Insectopedia (42 page)

In September 1997, Keith Toogood, described in the British press as a forty-four-year-old factory worker and father of two, was arrested at his home by customs officers who had seized a suspect item at a London mail-sorting office. The package originated in New York with a mail-order company called Expressions Videos and contained ten films, including
Clogs and Frogs, Barefoot Crush
, and
Toad Trampler.
Appearing eleven months later at Telford Magistrates’ Court, Mr. Toogood pleaded guilty to importing obscene material and was ordered to pay a fine of £2,000 plus costs. A customs spokesman, Bill O’Leary, commented that officers with twenty-five years’ experience “thought they had seen everything before they came across this.” The videos, he said, “are too grisly to describe.” Mike Hartley of the West Midlands Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals agreed. These so-called crush videos, he told a reporter for
The Scotsman
, “are as sick and depraved as you can get.”
¹

Four years earlier, with Toogood’s arrest and all that would follow still unimagined, Jeff Vilencia was living and making movies in his mother’s garage in Lakewood, a suburb south of Los Angeles. He was enjoying the unexpected art house success of two short films:
Squish
, which features a woman squishing grapes, and
Smush
, which involves a different woman smushing a large number of earthworms. Both movies had
screened at film festivals, some of them prestigious, and with his surfer looks and easy smile Jeff was proving an engaging interviewee, charming, articulate, and disarmingly direct. “A crush freak,” he patiently explained to the rather uncertain host of a Fox daytime talk show, “is one who desires himself tiny, insect size, bug-like, and then stepped on and squashed by the feet of a woman.”

“I’ve always been a pervert!” he merrily replied to an audience member’s question about how long he’d felt like this. If he was going to be a freak, he’d be his own freak. He was poised and relaxed, enjoying confounding expectations. This wasn’t some guy who had trouble getting girls—unlike the timid-looking Pie Man with whom he shared the stage. (“Sexuality has power in it,” Jeff pointed out, his tone somewhere between sex ed and a laundry-liquid commercial, “and we’re bound by humiliation—especially the Pie Man and myself.”)
²

Jeff passed on the opportunity to treat the studio and TV audience to a full description of what he meant by humiliation. He explained, instead, that since he’d made his first movie, in 1990, he’d become the linchpin in an international brotherhood of 300 crush freaks (“all gentlemen, by the way, very intellectual people”). Interested individuals could contact him at Squish Productions, a mail-order business he ran out of his home in Lakewood, from which they could purchase his videos or a copy
of
The American Journal of the Crush-Freaks
, the first of two books that he wrote and published as a way to build the crush community.

The
Journal
bursts with compressed energy, its pages packed with information and opinion: extended discussions of the fetish (its histories, its pleasures, its variations); a lengthy interview with Jeff in the foot-fetish magazine
In Step
(Jeff on his movies: “We have life, and the origin of life is sex, or the sexual act, and we have death which is the very final, very frustrating, very dark unknown thing. Somehow, occasionally these two things collide in some type of an orgasmic imagery”); a demographic analysis based on letters Jeff received after the interview was published (“A large concentration of the Crush-Freaks hail from the north and east coast, with a large amount of foot fetish people coming from New York”); reproductions of those letters (“I’ve read your interview in
In Step
and was very happy to learn that I am not the only one that has the fantasy of being stepped on by a Giant Woman!”); a helpful list of phrases guaranteed to excite a crush freak (“I’m going to squish you through my toes”); a review section highlighting gardening and entomology books that contain scenes of insect killing and are ranked from one (“Eeeeh”) to five pumps (“Thru the roof! Obviously the author herself has the crush fetish and this is her way of expressing it”); an extended interview with Ms. J, crush mistress, about her craft (“I do not step on the little spindly legged spiders ’cause they’re my friends. But when it comes to bugs, I mean they’re just icky little creatures so I can’t think of why they shouldn’t be stepped on!”); casting notices and responses (“I’m a model and commercial actress with a theatrical background. I have exactly what you want, BIG FEET. Enclosed is my modeling comp—read sizes carefully”); and much more. Interspersed among all this—some of it playful, some of it funny, some of it a bit scary, some of it a bit sad, all of it in his take-me-as-I-am, straight-from-me-to-you writing style—are Jeff’s crush fantasies, his stories and reminiscences that deploy what he identifies as the three key narrative elements of the crush fetish: power, sex-violence, and voyeurism.

Rei, Jeff’s girlfriend, has placed him in a small jar. She’s poked four or five airholes in the lid. She is on her way out for the evening with a couple she met through an ad in a foot-fetish magazine. As she leaves, she switches out the light. Jeff dozes off in the jar.

Rei comes home. The couple tie her up and lick the soles of her feet. (“She knows that I am helpless and can do nothing but watch.… I like to watch! I like to be bug-sized and trapped and forced to watch.”) Next thing he knows, Rei is shaking the jar like a bottle of hot sauce. His head smashes against the glass; he thinks his arm could be broken, his skull might even be fractured. She unscrews the lid and pours him out onto the carpet, flicks him over with her big toe. “Hey, you guys, look what I found, a squirmy little bug!”

The three of them tower over him. He tries to move but feels glued to the floor. “I must look like a tiny, squirmy silverfish or an oversized white worm or maggot.” He squirms helplessly. Rei peers down: “Look, there on the floor, you guys, it’s my boyfriend. I know it looks like a strange insect but it’s him.” One of her new playmates makes to fetch some tissue. “Why bother,” says Rei. “Let’s just step on him!”

It all happens in super-slow motion, the way we might guess that time occupies another scale for tiny short-lived beings, the way time drifts to a
near halt in moments of extremity. “She raises up her huge foot. I try to lift my head but it is no use. I can’t move. I hear her speak one last time. ‘Squish that bug!’”
³

And now it all converges. As he lies there immobilized, willing the foot toward him, begging it toward him, the foot descending toward him, the giant foot right over him, he spontaneously ejaculates and, right then, exactly then, the sticky foot crushes down on him.

Perhaps these words speak to you only if you’re already inside this story and captive to its call. Perhaps different writing could better measure this orgasmic collision of death, sex, and submission. Or perhaps the question is meaningless because these stories are functional, not educational. But
Squish
and
Smush—
Jeff’s art films—somehow manage to create experience for all kinds of viewers, not only the already committed. Maybe that says something about the difference between print and film, the modes of attention they create. Or maybe just about the inescapability of these particular movies, compressed and compact, distilled down to just pure idea, inexorable and unambiguous.

These are short films, five and eight minutes only, shot in high-contrast black-and-white. Erika Elizondo, the star of
Smush
, appears in a dark dress on a bright white background. She’s right there in extreme close-up over and over, her cute baby-fat face, her mobile expression, a little innocent, a little knowing, a little flirty, a little unpredictable, a little inaccessible, her pedicured feet, the fleshy soles soon soiled with bloody mess of worm.

“I weigh one hundred twenty-two pounds and have a size eight-and-a-half shoe,” she begins, striking a few exaggerated runway poses. “I love to smush worms. I love to tease them by pressing down softly at first.” She talks like Betty Boop, her voice high-pitched with lots of echo. She’s
talking to
you
, she knows what you like, and she’s going to give it to you. She’s not judging you, she’s playing with you, and she’s toying with you too. She’s giggling, but she’s in charge. She wrinkles her nose in mock disgust. “It’s fun to pretend that the worms are little men under my feet. Even better I like to pretend that they are old boyfriends and this is my revenge.” The amplified squelch of worms underfoot sounds like squealing. Eight minutes feels very long as she teases the animals, laughs, poses, switches into black pumps. (“These pumps belong to my mother. I decided to use them because she didn’t want me to be in a foot-fetish film!”) She stamps her bare feet on the flailing animals, and their intestinal fluids shoot from their anus like an orgasm, like the orgasm Jeff has the instant before Rei’s foot crushes him into messy oblivion. “You’re just a grease spot,” Erika Elizondo tells the worms as she grinds them into the bright white butcher paper.

Crush freaks loved the movies, which quickly became genre classics. You still come across people on fetish discussion boards trying to locate
copies. But critics and festival audiences were unsure how to react. “It fascinates, but … pushes the limits of tolerance,” said a spokesperson for the Helsinki International Film Festival. It’s a “humane society horror show,” wrote Charles Trueheart in
The Washington Post.

For Jeff Vilencia, the movies, the books, and the TV appearances were a celebration, an assertion of the right to live fully. “I love myself and my fetish and I won’t trade places with another fetish, ever! I love girls’ feet (sizes 8, 9, 10 and up!). I love to lick the soles and suck on their toes. I love to fantasize about being a bug and having her step on me and squish me! I masturbate about this two times a day,” he declared in the
Journal.
“We must be free to talk about sexuality and feelings,” he continued; “then all taboos will vanish.… We must move forward with teaching sexuality, and teach every child that sex and fantasy and fetishes are good things that can create a happy, healthy sex life which in turn will nourish a better relationship between partners. The world will be a better place through an understanding of sexuality and the meaning of this life experience. Many happy fantasies to you all whatever your kink may be.
We are the Crush-Freaks—Step On Us!
”
⁵