Twenty-one

I’ve often wondered what it would have been like to have lived in China somewhere between the eleventh and the nineteenth centuries. This was a time when a whole population, a whole society, appears to have fallen victim to one very specific fetish: that of the bound foot. It wasn’t a simple case of a few men and women getting together here and there and playing footsy. It was rather that for hundreds of years, millions of people decided that the female foot was the be all and end all of human sexuality. But not any old foot: only feet that were moulded and remodelled into a nightmarishly specific and rigid ideal — the lotus foot.

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.’

That was enough for me. I took a chance. I agreed to go with him to his flat to view his material.

Although he called it a flat, it was little more than a bedsit, an attic room, up in the eaves of a peeling Victorian house. The walls of the room were painted black and it was furnished with junk-shop kitsch; an Elvis mirror, a lamp in the shape of a flying saucer, a piece of green fun fur thrown over the bed. It was far too small to contain anything that might truly be considered an archive, but there were a couple of filing cabinets and some metal lockers that he said contained his material.

He began by showing me his books. Some of them coincided with volumes in my own collection but there were all sorts of oddities here that I’d never seen before, and in many cases never wanted to see again. He had manuals of foot surgery and dissection, atlases of foot disease. He showed me pictures of hideously ugly feet, feet with burned skin, feet with frostbite, with toes missing, lepers’ feet, and inevitably, endless pictures of feet that had been mutilated by foot binding. These obviously really hit the spot for him. He spent a long time leering over them and he obviously expected me to share his enthusiasm. I told him they revolted me, and he looked very disappointed, though it was clear he had plenty of other things that he thought would impress me.

He started to show me his shoe collection. He opened the metal lockers and pulled out samples. I was completely baffled. These were not FMs as I knew them. In fact they constituted the most dismal assembly of women’s footwear I had ever seen. There were beige slingbacks, tasselled loafers, clogs, flip-flops, sneakers, plastic sandals. There were even Earth Shoes and Dr Scholls. In normal circumstances they would just have been ugly and aesthetically unpleasing, erotically neutral, but what made them actively disgusting was their condition. He had obviously gone to great lengths to find the most distressed, scuffed, worn-out examples of each type. Fabric was torn, soles and heels were loose or flapping, and the owners’ feet had left them looking decayed, distorted, sweat laden.

I was horrified. The man disgusted me as much as his shoes did. I wanted to go.

‘Now wait,’ he said. ‘Look at these. They’re beauties, aren’t they?’

By now I knew him well enough not to expect to share his sense of what constituted beauty and I was not at all surprised to find that he was waving a pair of unexciting, open-toed, black patent high heels. They were horribly grubby and cracked and extremely large. I looked at them indifferently and said nothing. And then, to my dismay and horror, I saw that he’d taken off his own shoes and socks and he slipped his bare feet into the black high-heeled shoes. He stood up and strutted across the room. His gait was a little wobbly, yet he looked as though he was well practised in wearing women’s shoes. His feet looked totally, profoundly, disgustingly ugly, as ugly as anything I’d seen in his collection of pictures of bound and deformed feet.

I should probably have done nothing. I could have laughed at him or simply walked away, out of the building. But something in me couldn’t leave it just like that, I was disgusted and outraged and angry. I admit that I was also a little surprised by the power of my own reaction. I wanted to preserve my dignity, to say something pithy and dismissive and final, but words wouldn’t come to me. Instead he was the one who spoke.

‘I don’t know what you’re looking so mealy-mouthed about,’ he said. ‘I know you’re into it every bit as much as I am.’

I didn’t hit him exactly. I just headed for the door and as I went I pushed him out of the way. The flat of my hand made contact with his shoulder, nothing more violent than that, just a nudge really, and yet it resulted in him falling over. No doubt he wouldn’t have fallen so easily had he not been wearing the high heels, nor would he have fallen quite so far. But he made no attempt to break his fall, didn’t put out a hand or arm to stop himself, and his head hit the floor with a sharp, dry, full sound. He wasn’t knocked out but his eyelids flickered and he looked about him as though he didn’t recognize his surroundings or what had happened to him. He stared up at the ceiling for a moment, then slowly turned his head.

He had fallen in such a way that his head was next to the corner of the bed. I knelt down to make sure he was all right and I saw, hidden under the bed, a pair of spectacular silver and black FMs. I recognized the style immediately. I picked them up. Inside was Harold’s familiar trade mark, the footprint and the lightning flash. I was doubly disgusted. This pathetic specimen on the floor had no right to own a pair of Harold’s shoes. He didn’t deserve them. He wasn’t good enough. I grabbed the shoes and tried to stand up. The man protested groggily, and put out a hand to stop me. I was having none of that. I kicked him a few times in the ribs and then ran desperately out of his flat, taking Harold’s shoes with me.

That was the night I went home and smashed the plaster casts of Catherine’s feet. I didn’t know why I was doing it. Perhaps it was indeed a symbolic act to try to free myself, but it really made no sense at all. I treasured those casts. They were all I had left of Catherine. In destroying them I was only hurting myself. And I realized then there was a part of me that might have been perfectly happy to destroy Catherine’s actual feet as well as the casts. If they weren’t going to be mine, then nobody else was going to have them, not even Catherine. And, as I sat there amidst the plaster debris, with the pair of silver and black shoes I’d stolen from the ICA man, I feared that I might be going insane.

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