Geoff Nicholson - Footsucker

Or perhaps none of that happened at all, perhaps he was simply so besotted with Catherine, so in thrall to her, that all she needed to do was tell him to confess and he would immediately obey.

But even as these thoughts first occurred to me, I knew that in one sense none of it really mattered. I didn’t enjoy thinking of Catherine with Harold, but I knew that for her it was just another sexual adventure, quite a colourful one, managing to sleep with the fetishist and the creator of the fetish objects, with the murderer and the victim, but it was no more than an adventure. It was not love.

Besides, how could I feel resentful towards her? She saved me in more ways than one. I owed her everything. I knew I was still in love with her, and the weird thing was, I was no longer only in love with her feet.

It is 1966 in California and a group of young male student volunteers are sitting in a darkened lecture theatre on a distant part of the campus waiting for the slide show to begin. They have all stated that they are heterosexuals and that they are not foot or shoe fetishists. They have signed the appropriate forms, received a small cash payment, and they sit in their seats, their genitals wired up to electrical devices that measure the degree of their sexual arousal.

The projector kicks into life and the first slide appears; a picture of a woman’s high-heeled shoe. Then a slide of a slingback, then of a patent leather thigh boot. This goes on for some time. The guys giggle and get restless. Is this really what they’ve been brought here for? Then things get better. A new set of slides appears; a naked woman, Playboy-style , big breasted, air-brushed, not the girl next door. More giggles now, but of a different sort; they start to enjoy themselves and the display of naked female flesh continues till the end of the session when the projector dies, and the lights are switched on again. No word of explanation is forthcoming from the research staff as they unhook the electrical devices and tell the boys to come back next week for more of the same.

Once they’ve gone, the psychologists running the experiment, Rachman and Hodgson as they are known in the literature, scrutinize each subject’s arousal chart. They are as predicted: nothing when the shoes appear on the screen, but the moment the naked women appear there’s lots of vigorous, boyish arousal. Well, thinks Rachman, that could be changed.

Time passes. The students attend the weekly sessions, and on each occasion it’s the same procedure; sitting there wired up, looking at footwear followed by cheesecake. A few of the guys have started to find this whole thing totally ridiculous. There are strange things happening on every campus in America but this feels stranger than most. Still, the process isn’t arduous, it seems perfectly harmless and the money is worth having. Besides, the number of sessions is finite. The last session soon arrives. The students go into the lecture theatre and are appropriately blasé as they get wired up and take their seats for a final session of the same old thing. But this time there’s a surprise.

The room dims, the projector starts, and the slides of women’s shoes duly appear. But that’s all there is. This time the naked babes don’t put in an appearance. The students watch a slide show that consists entirely of women’s shoes. A couple of the guys make loud complaints but Rachman and Hodgson check the arousal meters and they see that five of the guys are every bit as aroused as they would be by watching slides of naked women. Five brand-new fetishists have been created. In some quarters this would be called a success.

I don’t find this piece of research particularly reassuring. It seems to suggest that there’s nothing very profound or deep-rooted about fetishism. Fetishists, it appears, can be created from scratch in no time at all. Fetishism, the experiment seems to imply, is just a form of conditioning, no more complex or crucial than being swayed by a TV commercial.

You see an ad on TV. It tells you that you need some new product. You never knew you needed it, but that’s because you’d never been told that you did. Now that you’ve been told, you know that you want it. It has become an object of desire, separate from all the rest of the world of objects. It has become a fetish. You have become a fetishist. If it works with soap powders and cars and tampons, then why shouldn’t it work with shoes and feet or any other damn thing? As I have said, I think we are all fetishists, but when I said it before I was only talking about sex and these days I think sex isn’t even the half of it.

There is the world and there is the individual. The world is vast, complex and complete, and we as individuals are none of the above. We live in our small corners, trying to catch a glimpse of the ground plan, the overall structure, but we never quite do. We only get to see architectural details: the finials, the gargoyles. It never quite makes sense, and artists’ impressions aren’t much use in this area.

There are people who profess to have some notion of the grand design, who claim to understand whole systems; the true believers, the conspiracy theorists. But I think they’re mistaken. Believing in the cross, or in the free market or in any other damn thing seems every bit as partial as ‘believing in’ women’s feet or shoes. These systems themselves are still only synecdoches, relics, fetishes.

But I happen to think this isn’t so terrible. We deal with what we can. We try to bite off no more than we can chew. We prefer to feel at home within the limits of our own space and our own understanding, rather than to be adrift and lost in the random world. We like the familiar.

You can’t transform the world so you redecorate your living room. You can’t love the whole world so you do your best with your spouses, your lovers, your children, your parents, your pets.

What do we see as we walk down the street? It’s not an egalitarian mass of light waves and ambient noise, it isn’t just atoms and vibrations, all sensory data of equivalent value. In order to see it at all we create separations, reductions, groupings. The window cleaner walks down the street and sees only windows that need cleaning. The Peeping Tom sees openings into new worlds. The boy with a slingshot sees only targets.

Sure we’re looking for wholeness, but where are you going to find it? We slice up the encyclopaedia into part works, manageable morsels, only what the reader can digest. Everybody selects, and the things we select might be called our interests, our obsessions, our fetishes. But they are more than that. These ‘selections’ are what constitute our lives.

One day Catherine came back. I was alone in my house. It was night. I was free, whatever that meant. Crawford was off my back and Harold was behind bars, although his trial was still a long way off. I was slumped in a chair drinking cheap lager and watching a hired video. I knew this looked pathetic, and it was not the way I would have wanted Catherine to find me, but then again I wasn’t expecting to be found. The doorbell rang and I came close to not answering it. There was nobody I wanted to see, no arrival that I thought I would have welcomed. But for some reason I did answer the door and there she was, Catherine, looking somehow very different and somehow very much the same. The hair was a shade lighter, the skin had a tan, and she was wearing unfamiliar clothes, a version of western gear: jeans and a denim jacket, an embroidered shirt, fancy cowboy boots.

‘I’m not interrupting am I?’ she asked as she slid past me into the house. ‘Have you missed me?’

There was no point playing it cool.

‘What do you think?’ I said.

‘You had the shoes,’ she replied. ‘Some photographs, the plaster casts. Wasn’t that enough?’