Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?: And Other Reflections on Being Human

by Jesse Bering

  More recent work has validated Ellis’s hunch that shoe fetishism is not simply a peculiar attraction to these inanimate objects and that sexual arousal is related to the intimate connection with the feet of a particular shoe owner. For example, in a series of reports on male homosexual foot fetishism, the sociologist Martin Weinberg and his colleagues asked members of the Foot Fraternity what they found especially attractive in shoes. The majority of these 262 men expressed complete sexual disinterest in new, never-worn shoes. Instead, they had a clear preference for footwear that had been well worn by a good-looking person. Shopping for shoes at thrift stores was a godsend for many of these fetishists, since it allowed them to fantasize about the original owner rather than face the ugly realties of an aesthetically challenged sole—soul, I mean soul. And just as heterosexual podophilia has a symbolic element, with straight connoisseurs displaying very particular tastes for certain styles of female footwear and leggings, gay foot fetishists associate shoe types with idealized males. One man, for example, explained to the investigators how a rich tapestry of senses had become linked to stereotypical associations with different male shoe types: “the odors and the corresponding image; docksiders and preppies, sneakers and young punks, boots and dominant men.” Other gay male foot fetishists repeated this symbolic theme in their likes and dislikes:

  “Boots represent power and strength … They exemplify the essence of manhood, an exaggeration of maleness.”

  “Wing tips typify a successful businessman.”

  “Sneakers have been in contact with a good-looking young stud.”

  “Weejun penny loafers are worn by preppie college guys.”

  In a subsequent article in The Journal of Sex Research, Weinberg and his colleagues returned to their foot fan base (the Foot Fraternity boasted more than a thousand members in 1995, the vast majority being well-educated white men with white-collar jobs) and asked these individuals to reflect in writing on the origins of their love of male feet. “We specifically asked the age at which respondents first became interested in feet/footwear,” explain the authors, “and, to tap the reinforcing effect of masturbation”—no pun intended, I think—“their experiences with fantasies about feet/footwear when they masturbated during adolescence.” Fetishists reported a mean age of twelve in their first becoming (consciously) sexually aroused by feet, with nearly all of them masturbating regularly to foot-related objects (such as shoes or socks or photographs of feet) or to mental images of steamy podiatric encounters.

  In terms of developmental context, many of the 204 respondents couldn’t recall a specific incident per se from their pasts that they might attribute to this now-concretized aspect of their adult sexual identity. Yet 89 were able to give detailed accounts of their suspected first foot-related triggers. And for you parents out there with your toes dangling promiscuously for your impressionable young children to see, their answers might give you pause. “Sleeping upside down with my parents,” reflects one grown man of his early childhood and his snuggling innocently with them under the covers, “and finding my dad’s feet in my face.” “I used to tickle my dad’s feet,” recalls another. “I enjoyed his laughter very much … He would feign enjoyment as part of the game.” Another reminisces: “At about 5 or 6 years old, removing my father’s shoes and massaging his hot feet … The soft, warm feet and the pleasure he seemed to experience—usually going to sleep—and I could kiss and lick his feet.” Other respondents had similar experiences, but theirs were unrelated to parental feet. The foot of a hero-worshipped older brother hanging down in front of one’s face as he lay on a topmost bunk bed, for example, or wrestling playfully with one’s friends or neighbors and finding a foot buried, and not unpleasantly so, in one’s crotch.

  As with Ellis’s analysis of heterosexual podophiles, Weinberg and his colleagues observed that the origins of this homosexual podophilia could almost always be traced back to such positive experiences during development, rather than negative or abusive ones. This is an important observation, in fact, because it’s often assumed that such a fetish represents the person’s masochistic desire to be kicked or violently tread upon. Although this is in some cases true, Ellis admonishes us not to so hastily assume that the average foot lover has a secret desire to be subservient to a dominant figure. “To suppose that a fetishistic admiration of his mistress’s foot is due to a lover’s latent desire to be kicked,” he proclaims, “is as unreasonable as it would be to suppose that a fetishistic admiration for her hand indicated a latent desire to have his ears boxed.”

  Ellis was convinced that it’s often the most intelligent and precocious children who are particularly “liable to become the prey of a chance symbolism” in their sexual development, forever shaping their adult orientations. One especially vivid example of such a child, in this case a very troubled one, is laid out in the American Journal of Psychotherapy in an article titled “The Treatment of a Child Foot Fetishist.” A team of physicians led by Jules Bemporad handled the case. The boy, whom the psychiatrists called “Kurt,” presented initially to the children’s clinic at age eight. His full-scale IQ tested in the superior range at 129, but somewhere along the way he’d acquired the bizarre habit of sneaking up on his mother, removing her shoes, and licking her feet with great excitement. “While licking the feet,” write the psychiatrists, “he regularly had an erection and played with his penis.” Digging a bit deeper into the boy’s past, the following tale emerged:

  The preoccupation with his mother’s feet began within the first year of life; the mother remembers that he “loved to play with my feet” and that she encouraged it, considering it cute. She would lie in bed while Kurt gave her a foot massage—an enjoyable experience for her and a source of comfort for him. Gradually, the rubbing was accompanied by mouthing and licking, as well as by the mother giving him monetary rewards for his “massages.” By the age of 5 or 6, the act had become sexually exciting, leading to wild shouting and genital manipulation. It was at this stage that the mother allegedly began prohibiting contact with her feet.

  At this stage, of course, it was too late. The authors follow Kurt up to age sixteen. While he continued to excel at school and managed to gain control over his blatant symptoms with his mom’s toes, his foot obsession remained very much intact, and his mother’s playful permissiveness left lifelong sexual problems. There were other factors involved, too, that made for a Freudian nightmare. Kurt’s distant and anal-retentive Jewish father allegedly informed the boy, on passing a delicatessen one day, that the salamis hanging in the storefront window were the severed penises of dead men. (To retaliate, Kurt started decorating his room with trappings of Christianity.) And the mom admitted to playing with her little son’s penis during baths and calling it “cute.”

  About a decade later, the British child psychotherapist Juliet Hopkins would describe the case of a very tomboyish little girl who also had a problematic eroticized interest in feet. Hopkins’s interpretation of the origins of the girl’s foot fetish is that it all started in the bathtub. Her father used to bathe the little girl while she sat in his lap in the tub. From the child’s perspective, says Hopkins, seeing the two sets of feet together with their similar appearance was comforting and empowering to the girl because it offset the more obvious—and threatening—difference in genital anatomy.

  Still, while sensational stories are easy to come by, it’s only the slim minority for whom this erotic penchant for feet turns sinister or criminal. Most psychiatrists believe that unless it interferes with the individual’s adjustment in society or his or her mental well-being, fetishes shouldn’t be treated as a “problem” requiring clinical intervention. Eighty percent of Weinberg’s homosexual sample, in fact, reported being in a relationship with an understanding partner who was willing to accommodate their unshared fetish by incorporating foot play into the couple’s normal sexual routines. (In fact, given his noticeable interest in fellating my toes, looking back, I suspect that one of the first men I was ever with had a
secret foot fetish. Honestly, I wouldn’t have much minded; I shooed him away only for his own good, since I did have a nasty case of athlete’s foot that summer.) Related to partner support, the researchers also found that having access to member groups such as the Foot Fraternity significantly reduces confusion and discontent, allowing like-minded individuals to come out of the closet—or out of the shoe box—and explore their shared interests in open comfort within a nonstigmatizing community.

  This live-and-let-live approach certainly wasn’t the tack of the therapist Joseph Cautela in 1986, however. Cautela submitted an actual case transcript to the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry detailing his first session with a very lonely thirty-one-year-old foot fetishist who, ever since roughhousing with other boys when he was a teenager and becoming aroused by all the flying feet, found himself fantasizing about the feet of twelve- to fourteen-year-old boys. Importantly, the man had never acted on these feelings, but he wanted to be “normal” and so sought treatment. Cautela attempted to reorient the patient, trying to turn him not only off boys’ feet but from the male sex entirely. Of course few parents would be thrilled to discover this fellow employed at Kids Foot Locker, but from the case report he at least appeared to be pretty harmless, so his treatment is a rather sad testament to those times. But you be the judge. Let’s listen in to their therapy session:

  THERAPIST: It’s very important for you to know that every time you fantasize and masturbate about wrestling with boys you make the fetish worse. It’s just like doing it in reality. You strengthen the habit.

  PATIENT: I guess you’re right, but it’s out of control.

  THERAPIST: Well, I’ll help you get control of the habit.

  PATIENT: Can you?

  THERAPIST: Well, we have a good chance if you cooperate. I can teach you relaxation, teach you the self-control triad to get rid of your negative thinking and have you imagine something terrible or disgusting happening if you start inappropriate sexual fantasy.

  PATIENT: Is that all?

  THERAPIST: No. There are other coping mechanisms we can use. Also, we have to try to get you aroused toward females.

  PATIENT: But isn’t that a sin?

  THERAPIST: Well, what is more sinful: having a foot fetish that can ruin your life, or learning to be aroused by females?

  PATIENT: Well, if you put it that way.

  THERAPIST: I’m just saying that, in my experience in treating fetishes, it is necessary to build up heterosexual relationships and arousal. It’s up to you if you want to change. That’s my approach.

  PATIENT: OK. That makes sense.

  Heterosexual podophiles are difficult enough to explain from an evolutionary perspective. Under certain conditions in the ancestral past, such male foot fetishists (among perhaps other fetishists) may have, strangely enough, had a leg up over those whose arousal patterns were less discriminating. Most fetishists are known to have very specific tastes, and so partners matching their desires and willing to accommodate them—or, in this case, possessing feet that make them go crimson—are hard to find. Yet, in some cases, having fewer reproductive partners and instead having sex with only very particular females may be the key to success.

  This is the intriguing, if speculative, theory hinted at by the researcher James Giannini and his colleagues in Psychological Reports. It seems that, historically, the cultural eroticization of the female foot has coincided with the presence of sexually transmitted epidemics in such cultures. Podophiliac tastes have waxed and waned as diseases have run their course, and the authors illustrate how foot love manifested itself, then subsided, during the gonorrhea epidemic in the thirteenth century, syphilis in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, and AIDS in the current century. In sixteenth-century Spain, for instance, painters began specializing, for the first time in history, in portraits of the female foot, and shoes that showed a teasing bit of “toe cleavage” were all the rage. Again, Giannini’s ideas here are highly speculative, but it’s a promising hypothesis waiting to be borne out by additional population-level data on sexual behaviors and fetishism. If the shoe fits, as they say.

  A Rubber Lover’s Tale

  On June 6, 1969, a detective in southern Michigan, apparently sensing some scholarly significance in the unusual case report before him, sat down at his desk and typed up a matter-of-fact, single-page cover letter to an associate at the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research. The detective was writing with regard to a male patient who was being held voluntarily at a Kalamazoo psychiatric ward—a polite, self-confessed “rubberphile” who, in the darkest burrows of his own deep shame and mortification, with the electric summer hum of cicadas, the shrill of rusted gurney wheels, and the groans of fellow patients as an orchestra for his thoughts, had for several long weeks before sat hunched over in his bed trying furiously to expurgate his sexual demons through his pen. “This report is my soul and will save my life,” wrote the patient. And it’s this report that came to land soon after on the detective’s desk and was looked at askance, stuffed in a manila envelope, borne off by airmail to Bloomington, and eventually shelved discreetly with tens of thousands of other such reports in the Kinsey Institute’s unpublished archives.

  Forty years later, under the soft glow of fluorescent lighting in the institute’s library, I happened across this fetishist’s handwritten sexual autobiography—along with the detective’s austere covering note—while working on a book, and I must say that this man’s presentation of his condition was an articulate, startling self-exorcism. In a document still effervescent with fear and spanning some fifty pages of lucid, densely packed prose glazed with biblical scripture, this tortured forty-one-year-old “rubber lover”—who’d been arrested for various rubber-related crimes, the most minor of these being his making thousands of indecent phone calls to department store saleswomen, inquiring about rubber bikinis for his imaginary wife while fondling laminated advertisements of elastic-clad models with one hand and himself with the other—worked feverishly to understand the origins of his own insatiable desire for rubber and flesh.

  To the best of his knowledge, it all started when, at the age of seven, he’d stumbled upon his mother’s glistening white rubber bathing suit hanging on a clothesline on the back porch, an arousing event that coincided with his first becoming aware of that strange stirring in his loins. What began as an innocent enough youthful quirk, however, would eventually grow horns and become a highly fetishistic—and criminal—adult sexual identity. “He would type on a 3x5 card that he liked to squirt sperm into rubber caps or rubber girdles,” wrote the detective, who in clichéd administrative dishevelment left the signature stain of a coffee mug on the police station memo. “Then [he would] place the cards in the victims’ mail box and sometimes under the windshield wiper of their cars.”

  You may think this pathological rubber lover is an extreme case of sexuality gone awry, which it may very well be. But in studying the sexually abnormal, researchers can gain unique insight into the nuanced, otherwise hidden mechanisms of standard human sexual development and psychosexuality. The rubberphile’s early childhood exposure to his mother’s bathing suit, an impossibly white piece of material still beaded with lake water and fragrant with her perspiration, was perhaps simply coincident with a happenstance erection. Yet this chemistry was so powerful that once he massaged that elastic between his little thumb and his forefinger, all was forever lost.

  This basic developmental system, one in which certain salient childhood events “imprint” on our developing sexualities, may not be terribly uncommon. In fact, that early childhood experiences mold our adult sexual preferences—specifically, what turns us on and off, however subtle or even unconscious these particular biases may be—could even be run-of-the-mill. And just like the institutionalized rubber lover, the more carnally humdrum among us might also owe our secret preferences in the bedroom to our becoming aroused, at some point in the distant past, by our own parents, relatives, or childhood friends.

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p; Consider the case of a twenty-nine-year-old woman reported in an old Archives of General Psychiatry article who noticed to her dismay that she wasn’t averse to a bit of sadomasochism and penis gazing when having sex with men. On accounting for these strong erotic triggers, the woman recalled:

  When I was four, my father once caught me masturbating. He put me over his knee and smacked my buttocks. He was in pajamas, and the slit in front of his trousers opened widely, so that I could see his big penis and dark scrotum moving quite near my mouth each time he raised his hand … Ever since, I subconsciously connected the smacking of my buttocks with the view of his penis and my first sexual excitement.

  The trouble, of course, is that childhood sexual experiences, and in particular their causal relationship with adult human sexuality, are an elusive topic to study, at least in any rigorously controlled sense. It’s also an area of research that a prudish society—or at least one that views an individual’s sexuality as appearing out of the blue with the first pubescent flush of hormones (or, alternatively, as unfolding in some highly innate, blueprinted sense impenetrable to experience, for example, “the gay gene”)—prefers to look away from, in spite of its centrality to the human experience. Unlike, say, studying children’s acquisition of language, examining the precise developmental pathways to adult sexuality is more or less impossible. That’s not because it’s empirically impossible but rather because childhood sexuality is one of those third-rail topics that gets zapped by the electric fencing of university ethics boards and is therefore at risk of always remaining little understood. So as intriguing as retrospective self-reports like the ones above may be, they are, alas, little more than anecdotes.

  Yet never underestimate the cleverness of a good experimentalist. Although examining the precise causal links between early exposure to specific stimuli and adult sexuality is not exactly amenable to laboratory manipulation, there may be ways yet to explore general developmental mysteries using controlled methods. For example, for many investigative purposes, children are easily enough replaced by rats, and that’s just what the researchers Thomas Fillion and Elliott Blass did in a now-classic study showing just how important early experiences can be in shaping adult sexual behavior. As reported in their 1986 study in Science, Fillion and Blass took three female rats that had just given birth to litters of pups and experimentally altered these mothers’ odors in different ways. One of the rat dams had her teats and vagina coated with a lemony scent called citral; another dam had only her back coated with the same citral scent; and finally the third mother rat went lemonless—instead, her teats and vagina were simply painted with an odorless isotonic saline solution. So, if you’ll follow this through, once the dams were placed back with their suckling babes, the litters of pups differed from one another with respect to the particular odor—or at least the location of the odor—emanating from their mothers while she nursed.