Fetish, Anyone?

Fetishes are called kinks or perversions and refer to any deviance from the accepted “normal” sexual practice. But is there not a certain flexibility allowed for them? Homosexuality, for example, has been called a perversion and in certain places still is deemed one, though no longer so in enlightened Western societies.

Then there are practices that opinion is divided about. Take anal intercourse between men and women. Whereas oral sex is no longer considered kinky, anal sex is still judged such in certain quarters, where not much has changed since Annabella Lady Byron was granted a divorce from her husband for requiring anal sex..

Certain perversions are associated with some kind of violence espoused by consenting adults, e.g., sadism and masochism (S&M). Others, however, are more peaceable, as, for instance, foot fetishism. An entire society, the Chinese, went in for foot binding, which had nothing to do with preventing wives from escaping their husbands, but with the latter liking to toy with tiny feet.

Why this impulse? On the one hand (or foot) because smallness itself is appealing—think puppies, kittens, babies, and miniatures of every kind. But also, I think, because for the smaller foot, toes are more proportionate. They can be only so big, and on a large foot they have a way of looking like a puny appendage. On a smaller foot, they have a way of blending in seamlessly into a symmetrical balance.

Still, why a foot fetish, and none on, say, a calf or knee? It would seem to have to do  with feet being usually hidden in shoes, and thus, when exposed, a kind of revelation. Other parts that would be erotic if bared, like breasts, remain mainly concealed. In any case, male attraction to the female bosom, an approved erotic zone, is considered normal.

Because hands are on full display, there seems to be no serious hand fetishism. There is, however, shoe fetishism for high-heeled women’s shoes, a kind of transference from feet, but I would wager offhand not all that frequent.

Much as I respond to a beautiful bare female foot, the stimulus is minimal on a beach full of bikinied women. Partly, this is a matter of excess, of indiscriminate exposure devoid of mystery. More so perhaps because there the exposed foot does not carry a promise of greater things to come. Conversely, a fully clad woman’s bare foot does induce further expectations of disrobing. Then again, a skilled woman can, with a bare foot, induce a fricative male orgasm. In any case, scantily clad ubiquitousness invites detumescence.

Why, all things considered, should it be all right for a man to caress, kiss, suck or nibble a woman’s breast, but not her foot? The answer would appear to be that, in the former, pleasure is shared; in the latter, one-sided. But then why is fellatio approved, when a woman would more likely prefer a lollypop or ice-cream cone to a penis and sperm?

Or is it enough for the woman to simultaneously merely sense the pleasure she is giving?

The eroticism of the foot has quite an outlet in literature. Take, for instance, Sir Thomas Wyatt’s famous poem that begins, “They flee from me, that sometimes did me seek/ With naked foot stalking in my chamber . . .” The epithet naked in preference to bare may be simply due to the need of a bisyllable to make the iambic line scan. But then what of Oscar Wilde’s “Salome,” where the drooling Herod mutters, “Ah, thou art to dance with naked feet! ‘Tis well! ‘Tis well. Thy little feet will be like white doves. They will be like little white flowers that dance upon the trees.” Of course it could be argued that Wilde wrote the play in French, where it had to be “pieds nus” because there is no word for bare. But surely he and his lover “Bosie” Douglas, who translated the play into English, must have been aware of the implications of “naked.”

Both Robert Herrick and Sir John Suckling have written poems celebrating a woman’s foot peeping out from under her skirt while dancing though there the foot remains shod. But what about Shakespeare about Cressida: “Her eye, her cheek, her lip,/ Nay, her foot speaks”?

Still, the apogee of foot fetishism in English is in George du Maurier’s 1894 novel, “Trilby.” Its heroine begins as a teenage Irish beauty in Paris, posing as a model for painters and sculptors, often in the altogether. “’Yes,” she says to her British admirers, “’l’ensemble, you know—head, hands, and feet—everything—especially feet. That’s my foot,’ she said, kicking off her slipper and stretching out her limb. ‘It’s the handsomest foot in all Paris. There is only one in all Paris to match it, and here it is,’ and she laughed heartily (like a merry peal of bells) and stuck out the other.

And in truth they were astonishingly beautiful feet, such as one only sees in pictures and statues—a true inspiration of shape and colour, all made up of delicate lengths and subtly-modified curves and noble straightnesses and happy little dimpled arrangements in innocent young pink and white.

So that Little Billee . . . was quite bewildered to find that a real, bare, live human foot could be such a charming object to look at . . . .

The shape of those lovely slender feet (that were neither large nor small), facsimiled in dusty pale plaster of Paris, survives on the shelves and walls of many a studio throughout the world, and many a sculptor yet unborn has yet to marvel at their strange perfection, in studious despair . . . .

It is a wondrous thing, the human foot—like the human hand; even more so, perhaps; but, unlike the hand, with which we are so familiar, it is seldom a thing of beauty in civilized adults who go about in leather boots or shoes.

So that it is hidden away in disgrace, a thing to be thrust out of sight and forgotten. It can sometimes be very ugly indeed—the ugliest thing there is, even in the fairest and highest and most gifted of her sex, and then it is of an ugliness to chill and kill romance, and scatter love’s young dream, and almost break the heart.

And all for the sake of high heel and a ridiculously pointed toe--mean things at the best!

Conversely, when Mother Nature has taken extra pains in the building of it, and proper care or happy chance has kept it free of lamentable deformations, indurations, and discolorations—all those grewsome [sic] boot-begotten abominations, which have made it generally upopular—the sudden sight of it, uncovered, comes as a very rare and singularly pleasing surprise to the eye that has learned how to see!

Nothing else that Mother Nature has to show, not even the human face divine, has more subtle power to suggest high physical distinction, happy evolution, and supreme development, the lordship of man over beast, the lordship of man over man, the lordship of woman over all . . . .

Trilby had respected Mother Nature’s special gift to herself—had never worn a leather boot or shoe, had always taken as much care of her feet as many a fine lady takes of her hands. . . .

With the point of an old compass, [Little Billie] scratched in white on the dark red wall a three-quarter profile outline of Trilby’s left foot, which was perhaps the more perfect poem of the two.”

Later, the great sculptor Durien comes visiting and, recognizing the foot on the wall, exclaims, “Tiens! Le pied de Trilby! Vous avez fait ca d’apres Nature?” and remarks, “Je voudrais bien avoir fait ca, moi!” The only thing du Maurier does not mention is a high instep, but being as much a visual artist as a writer, he includes among his illustrations for the book two little sketches of Trilby’s foot. There are several references throughout the novel to Trilby’s “beautiful [or alabaster] white feet,” plaster casts of which enriched their vendor and whose mural image was vainly tried to be removed from the studio wall. But let me move on to two incidents that reverberate in my memory.

One long-ago summer, my then girlfriend was driving us in her car. She was barefoot, and I, sitting next to her, pointed out how pretty her foot looked on the gas pedal. She was both surprised and delighted: it had never occurred to her that she had pretty feet. Another time, I went backstage to congratulate a lovely actress on her performance. She was barefoot, and for the first time I really saw her feet. They were large, flat, wide and, not to mince words, ugly. I was appalled, and wondered whether could ever again give her a rave review. Luckily I never saw her again, on or off the stage.

 I truly think I have figured out how I got my (mild enough) foot fetish, even though such a thing, I imagine, rarely has its etiology. Back in my childhood in Belgrade a maid who cleaned floors would attach a special brush by its strap to her bare foot for that purpose and scrub away. This afforded me my first glimpse of female flesh (the leg was bare too) and filled my young soul with erotic excitement.

I still admire a well-turned foot, preferably on the small side. I wonder what Francois Villon meant in his “Ballade des Dames du temps jadis,” in which he celebrates women for their beauty or power. One of them he refers to as “Berte au grant pie.” [Accent aigu on the E.] I recall, by the way, that Eric Partridge designates Bertha as a Teutonic name, meaning bright or shining one. So was this “grand pied,” as we would say now, perhaps also bright and shining, for Villon--an object of admiration or deprecation or merely observation?

Idle but enjoyable speculation. Let us now, however, turn to higher things.

POLITICS

Politics is a mug’s game, and by mug I don’t mean Donald Trump’s countenance that television would have me contemplate with scant respite. Mrs. Clinton looks more presentable, by which I do also mean electable, no matter which computer she used for whatever purpose. As for Bernie Sanders, the superannuated socialist, whose Vermont ill conceals his Brooklyn, and who uses his arms as if worked by a palsied puppeteer, I have my Harvard Ph. D. and no longer need free college tuition. And  I would hate to have to look at and listen to him for four years: his voice and visage are even less prepossessing than Trump’s.

But oh, politics in general! I am in total sympathy with the fine but undeservedly forgotten novelist Anatole France, whose autobiographical hero in that delightful novel “Le Lys rouge” declares, “I am not so devoid of all talents as to occupy myself with politics,” an enlightened view insufficiently shared.

Politics is one of the four high-stakes games along with sport, showbiz, and finance, each gambling for fame, wealth, and power. Yes, power. Think how barely slapped on the wrist are our leading footballers who beat the daylights out of their wives or girlfriends. And just how many women did Cosby have to drug and fuck before the Law finally got interested in his case, and may now—or still may not—pay some attention.

Well, who is or was more famous than Madonna or Sinatra, Beyonce or Michael Jackson? Who is or was more widely known and revered than Michael Jordan or Joe DiMaggio, Babe Ruth or Serena Williams? Would any of them have any difficulty getting a reservation at the fanciest restaurants? Even without CDs or old movies that won’t go away, these celebs are likely to subsist after the kids no longer know who George Gershwin and Emily Dickinson were.

You may wonder why I don’t include literature or classical music among the major games. It is because their representatives require some effort to make themselves known, some reading or serious listening. And the fine arts require visits to museums and galleries, for which one has to be prompted, and that also requires some effort. That and serious music also demand some sort of input, postulating education and tradition, unavailable to the lower orders and having little mass appeal, I remember how shocked I was when I read about “concerts” being something in arenas and featuring pop stars rather than in concert halls with classical music.

Back to politics. There are many problems with it. Take, for instance, dishonesty, which feeds into politics, combining with hypocrisy in a dreadful duet.. “Just because I lie,” says the politician, “I don’t want others to lie to me; just because I am untrustworthy, I don’t want you to be so.” How hypocritical even we nonpoliticians are. Let the politician be caught in a bit of adultery and his career is over. So, naturally, he hides things and lies. The mistress in South America does not exist, nor does the money come by illegally. More lies. The only reason Bill Clinton was more or less able to get away with the Monica affair is that there was apparently no penetration, only fellation, which, as Bill was first to tell us, is not sex at all.

But politicians have to lie. What adult human does not have an Achilles heel, some lapse or misdemeanor in the distant past, that a muckraker or rival can dig up and blow up out of proportion? What politician can shrug off some false step a rival with an eagle eye and sharp-edged spade can somehow detect?  How else can gossip columnists make a living? In France, to be sure, they are more civilized; there the married president or premier can have a fully recognized mistress and not be the worse off for it—perhaps even better.

The politician parades virtues that he does not in the least possess; he can appropriate illegal millions that he does not confide even to his pillow. Of course there are some honest politicians, sure enough; there are also some girls who are virgins, some men not prey to lust, some persons who find a stuffed wallet and somehow return it to the owner.  Thus when the editor of the New Yorker praised his star contributor Dwight Macdonald for having a hand that once shook the hand of James Joyce, Dwight replied with something like “But you have no idea what other hands it has shaken since.” What with such honesty, no wonder that Dwight’s magazine, “Politics,” did not last long.

I forget which famous person said that, in the street, we should sometimes wink also at unpretty girls. To be sure, nowadays the unpretty feminist might slap your face. Moreover, today’s politician would do more than wink at, even sweet talk, a monster, so long as the monster might contribute to his campaign fund. I wonder, by the way, why today’s politicians no longer seem to kiss other people’s babies. Could it be out of a more advanced sense of hygiene?

But how many people nowadays really trust a politician? Certainly those foolishly cheering young students who think Bernie Sanders will get them a free college education, as if that weren’t just one of his many socialist pipe dreams. They could never make it through the House and Senate. Not in many more years than may be left him after the stress and strain of his unrequited candidacy.

Which somehow made me wonder what Will Shakespeare, one of the smartest judges of men ever (I wish English could match the German Menschenkenner) had to say about politicians. In “Henry IV, Part One,” Hotspur refers to his arch enemy Bolingbroke as “this vile politician.” In “Twelfth Night,” Andrew Aguecheek exclaims in horror “I’d had as lief be a Brownist as a politician,” thus referring to a follower of William Browne, one of the first dissenters from the Church of England, and so a kind of heretic. In “Hamlet,” the Prince contemplates an unearthed skull and remarks, “This might be the pate of a politician . . . one that would circumvent God,” in other words a lowlife who would outwit God himself. And Lear warns, “Get thee glass eyes,/ And like a scurvy politician seem/ To see the things thou dost not”—in other words, a liar. That is a politician: vile, heretical, godless and a liar.

To be sure, an author does not necessarily believe what a character of his says. But such recurrent obloquy, so sharply expressed , does suggest authorial agreement.

Or consider what a fine poet nearer our own time had to say, E. E. Cummings’s “A politician is an arse upon/ which everyone has sat except a man.” How nice of Cummings to spell ass the classic British way, though perhaps he did so merely to emphasize that he meant a derriere, and not just a rather harmless thing, a donkey.

Does anyone of consequence have much good to write about a politician? In the nineteenth century perhaps, but hardly later. Certainly no such encomium makes it into any of the known dictionaries of quotations.

I once acted in the Harvard Dramatic Club’s production of Jean Giraudoux’s wonderful play ”The Trojan War Will Not Take Place,” unfortunately in Christopher Fry’s inadequate version. He called it “Tiger at the Gates,” thus impoverishing even its title. The director asked me what part I wanted to play, and I said Demokos, the cowardly lawyer who could just as well be a politician. It turned out that Fry had stupidly omitted the Demokos scene, and so the director asked me to translate it and play in it.

Incidentally, The Harvard Crimson ridiculed my version of Ajax, “le plus mauvais coucheur parmi les Grecs,” which I rendered as “the meanest plugugly among the Greeks.” But I still stand by plug-ugly, which the dictionary defines as “ruffian, rowdy, tough.” Something the Crimson should have blushed for not knowing.

This Demokos, a corrupt international lawyer who could just as well be a politician, finds for the Greeks in a disputed matter until Hector politely admonishes him, and the wretch fawningly adjudicates in favor of the Trojans. Or, closer to home, consider what our Donald Trump is up to. He speaks out of every corner of his mouth (surely more than two) whatever he deems his particular audience wants to hear, and there is not even a Hector around to threaten him. He’ll remain adamant about a few things, but about many others he goes whichever way the wind blows.

Yet the whole display of current politics, Clinton excepted, is a vast joke, and I can only hope that future writers will score easy belly laughs by reporting the shenanians. These Demokosian twists and turns need to be immortalized as a warning to future generations. The appalling Ted Cruz and a few lesser losers shall not go unremembered and unridiculed, which I hope to live to witness.

One other thing I’d like to ascertain: what is it with the Donald’s hair? Can it be natural or is it, as it looks to me, an ill-fitting, inexpensive wig? If that is all he allows himself, what favors can the nation expect from him should he be elected? Bernie’s white fringe is, I daresay, his own, and may even serve him as a flag of justice. What is it that Barbara Fritchie says in the famous poem? “’Shoot if you must this old gray head,/ But spare your country’s flag’ she said.” Hillary’s hair seems at any rate her own, ample and rather nice. What lodges beneath that thatch we cannot always tell, and perhaps not always approve of, but it is surely better than any other hirsuteness now on political offer.