write about their private sexual lives as women write about theirs. We really know nothing about the sexual lives of men. It’s a dirty secret.”
Today, as men move more steadily into the mirror, it is not surprising that the penis, along with everything else, is under closer scrutiny. Over the years when men have written to me, and thousands have, along with age, marital status, and profession, they have included their penis size, both flaccid and erect. I hadn’t asked for it, but clearly it is a detail men thought I should have if I were to understand them. Clothed or naked, a man is conscious of his penis in a way that women cannot fathom. Women’s image of The Sewer is an unconscious pressure, but for men, their genitals are very much a part of how they see themselves.
When June Reinisch was asked in an interview what men are most anxious about when it comes to sex, she replied, “Impotence is a big problem.” She also listed disease, homosexuality, and achieving the “right kind” of orgasm. Then she caught a quick breath and added, “And penis size! Penis size is a real American male concern. People are suicidal about it.”
In A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway writes of men’s insecurity about their penises. In it, F. Scott Fitzgerald tells Hemingway that he has never had sex with any woman other than Zelda, and that she had said “that the way I was built I could never make any woman happy and that was what upset her originally. She said it was a matter of measurements. I have never felt the same since she said that and I have to know truly.”
To which Hemingway suggests they retire to the men’s room and upon their return to the restaurant tells his friend, “You’re perfectly fine…. You are O.K. There’s nothing wrong with you. You look at yourself from above and you look foreshortened. Go over to the Louvre and look at the people in the statues and then go home and look at yourself in the mirror in profile.”
“Those statues may not be accurate.”
“They are pretty good. Most people would settle for them.”
“But why would she say it?”
“To put you out of business. That’s the oldest way in the world of putting people out of business.”
But Fitzgerald never does quite believe Hemingway, at least not according to Papa; maybe it should be remembered that there had been a long and competitive tug-of-war between the two men. In telling this story is Hemingway as guilty as Zelda of putting Fitzgerald “out of business”?
All their lives men have compared their size with the other guy’s in the locker room, the stranger standing beside them at the urinal. Nobody’s size was more duly noted than father’s, a lamentable comparison when you consider how young the boy is and how needy of images of manhood—many images!—that stand up opposite mother/women’s powerful look. Once again, if father had been as intimately involved in his son’s rearing as mother was, then the boy would feel as passionately about all forms of power, physical and emotional, that a man may possess. There wouldn’t be this crazed obsession with size, anecdoted by author/actor Tim Allen in the following passage:
My father would take me and my brothers to pee, and you’re just dick tall, and your dad’s is out. This whale of a penis would fly out, and you have a mushroom cap that two hands could barely pull out from your body. And your dad’s penis would—thrrumm! And you’d scream at this huge, hairy beast of an ugly—“Goddamn! Aw, God!” And we’d leave the bathroom and all go, “Shit! Did you see that? Goddammit, it was all hairy, you know?” And we all prayed: “I hope I never look like that!”
Raised and toilet-trained by women, the sex that thinks everything between the legs is dirty, the boy looks to father for alternative signs of male power only to run up against a penis that resembles Gulliver’s. A nurturing father would be part of what Helen Fisher calls his “love map”; during early childhood, he would have absorbed an unconscious list of what a man is like, what a man is supposed to do. Father’s larger penis would not have to compensate for all the power owned by mother. The penis would still be admirable but would be seen by the boy as a promise of what was to come. Until men get into the caretaker role, the penis will never be big enough.
“After sex, every man wonders, ‘Will I get hard again?’” says Gay Talese.
“And after sex, every woman wonders, ‘Will he call again?’” I reply.
The comparison of men’s and women’s postcoital worries is telling: The man is responsible for performing, meaning getting hard, and also for initiating the next step in courtship, meaning risking rejection. In bed, women lie there, and later prefer to weep by the telephone rather than call him. Nevertheless, we blame men for being tactless and cold in their hesitation to connect with us, and we blame them for their sexual performance too.
It is not surprising in this era of women’s new economics that penis enlargement surgery has also come of age. An article in Vogue magazine reports that between 1990 (when those operations began in America) until 1994, there were approximately 3,000 augmentations performed. In 1994 alone there were 3,000 more, and there are those who think that number may have doubled in 1995. Medical experts are alarmed, seeing genital cosmetic surgery as falling into a gray area between urology and chicanery. “We don’t tell guys who pump iron that they’re crazy, do we?” asks Gary Griffin, publisher of a newsletter called Penis Power Quarterly. “Men have always wanted bigger penises,” adds Griffin. “The bigger the better. A big penis is a sign of masculinity, and men are competitive about that.”
At a time when women are having more cosmetic surgery than ever, including breast implants, can we quibble with men who want to enlarge their penises? The figures vary on how women feel about penis size, whether it matters as regards performance, but one statistic stands out: “Women who rated themselves as more attractive were particularly concerned with larger size,” reports psychiatrist Michael Pertschuk in a Psychology Today survey. “Of women describing themselves as ‘much more attractive than average,’ 64 percent cared strongly or moderately about penis width, and 54 percent cared about penis length. Women who rated their own looks as average were about 20 percentage points lower.”
As men get more into overall attraction—clothes, cosmetics, bodybuilding—and women respond to their physical beauty, will men be less anxious about penis size, realizing that there are other things, physically, that appeal to women? According to a Glamour magazine survey, the answer is no. Asked whether they would rather be (A) 5 feet 2 inches tall with a seven-inch penis or (B) 6 feet 2 inches tall with a three-inch penis, 62 percent of the male respondents picked A and only 36 percent picked B.
Of Feet and Fetishes
There are no absolutes in the research regarding the connection of the penis to women’s shoes and feet, no final word as to what it all means, but as more women wander into X-rated
video stores to get a glimpse of the naked penis, they are also buying more high-heeled shoes; men too have returned to their fascination with women’s feet and shoes.
Here is a report from a journalist on returning from a recent fashion show in New York’s Bryant Park:
[The models] were mounted in… dominatrixy ankle-high boots and belted stiletto sandals and spike-heeled, black patent-leather witch slippers—shoes that would be at home in any fetish boutique. There was envy and drama and beauty and death in the air, and it was not coming from the sea of telephoto lenses or from… the orders being placed…. It was not coming from the clothes, either. It was coming from the shoes, the true instruments of transcendence.
Nothing is by chance in the world of fashion; the return to the stiletto, simultaneous with men’s padded underwear and penile implants, suggests this get-together is no coincidence. The flirtatious connection between penis, shoe, and vagina amuses and informs, so redolent are all three of fairy-tale connection.
“A tiny receptacle into which some part of the body can slip and fit tightly can be seen as a symbol of the vagina,” Bettelheim wrote in his reference to Cinderella and her slipper. “Something that is brittle and must not be stretched because it would break reminds us of the hymen; and something that is easily lost at the end of a ball when one’s lover tries to keep his hold on his beloved seems an appropriate image for virginity…. Every child knows that marriage is connected with sex… and it is quite clear that Cinderella is a virginal bride….
“Since for over two thousand years… in much loved stories the female slipper has been accepted as a fairy-tale solution to the problem of finding the right bride, there must be good reasons for it. The difficulty in analyzing the unconscious meaning of the slipper as a symbol for the vagina is that although both males and females respond to this symbolic meaning, they do not do so in the same ways.”
I rather like the vagueness of the penis/shoe connection, the not knowing, for unlike other provable facts of sexuality, here is one that none of us has escaped or understood, the eye mysteriously drawn to women’s feet and shoes. So rich is the history of the subject that I might have hung this entire book on its insoluble mystery, for the foot/shoe thing is integral to sexual beauty.
But let us start with Freud, who said that in dreams the shoe or slipper represents female genitalia, and that while the pungent aroma of the foot may be distasteful in later life, in childhood the strong smell is fascinating. There we all were once upon a time, at her considerable feet, crawling at the base of the center of our universe, Mother. On these bare or shod platforms she approached or left us, bringing or taking away the source of life. When we were very little and they were considerable, their proximity allowed for close inspection. We were imprinted.
I would imagine that the foot/genital connection goes back to the beginning of time. Before there were slippers there were feet, meaning, I suppose, that the symbol of the shoe is once removed. Symbol upon symbol leaves the mind a lot of room in which to fantasize. Barbara Stanwyck, in the movie The Lady Eve, entraps Henry Fonda on board a cruise ship by tripping him and, in the process, breaking the heel of her shoe. She leads him seductively to her cabin, wherein there is a trunkful of shoes.
“See anything you like?” she purrs, allowing him to choose. She dangles her naked foot before him as he sweats, he gulps, he slips the shoe on her foot and buckles the ankle strap, overcome. He’s been up the Amazon for two years, he explains, studying snakes: “My life is snakes.” Now his life is hers, for in slipping the shoe on her naked foot, as the Prince did with Cinderella, in our voyeuristic minds, his penis fits her vagina, perfectly. They are mated.
“Originally, the feet were just like the hands,” says Helen Fisher, “so they have tremendous nerve endings in the brain. Much of the brain is taken up with just receiving sensory impulses from the feet and the hands. You receive powerful stimuli from doing things with the feet. Evolutionarily speaking, feet are a very sensuous part of the body. There is a tremendous response in the brain if you suck somebody’s feet.”
In his book The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe, W. A. Rossi writes that foot and shoe eroticism comes from this sensitivity as well as from the phallic symbolism of the foot, the erotic appeal of which inspired the decoration of the foot. As Esquire reported it: “Of all fetish objects, sexy shoes are among the oldest and probably the most common…. They taper the toes. They arch the instep. They lift the calves. They tilt the fanny and bow the back and oil the hips and sashay the gait. Their leathery, animal scents and textures evoke the jungle blood sports braided in our genes. They make the foot look shorter and more precious and yet add the formidableness of extra height and often a sort of stiletto menace. A sexy shoe is a masterpiece of concealment and disclosure and so defines the dynamic of lust itself.”
We think of men as focused on women’s feet when, in fact, there was a time when men were equally focused on their own. Even before clothing lost its formless shape in the early fourteenth century and began to suggest the human form beneath, there was among men a highly suggestive use of the shoe as a tantalizing hint at what lay beneath all that shapeless cloth.
“The emphasis on parts of the body associated with sexuality began in the late eleventh century, with the adoption of elongated, pointed shoe styles,” writes Lois Banner. “It spread to the fourteenth century, when short jackets, long legs, and the exposure of the shape of the genitals became the vogue. By the late fifteenth century the preferred body type for men became more massive, while broad and blunted shoes replaced the long pointed ones. The codpiece, a sheath which enclosed the penis, was also developed in this time period.”
For several centuries men’s elongated shoes were the erotic symbols, a titillating hint of the mystery that lay beneath their clothing. These artistically pointed shoes were called poulaines and were probably invented by the Norman knights to better fit in their stirrups (as depicted in tapestries of the Norman Conquest). Another reason the long shoes were probably popular, says Banner, is because of perceptions of aristocratic feet as long and slender and peasant feet as broad and clumsy.
“European folk belief categorized feet, like noses, as related to the penis, the size of one reflective of the size of the other,” writes Banner. “Thus at one point the fashion was that the extensions of the poulaines should be filled with sawdust so that they would stand upright. And it was not unknown that some wearers of these shoes would shape and color the extension to resemble a penis.”
Imagine! Men walked around “flashing” images of their privates painted on the tops of their falsely elongated shoes. What springs to my mind are today’s padded, push-up bras, breast augmentations, men’s penile implants as well as men’s padded underwear. Everything old is new again. Eventually, in 1367, Charles V of France outlawed the wearing of penis-shaped poulaines.
Because fact flies faster than fiction as regards feet and sex these days, let me add that on my recent trip to Los Angeles—when I was halfway through this chapter—I was presented with a pair of “penis shoes.” On entering my favorite store in Los Angeles, Maxfield’s, the manager came forward to show me a pair of men’s shoes designed by Yohji Yamamoto, and there they were, nestled in what looked like, smelled like, a standard shoe box. Ah, but these were no ordinary shoes! I urged my husband to slip them on. “Wow!” he exclaimed. “They fit!” Cinderella. And so we bought them, beautifully constructed men’s black shoes, except for the fleshy pink penis painted on each, attended on either side by a large fuzzy black ball, each one as big as a golf ball.
This ageless puzzle of feet and shoes, vaginas and penises turns up nowadays in news stories as well as on the fashion pages. One day Marla Maples’s public relations man is arrested for, over the years, stealing her shoes. “I wondered where those shoes had gone,” mused Ms. Maples (wife of Donald Trump).
In another newspaper article, a man offers a seventeen-year-old one hundred and fifty dollars if she would go to a hotel room with him a
nd let him kiss her bare feet. The police duly arrest a happily married forty-four-year-old assistant district attorney. “He said he had a fetish,” the woman adds, “and that he wanted me to go to a hotel with him, put on a skirt and a pair of pumps so he could worship me while he satisfied himself…. He told me he could not wait to see those ‘beautiful feet’ of mine. He has this thing about toes, I think.”
Is there indeed a heightened foot and shoe eroticism in the land, or have these difficult days of changing sex roles made us all more aware of what was always there, alerting reporters’ and editors’ eyes to fasten on a foot and shoe event that might have slipped right past them twenty years ago? My own opinion is that the seismic shifts in reaction to feminism, technology, and reproductive biology have rearoused our interest in sexual symbolism.
For instance, just thinking about Bettelheim’s image of Cinderella’s tiny slipper as a virginal vagina, meaning a nice, snug fit for the penis of a prospective bridegroom, I am reminded that women today don’t look or act like Cinderella, being neither in economic need of a prince, nor virginal, nor do women even require a Prince’s penis, given the local sperm bank. When you also factor in the ever earlier onset of menstruation, meaning that adolescent girls are larger of body, it should be noted that they also walk on larger feet.
The American Orthopaedic Foot and Ankle Society estimates that women’s feet are on average a size 8 wide today. But the best-selling women’s shoe size is 7½ medium, suggesting that the average woman with a size 8 wide is hobbling around in shoes that are both too short and too narrow. In fact, that’s just what a 1991 study put out by the AOFAS reports: that 88 percent of those women surveyed were wearing shoes that were too small, and that 80 percent had foot problems. Do we women do this for the man’s sake or for our own? Are we squeezing our feet into shoes that are too small so that men see our feet as dainty and therefore a snug match for their penises, or do we do it so that when we look down at our feet our unconscious is reassured that we are as womanly as Cinderella, just a helpless little creature, regardless of our high-paying jobs? Meanwhile, women’s feet grow larger and larger, an estimated six million women today requiring a size 10 or larger shoe.
