phenomenon, and is certainly the most frequently occurring form
of fetichism. Many cases are brought together by Krafft-Ebing in
his _Psychopathia Sexualis_. Every prostitute of any experience
has known men who merely desire to gaze at her shoes, or possibly
to lick them, and who are quite willing to pay for this
privilege. In London such a person is known as a "bootman," in
Germany as a "Stiefelfrier."

The predominance of the foot as a focus of sexual attraction, while among
us to-day it is a not uncommon phenomenon, is still not sufficiently
common to be called normal; the majority of even ardent lovers do not
experience this attraction in any marked degree. But these manifestations
of foot-fetichism which with us to-day are abnormal, even when they are
not so extreme as to be morbid, may perhaps become more intelligible to us
when we realize that in earlier periods of civilization, and even to-day
in some parts of the world, the foot is generally recognized as a focus of
sexual attraction, so that some degree of foot-fetichism becomes a normal
phenomenon.

The most pronounced and the best known example of such normal
foot-fetichism at the present day is certainly to be found among the
Southern Chinese. For a Chinese husband his wife's foot is more
interesting than her face. A Chinese woman is as shy of showing her feet
to a man as a European woman her breasts; they are reserved for her
husband's eyes alone, and to look at a woman's feet in the street is
highly improper and indelicate. Chinese foot-fetichism is connected with
the custom of compressing the feet. This custom appears to rest on the
fact that Chinese women naturally possess a very small foot and is thus an
example of the universal tendency in the search for beauty to accentuate,
even by deformation, the racial characteristics. But there is more than
this. Beauty is largely a name for sexual attractiveness, and the energy
expended in the effort to make the Chinese woman's small foot still
smaller is a measure of the sexual fascination which it exerts. The
practice arose on the basis of the sexual attractiveness of the foot,
though it has doubtless served to heighten that attractiveness, just as
the small waist, which (if we may follow Stratz) is a characteristic
beauty of the European woman, becomes to the average European man still
more attractive when accentuated, even to the extent of deformity, by the
compression of the cor