FOREWORD (25 page)

In sex we especially resist the notion that our fears and desires are conditioned by developmental events that occurred long before we even thought about our present lovers.

Freud’s theories of infantile sexuality were the scandal of Vienna; even the medical profession turned their backs on him. Today, we still don’t want to think of children as feeling anything in that sweet talcumed area between their legs.

Who wants to surrender the flattery implicit in the notion that our characters have been carved by ourselves alone, out of life’s granite? This self-administered pat on the back may Nancy Friday

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superficially feel good; the price is high. If everything we do is conscious volition, why do we get into so many unhappy relationships for reasons we cannot name? How do we explain sexual anxieties and guilts, those patterns of repetitious failures,
over and over of the same kind?
Is it bad luck that is our enemy – or is the fault in ourselves?

For all my desire to believe in human choice and spontaneity, and in the remedial efficacy of life itself – only the penetrating insights of psychoanalytic theory are any help in unraveling the mysteries of fetishism.

ROY

I am a foot fetishist. I love bare feet, shoes, high-heel boots and anything pertaining to the female foot. The story starts this way. From the time I can remember, my mother, a beautiful woman then in her early forties, would give me horsy rides on her foot. At that age it didn’t bother me sexually, but it always felt good. By the age of thirteen or fourteen, she still allowed me the horsy rides, but now I am sure she realized that I wasn’t just playing. I was coming in my p.j.’s. The reason I know this now is because when the “ride” was finished, she would give me a complete going over with both feet, usually with her beautiful high-heel and pointed toe shoes on, kicking me between the buttocks, under my balls, and wind up rubbing her foot on my cock and bringing on another come. Then to bed. Needless to say, my fantasy is to have four girls or women in my room, then I strip naked and roll all around the floor while they take turns kicking me in all the vulnerable spots until they have brought me to as many comes as I can possibly take. Sound kinky?

True.

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KIP

As far back as I can remember, I was indulging in frequent masturbation and fantasies. I remember wearing diapers and rubber pants and I am sure I was lying on my tummy and masturbating against the diaper toweling before I can remember. I enjoyed my mother’s attention when she held me to make “weewee.” I can remember this and that the feeling of doing a “weewee” was pleasant. I also remember taking a diaper to bed because I sucked the corner to go to sleep. The real secret reason, however, was that as soon as I was left alone, I would lay on my tummy with the toweling under my penis and wriggle my legs.

Back to infancy; I must explain that my mother had a wardrobe of pretty feminine clothes but also a range of rubber aprons. She wore a rubber apron for all wet jobs, and attending to me. I was therefore well aware of its delicate touch and I regarded it as special. No doubt because of the wet connection I associated it with the “weewee” feeling and also because it was while wearing this that my mother carried out hygiene attentions on my penis, pulling back the skin and washing below the glans and working the skin back to stretch it so that there was no need for circumcision. I always became erect during this performance and I am sure she enjoyed virtually masturbating me, although her conscience caused her some trouble here, and I was not allowed to wriggle my legs because that was naughty. When I asked why, she gave me some answer which I remember as having something to do with girls and ladies, but I did not understand.

I fell in love at five, when I went to infant school, with a pretty little girl whom I admired from a distance, and when I asked my mother as she attended to me at bath time, if little girls had to have their skins pulled back, she explained that girls and ladies did not have a penis – only a hole. I was deeply shocked.

My father caught me masturbating in bed brooding on this problem, and I had a long lecture about it being bad for me. I Nancy Friday

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would hurt myself and it was not for little boys to do. I misunderstood him to mean that it was for little girls to do, an idea which made me want to masturbate even more.

About this time I had my first dry orgasm. I decided that girls and ladies felt nice like this all the time and could reach a seventh heaven of delight, which was when they wore a rubber apron. But if I continued to do this thing which felt so nice and was reserved for girls, I would be taken to a hospital where a beautiful fairy type of nurse wearing a beautiful rubber dress and apron and would make me wear rubber as well, and force me somehow to masturbate on and on to some extreme orgasm (I could not put that into words then). Then my penis would disappear and I would turn into a girl. This idea I both feared and wished for.

I masturbated to this fantasy for years after wearing my mother’s rubber apron at the same time. She did not seem to notice if I sneaked one out of her cupboard.

On rare occasions I had a bed-wetting accident. This made my mother very cross. She would start a cleaning up and changing operation. I was washed and laid across her rubber-aproned lap for a spanking. My penis in contact with her cold wet rubber apron was beautiful; the smacking tended to make my penis rub against the apron as well.

Rubber aprons disappeared during the war and I masturbated with a rubber hot-water bottle filled with cold water, the neck folded back to tickle between the scrotum and the anus.

I met my wife when I was twenty-one and she seventeen.

We were both shy. It took me much effort to find the courage to ask her out, yet in a few months, we were masturbating each other at every opportunity, and she was the first, the last and only. I am pleased to say that at forty-seven, she still has a face and figure (no corseting) which is the envy of many girls half her age.

My wife has never taken to the rubber idea, although she accepted it willingly enough at first – when I bought her the first rubber apron. I tried very hard to give her special atten-Men In Love

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tion when she wore it for me, but slowly a jealousy of it developed; recently, I have had some success with cunnilingus as the prize and I enjoy doing this for her just under the bottom edge of the apron. Rubber and her juices have a certain affinity and similarity. (I was even instinctively aware of this as a child.)

Rubber fantasies are still with me and when my wife masturbates me I fantasize that nude rubber-apron girls are doing it or that she is wearing a fantastic rubber night dress or that I am watching Miss World in rubber and seeing rubber-aproned girls masturbating themselves and each other.

In another fantasy, I am required to visit a house somewhere, and I am surprised to be received by a beautiful woman wearing a rubber apron night dress. She soon makes it clear that she is going to seduce me. I am very virile and achieve multiple dry orgasms, as when I was a child. I use fantasies like this when I am having sex with my wife, and it has the effect of actually making me last longer and hover on the brink a fair part of the time. Even after coming, I can remain semi hard and carry on gently a little longer.

How could anyone decide to make a shoe or a diaper into the sexual be-all and end-all of his life? Where do these tastes come from? When the four women enter Roy’s fantasy (above) we can see why he might want to dress them in sexy shoes or stockings as a form of imaginary foreplay – but why does he come to orgasm, not when in contact with their vaginas, but with their feet? What is the sexual power of the fetish?

There are two main schools of psychiatric thought on this subject; I must warn my readers that if both sound bizarre, how could they be any simpler than the subject they set out to explain?

The classical theory of the fetish centers its explanation around the Oedipus complex. To Freud, the most important determinant in male behavior is the degree to which the boy Nancy Friday

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succeeds in overcoming problems due to rivalry with the father for the mother’s love. Behind this is fear that the father, being bigger and stronger, will punish his young rival by castrating him. To this way of thinking, the fetish object somehow becomes linked in the child’s unconscious mind with his own penis.

We can see this process at work in Kip (above). As far back as he can remember he has had masturbatory memories of “wearing diapers and rubber pants.” These ideas are immediately linked with mother’s attention “when she held me up to make weewee,” and also with her handling his penis.

She “[pulled] back the skin and washed below the glans.” He would become erect during these ministrations. At night he would take a diaper to bed with him in order to masturbate.

The connection between penis, diapers, rubber-pants, and sexuality that involved mother could not be more clear.

In this kind of associative thinking, the sight of the fetish makes one immediately think of the penis. Here lies a magical escape from fear that daddy will perform his dread punishment on the boy who wants mama. The fetish
is
the penis; when the boy sees it, when he touches it, his unconscious is relieved. He has not lost his penis –
here
it is! The enormous relief from anxiety is expressed as a rush of sexual energy.

Confirmation that this kind of activity is connected more with joy at retaining the penis than with winning the woman is in the often-observed fact that it is the fetish itself that excites the man’s principal attention. The vagina is there, but it has only secondary glamour.

NEIL

About half of the time, my fantasies are really recollec-tions of previous sexual encounters, slightly embellished by

“clothing” the girl involved in garments that are sexually attractive to me. I have been turned on by women’s shoes since childhood. One of my earliest sensual memories is that Men In Love

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of being in my older sister’s closet, sitting on the floor among her shoes and smelling the exotic woman smells of perfume, powder and good leather. I don’t recall doing anything, just being there in a dark, semi-forbidden place and being stimulated. Tile attraction intensified during adolescence when I discovered masturbating over “girly” books as an exciting, everyday outlet for my growing sex drives. As you probably know, the models in those magazines were almost always dressed in provocative lingerie and inevitably wore garter belts, dark nylons and high heels. The footwear in vogue during my teen-age years was pointy-toed, stiletto-heeled plain pumps and as I’ve discovered from extensive reading on the subject of fetishism, this is the type of shoe that still attracts most fetishists. I differ somewhat, as my preference has changed as fashion has changed. In high school and college, I could be tremendously turned on by a girl wearing knee socks and brown penny loafers or saddle shoes. Again, unlike most fetishists I’ve read about, the shoe
itself
has no intrinsic attraction; I’m turned on by the
lady
, but it greatly intensifies my desire if she is fashionably shod.

I am thirty-one, divorced and a reasonably successful securities salesman living in a singles apartment complex. My sex life is quite active and I prefer “serial monogamy” rather than dating several girls at once. I like to get into my girl’s fantasies and act them out with her if she is liberated enough to do it. Consequently, I have been into about everything a man and woman can do together – everything but my particular fantasy. I feel that shoe fetishism is
very
common, as witness the aforementioned “girly” books, but it’s one of those things that men are ashamed to discuss with each other. I have asked girls, on occasion, to leave their shoes on when we go to bed and their reactions have all been the same – passive compli-ance without excitement and, I’m sure, a degree of distaste.

Like “Can I take my shoes off
now
?” immediately after climax.

My main fantasy, with variations, occurs about half the time I masturbate or make love. To save space, I’ll put all of Nancy Friday

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it together, but really I never have the whole fantasy at one time, just parts of it:

A man is tied to a chair in a woman’s frilly, feminine bedroom. Sometimes I am the man, sometimes an observer. He is naked or wearing women’s underclothes and stockings. A beautiful woman, sometimes black, is seated before him on a divan trying on shoes of all kinds: classic styles like Gucci loafers and I. Miller pumps; funky, whorish, shoes with platform soles and sky-high heels; teenybopper shoes like penny loafers and clogs. While she does this, she is continuously teasing the man verbally: Do you like this pair? Would you like to lick this shoe? How would you like this heel rammed up your ass? The man writhes in his chair and she occasionally rubs a shoe against her open vagina. Finally, she releases him and he falls at her feet, scattering the huge pile of shoes and licking and kissing her shod feet passionately.

On one occasion I did discuss this fantasy with a woman.

We had dated and made love on several occasions. She was a graduate student, working on her master’s in psychology, and lived in the complex. She was leaving the city and transferring to another school and we went out for beer and pizza on her last night in town. We returned to my apartment, smoked a joint and started to make love. I asked her to leave her shoes on, something rd done with limited results with other girls, and she willingly complied. We fucked, it was great and we lay and smoked another jay. Maybe it was the dope or the beer or the fact that I’d never see her again, but when she asked me, smilingly curious, why I had wanted her to leave her shoes on, I spilled my guts and laid the whole fantasy on her. Perhaps it was because of her psych background, but she wasn’t revolted or disgusted with my revelations, but seemed genuinely interested, and almost aroused. She asked me if I would like to do it with her and I was so excited I couldn’t stop shaking. She asked me if I wanted her to go to her apartment so she could get some high heels, but I was afraid she would change her mind if I let her go, so I told her what she was wearing was perfect. She had on a pair of Bass Wee-Men In Love