Footsucker Read online

  But an anatomist, for all his knowledge of the structure and internal workings, would not be used to making aesthetic judgements about the foot, whereas I used to spend my whole time doing precisely that.

  Let me see if I can describe the perfect pair of women’s feet. Certainly they would need to be long and lean. A thick layer of fat around the foot hides its character. They should not be too small and neat in case they look too childlike and innocent, and that is anything but sexy. They should look strong and active. They should have high arches and lean, narrow ankles.

  Obviously, these perfect feet will be healthy, free from growths, scars, deformities, without hard or discoloured or flaky skin. However, I am not averse to a foot having a lived-in look. A lifetime of wearing high heels and exotic shoes will inevitably leave a few traces, and these are not to be despised.

  The flesh may be stark white or beautifully tanned, but as I say, in either case, the bones, tendons and veins must be visible through the skin, rippling and articulating as the foot moves. Occasionally one sees a foot that looks as taut and veined as an engorged penis. Or is it the other way round? That is the kind of foot I lust over. That is the kind of foot Catherine had.

  The toes need to be long, straight and slender. They should never be plump or bulbous. Twisted or overlapping toes are hideous, and, despite the examples we see in Renaissance and Greek sculpture, I like the first toe to be shorter than the big toe.

  The nails are all-important. The perfectly shaped foot can be ruined by bad nails, and the prime factor here is shape. They must not be spatulate. They should be the shape of tiny television screens rather than of sea shells. They should be large in relation to the size of the toe, centrally and symmetrically placed. They should be without ridges and free from cuticle debris. They should be kept long rather than cut short and of course they should be painted. The range of acceptable colours runs a comparatively narrow spectrum, from dark pink to deep maroon, and my personal preference is for something approaching Porsche red. White, silver, metallic and pearl finishes are totally dreadful. I always think that black polish should deliver a certain frisson, yet I find it never quite does. Greens and purples seem merely odd and unnatural, and, if it seems strange to talk about nature in this cosmetic context, I think that what we’re actually dealing with here is nature red in claw if not in tooth.

  Foot jewellery has always struck me as a gilding of the lily. Likewise painting the feet with henna seems an unnecessary, and not especially sexual, complication. I can see that a small tattoo on the foot could have a certain erotic charge, but I have always felt that the perfect foot would not be tattooed, and Catherine’s feet certainly were not.

  I realize, of course, that laying down laws for female beauty is an absurd and dangerous occupation. And if I sound dogmatic and impossibly demanding, all I can say is sorry but that’s how it is with fetishes. Of course, feet that do not conform to my ideal have every right to exist, have every right to be admired. Indeed I myself have admired and been intimate with feet that were a long way from perfect. Nevertheless, a man knows what he wants. And in one sense I am being descriptive rather than prescriptive, for, as I describe my idea of the perfect foot, I find that I am very precisely describing Catherine’s.

  But the perfect foot is not bare. It is shod. The shoe delivers a vital aesthetic transformation. It customizes a part of the body. Whereas the perfect foot allows only one possibility, there are an infinite number of shoes that may be admired and enjoyed. And finding the right shoe is the comparatively easy part. Shoes can be bought, they can be specially made, whereas the perfect foot is a natural phenomenon like the Grand Canyon or the Victoria Falls.

  Of course the shoes need to be high heeled, the higher the better within reason. I don’t personally feel any need to psychoanalyse the high heel but undoubtedly it makes women stand and walk differently. It raises their buttocks and it makes them wiggle. It makes them look dominant but at the same time it makes them quite vulnerable. It is hard for them to run away. Hence the term ‘fuck-me shoes’, or FMs as I prefer to call them; i.e., the woman is saying if you can catch me you can fuck me, and of course, any damn fool can catch a woman in a pair of shoes with six-inch heels.

  This does not sound politically correct, I know; indeed it sounds downright misogynistic, but, hey, I didn’t invent the term or the concept. As a matter of fact, the first time I ever saw the phrase ‘fuck-me shoes’ in print was in Shelley Winters’ autobiography, Shelley, Sometimes Known as Shirley.

  She tells how, in her early career, she and Marilyn Monroe used to steal shoes from the studio to go dancing in. They were high-heeled sandals with a kind of lattice work at the toe and an ankle strap tied in a bow, and she refers to them as fuck-me shoes. She says, ‘They really were the sexiest shoes I’ve ever seen.’

  Like Shelley, I’m a great fan of the ankle strap, and even more so of the double ankle strap. I’m absolutely sure this must have something to do with bondage and restraint, and it is echoed in thongs, and even in certain kinds of laces. All these are very welcome.

  Fabrics may vary, but only within certain limits. I tend to like my women’s shoes to be made of something that was once alive; leather or suede, snake or alligator-skin, tiger, antelope or, as in Catherine’s case, zebra. But I am not too dogmatic about this. I also enjoy velvet, silk and satin. Synthetic fabrics are not a source of pleasure for me. Perspex, plastic, Bakelite are not on my erotic map, and neither are raffia, wood or rubber.

  Colour is again important. My taste is towards strong colours, reds and blacks above all, but purples and blues are fine too. Earth tones, beiges, yellows and greys are really not on at all, and white shoes are, of course, simply absurd.

  I am something of a classicist in my choice of shoes. I like them to be bold and uncluttered. I go for the grand sweep rather than the telling detail. I like them to be hard-edged, smooth, streamlined. I really don’t have much time for fussiness, for buckles and bows, buttons, beadwork, rhinestones, sequins, artificial flowers. On the other hand, I am very prepared to be entertained by a mule, a slingback, a strappy sandal, a fur slipper. Much as I like the straight stiletto, I am still an admirer of the comma heel and the talon choc.

  There is, however, a whole category of shoe that is simply unerotic. Included here are the clog, the trainer, the flip-flop, the Dr Scholl exercise sandal. We need not concern ourselves with these except to note that my dislike of them indicates the extent to which my fetishism is concerned with aesthetics, not with function or proximity. It’s not the idea of the foot or shoe that’s important to me, it’s the reality, the sight, the touch, the form.

  I have nothing against boots, whether they run to the ankle, to the calf, the knee or the thigh, and I’m well aware that a whole category of fetishist worships them. But they fail to work for me simply because they enclose and therefore hide the foot. They conceal the object of desire. This might be a good thing if one’s sexual partner had ugly feet, I suppose, but how could you live with such a partner? How could you have sex with her?

  What a good shoe crucially does, must do, is reveal the foot, enhance and display it, offer a frame and a setting for it. And this is precisely the nature of my erotic obsession. I crave the intersection of art and nature, of the human body and the created object, the foot and the shoe, flesh and leather.

  I am not one of those unhealthy fetishists who will curl up at night masturbating into a black silk slingback. I need a female presence to give life to the shoe. And I need a shoe to embellish and fully eroticize the foot.

  I must admit that in all these calculations I find myself envisaging a white foot in a dark shoe, and I hope this doesn’t sound racist, or more precisely, I suppose, ‘skinist’. Frankly, I don’t see why it should. I’m talking about preference here, not prejudice. But a black-skinned foot in a dark shoe lacks contrast and tension, and the same applies to a black foot with dark-painted nails. You might then think that a dark foot in a white shoe or with white-painted n
ails would be erotic, but for me those things don’t hit the pleasure centres at all.

  There is one area where dark skin is infinitely more dramatic than white and that is in the matter of sperm. White strands and globs of semen standing out against a background of a taut black instep is an immensely powerful and moving image, however it seems somehow peripheral to the true stuff of foot and shoe fetishism. It may involve a foot, but it is somehow not about that foot.

  Rather, for me, the entire nexus of foot and shoe sexuality is emblemized by the peep-toe. Ah, the peep-toe, that most perverse and erotic element of all. The foot is partly concealed by the body of the shoe, but here at its very apex we have a small, circular, inviting orifice. The bare flesh of the big toe is indecently revealed, ready to be touched or kissed, pushing out through this hole, penis-like, no doubt, mimicking penetration, the toenail varnished a glossy, vibrant, cherry red. The erotic charge of the peep-toe is more potent, exciting and dangerous than anything I know. Catherine wore a lot of peep-toed shoes.

  Four

  The above was part, but only a small part, of what I told Catherine that evening in the bar on the day we met. She was genuinely fascinated. She found it strange, and perhaps slightly shocking, but she certainly wasn’t repelled. As she said, she had never encountered a real foot and shoe fetishist before, and she found me interesting, a curiosity, a case study. She was attracted by the fact that I was different, and perhaps she was attracted by other things too. I am a reasonably good-looking man. I have a certain charm and openness. She was interested to meet a fetishist but I don’t think she would have gone drinking with me had I been physically repellent, if I had been older or uglier or if I had more closely resembled the popular image of a sexual pervert. The fact that I do not resemble this image is not the least of my advantages. She was also an American, and, strange as it seems to me, some Americans still have a taste for things British. She said she was ‘attached to the university’, whatever that meant, and perhaps I was an area of research for her.

  At some point in our long session in the bar it became inevitable that we would go home together, the only doubt being whose home. For my part I wanted very much to go to hers. There was the promise of two hundred and fifty pairs of fuck-me shoes, and for her there was the security of being on her own territory. She needed a little persuading, but in the end she shrugged and agreed.

  We arrived by taxi, thickly drunk by now. Her flat was rented and looked curiously unlived-in, very unhomely. She said she hadn’t been there long, wasn’t sure if she was staying. As an American in London it fitted. I supposed she was just passing through. That should have made me suspicious. We soon found our way into her bedroom. My imagination had been working too hard, accelerating away. I had pictured all two hundred and fifty pairs of shoes artfully displayed on shelves, shown to their best advantage, spotlit like exotic birds. She saw me looking around, saw my confusion and disappointment.

  ‘I lied,’ she said quietly.

  My disappointment increased, no doubt tinged with drunken frustration and anger. It had never occurred to me that she was a liar, much less a tease.

  ‘I was drunk,’ she continued. ‘I just thought of a number and tripled it.’

  I made a move towards the door, towards leaving.

  ‘Hey, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It was just a joke. I don’t have two hundred and fifty pairs. But I do have one or two good pairs of shoes if you want to see them. If you want me to dress up in them.’

  She could see that I didn’t believe her. She had committed an act of betrayal. I felt used and deceived, and I wasn’t going to make myself vulnerable again so quickly.

  In a corner of the room there was a large oak wardrobe that had a deep drawer along the full width of its base. She pulled it open, trying to be conciliatory, trying to please. Inside there were some shoe boxes, though scarcely more than half a dozen. I knew that quality and quantity were not the same thing, nevertheless I wasn’t expecting much, but she opened the boxes one by one, and in the end I was partly consoled. She did own some very elegant and pleasing pairs of shoes; a pair of Manolo Blahnik evening mules in red satin, a pair of Maud Frizon high heels in black suede with open backs, a pair of towering black patent stilettos from Frederick’s of Hollywood, a pair of trashy Terry de Havilland platforms in what looked like gold snakeskin, some very curious Kurt Geiger open sandals with a tripod heel, three slender metal supports converging in an inverted cone like a piece of miniature scaffolding. The feeling of being let down had hardly passed, but these shoes weren’t at all bad. I was quietly impressed and I was prepared to be forgiving. At least now we could have sex.

  The question of what foot and shoe fetishists do in bed isn’t a particularly complex one. Nor is it difficult to answer. They do everything that everybody else does, but they do one or two other things as well. They (we) use all the techniques and actions and positions that everyone else does, but usually the woman is wearing high heels.

  The fetishist will fondle his partner’s feet, of course. He will kiss them, perhaps lick and suck the toes. The woman will run her feet, whether shod or bare, over her partner’s body. Of course she will concentrate on his erogenous zones, of course she will use her feet to massage his genitals, she may well press her feet into his face.

  The practice of taking your partner’s toes in your mouth is known to some people as ‘shrimping’, and in one sense this seems like rather a good term. The toes do resemble shrimps by virtue of being pink, curled and soft, and of about the right size. But the word shrimping sounds like a frivolous and silly activity, and when I have a woman’s toes in my mouth, the feeling is anything but frivolous. For me it is a moment of breathtaking, stomach-churning intensity.

  In answer to a question Catherine asked right at the beginning, I was able to assure her that I had no desire to be walked on, trodden on, or kicked. There’s a certain undeniable element of self-abasement involved in scrabbling around at a woman’s feet, but humiliation and subjugation are no part of my own sexual profile, although I’m sure there are other foot and shoe fetishists for whom they’re essential.

  So that is what Catherine and I did together – all the usual things. We were drunk and we were unfamiliar with each other’s tastes and preferences, the very conditions that make a first time so exciting yet so unsatisfactory.

  Despite having a few, though extremely limited number of, pairs of shoes to choose from, and despite her willingness to explore this new sexual area, when it came right down to it I asked her to keep on the zebra-skin numbers she’d been wearing in the street. After all, they were the ones that had brought us together. In fact they weren’t a famous make. There was no signature or manufacturer’s name inside, just a small trade mark, the outline of a bare footprint with a tiny lightning flash across it. It wasn’t a mark I recognized, so I made a note to look it up when I got back to my archive. I asked her where she’d bought them and she said in a second-hand clothes shop in Islington, but they had been unworn.

  I stayed the night, and the next morning, early, a little hungover, a little shamefaced, having received no offer of breakfast, I said goodbye. We exchanged telephone numbers, but I couldn’t tell if Catherine was being anything other than polite.

  At some point in the night I had asked her whether this was the sort of thing she did very often, allowing herself to be picked up in the street by strange men. It was a crass question, I know.

  ‘What do you want me to say?’ she demanded. ‘That I’ve never done anything remotely like this before, not once, not ever. That you’re so special, so attractive, so charismatic, that I was driven to do something dangerous and out of character that I’d never normally do.’

  Now, I am sufficiently versed in the arts and science of courtship to realize that it’s no good simply telling a woman that she has perfect feet, the feet you’ve been looking for all your life, feet that you could happily spend the rest of your life contemplating, adoring, worshipping. You just can’t do that, c
ertainly not on a first date. It just scares them away, and I was determined that Catherine should not be scared.

  Given the strange, unlikely way we had got together, neither of us had any right to expect anything from the other. The situation, the transaction, had all the features of a brief and singular encounter, a one-night stand, but I knew from the very beginning that I wanted it to be much more than that. It is not every day you encounter the perfect feet of your dreams, and when you do, you aren’t inclined to let them skip away so easily.

  I stood on the threshold of her flat, about to let myself out. She stood at the other end of the hall, across an expanse of marble tiles, and it was quite clear that she was not about to kiss me goodbye. She had a chaste blue robe wrapped around her, but she was barefoot. I saw nothing chaste in that. I half-slid, half-pounced the length of the hall, and threw myself at her feet. I gave them a final ravish before I left. Above me I heard her give a small, dry laugh, and at the time I chose to believe her laughter was not unkind.

  Five

  I think it’s important to say right away that I perceive myself as a serious person. I read newspapers. I follow politics. I try to keep up with the new books and films, plays and exhibitions. In my interactions with the world, in my job (which is dull but responsible), in my tastes and opinions and beliefs, I would say that I’m a substantial and complete and serious person. Yet I can see that there is something profoundly unserious about being a foot and shoe fetishist.

  Certain sexual obsessions, let us say an addiction to pain, either given or received, a taste for violation of the self or others, a compulsive attraction towards children or animals or faeces, these things carry with them a sense of scale, of drama, of awful consequence, that a love of feet and shoes simply does not.

  This is a paradox and occasionally a problem. Here I am, this serious person, seriously obsessed with something that most people are unable to take seriously. Tell people you are obsessed with bondage, with cottaging, with prostitutes and see them react. They may express surprise or shock or disapproval, and this expression may be real or feigned, it may be only an attempt to hide their true feelings, it may be a conditioned response, but either way there is a definite response. They look at you as though you’re talking about something risky and edgy and, yes, serious. But tell them you’re a foot fetishist and they giggle. For them it’s a joke, it’s funny, it’s not serious sex. Yet for me it is. For me it is the only kind of serious sex.