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Animals as Sources of Erotic Symbolism. Mixoscopic Zoophilia. The
Stuff-fetichisms. Hair-fetichism. The Stuff-fetichisms Mainly on a Tactile
Base. Erotic Zoophilia. Zooerastia. Bestiality. The Conditions that Favor
Bestiality. Its Wide Prevalence Among Primitive Peoples and Among
Peasants. The Primitive Conception of Animals. The Goat. The Influence of
Familiarity With Animals. Congress Between Women and Animals. The Social
Reaction Against Bestiality.
Exhibitionism. Illustrative Cases. A Symbolic Perversion of Courtship. The
Impulse to Defile. The Exhibitionist's Psychic Attitude. The Sexual Organs
as Fetiches. Phallus Worship. Adolescent Pride in Sexual Development.
Exhibitionism of the Nates. The Classification of the Forms of
Exhibitionism. Nature of the Relationship of Exhibitionism to Epilepsy.
The Forms of Erotic Symbolism are Simulacra of Coitus. Wide Extension of
Erotic Symbolism. Fetichism Not Covering the Whole Ground of Sexual
Selection. It is Based on the Individual Factor in Selection.
Crystallization. The Lover and the Artist. The Key to Erotic Symbolism is
to be Found in the Emotional Sphere. The Passage to Pathological Extremes.
The Psychological Significance of Detumescence. The Testis and the Ovary.
Sperm Cell and Germ Cell. Development of the Embryo. The External Sexual
Organs. Their Wide Range of Variation. Their Nervous Supply. The Penis.
Its Racial Variations. The Influence of Exercise. The Scrotum and
Testicles. The Mons Veneris. The Vulva. The Labia Majora and their
Varieties. The Public Hair and Its Characters. The Clitoris and Its
Functions. The Anus as an Erogenous Zone. The Nymphц and their Function.
The Vagina. The Hymen. Virginity. The Biological Significance of the
Hymen.
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The Object of Detumescence. Erogenous Zones. The Lips. The Vascular
Characters of Detumescence. Erectile Tissue. Erection in Woman. Mucous
Emission in Women. Sexual Connection. The Human Mode of Intercourse.
Normal Variations. The Motor Characters of Detumescence. Ejaculation. The
Virile Reflex. The General Phenomena of Detumescence. The Circulatory and
Respiratory Phenomena. Blood Pressure. Cardiac Disturbance. Glandular
Activity. Distillatio. The Essentially Motor Character of Detumescence.
Involuntary Muscular Irradiation to Bladder, etc. Erotic Intoxication.
Analogy of Sexual Detumescence and Vesical Tension. The Specifically
Sexual Movements of Detumescence in Man. In Woman. The Spontaneous
Movements of the Genital Canal in Woman. Their Function in Conception.
Part Played by Active Movement of the Spermatozoa. The Artificial
Injection of Semen. The Facial Expression During Detumescence. The
Expression of Joy. The Occasional Serious Effects of Coitus.
The Constituents of Semen. Function of the Prostate. The Properties of
Semen. Aphrodisiacs. Alcohol, Opium, etc. Anaphrodisiacs. The Stimulant
Influence of Semen in Coitus. The Internal Effects of Testicular
Secretions. The Influence of Ovarian Secretion.
The Aptitude for Detumescence. Is There an Erotic Temperament? The
Available Standards of Comparison. Characteristics of the Castrated.
Characteristics of Puberty. Characteristics of the State of Detumescence.
Shortness of Stature. Development of the Secondary Sexual Characters. Deep
Voice. Bright Eyes. Glandular Activity. Everted Lips. Pigmentation.
Profuse Hair. Dubious Significance of Many of These Characters.
The Relationship of Maternal and Sexual Emotion. Conception and Loss of
Virginity. The Anciently Accepted Signs of This Condition. The Pervading
Effects of Pregnancy on the Organism. Pigmentation. The Blood and
Circulation. The Thyroid. Changes in the Nervous System. The Vomiting of
Pregnancy. The Longings of Pregnant Women. Mental Impressions. Evidence
for and Against Their Validity. The Question Still Open. Imperfection of
Our Knowledge. The Significance of Pregnancy.
The Definition of Erotic Symbolism--Symbolism of Act and Symbolism of
Object--Erotic Fetichism--Wide extension of the symbols of Sex--The
Immense Variety of Possible Erotic Fetiches--The Normal Foundations of
Erotic Symbolism--Classification of the Phenomena--The Tendency to
Idealize the Defects of a Beloved Person--Stendhal's "Crystallization."
By "erotic symbolism" I mean that tendency whereby the lover's attention
is diverted from the central focus of sexual attraction to some object or
process which is on the periphery of that focus, or is even outside of it
altogether, though recalling it by association of contiguity or of
similarity. It thus happens that tumescence, or even in extreme cases
detumescence, may be provoked by the contemplation of acts or objects
which are away from the end of sexual conjugation.[1]
Erotic symbolism is founded on the factor of individual taste in beauty; it
arises as a specialized development of that factor, but it is,
nevertheless, incorrect to merge it in sexual selection. The attractive
characteristics of a beloved woman or man, from the point of view of
sexual selection, are a complex but harmonious whole leading up to a
desire for the complete possession of the person who displays them. There
is no tendency to isolate and dissociate any single character from the
individual and to concentrate attention upon that character at the expense
of the attention bestowed upon the individual generally. As soon as such a
tendency begins to show itself, even though only in a slight or temporary
form, we may say that there is erotic symbolism.
Erotic symbolism is, however, by no means confined to the individualizing
tendency to concentrate amorous attention upon some single characteristic
of the adult woman or man who is normally the object of sexual love. The
adult human being may not be concerned at all, the attractive object or
act may not even be human, not even animal, and we may still be concerned
with a symbol which has parasitically rooted itself on the fruitful site
of sexual emotion and absorbed to itself the energy which normally goes
into the channels of healthy human love having for its final end the
procreation of the species. Thus understood in its widest sense, it may be
said that every sexual perversion, even homosexuality, is a form of erotic
symbolism, for we shall find that in every case some object or act that
for the normal human being has little or no erotic value, has assumed such
value in a supreme degree; that is to say, it has become a symbol of the
normal object of love. Certain perversions are, however, of such great
importance on account of their wide relationships, that they cannot be
adequately discussed merely as forms of erotic symbolism. This is notably
the case as regards homosexuality, auto-erotism, and algolagnia, all of
which phenomena have therefore been separately discussed in previous
studies. We are now mainly concerned with manifestations which are more
narrowly and exclusively symbolical.
A portion of the field of erotic symbolism is covered by what Binet
(followed by Lombroso, Krafft-Ebing, and others) has termed "erotic
fetichism," or the tendency whereby sexual attraction is unduly exerted by
some special part or peculiarity of the body, or by some inanimate object
which has become associated with it. Such erotic symbolism of object
cannot, however, be dissociated from the even more important erotic
symbolism of process, and the two are so closely bound together that we
cannot attain a truly scientific view of them until we regard them broadly
as related parts of a common psychic tendency. If, as Groos asserts,[3] a
symbol has two chief meanings, one in which it indicates a physical
process which stands for a psychic process, and another in which it
indicates a part which represents the whole, erotic symbolism of act
corresponds to the first of these chief meanings, and erotic symbolism of
object to the other.
Although it is not impossible to find some germs of erotic symbolism in
animals, in its more pronounced manifestations it is only found in the
human species. It could not be otherwise, for such symbolism involves not
only the play of fancy and imagination, the idealizing aptitude, but also
a certain amount of power of concentrating the attention on a point
outside the natural path of instinct and the ability to form new mental
constructions around that point. There are, indeed, as we shall see,
elementary forms of erotic symbolism which are not uncommonly associated
with feeble-mindedness, but even these are still peculiarly human, and in
its less crude manifestations erotic symbolism easily lends itself to
every degree of human refinement and intelligence.
In the study of "Love and Pain" in a previous volume, the analysis of the
large and complex mass of sexual phenomena which are associated with pain,
gradually resolved them to a considerable extent into a special case of
erotic symbolism; pain or restraint, whether inflicted on or by the loved
person, becomes, by a psychic process that is usually unconscious, the
symbol of the sexual mechanism, and hence arouses the same emotions as
that mechanism normally arouses. We may now attempt to deal more broadly
and comprehensively with the normal and abnormal aspects of erotic
symbolism in some of their most typical and least mixed forms.
The Greeks appear not only to have found in the myrtle-berry, the fruit of
a plant sacred to Venus, the image of the clitoris, but also in the rose
an image of the feminine labia; in the poetic literature of many
countries, indeed, this imagery of the rose may be traced in a more or
less veiled manner.[5]
The widespread symbolism of sex arose in the theories and conceptions of
primitive peoples concerning the function of generation and its nearest
analogies in Nature; it was continued for the sake of the vigorous and
expressive terminology which it furnished both for daily life and for
literature; its final survivals were cultivated because they furnished a
delicately sthetic method of approaching matters which a growing
refinement of sentiment made it difficult for lovers and poets to approach
in a more crude and direct manner. Its existence is of interest to us now
because it shows the objective validity of the basis on which erotic
symbolism, as we have here to understand it, develops. But from first to
last it is a distinct phenomenon, having a more or less reasoned and
intellectual basis, and it scarcely serves in any degree to feed the
sexual impulse. Erotic symbolism is not intellectual but emotional in its
origin; it starts into being, obscurely, with but a dim consciousness or
for the most part none at all, either suddenly from the shock of some
usually youthful experience, or more gradually through an instinctive
brooding on those things which are most intimately associated with a
sexually desirable person.
The kind of soil on which the germs of erotic symbolism may
develop is well seen in cases of sexual hyperцsthesia. In such
cases all the emotionally sexual analogies and resemblances,
which in erotic symbolism are fixed and organized, may be traced
in vague and passing forms, a single hyperцsthetic individual
perhaps presenting a great variety of germinal symbolisms.
Thus it has been recorded of an Italian nun (whose sister became
a prostitute) that from the age of 8 she had desire for coitus,
from the age of 10 masturbated, and later had homosexual
feelings, that the same feelings and practices continued after
she had taken the veil, though from time to time they assumed
religious equivalents.
A boy of 15 (given to masturbation), studied by Macdonald in
America, was similarly hyperцsthetic to the symbols of sexual
emotion. "I like amusing myself with my comrades," he told
Macdonald, "rolling ourselves into a ball, which gives one a
funny kind of warmth. I have a special pleasure in talking about
some things. It is the same when the governess kisses me on
saying good night or when I lean against her breast. I have that
sensation, too, when I see some of the pictures in the comic
papers, but only in those representing a woman, as when a young
man skating trips up a girl so that her clothes are raised a
little. When I read how a man saved a young girl from drowning,
so that they swam together, I had the same sensation. Looking at
the statues of women in the museum produces the same effect, or
when I see naked babies, or when a mother suckles a child. I
have often had that sensation when reading novels I ought not to
read, or when looking at a new-born calf, or seeing dogs and cows
and horses mounting on each other. When I see a girl flirting
with a boy, or leaning on his shoulder or with his arm round her
waist, I have an erection. It is the same when I see women and
little girls in bathing costume, or when boys talk of what their
fathers and mothers do together. In the Natural History Museum I
often see things which give me that sensation. One day when I
read how a man killed a young girl and carried her into a wood
and undressed her I had a feeling of enjoyment. When I read of
men who were bastards the idea of a woman having a child in that
way gives me this sensation. Some dances, and seeing young girls
astride a horse, excited me, too, and so in a circus when a woman
was shot out of a cannon and her skirts flew in the air. It has
no effect on me when I see men naked. Sometimes I enjoy seeing
women's underclothes in a shop, or when I see a lady or a girl
buying them, especially if they are drawers. When I saw a lady in
a dress which buttoned from top to bottom it had more effect on
me than seeing underclothes. Seeing dogs coupling gives me more
pleasure than looking at pretty women, but less than looking at
pretty little girls." In order of increasing intensity he placed
the phenomena that affected him thus: The coupling of flies, then
of horses, then the sight of women's undergarments, then a boy
and a girl flirting, then cows mounting on each other, the
statues of women with naked breasts, then contact with the
governess's body and breasts, finally coitus.
It is worthy of remark that the instinct of nutrition, when
restrained, may exhibit something of an analogous symbolism,
though in a minor degree, to that of sex. The ways in which a
hyperцsthetic hunger may seek its symbols are illustrated in the
case of a young woman called Nadia, who during several years was
carefully studied by Janet. It is a case of obsession ("maladie
du scrupule"), simulating hysterical anorexia, in which the
patient, for fear of getting fat, reduced her nourishment to the
smallest possible amount. "Nadia is generally hungry, even very
hungry. One can tell this by her actions; from time to time she
forgets herself to such an extent as to devour greedily anything
she can put her hands on. At other times, when she cannot resist
the desire to eat, she secretly takes a biscuit. She feels
horrible remorse for the action, but, all the same, she does it
again. Her confidences are very curious. She recognizes that a
great effort is needed to avoid eating, and considers she is a
heroine to resist so long. 'Sometimes I spent whole hours in
thinking about food, I was so hungry; I swallowed my saliva, I
bit my handkerchief, I rolled on the floor, I wanted to eat so
badly.
"There is almost no feature, article of dress, attitude, act," Stanley
Hall declares, "or even animal or perhaps object in nature, that may not
have to some morbid soul specialized erogenic and erethic power."[6] Even
a mere shadow may become a fetich. Goron tells of a merchant in Paris--a
man with a reputation for ability, happily married and the father of a
family, altogether irreproachable in his private life--who was returning
home one evening after a game of billiards with a friend, when, on
chancing to raise his eyes, he saw against a lighted window the shadow of
a woman changing her chemise. He fell in love with that shadow and
returned to the spot every evening for many months to gaze at the window.
Yet--and herein lies the fetichism--he made no attempt to see the woman or
to find out who she was; the shadow sufficed; he had no need of the
realty.[7] It is even possible to have a negative fetich, the absence of
some character being alone demanded, and the case has been recorded in
Chicago of an American gentleman of average intelligence, education, and
good habits who, having as a boy cherished a pure affection for a girl
whose leg had been amputated, throughout life was relatively impotent with
normal women, but experienced passion and affection for women who had lost
a leg; he was found by his wife to be in extensive correspondence with
one-legged women all over the country, expending no little money on the
purchase of artificial legs for his various protegщes.[8]
It is important to remember, however, that while erotic symbolism becomes
fantastic and abnormal in its extreme manifestations, it is in its
essence absolutely normal. It is only in the very grossest forms of sexual
desire that it is altogether absent. Stendhal described the mental side of
the process of tumescence as a crystallization, a process whereby certain
features of the beloved person present points around which the emotions
held in solution in the lover's mind may concentrate and deposit
themselves in dazzling brilliance. This process inevitably tends to take
place around all those features and objects associated with the beloved
person which have most deeply impressed the lover's mind, and the more
sensitive and imaginative and emotional he is the more certainly will such
features and objects crystallize into erotic symbols. "Devotion and love,"
wrote Mary Wollstonecraft, "may be allowed to hallow the garments as well
as the person, for the lover must want fancy who has not a sort of sacred
respect for the glove or slipper of his mistress. He would not confound
them with vulgar things of the same kind." And nearly two centuries
earlier Burton, who had gathered together so much of the ancient lore of
love, clearly asserted the entirely normal character of erotic symbolism.
"Not one of a thousand falls in love," he declares, "but there is some
peculiar part or other which pleaseth most, and inflames him above the
rest.... If he gets any remnant of hers, a busk-point, a feather of her
fan, a shoe-tie, a lace, a ring, a bracelet of hair, he wears it for a
favor on his arm, in his hat, finger, or next his heart; as Laodamia did
by Protesilaus, when he went to war, sit at home with his picture before
her: a garter or a bracelet of hers is more precious than any Saint's
Relique, he lays it up in his casket (O blessed Relique) and every day
will kiss it: if in her presence his eye is never off her, and drink he
will where she drank, if it be possible, in that very place," etc.[9]
Burton's accuracy in describing the ways of lovers in his century
is shown by a passage in Hamilton's _Mщmoires de Gramont_. Miss
Price, one of the beauties of Charles II's court, and Dongan were
tenderly attached to each other; when the latter died he left
behind a casket full of all possible sorts of love-tokens
pertaining to his mistress, including, among other things, "all
kinds of hair." And as regards France, Burton's contemporary,
Howell, wrote in 1627 in his _Familiar Letters_ concerning the
repulse of the English at Rhщ: "A captain told me that when they
were rifling the dead bodies of the French gentlemen after the
first invasion they found that many of them had their mistresses'
favors tied about their genitories."
The tendency to treasure the relics of a beloved person, more especially
the garments, is the simplest and commonest foundation of erotic
symbolism. It is without doubt absolutely normal. It is inevitable that
those objects which have been in close contact with the beloved person's
body, and are intimately associated with that person in the lover's mind,
should possess a little of the same virtue, the same emotional potency. It
is a phenomenon closely analogous to that by which the relics of saints
are held to possess a singular virtue. But it becomes somewhat less normal
when the garment is regarded as essential even in the presence of the
beloved person.[10]
While an extremely large number of objects and acts may be found to
possess occasionally the value of erotic symbols, such symbols most
frequently fall into certain well-defined groups. A vast number of
isolated objects or acts may be exceptionally the focus of erotic
contemplation, but the objects and acts which frequently become thus
symbolic are comparatively few.
It seems to me that the phenomena of erotic symbolism may be most
conveniently grouped in three great classes, on the basis of the objects
or acts which arouse them.
Although the three main groups into which the phenomena of erotic
symbolism are here divided may seem fairly distinct, they are yet very
closely allied, and indeed overlap, so that it is possible, as we shall
see, for a single complex symbol to fall into all three groups.
A very complete kind of erotic symbolism is furnished by Pygmalionism or
the love of statues.[12] It is exactly analogous to the child's love of a
doll, which is also a form of sexual (though not erotic) symbolism. In a
somewhat less abnormal form, erotic symbolism probably shows itself in its
simplest shape in the tendency to idealize unbeautiful peculiarities in a
beloved person, so that such peculiarities are ever afterward almost or
quite essential in order to arouse sexual attraction. In this way men have
become attracted to limping women. Even the most normal man may idealize a
trifling defect in a beloved woman. The attention is inevitably
concentrated on any such slight deviation from regular beauty, and the
natural result of such concentration is that a complexus of associated
thoughts and emotions becomes attached to something that in itself is
unbeautiful. A defect becomes an admired focus of attention, the embodied
symbol of the lover's emotion.
Thus a mole is not in itself beautiful, but by the tendency to
erotic symbolism it becomes so.
Stendhal long since well described the process by which a defect
becomes a sexual symbol. "Even little defects in a woman's face,"
he remarked, "such as a smallpox pit, may arouse the tenderness
of a man who loves her, and throw him into deep reverie when he
sees them in another woman. It is because he has experienced a
thousand feelings in the presence of that smallpox mark, that
these feelings have been for the most part delicious, all of the
highest interest, and that, whatever they may have been, they are
renewed with incredible vivacity on the sight of this sign, even
when perceived on the face of another woman. If in such a case we
come to prefer and love _ugliness_, it is only because in such a
case ugliness is beauty. A man loved a woman who was very thin
and marked by smallpox; he lost her by death. Three years later,
in Rome, he became acquainted with two women, one very beautiful,
the other thin and marked by smallpox, on that account, if you
will, rather ugly. I saw him in love with this plain one at the
end of a week, which he had employed in effacing her plainness by
his memories."
In the tendency to idealize the unbeautiful features of a beloved person
erotic symbolism shows itself in a simple and normal form. In a less
simple and more morbid form it appears in persons in whom the normal paths
of sexual gratification are for some reasons inhibited, and who are thus
led to find the symbols of natural love in unnatural perversions. It is
for this reason that so many erotic symbolisms take root in childhood and
puberty, before the sexual instincts have reached full development. It is
for the same reason also, that, at the other end of life, when the sexual
energies are failing, erotic symbols sometimes tend to be substituted for
the normal pleasures of sex. It is for this reason, again, that both men
and women whose normal energies are inhibited sometimes find the symbols
of sexual gratification in the caresses of children.
The case of a schoolmistress recorded by Penta instructively
shows how an erotic symbolism of this last kind may develop by no
means as a refinement of vice, but as the one form in which
sexual gratification becomes possible when normal gratification
has been pathologically inhibited. F.R., aged 48, schoolmistress;
she was some years ago in an asylum with religious mania, but
came out well in a few months. At the age of 12 she had first
experienced sexual excitement in a railway train from the jolting
of the carriage. Soon after she fell in love with a youth who
represented her ideal and who returned her affection. When,
however, she gave herself to him, great was her disillusion and
surprise to find that the sexual act which she had looked forward
to could not be accomplished, for at the first contact there was
great pain and spasmodic resistance of the vagina. There was a
condition of vaginismus. After repeated attempts on subsequent
occasions her lover desisted. Her desire for intercourse
increased, however, rather than diminished, and at last she was
able to tolerate coitus, but the pain was so great that she
acquired a horror of the sexual embrace and no longer sought it.
Having much will power, she restrained all erotic impulses during
many years. It was not until the period of the menopause that the
long repressed desires broke out, and at last found a symbolical
outlet that was no longer normal, but was felt to supply a
complete gratification. She sought the close physical contact of
the young children in her care. She would lie on her bed naked,
with two or three naked children, make them suck her breasts and
press them to every part of her body. Her conduct was discovered
by means of other children who peeped through the keyhole, and
she was placed under Penta for treatment. In this case the loss
of moral and mental inhibition, due probably to troubles of the
climacteric, led to indulgence, under abnormal conditions, in
those primitive contacts which are normally the beginning of
love, and these, supported by the ideal image of the early lover,
constituted a complete and adequate symbol of natural love in a
morbidly perverted individual. (P. Penta, _Archivio delle
Psicopatie Sessuali_, January, 1896.)
Foot-fetichism and Shoe-fetichism--Wide Prevalence and Normal
Basis--Restif de la Bretonne--The Foot a Normal Focus of Sexual Attraction
Among Some Peoples--The Chinese, Greeks, Romans, Spaniards, etc.--The
Congenital Predisposition in Erotic Symbolism--The Influence of Early
Association and Emotional Shock--Shoe-fetichism in Relation to
Masochism--The Two Phenomena Independent Though Allied--The Desire to be
Trodden On--The Fascination of Physical Constraint--The Symbolism of
Self-inflicted Pain--The Dynamic Element in Erotic Symbolism--The
Symbolism of Garments.
Of all forms of erotic symbolism the most frequent is that which idealizes
the foot and the shoe. The phenomena we here encounter are sometimes so
complex and raise so many interesting questions that it is necessary to
discuss them somewhat fully.
It would seem that even for the normal lover the foot is one of the most
attractive parts of the body. Stanley Hall found that among the parts
specified as most admired in the other sex by young men and women who
answered a _questionnaire_ the feet came fourth (after the eyes, hair,
stature and size).[13] Casanova, an acute student and lover of women who
was in no degree a foot fetichist, remarks that all men who share his
interest in women are attracted by their feet; they offer the same
interest, he considers, as the question of the particular edition offers
to the book-lover.[14]
In a report of the results of a _questionnaire_ concerning
children's sense of self, to which over 500 replies were
received, Stanley Hall thus summarizes the main facts ascertained
with reference to the feet: "A special period of noticing the
feet comes somewhat later than that in which the hands are
discovered to consciousness. Our records afford nearly twice as
many cases for feet as for hands. The former are more remote from
the primary psychic focus or position, and are also more often
covered, so that the sight of them is a more marked and
exceptional event. Some children become greatly excited whenever
their feet are exposed. Some infants show signs of fear at the
movement of their own knees and feet covered, and still more
often fright is the first sensation which signalizes the child's
discovery of its feet.... Many are described as playing with them
as if fascinated by strange, newly-discovered toys. They pick
them up and try to throw them away, or out of the cradle, or
bring them to the mouth, where all things tend to go.... Children
often handle their feet, pat and stroke them, offer them toys and
the bottle, as if they, too, had an independent hunger to
gratify, an _ego_ of their own.... Children often develop [later]
a special interest in the feet of others, and examine, feel them,
etc., sometimes expressing surprise that the pinch of the
mother's toe hurts her and not the child, or comparing their own
and the feet of others point by point. Curious, too, are the
intensifications of foot-consciousness throughout the early years
of childhood, whenever children have the exceptional privilege of
going barefoot, or have new shoes. The feet are often
apostrophized, punished, beaten sometimes to the point of pain
for breaking things, throwing the child down, etc. Several
children have habits, which reach great intensity, and then
vanish, of touching or tickling the feet, with gales of laughter,
and a few are described as showing an almost morbid reluctance to
wear anything upon the feet, or even to having them touched by
others.... Several almost fall in love with the great toe or the
little one, especially admiring some crease or dimple in it,
dressing it in some rag of silk or bit of ribbon, or cut-off
glove fingers, winding it with string, prolonging it by tying on
bits of wood. Stroking the feet of others, especially if they are
shapely, often becomes almost a passion with young children, and
several adults confess a survival of the same impulse which it is
an exquisite pleasure to gratify. The interest of some mothers in
babies' toes, the expressions of which are ecstatic and almost
incredible, is a factor of great importance." (G. Stanley Hall,
"Some Aspects of the Early Sense of Self," _American Journal of
Psychology_, April, 1898.) In childhood, Stanley Hall remarks
elsewhere (_Adolescence_, vol. ii, p. 104), "a form of courtship
may consist solely in touching feet under the desk." It would
seem that even animals have a certain amount of sexual
consciousness in the feet; I have noticed a male donkey, just
before coitus, bite the feet of his partner.
At the same time it is scarcely usual for the normal lover, in most
civilized countries to-day, to attach primary importance to the foot, such
as he very frequently attaches to the eyes, though the feet play a very
conspicuous part in the work of certain novelists.[15]
In a small but not inconsiderable minority of persons, however, the foot
or the boot becomes the most attractive part of a woman, and in some
morbid cases the woman herself is regarded as a comparatively unimportant
appendage to her feet or her boots. The boots under civilized conditions
much more frequently constitute the sexual symbol than do the feet
themselves; this is not surprising since in ordinary life the feet are not
often seen.
It is usually only under exceptionally favoring conditions that
foot-fetichism occurs, as in the case recorded by Marandon de
Montyel of a doctor who had been brought up in the West Indies.
His mother had been insane and he himself was subject to
obsessions, especially of being incapable of urinating; he had
had nocturnal incontinence of urine in childhood. All the women
of the people in the West Indies go about with naked feet, which
are often beautiful. His puberty evolved under this influence,
and foot-fetichism developed. He especially admired large, fat,
arched feet, with delicate skin and large, regular toes. He
masturbated with images of feet. At 15 he had relations with a
colored chambermaid, but feared to mention his fetichism, though
it was the touch of her feet that chiefly excited him. He now
gave up masturbation, and had a succession of mistresses, but was
always ashamed to confess his fancies until, at the age of 33, in
Paris, a very intelligent woman who had become his mistress
discovered his mania and skillfully enabled him to yield to it
without shock to his modesty. He was devoted to this mistress,
who had very beautiful feet (he had been horrified by the feet of
Europeans generally), until she finally left him.
Probably the first case of shoe-fetichism ever recorded in any
detail is that of Restif de la Bretonne (1734-1806), publicist
and novelist, one of the most remarkable literary figures of the
later eighteenth century in France. Restif was a neurotic
subject, though not to an extreme degree, and his shoe-fetichism,
though distinctly pronounced, was not pathological; that is to
say, that the shoe was not itself an adequate gratification of
the sexual impulse, but simply a highly important aid to
tumescence, a prelude to the natural climax of detumescence; only
occasionally, and _faute de mieux_, in the absence of the beloved
person, was the shoe used as an adjunct to masturbation. In
Restif's stories and elsewhere the attraction of the shoe is
frequently discussed or used as a motive. His first decided
literary success, _Le Pied de Fanchette_, was suggested by a
vision of a girl with a charming foot, casually seen in the
street. While all such passages in his books are really founded
on his own personal feelings and experiences, in his elaborate
autobiography, _Monsieur Nicolas_, he has frankly set forth the
gradual evolution and cause of his idiosyncrasy. The first
remembered trace dated from the age of 4, when he was able to
recall having remarked the feet of a young girl in his native
place. Restif was a sexually precocious youth, and at the age of
9, though both delicate in health and shy in manners, his
thoughts were already absorbed in the girls around him. "While
little Monsieur Nicolas," he tells us, "passed for a Narcissus,
his thoughts, as soon as he was alone, by night or by day, had no
other object than that sex he seemed to flee from. The girls most
careful of their persons were naturally those who pleased him
most, and as the part least easy to keep clean is that which
touches the earth it was to the foot-gear that he mechanically
gave his chief attention. Agathe, Reine, and especially
Madeleine, were the most elegant of the girls at that time; their
carefully selected and kept shoes, instead of laces or buckles,
which were not yet worn at Sacy, had blue or rose ribbon,
according to the color of the skirt. I thought of these girls
with emotion; I desired--I knew not what; but I desired
something, if it were only to subdue them." The origin Restif
here assigns to his shoe-fetichism may seem paradoxical; he
admired the girls who were most clean and neat in their dress, he
tells us, and, therefore, paid most attention to that part of
their clothing which was least clean and neat. But, however
paradoxical the remark may seem, it is psychologically sound. All
fetichism is a kind of not necessarily morbid obsession, and as
the careful work of Janet and others in that field has shown, an
obsession is a fascinated attraction to some object or idea
which gives the subject a kind of emotional shock by its
contrast to his habitual moods or ideas. The ordinary morbid
obsession cannot usually be harmoniously co-ordinated with the
other experiences of the subject's daily life, and shows,
therefore, no tendency to become pleasurable. Sexual fetichisms,
on the other hand, have a reservoir of agreeable emotion to draw
on, and are thus able to acquire both stability and harmony. It
will also be seen that no element of masochism is involved in
Restif's fetichism, though the mistake has been frequently made
of supposing that these two manifestations are usually or even
necessarily allied. Restif wishes to subject the girl who
attracts him, he has no wish to be subjected by her. He was
especially dazzled by a young girl from another town, whose shoes
were of a fashionable cut, with buckles, "and who was a charming
person besides." She was delicate as a fairy, and rendered his
thoughts unfaithful to the robust beauties of his native Sacy.
"No doubt," he remarks, "because, being frail and weak myself, it
seemed to me that it would be easier to subdue her." "This taste
for the beauty of the feet," he continues, "was so powerful in me
that it unfailingly aroused desire and would have made me
overlook ugliness. It is excessive in all those who have it." He
admired the foot as well as the shoe: "The factitious taste for
the shoe is only a reflection of that for pretty feet. When I
entered a house and saw the boots arranged in a row, as is the
custom, I would tremble with pleasure; I blushed and lowered my
eyes as if in the presence of the girls themselves. With this
vivacity of feeling and a voluptuousness of ideas inconceivable
at the age of 10 I still fled, with an involuntary impulse of
modesty, from the girls I adored."
We may clearly see how this combination of sensitive and
precocious sexual ardor with extreme shyness, furnished the soil
on which the germ of shoe-fetichism was able to gain a firm root
and persist in some degree throughout a long life very largely
given up to a pursuit of women, abnormal rather by its
excessiveness than its perversity. A few years later, he tells
us, he happened to see a pretty pair of shoes in a bootmaker's
shop, and on hearing that they belonged to a girl whom at that
time he reverently adored at a distance he blushed and nearly
fainted.
In 1749 he was for a time attracted to a young woman very much
older than himself; he secretly carried away one of her slippers
and kept it for a day; a little later he again took away a shoe
of the same woman which had fascinated him when on her foot, and,
he seems to imply, he used it to masturbate with.
Perhaps the chief passion of Restif's life was his love for
Colette Parangon. He was still a boy (1752), she was the young
and virtuous wife of the printer whose apprentice Restif was and
in whose house he lived. Madame Parangon, a charming woman, as
she is described, was not happily married, and she evidently
felt a tender affection for the boy whose excessive love and
reverence for her were not always successfully concealed.
"Madonna Parangon," he tells us, "possessed a charm which I could
never resist, a pretty little foot; it is a charm which arouses
more than tenderness. Her shoes, made in Paris, had that
voluptuous elegance which seems to communicate soul and life.
Sometimes Colette wore shoes of simple white drugget or with
silver flowers; sometimes rose-colored slippers with green heels,
or green with rose heels; her supple feet, far from deforming her
shoes, increased their grace and rendered the form more
exciting." One day, on entering the house, he saw Madame Parangon
elegantly dressed and wearing rose-colored shoes with tongues,
and with green heels and a pretty rosette. They were new and she
took them off to put on green slippers with rose heels and
borders which he thought equally exciting. As soon as she had
left the room, he continues, "carried away by the most impetuous
passion and idolizing Colette, I seemed to see her and touch her
in handling what she had just worn; my lips pressed one of these
jewels, while the other, deceiving the sacred end of nature, from
excess of exaltation replaced the object of sex (I cannot express
myself more clearly). The warmth which she had communicated to
the insensible object which had touched her still remained and
gave a soul to it; a voluptuous cloud covered my eyes." He adds
that he would kiss with rage and transport whatever had come in
close contact with the woman he adored, and on one occasion
eagerly pressed his lips to her cast-off underlinen, _vela
secretiora penetralium_.
