That was the name they gave to the anatomical curiosity that was created by foot binding. The big toe was left free, then the other toes and the body of the foot were strapped tight back, curving the foot and reducing its length, and also creating a sort of cleft on the underside between the end of the heel and the start of the sole. The flesh in this cleft became incredibly soft and sensitive. It was a brand new erogenous zone for the woman, and one into which the Chinese male loved to insert his penis.
There’s some evidence that foot binding started with the Empress Taki. She was born in the eleventh century with tiny deformed feet, and as a mark of honour other women started binding their feet in imitation of her deformity. Now medieval Imperial China was no doubt a wacky place, but this simply doesn’t sound like a credible example of human behaviour. In fact it sounds like deranged lunacy to me, but there’s no doubt that it happened. Millions of women had their feet bound, and a great many of those who didn’t probably wanted to.
I understand there was a considerable class element involved in foot binding. If you were a very rich woman you’d have your feet completely bound and therefore be completely crippled. If you were very poor you’d need to stand up in a field working all day in which case you couldn’t afford to be bound at all. But in between there were lots of women who were only moderately rich, who might need to do a little work now and again, and so they were only moderately bound, only moderately crippled.
Of course, like any other good Westerner I find foot binding a complete horror. Crippling women isn’t my idea of fun. And not least of the problems for a man like me is that the lotus foot doesn’t look very appealing in a shoe. The foot itself is so distorted that it can never fit into an ordinary shoe at all. Such shoes as ever existed for women with bound feet were just loose slippers, shapeless in themselves.
But the main problem for me with the lotus foot is how it looks. I realize that beauty is always in the eye of the beholder, is indeed culturally specific, but the lotus foot seems to me to be quite objectively ugly. It looks like the foot of some strange, mutated animal, or some half-developed foetus. Call me an old square, but I can’t see why someone would create, much less worship and have sex with, a thing that looked like that.
What exactly was going on here? Now, you might say that the people of China were attempting to redesign and customize the human body. And you might say that’s what all clothes, all shoes, all fashion attempts to do. I’d know what you meant, and I could sort of agree with you, but my gut feeling is that something very different is at stake. What I think was really going on in China for all those centuries was that these people had fallen in love with deformity for its own sake. They’d found a way to revel in ugliness. It can happen. I know.
In an ever more futile attempt to blot out Catherine, I went to a one-day conference at the ICA. Its title was ‘Defeating the Object: the body as a medium of subversion.’ There were lectures and workshops on tattooing and body piercing, on the feminist aesthetics of lesbian SM, and a good deal about ‘the frenzy of the visible’.
Late in the afternoon I found myself in a seminar on fetishism. There were about twelve of us in the small white seminar room, more women than men, and a number of the women were wearing some serious FMs.
The first half-hour or so was spent discussing ‘the female gaze’ and how it differed from the male gaze. Then we debated whether or not women could be fetishists, and it came as no surprise, given the tenor of the group, when it was agreed that they could. They could be food fetishists, for instance, which sounded like no fun at all to me, and this led to a long and depressing discussion about eating disorders. It was said that shopping could be a form of fetishism, shoplifting too. Finally there was a debate about whether femininity itself wasn’t perhaps a form of fetishism, and a couple of people suggested that femininity was a thing that could be put on and taken off in much the same way as a leather cat suit or a pair of thigh boots.
I wasn’t really surprised that the discussion was on these terms. I’d hardly expected that we would regale each other with tales of our sexual escapades, much less have any fun. Nevertheless, I soon felt as though I was in a rapidly descending submarine and that all the oxygen around me was being used up. I didn’t make any contribution to the seminar, and I wondered if I’d survive to the end of the session without screaming out in agony, but somehow I did.
It was late afternoon when we at last trooped out of the seminar room. The conference was over. Certain friendships and alliances had been established in the course of the day, and people were standing around in small groups continuing to talk and debate. I decided to head for the bar. I did not feel part of any group, nor had I struck up any friendships; nevertheless, when a young man walked up to me as though to start a conversation, I wasn’t particularly surprised. He had been in the fetishism seminar, but he had contributed as little as I had.
He was in his early twenties, pale, wiry, nervous but studious looking. He was dressed all in black, with a black leather jacket, and he wore curious, high-tech spectacles. His hands and his Adam’s apple looked too large for his body. His appearance seemed to hold the world at bay, but he was friendly enough when he talked to me.
‘I don’t think you enjoyed that seminar any more than I did,’ he said.
‘That depends how much you enjoyed it,’ I said.
‘It sucked.’
I didn’t disagree.
‘I’m not wholly against theory,’ he continued. ‘What I am against is people who need to hide behind theory. I mean, if people want to writhe around and suck each other’s feet, why not just do it? Why do they feel they need to justify it intellectually?’
‘I’ll drink to that,’ I said.
So we went to the bar and had a couple of bottles of beer and we talked about (what else?) foot and shoe fetishism. He did far more talking than I did, but what he said made a lot of sense to me. I wondered what Mike would have made of it all. He’d have wanted both of us locked up, probably. I had no desire to describe my own practices and preferences to this stranger, no desire to tell him about Catherine, but he was happy enough to do most of the talking, and he continued ever more enthusiastically. He was now in a confessional mood, talking of the feet he had sucked, the shoes he had masturbated over, and so on. I was faintly embarrassed. He was assuming an intimacy that I neither desired nor intended to reciprocate, but I didn’t try to stop him talking. I doubt whether I could have.
Before long I said I had to leave. He looked disappointed, as though he had much, much more to confess, but he said that he was going too. We left the bar, left the ICA and stood on the wide grass verge outside the entrance. Traffic swept up and down the road and I intended to say a swift, final goodbye to this stranger and hail a taxi. But he said, ‘I don’t live very far from here. I have a great deal of material you might be interested in.’
‘What kind of material?’ I asked.
‘Photographs, drawings, books, samples. Some of it’s very, very unusual. It’s a kind of archive.’