by Nancy Friday
Surely we would work more profitably in shoes that fit; women account for 90 percent of the surgeries for common foot ailments in this nation, which cost us $3.5 billion for surgery and 15 million lost workdays. Add to this madness the return of the six-inch stiletto heel, which my friend Jane wears religiously; when she returns home from work, her calf muscles are so distended that she cannot stand barefoot and must fall from her shoes onto the bed, where she lies until the leg muscles relax and she can walk without pain. How reminiscent of Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters, who tried to squeeze their feet into the glass slipper only to rub them until they were raw and bleeding. Cinderella’s foot fit the slipper perfectly.
Sooner or later, the shoe, the vagina, and the penis are going to have to sit down together and have it out: What does it all mean? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but how far will our technologically advanced world carry this unconscious pressure of fairy-tale wisdom that encourages working women to squeeze their feet into shoes that hurt? Now that high-heeled boots are back, is the pleasure women feel when they wear them equal to the discomfort? “In the dress code of sadomasochism, boots, of course, are very important as power symbols and very exciting to men,” says psychiatrist Avodah Offit. “The current passion for boots seems to me distinctly masculine in derivation. Women wearing [them] tend to imitate or adopt the strength and dominance of men.”
Feet tend to swell even more in boots than in shoes, meaning that the feel of sexual power must be very sweet indeed. Men don’t force us to buy these objects that restrict our movements, deform our feet, and cripple our backs. We do it for the image in the mirror, the reflection of ourselves as hot and in charge, an extraordinarily satisfying goal that we can live with more happily than with a man; who needs him?
There is no parallel in women’s sexual fantasies to those of men who take a woman’s shoe to bed. Sex therapists and psychiatrists offer various explanations of foot fetishism. The least persuasive is, “The foot is the farthest from the heart, meaning the farthest from intimacy, which allows the man to have pure sex without entanglements.” For me, there is a certain rightness to the early childhood experience of the shoe/foot being that part of mother that is familiarly close to the touch, sight, and smell of the tiny person crawling around her all-powerful feet on the kitchen floor. But let me quote Valerie Steele, who has written extensively and well on fetishism:
“Freud argued that ‘The fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and… does not want to give up… for if a woman had been castrated, then his own possession of a penis was in danger.’ The fetish represented an unconscious ‘compromise’ between the ‘unwelcome perception’ that the mother has no penis and the wish and earlier belief that she does. The ego defends itself by disavowing or repressing an unpleasant perception. ‘Yes, in his mind the woman has got a penis… but this penis is no longer the same…. Something else has taken its place.’ The fetish thus serves to assuage his fear of castration, at the same time ‘transfer[ring] the importance of the penis to another part of the female body’ or to some article of clothing.”
Steele continues: “The objects chosen as ‘substitutes for the absent female phallus’ were not necessarily those that appeared elsewhere as symbols of the penis; but they were perhaps related to ‘the last moment in which the woman could still be regarded as phallic.’ Thus, for example, ‘pieces of underclothing, which are so often chosen as a fetish, crystallize the moment of undressing.’ Fur or velvet was associated with the pubic hair that should have revealed a penis. The appeal of shoes is related to the association of the foot and penis: ‘The foot represents a woman’s penis, the absence of which is deeply felt.’”
When men get more deeply into the nursery and children grow up alongside father’s heavy cordovans, their reassuring presence on the kitchen floor, their disappearance into the next room arousing alarm, will we all grow fonder of men’s shoes and feet? We are used to pictures of little girls climbing into mother’s high heels, but sometimes, so do little boys. “One day when I was maybe three or four, I was alone in my mother’s bedroom and went into her closet,” a captain of industry tells me. “I saw her shoes and was clumping around the room in her high heels when she walked in and gave me hell. She was so upset, I never did it again.”
But some men put on women’s shoes, dream of sex with a naked woman who is wearing only her Bass wedgies, or they take a woman’s stiletto-heeled shoe to bed and masturbate. “The feet are symbols of both humiliation and power,” says Offit. “The high heel is a weapon… and also a phallic symbol. And at the same time that it cripples a woman, it makes her seem powerful. In heels, the woman can be evilly subdued—she can’t run very fast, she’s off balance, her feet probably hurt—but she’s also taller, wearing a spiked thing that could be driven into a man’s body: It’s called a stiletto, after all.”
The absence of absolutism as regards this business of shoes and feet lends to it a quality of human frailty, our inability to solve the issue, which is exciting and ongoing. While fetishism may be an exclusively male phenomenon, as Kinsey said, women’s inability to travel with fewer than ten pairs of shoes implicates us too, maybe not as fetishists, yet, but certainly as participants. Being attracted to shoes, it should be remembered, doesn’t make one a fetishist; it is wanting the shoe instead of the human that makes one a fetishist.
“Of all forms of erotic symbolism the most frequent is that which idealizes the foot and the shoe,” wrote Havelock Ellis. For instance, the “lotus” foot in Chinese pornography is prevalent: “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.” Because the foot is so readily associated with sexual attraction, Ellis suggests that “some degree of foot-fetichism [is] a normal phenomenon.” According to Freud, the foot/shoe preoccupation “only becomes pathological when the longing for the fetish… actually takes the place of the normal aim, and… becomes the sole sexual object.”
Prostitute Norma Jean Almodovar offers a more pragmatic perspective: “You’re not talking about having intercourse with foot fetishists. They want to fixate on the physical object while you’re present. Basically their fantasies are about groveling on the floor, licking the heels of the shoe, which is on your foot, licking the toes of the shoe, maybe having you put the shoe on their genitals. You don’t have to step on it hard, just so they can feel the shoe, the heel on their penis. After that, I take off the shoe and they go through the same routine with my bare or stockinged foot, my toes, after which they masturbate and come on my foot.”
For more than nine centuries, curled toes have been a stylized symbol of erotic response in Japanese art. Learning this reminds me of a former lover who would cry out in midorgasm, “Oh, my God, my toes have gone into spasm!” His was a “normal” response, according to Kinsey, who wrote that during sex the toe and foot muscles can react this way.
“The popularly accepted idea of cultural quasi-fetishism,” Steele points out, “involves the conflation of the distinctions between individual perversions (such as foot and shoe fetishism) and widespread erotic interest in, say, feet and shoes. Thus, many fashion historians argue that the long skirts of the nineteenth century contributed to the development of a cultural obsession with female feet, since concealment theoretically invested these appendages with greater erotic appeal. These historians then jump to the conclusion that this indicated that the incidence of foot and shoe fetishism was significantly higher in the nineteenth century than in earlier or later periods—an hypothesis that the available evidence does not necessarily support.”
In Turgenev’s First Love, an adolescent boy falls in love with a young woman who works on his father’s estate: “I gazed at her… it seemed to me that I had known her for a long time, and that before her I had known nothing and had not lived…. She was wearing a dark rather worn dress with an
apron. The tips of her shoes looked out from under her skirt. I could have knelt in adoration of those shoes.”
There is nothing like the forbidden to excite fantasy; forbid a child to touch his or her genitals, and the forbidden becomes so loaded with emotion that the idea of breaking the rules, defying the all-powerful mother, becomes the erotic fantasy. The history of our erotic dreams lies in childhood, its roots entangled in naysaying, finger-wagging, promises of hell and damnation. Irresistible.
As today’s women step eagerly back into their six-inch stiletto heels, the sex boutique Eve’s Garden, in answer to popular demand, adds a new dildo to its fall line, which is wider, making it one and five-eighths inches, to be exact. Can men, with or without penile augmentations, measure up? We take their jobs, we satisfy ourselves sexually with plastic imitations of their penises, and we wear their suits. As we appropriate men’s total ensemble, and Patriarchy’s definition of masculinity blurs, men dip into our closets. Cross-dressing by heterosexual men has become a popular theme in films on the big screen; in real life, there are now annual conventions for cross-dressers and their wives. As for the raging popularity of drag queens, men like RuPaul, who favor outlandishly feminine female clothing, have become beloved icons. One can’t help wondering how far men will carry their appropriation of women’s looks. We underestimate men’s historical inventiveness in the mirror.
The Codpiece
For instance, in 1367, when Charles V prohibited men from continuing to wear penis-shaped poulaines, the elongated shoes, men simply made the codpiece a fashion statement. “In other words,” writes Banner, “one might argue that the sexualization of the foot was transferred to the more obvious sexual organ.” Evolution. The codpiece, already popular in the gay world, may soon enjoy a broader revival, given Val Kilmer in Batman Forever and the look of Calvin Klein’s fashion photos, presumably selling underwear. Who can avoid that tantalizing bulge, teasing the eye to explore?
What a fascinating mental picture, a world in which men walked about with their penises proudly emphasized, decorated, embellished in such ways that women’s eyes—and other men’s—were drawn to them, much as we can’t help staring at women’s furs, jewels, breasts, ass-clinging satin skirts, and bewitchingly heeled feet. What was it like for men in earlier days to compete with one another in the beauty of their individual codpieces? Did it feel good to be the center of attention? Not for ages have men enjoyed the feel of eyes actually focused on their person. Did it make men less voyeuristic, less abusive of women when they were able to share the limelight with us? The only modern version of the man-with-codpiece that comes to mind is the cowboy in his leather chaps, and there, between his thighs, bull’s-eye: the crotch, the denim-covered “basket,” unavoidable and unashamed.
Remember The Village People, the gay men’s singing group from the seventies and their fondness for cowboys’ chaps and sailors’ suits? Ah, those tight white navy bell-bottoms, all over town when I was growing up, Charleston being a seaport. How unhesitatingly my youthful, preadolescent eye was pulled to the crotches walking toward me on the sidewalks between movie theater and home. My good friend Bob tells me that when he was in the navy, the first thing a guy did with his new whites was to get them tailored, tops and bottoms so tight that the body became a beacon, not only the “basket” but the deliciously rounded buttocks. Having just emerged from boot camp, the young sailor was aware that his body had never before been so well tuned, the stomach so flat, the muscles pumped; some sailors had their uniforms fitted so tightly that small zippers had to be sewn in around the waist.
The codpiece has its unforgettable place in history. Surely, as men’s designers cast about for reinventions—fashion being a merry-go-round—the codpiece, with its variety of decorative appeals, will return; I would welcome it heartily, seeing in its erotic display some respite from cranky feminists’ complaints of male voyeurism; let men strut and compete for the common eye.
Describing the grandeur and opulence of court life in the Renaissance, Ackerman writes that clothing, “did not conceal the body, but clung in just the right places to accentuate gender. One of the most curious, perhaps, was the codpiece, worn by European men between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Somewhat like a tribal penis sheath or a jockstrap, its purpose was to protect the penis, but men exaggerated its size and shape—sometimes even decorating it with a gargoyle-like head—to draw attention to the penis and make it appear to be constantly large and erect.”
During all this, writes Hollander, women stayed in pretty shapeless clothing as their men donned the new “perfectly fitted tights and tight-fitting doublets… laced together around the waist for smooth overall fit…. The separate hose were sewn together to become tights, and drawn up firmly to hide the underpants; and once legs showed all the way up, the codpiece was invented, and padded.”
Whatever the origin of the codpiece, its ability to demand the eye, to arouse sexual feeling, can’t be diminished. Banner suggests that the inspiration for the codpiece may have been to protect the penis during battle. “Yet one recent scholar has argued that the codpiece was in fact devised as a protective device to prevent the staining of expensive fabrics by the oily, mercury-based cream applied to the penis and used as a treatment for syphilis, suddenly epidemic in Europe in the 1490s.” Banner concedes, however, that “it was also a sexualized garment, for it riveted attention to the male sexual organ. The conservative parson in The Canterbury Tales thundered against the short jacket’s exposure of the shape of the genitals. In fourteenth-century mystery and miracle plays, devils as characters often wore large false penises.”
Men gave their codpieces various shapes and forms, painted them inventively, all the better to catch the eye. “One might glance at an especially fashionable Elizabethan young man and discover an upturned, mightily erect leather codpiece with a gargoyle face staring back,” writes Ackerman. “Somewhere underneath, a normal member was hanging with the homeboys. This is like being cowed by the big booming voice of the Wizard of Oz only to discover a modest-sized man with a megaphone hiding inside the wizard’s costume.”
Is Ackerman teasing men for cheating via their padded codpieces? What hides inside the Wonderbra? As often as not a little girl of a woman doesn’t know whether she wants to have sex with a man or sleep with women; she puts on the sexual signal, as is her right, but when the man responds, she doesn’t protect herself contraceptively. What began in the sixties as exciting exhibitionism, which we called freedom, has come to this, a fashion dead end, a sexual display with nothing inside, no sense of power or responsibility.
Lacking our blessing, men are reclaiming the mirror anyway. When Calvin Klein’s Marky Mark underwear ads appeared on giant billboards across the country at the end of 1992, there wasn’t a whisper from feminist headquarters. “Wearing only a pair of lycra boxer shorts that hugged his muscular thighs and bulged provocatively at the crotch, he stood laughing directly out at us,” writes a male journalist. “An article of clothing that we have either emasculated or kept out of sight entirely has now broken out of its sartorial prison and emerged into public view as the object of nothing less than a mass cult, a collective act of fetishization.”
Advertisements for “The New Men’s Underwear” sound very much like the hype for the Wonderbra: The exotic briefs and boxer shorts don’t simply fit, protect, cover, and support, they “sculpt,” “mold,” “contour,” “chisel,” “transform,” “embrace,” “accentuate,” and even, in the case of the form-fitting “Body Brief,”… “kiss your every contour.”
The journalist quoted above continues his review of men’s new undies thus: “Often needlessly complicated with laces, zippers, and snaps, flies are no longer simply convenient openings but full-fledged codpieces, distended pouches that protrude from the crotch of the brief.”
I cheer men forward in their inventive sexual display as we women slowly but surely boost our earning power, requiring male providership less and less. Maybe men’s stealing our
thunder will incite women to abandon our foolish denials regarding how we compete with one another. Given the pitch of our infighting, the weight of the economic prizes, and the girlish denials we use to conceal what we do, we call our elimination of opponents, male and female, any word but what it really is: competition.
Will our new independence nudge women past the anti-voyeurism rules that have kept our eyes lowered for centuries? Imagine, women as voyeurs! That would be a first, liberty for both men and women. There is no joy in the parade if no one watches.
9
Changing the Double Standard of Aging
Adultery: Scarlet Letter or Red Cross?
In January 1980, when my house burned down, everything went up in smoke, including my former marriage. It has required the intervening years, in particular the writing of this book, for me to give that fire due credit for ending a chapter in my life I had outgrown years earlier, a fact I was unable to admit as a child might be unable to acknowledge reluctance to leave her parents’ home.
Mine was certainly not a typical marriage, but it was a product of that time when sex, economics, beauty, and feminism were a fireball: It bore the seeds of the new deal between the sexes now being negotiated as well as the evolution of our double standard of aging. During that marriage I wrote my first books, and out of that writing came the beginning of self-knowledge. I had the good luck and timing to tackle the issues of women’s sexual fantasies and the mother/daughter relationship during modern feminism’s most energetic era. Back then, the air was drenched with intoxicating permission to say and think formerly inadmissible ideas.
