Something like a third of women in Britain own over a hundred pairs of shoes. Many men feel equally strongly about shoes. Most people have shoes that they wear only rarely or not at all. Why are we so obsessed by shoes?
I have stumbled across the answer–or at least one answer–in an unlikely place, Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer-prize winning book The Denial of Death. The obsession with shoes has to do with death–as does everything, according to Becker. The route between death and shoes lies through fetishism, a subject much loved by psychoanalysts and artists. Shoes are one of the commonest objects of fetishism. “The fetishist,” writes Becker, needs some object like a shoe or a corset before he can begin to make love to a woman.”
The thoughts and feelings of the fetishist are beautifully described in this case stufdy:
“Whenever he saw or touched [ladies boots] “the world changed miraculously,” he [the patient] said. What had just appeared as “grey and senseless within the dreary, lonely and unsuccessful everyday, then suddenly drifts away from me, and light and glamour radiate from the leather to me.” These leather objects seemed to have “a strange halo” shedding its light upon all other things. “It is ridiculous, but it feels like being a fairy prince. An incredible power, Mana, emanates from these gloves, furs and boots, and completely enchants me.” … Naked women or a woman’s hand without a glove or especially a woman’s foot without a shoe … seemed to be like lifeless pieces of meat in a butcher shop. In fact, a woman’s naked foot was really repulsive to him…. However, when the woman wore a glove, a piece of fur, or a riding boot, she was at once “raised above her arrogant, too humanly personal level.” She then grew above the “pettiness and vicious concreteness of the common female” with her “abhorrent genitals” and she was raised into the super individual sphere, “the sphere where superhuman and subhuman blend into universal godliness.”
Shoes and boots make the fetishist feel like a fairy prince and are a common objects of fetishism because feet are ugly things that make us think of death, decay, and our creatureliness, whereas shoes, which by necessity are foot-shaped, are like false feet, can be exquisite creations, symbolising our potential to rise above death–to be immortal, among the gods.
“It [the foot] is the closest thing to the body and yet is not the body, and it is associated with what almost always strikes fetishists as the most ugly thing: the despised foot with its calloused toes and yellowed toenails. The foot is the absolute and unmitigated testimonial to our degraded animality, to the incongruity between our proud, rich, lively, infinitely transcendent, free inner spirit and our earth-bound body….the foot is its own horror; what is more, it is accompanied by its own striking and transcending denial and contrast—the shoe.”
Knickers, bras, suspenders, and the like are just not as good as shoes, explains Becker:
“The genitals and breasts, it is true, are contrasted by underclothing and stiff corsets, which are popular as fetishes, but nothing equals the foot for ugliness or the shoe for contrast and cultural contrivance. The shoe has straps, buckles, the softest leather, the most elegant curved arch, the hardest, smoothest, shiniest heel. There is nothing like the spiked high heel in all of nature, I venture. In a word, here is the quintessence of cultural contrivance and contrast, so different from the body that it takes one a safe world away from it even while remaining intimately associated to it.”
Becker himself seems to be turned on by the thought of “the spiked high heel,” and this does seem to be a very male view of fetishism. I must seek out a feminist view–or maybe you can send me one–but Becker was writing his book in the early 70s when feminism was just getting going and nobody seemed to object to “he” substituting for “he and she.”
But if shoes don’t turn you on, stop to reflect what does–because, as Freud observed, fetishism is universal. Becker concludes: “all cultural contrivances are self-hypnotic devices—from motorcars to moon rockets—ways that a sorely limited animal can drum up to fascinate himself with the powers of transcendence over natural reality [decay and death].”
