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Author: Hans-Jürgen Döpp

Translators: Philip Jenkins, Jane Rogoyska, Dr. Jane Susanna Ennis, Susana M. Steiner

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Hans-Jürgen Döpp

Erotic Fantasy

Contents

Introduction

Love’s Body Reflections on Fragmentation of the Body

Which brings us back to the Anatomical Blazons.

The Erotic Orient

Bound Happiness Chinese Eroticism

Between the Sublime and the Grotesque Japanese Erotic Engravings

In Praise of the Backside

Our Arses Shall Be Symbols of Peace

Feet-Ishism

Sapphic Art

Sappho’s Repudiated Love

Objects of Desire

“SEE ME! - TOUCH ME!” The Eroticism of Touch

Sadomasochism

On the Ecstasies of the Whip

Ecstasy

The Kiss

Oral Pleasures

Sexology: Kisses Better Than Valium

Priapus

The Damned God

The Manipulated Breasts

The Covered Breast

The Breast in Psychoanalysis

The Liberated Breast

Index

Notes

1. Margit Gaal, 1920.

Introduction

Love’s Body
Reflections on Fragmentation of the Body

The subject of the essays in this book is not the body as a whole, but rather its separate parts. As we fragment the body, we make its parts the subject of a fetish. Each individual part can become a focus of erotic passion, an object of fetishist adoration. On the other hand, the body as a whole is still the sum of its parts.

The partitioning that we carry out here brings to mind the worship of relics. Relic worship began in the Middle Ages with the adoration of the bones of martyrs and was based on the belief that the body parts of saints possessed a special power. In this respect, each fetishist, however enlightened he pretends to be, pays homage to relic worship.

At first, this dismemberment only happened to saints, in accordance with the belief that in paradise the body will become whole again. Only later were other powerful people such as bishops and kings also carved up after their deaths. In our cultural survey of body parts, we are particularly concerned with the history of those with “erotic significance.” Regardless of whether their significance is religious or erotic, they all attain the greatest importance for both the believer and the lover because of the attraction and power inherent in them. This way, fetishist heritage of older cultures survives in both the believer and the lover.

O Body, how graciously you let my soul

Feel the happiness, that I myself keep secret,

And while the brave tongue shies away,

From all that there is to praise, that brings me joy,

Could you, O Body, be any more powerful,

Yes, without you nothing is complete,

Even the Spirit is not tangible, it melts away

Like hazy shadows or fleeting wind.[1]

Anatomical Blazons of the Female Body appeared in 1536, a newly printed, multi-volume collection of odes to each body part individually. These poems, praising parts of the female body, constituted an early form of sexual fetishism. “Never,” wrote Hartmut Böhme, “does it sing the ‘whole body,’ let alone the persona of the adored, but rather it is a rhetorical exposition of parts or elements of the body.”[2] In these poems, head and womb represented the “central organs.” It was to be expected that representatives of the church scented a new form of idolatry in this poetic approach and identified a sinful indecency in this depiction of female nakedness:

“To sing of female organs,

To bring them to God’s ears,

Is madness and idolatry,

For which the earth will cry on Judgement day.”

This is how such condemnation is expressed in a document entitled Against the Blazoners of Body Parts, written in 1539[3]. The poets of the Blazons were “the first fetishists in the history of literature.”[4] “The Anatomical Blazons represented a sort of a sexual menu à la carte: from head to toe, a series of fetishist delicacies (and in the Counterblazons from head to toe a series of sensual atrocities and defacements). Such a gastrosophy of feminine flesh is only conceivable when the woman is not regarded as a person. The fetish of the female body involves the abolition of woman as such.”[5] From this perspective, the Blazons would be womanless.

The poetic dismemberment of the female body satisfies fetishist phallocentrism, which, as Böhme points out, also lies at the root of male aggression. Today it would be called “sexist.”

“A woman is a conglomerate of sexual-rhetorical body parts, desired by men: one beholds the female body in such explicit detail that the woman herself is negated. A courtly, cultivated dismemberment of a woman is celebrated in the service of male fantasy.”[6] Is the female body thus reduced to a plaything of lust?

Böhme’s analysis echoes much of contemporary feminist critique: The corporeal should be given homage only when it is united with personality, as if the body itself was something inferior.

What Böhme refers to as “phallocentrism,” can be observed even in the context of advanced cultures: the progress of civilisation has been accompanied by an ever-increasing alienation of the body – this process is repeated in each stage of history.

The lustful preoccupation with the body is the primary interest of a child. Children are able to experience desire in the activity of their whole body to a much greater degree than adults. In adults, this original, all-consuming childhood desire is focused in one small area – the genitals. This is how Norman O. Brown describes erotic desire in The Resurrection of the Body[7]: “Our displaced desires point not to desire in general, but specifically to the desire for the satisfaction of life in our own body.”[8] All morals are bodily morals. Our indestructible Unconscious wishes to return to childhood. This childhood fixation is rooted in the yearning for the pleasure principle, for the rediscovery of the body, which has been estranged from us by the culture. “The eternal child in us is actually disappointed in the sexual act, and specifically in the tyranny of the genital phase.”[9] It is a deeply narcissistic yearning that is expressed in the theory of Norman O. Brown. For him, psychoanalysis promises nothing less than the healing of the breech between body and spirit: the transformation of the man’s “I” into the bodily “I” and the resurrection of the body.[10]

This dichotomy between body and spirit defines our culture. Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf discuss this in their study of the destiny of the body throughout history and conclude that “…the historical progress of European imprinting since the Middle Ages was made possible by the distinctively Western separation of body and spirit, and then fulfilled itself as ‘spiritualisation’ of life, as rationalising, as the devaluation of human body, that is, as dematerialisation.”[11]

3. Intense Pleasure, 19th century. Photograph.

4. Erotic Wooden Sculpture,

work of the Makombe in Tanzania.

In the course of progress, the alienation of the body evolved into a hostile estrangement. The body with its variety of senses, passions, and desires was clamped into a rigid framework of commandments and taboos and was made into a simple “mute servant” through a series of repressive measures. Therefore, it needed to regain its value in an alternative way.

This estrangement consisted of an unstoppable process of abstraction, of the ever growing estrangement of people not only from their own bodies, but also from other people’s bodies. The progress in the name of conquering nature in the past two centuries has increasingly led to the destruction of nature, and not only in the external world, but also in the inner nature of man. The dominion of people over nature led at the same time to dominion over human nature. The “love-hate relationship with the body” is the basis of what we call “culture”: “Only culture views the body as a thing that one can possess, only in the context of culture did the body first differentiate itself from the spirit – the epitome of power and authority – as an object, a dead thing, a ‘corpus.’ In man’s devaluation of his own body, nature takes vengeance on man for reducing it to the level of an object of mastery, of raw material.”[12]

Due to the demands of the intensification of work, discipline, and increased mental control, the body becomes increasingly transformed “…from an organ of desire into an organ of production.”[13] In accordance with the principle of division of labour, industrialised societies separated work from life, learning from work, intellectual from manual work. The result has been turning the body into a machine.

On it own, the “freedom of sexuality” changes little in this disfigurement of the inner nature of man. “Sexuality is, at least in its modern reduction to ‘sex,’ a term too narrow to correctly describe the fullness and versatility of emotions, energies, and connections,” concludes Rudolf zur Lippe. [14] In the digital age, the body completely loses its substantial meaning. Volkssport and swinger clubs represent an attempt to reanimate the estranged body.

In the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, the first modern philosopher of the body, that which had been despised previously was brought to the foreground. As he first observed, the destruction of humanity in the age of capitalism began with the destruction of the body. He praised the living body as the sole carrier of happiness, joy, and self-elevation[15], and heavily criticised the view of the body characteristic of Christian morality. “All flesh is sinful,” taught Christianity, and while it praised work, it diminished the flesh to being the source of all evil. The sinful flesh had to be subjected to the ascetic spirit. Christianity was for him “the hatred of the senses, of joy in the senses, of joy itself.”[16]

He replied to the “despisers of the body”: “There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom.”[17] Here the spirit would be inclined to interpret itself falsely, advises Nietzsche, to escape from the body and “use it as guide… Faith in the body is better manifested than faith in the spirit,”[18] a thesis that today is being confirmed through psychosomatic research.

Nietzsche anticipates the psychoanalytical insight that everything having to do with soul and spirit is rooted in physical experience: “‘I’ says you, and are proud of this word. But the greater thing – in which you are not willing to believe – is your body with its great wisdom; it does not say ‘I,’ but does it.”[19]

One needs to be wary of misunderstanding when interpreting Nietzsche, especially in the face of fascist ideology which justified its barbaric conception of man through references to his writings. “Today we are tired of civilisation”: fascism used this complaint voiced by Nietzsche to support naked violence. Such violence is exactly what the progress of civilisation that Nietzsche criticises was based on from the very beginning. The liberation of people is based not on an excess of reason and enlightenment, but, rather, on its shortage, bodily reason notwithstanding. The fascist cult of the body was only the ultimate manifestation of the process that silenced the body. Those who exalted the body in the Third Reich, “…had the same affinity with killing as the lover of nature has with hunting. They viewed the body as a movable mechanism, with the joints as hinges and the flesh as the padding of the skeleton. They related with the body and worked with their limbs as if they were already separated.”[20]

The new Man is a body-machine: his physique is mechanised, his psyche eliminated.[21] “I am not following your path, you, the despisers of the body!” was Nietzsche’s answer to such philistines. Did the “sexual revolution” liberate the body? Only to a certain degree. Indeed, what appeared to be liberation, was often nothing more than propagation of the socially mandated self-objectification and mechanisation of the genitalia. “The so-called ‘Sex Wave’ movement addresses the needs that were banned for so long from morality and from the public sphere using the technology of mechanical production and propagation, thereby degrading those needs even more.”[22] Sexuality and erotica are no longer the expression of resistance to the ongoing process of socialisation, but rather its victims.

5. Anonymous, Tit Fuck, 1850.

6. Images of Spring, coloured shunga,

18th century. Silk on card.

7. David Greiner, Love Games I, 1917.

Meanwhile, in the private world of a fetishist, the body, with its sensuality, experiences a libidinous revaluation that potentially reimburses it for what the socialisation process has taken away. This is how Eberhard Schorsch attempted to rehabilitate perversion, which he saw as a complement to an all around curtailed sensuality: “Perversions reveal the narrowness, the one-dimensionality, the amputated desire of exclusively genital, partnership-based heterosexuality.”[23] He explains:

“Exhibitionism and voyeurism expose the restriction of sexuality produced by the introduction of intimacy and a sense of shame… Fetishism points out the narrowness of the ideology of personality and partnership as necessary for sexual fulfilment. As a result, an emotional attachment, or ‘love,’ is projected onto objects. A sadomasochistic relationship represents the possibility of unlimited, unconditional mutual love to the point of the obliteration of one’s own person, thereby showing the limits imposed by individuality in the context of accepted sexuality.”[24]

Schorsch’s rehabilitation of perversion is valid, however, only on sociologic-analytical level: “Perversions as phenomena manifest the utopia of sexual freedom, the utopia of unrestricted desire, because they expose the great limitations and narrowness of what is socially accepted as sexuality.” This sounds nice, but, on the other hand, from the subjective, psychoanalytical standpoint, perversions can be also seen as great obstacles. In any case, they illustrate the dynamism and explosive force of sexuality.

Freud considered perversions to be symptoms of neurosis, whereby that which is suppressed in neurosis is expressed “directly in resolutions and acts of fantasy.”[25] As Volkmar Sigusch summarises this thesis: “Perversion is the affirmation of normality. It is not its reversal and distortion, but its emphasis and pinnacle.”[26]

Thus, the fetish of a pervert focuses on the sensual experiences of childhood, while for a “normosexual” a vague, more or less mild fetish of certain body parts and features of the so-called sexual object would not at all be conceivable without otherwise normal sexual desire. The apparent directness with which the sexuality of a fetishist relates to things or, rather, objects, “allows a perverse act to appear as seemingly primal and vital, akin instinctive carnal desire and animalistic lust[27]. Yet, Sigusch observes the closeness of a fetishist act to poetry: “The surprise: a perverse act is comparable to poetry writing.”[28]

8. David Greiner, Love Games II, 1917.

Which brings us back to the Anatomical Blazons.

All the body parts focused on in the following essays can become the subject of poetry as much as of fetish: an ecstatic face, a beautiful backside, breasts, a leg or a foot. Through the psychoanalytically oriented cultural-historical approach it becomes obvious that the body, as we experience it, is not something naturally given, but rather, first of all, something historical. Other essays in this volume deal with the oral and the sense of taste. The oral desire, as well as sense of taste, are modes of sensual appropriation of the world; as this book is illustrated with pictures of erotic art, the sense of sight should be appealed to equally. The chapter “Delights of a Whip” and “Lesbos” refer not only to real gender-relationships – the phantasm that they are based on is even more significant. The central phantasm, essential to both the history of culture and of life, is the “phallus.” As a Basso Continuo, it is present in every sexual maturing, even when its power is renounced.

“There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom”: An awareness of the bodily that can bridge the separation between body and spirit and allow the body to be understood as a cultural-historical product has yet to develop. Everything that is exclusively erotic, however, joins together in praising the whole body:

So we would like to praise the Body duly,

Pay homage to it as to Lord and Master,

So that the sprit, that only nourishes thoughts,

Without body, neither happiness nor sorrow does excite us:

The Body makes its energy praiseworthy,

The force that completes us, consumes us.[29]

9. Wedding book illustrating
love positions, 19th century. Japan.

The Erotic Orient

Bound Happiness
Chinese Eroticism

The aim of Taoist art and culture was to reach that state of harmony which would lead Man, perennially confronted by a chaotic universe, towards a new serenity. In this spiritual context, love represented for the Chinese a force which they believed to unite sky and earth in balance and to maintain the reproductive cycle of nature. Eroticism thus became an art of living and formed an integral part of religion (to the extent that such western notions can be applied to philosophical thought of this kind).

Taoist religion assumes that pleasure and love are pure. “In order to gain some understanding of Chinese eroticism,” writes Etiemble, a great connaisseur of Chinese art, “we need to distance ourselves from the notion of sin and the duality between the corrupt body and the holy spirit,” an ideology which lies at the very base of Christianity. Erotic Chinese art reflects the extent to which we are “morally corrupt” and “full of prejudices.”

The Yin-Yang pairing introduces us directly into the world of Chinese eroticism: “The path of Yin and Yang” signifies nothing less than the sexual act itself. One of the best-known sayings of ancient Chinese philosophy, “Yi yin yi yang cheh we tao” (“On the one side yin, on the other yang, this is the essence of Tao”) indicates the fact that sex between a man and a woman expresses the same harmony as the changes between day and night, or summer and winter. Sex symbolises the order of the world, the moral order, while our culture stigmatises it as evil.

In this sense, master Tung-huan wrote in his Art of Love: “Man is the most sublime creature under the skies. Nothing which he enjoys can be compared to the act of sexual union. Formulated according to the harmony between the sky and the earth, it rules Yin and dominates Yang. Those who understand the sense of these words can preserve their essence and prolong their life. Those who do not grasp their true significance are heading towards their doom.”

The split in the Universe between Yin and Yang is all the more important because these two inseparable principles mutually influence each other. We know of a great many Chinese manuals whose purpose was to provide an education in the art of love-making for young couples; this education would cover desire, morality, and religion. In these texts, the sexual act is always referred to metaphorically with terms such as “the war of flowers,” “lighting the great candle” or “games of cloud and rain.” The texts are also full of images referring to various sexual positions:

unfurling silk

the curled-up dragon

the union of kingfishers

fluttering butterflies

bamboo stalks at the altar

the pair of dancing phoenixes

the galloping tournament horse

the leap of the white tiger

cat and mouse in the same hole

10. Wedding book illustrating
love positions, 19th century. Japan.

11. Wedding book illustrating
love positions, 19th century. Japan.

In Chinese aesthetics, nothing is ever named directly and obviously. Instead, things are referred to obliquely; any transgression of this tradition is considered vulgar. Even the European notion of “eroticism” is much too direct. They would prefer to substitute the term “the idea of spring.” In the verses of a popular Chinese song, physical love is praised without pretence but also without vulgarity:

“The window open in the light of an autumn moon,

The candle snuffed out, the silk tunic undone,

Her body swims in the scent of the tuberoses.”

In the erotic images of paintings on silk or porcelain, wood engravings or illustrations, sexuality is never shown in its crude state or in a pornographic manner, but always in a context of beauty and harmony. Symbolic meaningful details enrich these illustrations, evoking the tenderness which occupies a favoured place in Chinese iconography. Nevertheless, these details are difficult for Europeans to decipher: the cold and impassive faces of the lovers are a long way from our idea of a blaze of passion.

Thus it is that one of the most fertile and ancient cultures in the world invites us, through its religious practices, to make love. Taoist manuals advocate the technique of holding back from ejaculation, a truly prodigious invention which allows the man to satisfy the woman. By doing this, a subtle alchemy is achieved: the man receives Yin from the woman, who obtains from him the pure essence of Yang. For this reason, coitus reservatus is considered in Taoism and in Tantrism to be the most subtle form of sexual union, because it allows the crossing of the divide between masculine and feminine energy. The creation of a new life is not the principal aim of the sexual act. Rather the act has more to do with identification with cosmic forces than with the forces of life.

The “theory of juices” holds that sperm passes through the spinal column directly to the brain. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European medicine laboured under the same misapprehension. How frightening it must have been to be a young boy masturbating and believing that doing so would lead to a degeneration of the spinal chord and a drying-out of the brain!

Whilst ejaculation provides a mere instant of pleasure which is very swiftly lost and finishes in the relaxation of the entire body, a buzzing in the ears, tiredness of the eyes and a dry throat, coitus reservatus or coitus interruptus provokes a growth in vitality and an improvement in all the senses. Among the best-known manuals are those of Sou Nu King and Sou Nu Fang, which among other things recount how the legendary Yellow Emperor, Huang-ti (2697-2599 B.C., according to traditional historical reckoning) used experienced women to teach him about the art of love-making. In The Treaties of the Bedroom there is a conversation between the Emperor and one of his mistresses, a simple young girl:

‘The Yellow Emperor asks the simple young girl: My spirit is listless and lacking in substance; I live constantly in fear and my heart is full of sadness. What can I do to cure myself? The young girl replies quite simply: “All human weaknesses come from an unhappy union of bodies during the sexual act. As water wins in the fight against fire, so woman gains in the fight against man. Those who are skilled in pleasure are like good cooks who know which five spices to add to a soup.” Those who understand the art of Yin and Yang can unite the five modes of pleasure; those who do not know this die before reaching the age of maturity and without having had the slightest pleasure from sex. Should one not forestall this danger?’

12. Wedding book illustrating
love positions, 19th century. Japan.

13. Wedding book illustrating
love positions, 19th century. Japan.

14. Wedding book illustrating
love positions, 19th century. Japan.

15. Wedding book illustrating
love positions, 19th century. Japan.

And in another lesson in the same work: Huang-ti asked: “What does one gain from practising sex according to the path of Yin and Yang?”

“For man, sex makes his energies surge – for woman, it serves as protection against sickness. Those who do not know the right path think that the sexual act can be harmful to health. In truth, the sexual act has only one purpose: physical pleasure and joy, but also peace in the heart and strength of the will. The person feels neither sated nor hungry, he is neither hot nor cold; the body is satisfied and the spirit likewise. Energy ebbs and flows majestically, and no desire troubles this harmony. This is the result of a well-accomplished union. If one follows this rule, women will achieve full pleasure and men will always remain healthy.” Thus answered Sunu.

All of these manuals advocate making love as often as possible and even at an advanced age: “Whatever his age, man would not be happy living without a woman. If he is without a woman, his concentration suffers because of it. If his concentration suffers, the forces of his mind grow weaker; if the forces of his mind weaken, the span of his life grows shorter…”

The bibliography of works of the Han era, which directly pre-dated the birth of Christ, includes eight books that are entirely devoted to the art of love-making. During that era the following maxim was adopted: “The art of having sexual relations with a woman consists of remaining master of oneself and preventing ejaculation in order to allow the sperm to return to the brain.” From that moment on, every educated Chinese man felt obliged to be familiar with the technique of reinforcing masculine power named “drinking at the jade fountain”: the man had to remain inside the woman while she had her orgasm and only leave her when it was over, without releasing any sperm in the process. The treatises teach that it was even possible to make love several times in one night with different women if one followed this technique. Taoist wisdom emphasises the positive aspects of this for the man’s health:

‘Those who are capable of making love several times a day without spilling their sperm will be cured of all illnesses and will reach a ripe old age. If sexual relations are not limited to one woman, the success of this method will only be enhanced. The best option is to make love with ten women or more during the course of one night.’

16. Wedding book illustrating
love positions, 19th century. Japan.

Sex, medicine and religion are thus closely linked in Taoism because of the large number of energy channels that flow through the body. There is a link between the exterior world in which man lives and the individual interior of every human being. Sexuality is thus called upon to play a central role in everyone’s life.

This explains why men thought of satisfying several women sexually as a duty. And the aim was to do it without exhausting all their energy. So, men were supposed to learn different erotic techniques for giving several women multiple orgasms without, however, experiencing their own. Taoist education, from the simplest effort right up to the most elevated spiritual heights, was founded on the control of sexual energies. Tantrism, influenced by Buddhism, was in its teachings and intentions largely similar to Taoism.

The greatest development in erotic art was principally concentrated in the rich commercial cities in the south of China, during the early part of the period that is considered the beginning of the modern era in Asia. From the tenth century onwards, cities as famous as Suzhou, Hanzhou or Quanzhou were among the most flourishing in the entire world. Businessmen frequented luxurious brothels, wine houses and other places of pleasure such as tea houses or the baths. They formed a sub-culture which today is largely documented by writings and novels from that period. The culture of courtesans was a part of this.

The golden age of Chinese erotic art dates from the end of the Ming period (1368-1644), which was characterised by relatively great liberty and the flourishing of all kinds of arts and science. The prudery of Confucianism was the cause of the destruction of a great number of erotic paintings which illustrated the ancient Taoist manuals. Confucianism denied eroticism, and advocated the separation of the sexes as well as the subordination of personal passions to the laws of family and the state.

17. Images of Spring, coloured shunga,
18th century. Silk on card.

Later on, Christianity played a negative role in favouring these iconoclastic practices. What had survived all of these eras was finally destroyed during the Maoist cultural revolution. These philosophical detours can no doubt go some way to explain the delicacy of Chinese eroticism. Like a mantra, these pieces of information are repeated again and again in books about China. And yet Asian eroticism still remains very enigmatic to western understanding.

As Europeans, we cannot help but wonder how sexual ecstasy can be combined with a technique that is so precisely worked out and that is controlled by such a myriad of instructions and recommendations. Does it not lead to a loss of spontaneity in one’s feelings and passions? Is this whole culture of delicacy, of the small and the pure, perhaps obeying a process of distancing things from reality and idealisation? Is what is really happening actually a change in the opposite direction? Does this oh-so-subtle control of natural impulses perhaps indicate repressed anguish hidden by the official and ideological explanation of love?

For a man to avoid having an orgasm is clearly in this day and age a very reasonable method of birth control, but when this practice is advocated because of the loss of vital energies, one suspects quite another motivation. Is there not here a fear of orgasm, in the form of a fear of the oneiric dilution of one’s self?

Orgasm, indeed, means “little death”, because during an orgasm the barriers of the individual are broken down for a moment. To flee death … would that not mean, in this male-centred sexuality, fleeing union with woman? Does the fear of death really mean a fear of women’s power? Chastity can only be dangerous, but seeing the loss of sperm as the loss of the very substance of life is no less so.

If a young man neglects his sexual life, he will be haunted by phantoms which will rear up in his dreams in the form of seductive young women. If he gives in to them, they will suck out his vital energy. It is exactly on this point that Chinese and European traditions meet. In this dream, it is the unconscious which is reclaiming its rights. Thus, regular sexual relations are recommended.

In this sense, Chinese sexuality seems to be held hostage between two distinct fears: on the one side, there is the fear of losing one’s vital energy because of sexual abstention, and on the other is the fear of losing one’s vital energy by ejaculating.

Sharing, as we all, do the human condition, that is, having all been born of a mother and a father who, in one way or another, have been able to come to terms with the Oedipus complex, sexuality can only consist, even in China, of a mixture of pleasure and pain. It is exactly these elements that one must seek behind these endless affirmations of eternal harmony.

What, for example, is the significance of that fact that, in hundreds and hundreds of depictions of the sexual act claiming to offer a complete guide to all conceivable sexual positions, I have only found two or three images of cunnilingus? Was this position forbidden? In 1,000 erotic images, only three represent this theme. Isn’t that strange?

18. Wedding book illustrating
love positions, 19th century. Japan.

Likewise, another theme can give us an insight into repressed fears: In all the images that we have seen, women wear their shoes, even if they are naked. Unshod feet are never shown. For the Chinese, these feet, enclosed in their embroidered shoes, represented the most sublime erotic quality, and small feet exerted a very specific charm over men which we find difficult to understand today. During the Ming period, the custom of foot-binding developed rapidly. Concubines, courtesans, and also simple, mainly peasant women, had their feet broken in childhood and then had them bound for the rest of their lives. Any refusal of this custom was considered shameful. When in 1644 an attempt was made to abolish the custom, the women of Manchuria practically revolted. Indeed, this sign of nobility was held particularly dear among the poorest elements of the population. The bound foot represented at the same time the most powerful taboo: if a woman allowed her foot to be touched without resisting too strongly, one could hope for anything from her.

This custom was finally abolished by Mao Tse-Tung in 1949. Some authors have posited the theory that this ‘walk of the golden lotuses’ tightened the vaginal muscles, but there is no medical proof to sustain the idea.

Voyage Around the World

Perhaps I, too, am nothing more than a desperately decadent European who will never be able to find the path to the noble art that is love.