One strain of feminism tends to believe that the accepted norms of heterosexuality and heterosexual society operate to repress women. Therefore, they reason, anything that disturbs those norms and that society must be a good thing. I’m not at all sure how I feel about this. I can see that the wilder shores of sexuality do seem to threaten many of the norms that our society holds dear, but I’m not sure if fetishism fits into that category. I think foot and shoe fetishism is an essentially conservative form.
For one thing it seems to be as old as civilization. But far more to the point, as far as I can see, it threatens nobody and nothing. It can coexist with marriage, with family life, with religion (whether organized or unorganized), with capitalism or socialism, or any other damn political system.
I don’t think of myself as inherently conservative, but I suppose I am to the extent that I quite like the world I live in. It presents enough opportunities for me to enjoy my obsession. There might be other worlds in which those opportunities would be more numerous and my enjoyment greater and, yes, I find that an attractive idea, but I’m not basically dissatisfied with the current state of play.
Or put it another way; perhaps there is a Utopian society to be found somewhere, a supposedly happier and healthier place, a place in which all sexual neurosis has been alleviated, where fetishism and deviation and perversion are wholly absent. But if so, well, thanks very much but I wouldn’t want to live there. I’m happy in the here and now, with my fetishism.
It seems to me that almost all male sexuality is fetishized to a greater or lesser extent. However catholic we may be in our sexual tastes we still have preferences. Even those men who claim to ‘love all women’ must still love some women more than others, which is to say they prefer women who possess certain qualities to the exclusion of certain other qualities. Is a man who demands a high IQ in a woman any different from a man who demands a good pair of feet? I don’t think so.
I have a feeling this may be what all sex and even all love is about. When we say, ‘I love her because she is kind,’ we are separating her kindness from all her other attributes. However much we love the whole person it’s not possible to love all a person’s attributes equally. However much we love someone there are always things about them that we like more than others. ‘I love her strength but not her short temper, her good humour but not her docility.’ We are all fetishists in these matters.
Why should that surprise us? We live in a fetishized society. We are accustomed to take the part for the whole. We are beset with graven images. We see a man driving a Rolls-Royce. We see a woman in a Chanel suit. We see someone consulting their Rolex. Is this really any different from seeing a woman in a pair of fuck-me shoes? It is not only in the sexual arena that objects speak more concisely and eloquently about people than they could ever speak for themselves.
I tried to talk about this with Catherine, and at least in the beginning she appeared to be interested, but I could feel myself sinking. The moment I said anything, the moment I asserted anything as true, it felt like a silly generalization and its opposite could be equally true.
In a last, slightly desperate, bid to make her understand I said how much simpler fetishism could make life. I said it had not been easy to find a woman with a perfect pair of feet but it had at least been possible. I had at last succeeded. If I had been looking for the perfect soulmate, someone who conformed to the idealized specifications of romantic love or spiritual need, I might have been looking for the rest of my life. Finding a woman who was perfect in one way was hard enough. How could one expect to find someone who was perfect in every way. What’s more, I insisted, having someone like me could make life much easier for the woman too. ‘Just keep your feet in good shape and wear the right shoes,’ I said, ‘and I’ll love you forever.’
That was the first time she looked really unhappy. That use of the word love really scared her.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘I think you may be a very crazy person.’
Seven
But she was wrong. In those days, as I have said, I was not a crazy person at all. And if more proof were needed of my sanity, of my essential social adequacy, I would have presented my friends. I had plenty of them; friends from work, friends from university, even the odd remaining friend from school. I had male friends and female friends, friends in couples, single friends, married friends, friends in ménages, the occasional gay friend. And especially I had Mike and Natasha. Mike and Natasha were nice people and they liked me. If I had been a true degenerate they couldn’t possibly have wanted me as their friend.
I had been at university with both of them. They met in their first year and had been together ever since. They were my best friends, both of them equally. I was fond of them and they were fond of me. They led a secure, comfortable, affluent, couply sort of life, and that was just fine by me. There was nothing there for me to disapprove of. In fact, most of the time I was extremely envious. I had no problem with the way they lived their lives, but I sensed they had a problem with the way I lived mine.
To their credit, I’m sure this came out of compassion and concern. They seemed to think I must be unhappy, or perhaps that I ought to be unhappy, since I wasn’t leading a secure, comfortable, couply sort of life like them. They thought I had a little problem that needed solving. They weren’t unsympathetic, they just wished it would go away. I know they must have speculated from time to time about why I was still single, why I’d never even lived with anyone, why I’d never made it to the sort of life they’d got. Essentially, I think they just wished I was more ‘settled’.
In the beginning I used to introduce my girlfriends to Mike and Natasha, and they tried very hard to like them, even the ones I didn’t particularly like myself. They were always warm and welcoming, they were like that. We went out together in foursomes, did things, had meals together. But I think Mike and Natasha eventually found the emotional investment too much. They’d pin all their hopes on some new woman who’d entered my life, then a month later they’d have to start all over again. Using methods of greater or lesser subtlety, they sometimes tried to find out what was going wrong.
‘Are you not seeing Angela any more?’ Mike would ask.
‘That’s right.’
Mike would be prepared to leave it at that but Natasha would ask, ‘Why not?’
I’d shrug and say, ‘You know how it is.’
‘No,’ said Natasha. ‘Tell me.’
Trying to make a joke of it I’d reply, ‘She wasn’t Miss Right.’
Taking me more seriously than I wanted to take myself, Natasha would ask, ‘What does Miss Right look like?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t met her yet.’
‘Will you know her when you do?’
‘Sure.’
‘So what are the qualities she’ll have?’
Even then I could have talked about admiring a person’s qualities as being a form of fetishization, but mercifully I didn’t. At this point, sensing my discomfort, Mike would step in and say, ‘Hey, give the man a break.’
‘He doesn’t mind,’ Natasha would say. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’