Solemates (eBook)

Chapter 1: Walk Softly and Leave Prints

When you think about the history of sex, you probably think about diseased pricks and restricted cunts. Maybe the earliest dildo, made from stone 28,000 years ago? Or secret gays in the Cold War and whispering Victorian lesbians in bursting bodices? Maybe you can smell the body odour of the Baroque, well before the era of anti-perspirants? In looking backwards like this, you might not have looked down. Our feet were there this whole time. They’ve played a role in our sex lives in different cultures, across millennia. This chapter is a time-travelling tour through our historical interest in feet – and it’s full of surprises.

Our journey poses some challenges. Ultimately, sex is just a moment in time when two or more bodies come together; even a recording of it is not the thing itself. Other historians focus on material objects – things like tools and mansions – and what they tell us about the people who made and used them. But sexual desire? Fetishes? I’m a historian in trouble, because these experiences are like love: indescribable and immaterial. This is their joy and their mystery. That’s lovely, of course, but also really annoying when you’re trying to write a history about it. Instead, all we have about fetishes in history are the traces that people have made about them: writing, pictures, films.

The second challenge emerges when you’ve got your hands on one of those representations: an ancient painting, for instance, or a Bible story. In those, it’s impossible to know what is sex, and how the people at the time thought about sex and feet. It’s safe to say that a painting of a person putting a toe into the vagina of another person, when both are shown in ecstasy, is representing sex. Other examples are not so clear cut.

Some of the earliest footprints of this fetish rest in surprising places. Psychiatrist and researcher A. James Giannini began looking into the correlation of our fetish for feet and outbreaks of sexually transmitted infections during the peak of the HIV pandemic.13 Because that virus was spreading among men having sex with men, many of them got creative in how to share sexual moments while reducing their risk of transmission. If you speak to a gay or bi man who was sexually active during the 1980s and ’90s, but wanting to avoid HIV, he may tell you that he attended parties where men sat around and wanked together. Or he may say that he got into kinky practices that had a lower risk of transmitting a virus than bum-fucking had. If someone is making you worship their feet, neither of you need to worry about passing, what was then, a deadly virus to each other.

Knowing that men were trying all sorts of inventive and low-risk sex practices to dodge HIV, Giannini wondered if others in history had done the same. So, he looked through a timeline of sexually transmitted infections over eight hundred years and found that outbreaks often correlated with evidence of foot action. Giannini noticed that when gonorrhoea flared up in the medieval period in Europe, poets wrote odes to feet.

There’s an example of this in the book that became a mega bestseller through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, The Romance of the Rose. It was written in two spurts, first around 1230 and then around 1275, each part by a different author. This long river of a poem winds through the philosophy of love, and portrays a courtier attempting to woo a woman. It contains several love-drenched references to feet, such as:

“For I’ve heard so much good of you,

Such fine things, and of such virtue,

That I would give, and do promise

My body and soul, in your service.

And if I do grant all you ask for,

Naught shall I complain of more.

I will believe that tis my fate

To receive the mercy I await,

And, in that trust, I surrender.”

With these words I bent lower

Wishing to kiss his foot…

In fact, feet had already shown up in earlier writing. In the third century, Greek philosophy teacher Philostratus wrote love letters. In one, “To a Barefoot Boy”, he gushes about the beautiful shape of his beloved’s feet. In another, to a woman, he implored, “Do not torture your feet, my love, and do not hide them … walk softly and leave prints of your own foot behind you, for those who would love to kiss them.”

Once the Catholics got organised, it didn’t take them long to get in on the kink either. The pages of Catholic monks such as Cerveri of Girona, the Monk of Montavidin and Guirat Riguier, are filled with toe-bothering – during the era that gonorrhoea swept through Europe. Giannini found that these poets also began to set down an idealised version of a woman’s foot: narrow, with high arches and long toes. Giannini found that as the medieval gonorrhoea outbreak faded, so too did the fad for feet. In the sixteenth century, the threat was syphilis – and feet stepped back into the bedroom. Painters showed renewed interest in feet, and shoes began to show off toe cleavage, says Giannini, quoting from multiple sources. Sex workers advertised their nude feet to punters. The fetish continued until mercury began to temper down on syphilis. It’s curious to find traces of your sexual desire popping up through history thanks to the parallel appearance of disease, but a trace is a trace.

Among these whispers of our fetish for feet in history are also stomping great clods of evidence. The scale of a particular cultural practice in China is probably unmatched. “For nearly one thousand years some five billion Chinese were immersed in a sex orgy with the female foot,” proclaimed William A. Rossi in his book The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe, in 1976. He dedicated a chapter to Chinese footbinding, drawing on the research of Chinese historians and physicians such as Chang Hui-sheng, and Howard S. Levy, who wrote an entire book on it in 1967, called Chinese Footbinding: The History of a Curious Erotic Custom. Levy’s expansive study covers thousands of years of Chinese history and culture, features photos and drawings, includes interviews with women, and as it reveals the sexist and classist nature of footbinding, does not shy away from the sexual element either.14

In Rossi’s own survey of our love for everything below the ankle, he described the long practice of Chinese footbinding as superlative, writing: “Perhaps nothing in history so convincingly demonstrates the reality of the foot’s ‘sexual nerves’ and the role of the foot and shoe in the realm of human sexuality.”

The practice of breaking the feet of young girls and binding them in cloth to change their shape and size originated, most likely, in the tenth century. It started among the elite, but spread to the lower social classes by the Qing dynasty (1644–1912). ‘Lotus feet’, as they were known, impaired women’s mobility while also giving them the marker of status and feminine beauty. The practice continued well into the twentieth century. Although body modifications for status and beauty are common across cultures – from corsets to boob jobs, from large-gauge piercings to hair transplants, from intense dieting to, of course, high heels – what’s unique about Chinese footbinding is the way it focused an entire set of social systems on the feet. It did this for centuries, and in a way that bound the women who did it to notions of desirability and sexual practice. Because the practice was so widespread and endured for so long, it is impossible to assign a single set of meanings to it. Binding was also variously implicated in issues of gender, class and sexism. For example, women’s feet were often bound to prevent them from doing manual labour. They were kept in the home instead.

Over the long history of the practice it is also clear that for some people it was about sexual attractiveness – women with lotus feet were forced to walk differently, which changed their buttocks, legs and even the flesh around their vaginas, according to Taiwanese doctor Chang Hui-sheng.15 Bound feet had a different scent to unbound feet. The book features stories of women penetrating each other with their lotus feet, and the long tale of a man known as Green Crane who travelled China seeking the pleasure that could only come to him via the “tiny foot”: “When he had intercourse, he always grasped the lotuses tightly and bit them, not desisting until he had caused extreme pain.”

There are countless interpretations of what lotus feet meant, but for Rossi, “This national intoxication with the human foot will certainly prevail as one of the strangest and most prolonged erotic love affairs in all history.”

Europeans have had their own affairs, of course, via the high heel. From the sixteenth century onwards, wearing heels has also deformed peoples’ feet, although less extremely than binding has.

Looking through paintings from all different periods and places turns up some other interesting love affairs with feet. In an epic artwork from Kota, Rajasthan the ruler Maharao Shatru Sal II is depicted as virile and powerful.16 The mid-nineteenth-century piece shows a huge orgy, featuring men, women and animals, and includes the smug ruler himself giving pleasure to five separate women: one with his penis, two with each...