Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

Perhaps that’s why Wilson left these “other ethical behaviors” so vague. Also, if he had specified as ethical such behavior as, say, cooperation and mutual aid between individuals not blood kin, he would have risked his credibility with his fellow biologists still trained to interpret behavior strictly in the mechanistic mode.

Finally, I wonder if genetic determinism as such really is “the bugbear of the social sciences.” Academics are the very model of territorialism, and some social scientists certainly responded with fear and fury to what they saw as Wilson’s aggression when he published Sociobiology . But on the whole, Wilson’s statement seems a little paranoid, or a little boastful.

The controversy and animus aroused by Sociobiology might have been avoided if the author had presented his determinism in more precise, more careful, less tendentious, less anthropologically naive terms. If in fact his theory is not a bugbear to the social sciences, it’s because it has not proved itself useful or even relevant to them.

I’d find his arguments far more interesting if he had genuinely taken pains to extend his reductive theory to explain specifically human behavior, including the elaboration of the gender-based, kinbased repertory of behaviors we share with animals into the apparently infinite varieties of human social structures and the endless complexities of culture. But he has not done so.

There are social scientists and humanists, as well as determinists, who would argue that it’s the vast range and complexity of human behavioral options, in origin genetically determined, that gives us what may ultimately be the illusion of free will. But Wilson, having raised this question in Naturalist , ducks right under it with a flat statement of belief that “people have free will.” The statement as such is meaningless. I am not interested in his beliefs. He is not a religious thinker or a theologian but a scientist. He should speak as such.

Watching a ballroom dancing competition on television, I was fascinated by the shoes the women wore. They were dancing in strapped stiff shoes with extremely high heels. They danced hard, heel and toe, kicking and prancing, clapping their feet down hard and fast with great precision. The men wore flat-heeled shoes, conformed to the normal posture of the foot. One of them had flashing jewels on the outer side of each shoe. His partner’s shoes were entirely covered with the flashing jewels, which must have made the leather quite rigid, and the heels were so high that her own heels were at least three inches above the balls of her feet, on which all her weight was driven powerfully again and again. Imagining my feet in those shoes, I cringed and winced, like the Little Mermaid walking on her knives.

The question has been asked before but I haven’t yet got an answer that satisfies me: why do women cripple their feet while men don’t?

It’s not a very long step to China, where women broke the bones of their daughters’ feet and strapped the toes under the ball of the foot to create a little aching useless ball of flesh, stinking of pus and exudations trapped in the bindings and folds of skin: the Lotus Foot, which was, we are told, sexually attractive to men, and so increased the marriageability and social value of the woman.

Such attraction is comprehensible to me as a perversity. A gendered perversity. How many women would be attracted by a man’s feet deliberately deformed, dwarfed, and smelling of rot?

So there is the question again. Why? Why do we and why don’t they?

Well, I wonder, did some Chinese women find other women’s Lotus Feet sexually attractive?

Certainly both men and women may find cruelty and suffering erotic. One person hurts the other so that one or both can feel a sexual thrill that they wouldn’t feel if neither was frightened or in pain. As in having a child’s foot broken and bound into a rotting lump and then getting an erection from fondling the rotting lump. Sadism and masochism: a sexuality dependent on pain and cruelty.

To let sexual feeling be aroused by pain and cruelty may be better—we are often told it is better—than not having any sexual feeling at all. I’m not sure. For whom is it better?

I’d like to think Chinese women looked with pity, with terror, at one another’s Lotus Feet, that they flinched and cringed when they smelled the smell of the bindings, that children burst into tears when they saw their mother’s Lotus Feet. Girl children, boy children. But what do I know?

I can understand why a mother would “give” her daughter Lotus Feet, would break the bones and knot the bindings; it’s not hard at all to understand, to imagine the circumstances that would lead a mother to make her daughter “marriageable,” that is, saleable, acceptable to her society, by torturing and deforming her.

Love and compassion, deformed, act with immense cruelty. How often have Christians and Buddhists thus deformed a teaching of compassion?

And fashion is a great power, a great social force, to which men may be even more enslaved than the women who try to please them by obeying it. I have worn some really stupid shoes myself in the attempt to be desirable, the attempt to be conventional, the attempt to follow fashion.

But that another woman would desire her friend’s Lotus Feet, find them erotic, can I imagine that? Yes, I can; but I learn nothing from it. The erotic is not the sum of our being. There is pity, there is terror.

I look at the ballroom dancer’s rigid glittering shoes with dagger heels that will leave her lame at fifty, and find them troubling and fascinating. Her partner’s flat shiny shoes are boring. His dancing may be thrilling, but his feet aren’t. And male ballet dancers’ feet certainly aren’t attractive, bundled into those soft shoes like big hotdog buns. The uncomfortable fascination comes only when the women get up on their pointes with their whole body weight on the tips of their toes, or prance in their dagger heels, and suffer.

Of course this is a sexual fascination, eroticism explains everything…. Well, does it?

Bare feet are what I find sexy—the supple, powerful arch, the complex curves and recurves of the dancer’s naked foot. Male or female.

I don’t find shod feet erotic. Or shoes, either. Not my fetish, thanks. It’s the sense of what dancers’ shoes are doing to the dancer’s feet that fascinates me. The fascination is not erotic, but it is physical. It is bodily, it is social, ethical. It is painful. It troubles me.

And I can’t get rid of the trouble, because my society denies that it is troubling. My society says it’s all right, nothing is wrong, women’s feet are there to be tortured and deformed for the sake of fashion and convention, for the sake of eroticism, for the sake of marriageability, for the sake of money. And we all say yes, certainly, all right, that is all right. Only something in me, some little nerves down in my toes that got bent awry by the stupid shoes I wore when I was young, some muscles in my instep, some tendon in my heel, all those bits of my body say No no no no. It isn’t all right. It’s all wrong.

And because my own nerves and muscles and tendons respond, I can’t look away from the dancer’s dagger heels. They pierce me.

Our mind, denying our cruelty, is trapped in it. It is in our body that we know it, and so perhaps may see how there might be an end to it. An end to fascination, an end to obedience, a beginning of freedom. One step towards it. Barefoot?

An earlier version of this piece was published in 1992 in the “Reflections” section of Allure magazine, where it was retitled “The Stranger Within.” I have fiddled around with it a good bit since then.