Podophilia is apparently the most common form of fetish. And that's understandable: for what man doesn't - to a greater or lesser degree - desire to touch, kiss, or in some manner modify the feet of his beloved?
(This modification might involve the simple joy of painting toe nails, or the rather more complex procedure of binding that the Chinese practised for many centuries in an attempt to cultivate the golden lotus.)
Clearly, therefore, podophilia very often has an aesthetic component. But it's not always about sex. Indeed, many a masochist wishes for nothing more than to find suprasensual satisfaction at the feet of a woman in submission, with no expectation or desire for a happy ending. We see this illustrated in Lawrence's novella The Ladybird.
Returning home after having been badly injured at the front during the Great War, Basil greets his wife, Daphne, with a mixture of nervousness and a will to worship:
"He suddenly knelt at her feet, and kissed the toe of her slipper, and kissed the instep, and kissed the ankle in the thin black stocking.
... 'I knew if I had to kneel, it was before you. I knew you were divine ... I knew I was your slave. I knew. It has all been just a long initiation. I had to learn how to worship you.'
He kissed her feet again and again, without the slightest self-consciousness, or the slightest misgiving. Then he went back to the sofa, and sat there looking at her, saying:
'It isn't love, it is worship. Love between me and you will be a sacrament, Daphne. That's what I had to learn. You are beyond me. A mystery to me. My God, how great it all is. How marvellous!'"
- D. H. Lawrence, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl, (CUP, 1992), p. 193.
Naturally enough, Daphne was a little frightened and somewhat horrified by this declaration. But she was also a little thrilled and flattered and "really felt she could glow white and fill the universe like the moon", inflated with the grandeur of her own pale power over the man who adored her rather than just amorously desired her. She was ready to assume the pedestal upon which he wished to place her and accept him as her devotee.
But of course, this comes at a price: Daphne gains a worshipper, but loses a husband. For eventually Basil's interest in her as a flesh-and-blood woman fades; the excitement of physical desire leaves him just as he imagines himself closer to her than ever, spiritually speaking.
Ultimately, you can't fuck the one you idealise; to even think of doing so becomes a kind of desecration. And that's the great danger or the transsexual consummation of fetishism, depending on how you view these things.
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