LITMIR.BIZ

      Every lover is also somewhat of an erotic fetishist. He, or she, loves objects that have been in close or intimate contact with the beloved and thus are especially dear. These objects ensure the proximity and closeness of the beloved. Special physical forms of expression of this desired person can also become a symbol for the significance of the partner as a loved and cherished individual: a way of walking, a way of smiling, “the way you wear your hat, the way you sip your tea.” Physical characteristics such as hair colour, shape of eyes and mouth, clothing, etc. can constitute the cause, the movens, of being in love. Today, a value such as youth itself seems to have turned into an overvalued fetish. As long as these concrete and physical symbols represent the totality of the loved individual, one can speak of a “normal fetish”.

      However, there are forms in which the sexual partner disappears completely behind the symbol, sometimes to the extent that the symbol is stripped of its symbolic character and becomes the sexual trigger and stimulus itself. This is what occurs when items of clothing, especially shoes, stockings, handkerchiefs, and underwear play a significant role.

      In classical literature cases are known when handkerchiefs, clothing, money purses, and braids are snatched from their owners through violence and trickery to satisfy a sexual motive, while orgasm occurs in part during the act of purloining, in part through masturbation when subsequently viewing, or handling the fetish.

      All of these objects are charged with magical powers similar to the “holy relics” of Christianity and the amulets of so-called “indigenous tribes.” The term applied to the phenomenon of fetishism also has its roots in ethnology. During the fifteenth and sixteenth century, when the Portuguese in West Africa noticed the reverence and veneration with which the local natives treated such objects as stones, sticks, and idols, they compared these objects with amulets or talismans and called them “feiticio” [Italian: “fetisso”] or “magic,” a word which is derived from the Latin “factitius” [of magic power]. This magical thinking, which also penetrated the cults of Christian religion, corresponds with a deep human need. Those who are aware of the close relationship between religious and erotic sensations and feelings understand that fetishist imagery also occurs frequently in love.

      The Frenchman A. Binet was the first to describe sexual fetishism in his 1877 article Du fétichisme dans l’amour. The few mentioned examples of fetishist objects already illustrate how much the fetishes themselves depend on current fashions. The braids of old have been cut off a long time ago and a paper Kleenex will hardly become an object feverishly desired by a lover. Shoe and foot fetishism has been influenced by fashion as well. When women still wore long skirts with their feet every so often accidentally peeking out from underneath, it was literally a “fiendish joy” to steal a glance at an ankle and shoe. When calves were still hidden from view, never mind the knees, the calf fetishists were happy about bad weather: This gave them the opportunity to follow women for long stretches in the hopes that the ladies might be forced to lift their skirts because of the puddles and thus expose their calves to the greedy looks of their pursuers. Concealment, thus, steered the imagination towards calves, feet, and footwear, and promoted the fetishist preference for these body parts and their clothing.

      49. Series of anonymous watercolours illustrating Women of the world, 1940.

      50. Series of anonymous watercolours illustrating Women of the world, 1940.

      There were shoe fetishists who aroused themselves with the shoes and boots which used to be placed outside the doors of hotel rooms for cleaning. Hirschfeld describes the case of a man who engaged in masturbation when he looked at a pair of large men’s boots, preferably a soldier’s boots with spurs, next to delicate women’s shoes that were placed outside the door; during the cover of night, he would sneak over to where the shoes were to caress, smell, and kiss them.

      An expressive example of how both the foot and the shoe can become a fetishist object is provided by the French writer Rétif de la Bretonne (1734–1806). He represents the type of a pure shoe fetishist. When looking at women’s shoes, he used to quiver lustfully and blush in front of them as if they were the girls themselves. He collected the slippers and shoes of his lover, kissed and smelled them, and sometimes masturbated into them. In his autobiographical novel, Monsieur Nicolas, Rétif wrote the following about his shoe fetish: “Dragged away from the stormiest, completely adoring passion for Colette, I imagined seeing and feeling her in body and spirit by caressing the shoes she had worn just a moment ago with my hands. I pressed my lips on one of these jewels while the other substituted as woman during a frenzied fit… This bizarre, mad pleasure seemed to – how should I say? – seemed to lead me straight to Colette herself.”

      His famous story Fanchette’s Foot was conceived in 1767. One Sunday morning, at the corner of Montorgueil Street he saw a pretty girl standing in front of a boutique. She was dressed in a white slip, silk stockings, and pink shoes with high stiletto heels. He was enchanted by what he saw, including the charming walk of the girl, and in his mind immediately began writing the first chapter of the above-mentioned work, which starts with the words: “I am the actual historian recording the glorious conquest of the small foot of a beauty.” The following day, when his imagination had somewhat cooled, he wanted to see his muse once more but instead noticed a woman on Saint-Denis Street whose foot was a “miracle of daintiness” dressed in a delightful gold-trimmed shoe made by the premier shoemaker of Paris. Full of enthusiasm he hurried home and in two days wrote the first fourteen chapters of Pied de Fanchette.

      A friend reports about Rétif: “Our dear Nicolas had a rather strange but I believe excusable obsession. No matter how ugly a woman’s face was, whether she was hunchbacked or limped, our dear friend always fell madly in love with her if she had a pretty foot and especially if she wore pretty shoes. He relished a woman’s feet more than anything; they were everything for him in terms of bliss and pleasure.” The woman herself was viewed as a somewhat insignificant appendix of her foot or her shoes.

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      Примечания

      1

      Blasons auf den weiblichen Körper, hg.v. L.Klünner, Berlin 1964.

      2

      Hartmut Böhme, Erotische Anatomie, in: C. Benthieu/Ch.Wulf (Hg.), Körperteile. Eine kulturelle

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