posted
We are less than a month away from the return of the be all and end all of all celebrity foot fetish contest. National Femme Famosas returns on February 10 for, what I promise will be, the season of historical proportions.
As we get close, I have put together a piece that I think is one of the greatest testament for how profound our fetish is. This piece is a great candidate for a foot fetish conversation that will end all conversations.
Here it is...
TRUE STORY
It is 1966 in California and a group of young male student volunteers are sitting in a darkened lecture theatre on a distant part of the campus waiting for the slide show to begin. They have all stated that they are hetrosexuals and that they are not foot or shoe fetishists. They have signed the appropriate forms, received a small cash payment, and they sit in their seats, their genitals wired up to electrical devices that measure the degree of their sexual arousal.
The projector kicks into life and the first slide appears; a picture of a woman's high-heeled shoe. Then the slide of a slingback, then of a patent leather thigh boot. This goes on for some time. The guys giggle and get restless. Is this really what they've been brought here for? Then things get better. A new set of slides appears; a naked woman, Playboy-style, big breasted, air-brushed, not the girl next door. More giggles now, but of a different sort; they start enjoying themselves and the display of naked female flesh continues till the end of the session when the projector dies, and the lights are switched back on again. No word of explanation is forthcoming from the research staff as they unhook the electrical devices and tell the boys to come back next week for more of the same.
Once they've gone, the psychologists running the experiment, Rachman and Hodgson as they are known in the literature, scrutinize each subject's arousal chart. They are as predicted: nothing when the shoes appear on the screen, but the moment the naked women appear there lot's of vigorus, boyish arousal. Well, think Rachman, that could be changed.
Time passes. The students attend the weekly sessions, and on each occasion it's the same procedure; sitting there wired up, looking at footwear followed by cheescake. A few of the guys have started to find this whole thing totally ridiculous. There are strange things happening on every campus in America but this feels stranger than most. Still, the process isn't arduous, it seems perfectly harmless and the money is worth having. Besides, the number of sessions is finite. The last session soon arrives. The students go into the lecture theatre and are appropriately blase as they get wired up and take their seats for a final session of the same old thing. But this time there's a surprise.
The room dims and the projector starts, and the slides of women shoes duly appear. But that's all there is. This time the naked babes don't put in an appearance. The students watch a slide show that consists entirely of women's shoes. A couple of guys make loud complaints but Rachman and Hodgson check the arousal meters and see that five of the guys are very bit as aroused as they would be by watching slides of naked women. Five brand-new fetishists have been created. In some quarters this would be called a success.
----
MY TAKE ON THIS
I don't find this piece of research particularly reassuring. It seems to suggest that there is nothing very profound or deep-rooted about fetishism. Fetishists, it appears, can be created from scratch in no time at all. Fetishism, the experiment seems to imply, is just a from of conditioning, no more complex or crucial than being swayed by a television commercial.
You see an ad on TV. It tells you that you need some new product. You never knew you needed it, but that's because you've never been told that you did. Now that you've been told, you know that you want it. It has become an object of desire, separate from the rest of the world of objects. It has become a fetish. You have become a fetishist. If it works with soap, lotion, cars, and tampons, then why shouldn't it work with shoes or feet or any other thing? There was a time when I thought when I thought we were all fetishists, but at that time I was only making reference to sex and these days I think sex isn't even half of it.
There is the world and there is the individual. The world is vast, complex and complete, and we, as individuals, are none of the above. We live in our small corners, trying to catch a glimpse of the ground plan, the overall structure, but we never quite do. We only get to see architectural details: the finials, the gargoyles. It never quite makes sense, and artists' impressions aren't much use in this area.
There are people who profess to have some notion of the grand design, who claim to understand whole systems; people such as conspiracy theorists. But I think they're mistaken. Believing in the cross, or in the free market or in any other thing seems every bit as partial as 'believing in' women's feet or shoes. These systems themselves are still only synecdoches, relics, and fetishists.
But I happen to think this isn't so terrible. We deal with what we can. We try to bit off no more than what we can chew. We prefer to feel at home within the limits of our own space and our own understanding, rather than to be adrift and lost in the random world. We prefer to stick with what is most familiar to us.
You can't transform the world so you redecorate your living room. You can't love the whole world so you do your best with your spouses, your lovers, your children, parents, and/or pets.
What do we see as we walk down the street? It's not an egalitarian mass of light waves and ambient noise, it isn't just atoms and vibrations, all sensory data of equivalent value. In order to see it all we create separations, reductions, and groupings. The window cleaner walks down the street and sees only windows that need cleaning. The Peeping Tom sees opening into new worlds. The boy with the slingshot sees only targets.
Sure we're looking for wholeness, but where are you going to find it? We slice up the encyclopaedia into part works, manageable morsels, only what the reader can digest. Everyone selects, and the things we select might be called our interests, our obsessions, and our fetishes. But they are more than that:
UBBFriend: Email this page to someone!
Printer-friendly view of this topic
