More Toe Cracking

Hillsborough County School Board Council of Trent's Foot Fetishism and Toe Cracking Supporters

The summer I took my psychiatric nurses' training at Seton Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, I encountered fetishism big time.

Much of the patient population was former nuns and priests, groups liable to all kinds of substitutes for sex. Fetishism is a handy side ride.

When I was not on duty or playing tennis with a former priest who called me "sissy" and who was as mad as as hatter, I was in the hospital library boning up on fetishism. It was Freud's discovery, of course; he was a clever guy.

The long and the short of fetishism is that it is a mechanism in men for warding off a castration complex. I finished reading all that Freud ever wrote when I went back to my home hospital. The sister in charge said to me, "Miss Drury, you spend far too much time in the library. Such studiousness at your age is unhealthy."

When sister wasn't warning against reading too much, she was warning us against the boys in the neighboring college of Belmont Abby. Sister said we should avoid them for they were "interested in only one thing."

Sister did not waste too much time on me, however; I was Episcopal in a student body of Catholics. She naturally wanted to save them more than me from reading too much and socializing with the randy Belmont Abbey boys.

I met a former Belmont Abby boy on the elevator in my beach condo recently. He had a suitcase. I said, "Going home??

He said, "Yeah."

I said, "Where 'bouts?"

He replied, "North Carolina."

"I went to school in Charlotte," I said.

"No kidding?" quoth he. "Where?"

"Mercy Hospital School of Nursing," I answered.

"We used to date the Mercy girls," he said.

"You didn't date as many as you could have had Sister Mercy and Mother Benignus not warned us girls against you," I offered.

"Why did they warn you against us Belmont boys?" asked he as the elevator settled on the lobby floor.

"They said you were interested in only one thing," I said.

This comment made the fellow let out a whoop of delight that redounded up and down the elevator shaft. He dragged his suitcase through the door of the lobby, laughing like a hyena.

I am sure when this old Belmont Abbey graduate got back to North Carolina that he called every Belmont Abbey alumnus he could think of to chortle over what slashing sexual characters they had been fifty years ago.

All hoopla, of course. Every Mercy girl could testify to the feeble erotic performance of the Belmont Abbey boys. We brought to the assessment clinical criteria learned in anatomy and physiology classes.

The following clinical data on foot fetishism suggests that the guy in the vice-principal's job in the schools who cracks every boy's toes who enters his office suffers from foot fetishism, ergo fear of castration. That he preys on boys, not girls. says much about the administration's ignorance thus strange tolerance of this practice in their midst. Abuse of boys is more palatable in society than abuse of girls. I disagree with this discrimination because I have seven grandsons as well as three granddaughters.

This we can posit with confidence: One: the vice-principal's fear is not of castration by a vagina; two, it's hence more likely homoerotic displacement from male genitalia to feet, hence the cracking of the boys' toes.

Were I the parents of these boys, I would sue. In the first place, when is leaping to crack a boy's toes not assault? I am confidant that an intelligent lawyer could make the jury see how pathological and malignantly allusive this toe-cracking behavior is.

There is something innately repulsive about this male assistant principal's behavior. And a skillful attorney could open a jury's eyes to Freud's theory on fetishism in plain English to explain why it is so repulsive.

The vice-principal's involuntary toecracking has little to do with innocent fun and everything to do with sexual pathology. The jurors would also discern how careless of pathological behavior and how marginally educated the board and administration are and how incompetent they are to be the guardians of the community's children.

This is an instance of why the administration needs more sophisticated people in administrative positions in ROSSAC. And it shows why smarter people should run for the board. When it comes to stuff like fetishism and Freud's gloss on it, Kipley's home-ec certificate that yields her a hundred and fifty thousand tax dollars yearly does not cut the mustard. lee




Freud’s rather meandering and strangely-structured argument in the (1927) paper on fetishism contains a number of quasi-assertions which could be recast in probabilistic language and made the basis of empirical study of the peculiar conditioning history implied for fetishists.The first clinical example, simply cited in passing, concerns an English-German male’s basing a fetish on the expression ‘Glanz auf der Nase’/ (‘glance at the nose’) (p. 152).

It is not true that, after the child has made his observation of the woman, he has preserved unaltered his belief that women have a phallus. He has retained that belief, but he has also given it up. In the conflict between the weight of the unwelcome perception and the force of his counter-wish, a compromise has been reached, as is only possible under the dominance of the unconscious laws of thought—the primary processes. Yes, in his mind, the woman has got a penis, in spite of everything; but this penis is no longer the same as it was before. Something else has taken its place, has been appointed its substitute, as it were, and now inherits the interest which was formerly directed to its predecessor.

But this interest suffer an extraordinary increase as well, because the horror of castration has set up a memorial to itself in the creation of this substitute. Furthermore, an aversion, which is never absent in any fetishist, to the real female genitals remains a stigma indelible of the repression that has taken place. We can now see what the fetish achieves and what it is that maintains it. It remains as a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it. It also saves the fetishist from becoming a homosexual, by endowing women with the characteristic which makes them tolerable as sexual objects.

In later life, the fetishist feels that he enjoys yet another advantage from his substitute for a genital. The meaning of the fetish is not known to other people, so the fetish is not withheld from him: it is easily accessible and he can readily obtain the sexual satisfaction attached to it. What other men have to woo and make exertions for can be had by the fetishist with no trouble at all.

Dark fetishes: foot fetishes
By Ali the Sexpert
October 31, 2007

A foot fetish is also referred to as foot partialism, or the formal term for foot fetish which is pedophilia, because fetishes are usually a sexual focus on an inanimate object. Since the foot is a body part, it is more correct to call it pedophilia, however, it is most commonly known as foot fetishism. The fetish itself involves a sexual interest in feet, shoes, boots or any accessories that may be associated with the feet. Even nail polish, panty hose or anklets can be part of this foot fetish.

About Foot Fetishes

In 1887, Sigmund Freud was the first person to define and discuss foot fetishism. Freud defined fetishism as the displacement of sexual desire onto inanimate objects or body parts which was caused be the person’s struggle with the confrontation of the castration complex (when a child’s sexual activities are stopped by his father who he fears castration from because the young male child is considered to be in love with his mother). Freud also described the fetish as occurring through exposure over time to an object (feet) while being sexually aroused. This form of conditioning is still theorized as the reason why people have foot fetishes today.

Foot fetishism in the modern world is understood to be on a continuum where a person may be aroused by the sight of feet, to more extreme forms of sexual arousal such as the desire to use the feet for sexual gratification. What is arousing for a person with this fetish is the shape and size of the foot, toes, toe nails, the texture of the skin, the cleanliness or dirtiness of the foot, if the foot is clothed or not, and the odor. People who enjoy feet may also enjoy touching, kissing, licking, sucking, smelling, massaging and/or lovemaking with feet or their accessories. However, if a person is attracted to feet and enjoys these activities but can still get aroused by other forms of sexual contact (kissing, hugging, fondling etc), then the person is not considered to have a clinical condition that needs treatment.

The treatment of neurosis consists of making conscious some of the unconscious until "we transform the pathogenic conflict into a normal one for which it must be possible somehow to find a solution" (Introductory Lectures 16.435). However, simply stating the "truth" of a patient's neurosis is often not enough, since the work of repression is such that the patient may hear the analyst's words but not believe them or perhaps allow the "truth" to stand alongside a continuing illness.

A good example of this tendency for the truth to stand alongside the symptom is in fetishism, the displacement of sexual desire onto alternative objects or body parts (eg. a foot fetish or a shoe fetish), caused by the subject's confrontation with the castration complex. Freud came to realize in his essay on "Fetishism" that the fetishist is able at one and the same time to believe in his fantasy and to recognize that it is nothing but a fantasy. And yet, the fact of recognizing the fantasy as fantasy in no way reduces its power over the individual.


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