Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [92]
"I learned this really from doing Leg Show," she continued. "The breast thing was so common I didn't think about it. But I had to figure out why men were obsessed with feet and legs and groveling before them. I learned that men get security from legs, because when a little child is scared, he grips his mother's legs. They're always trying to get up under the skirt, holding on to the legs—and the legs represent safety. A loving mother may pick up the child and hold him, but a less loving, harsher mother may just leave the child down there, so the legs are all he gets. When a boy with a stern, withholding mother grows up, he often fastens on a harsher, more demanding woman as his love object."
Such men also fasten on Barbie's fetishistic shoes, which "raise the foot, contort it, and display it as if it's on a pedestal—which is precisely what most foot fetishists want. Foot fetishists think of the foot like the breast; and a man who likes the breast wants to see it lifted up and displayed. He wants a big push-up bra. Men who are into breasts don't want to see the breast just lying there. They really love those low-cut fifties dresses where they see cleavage really displayed. A shoe like Barbie wears does the same thing: It draws attention to the foot, much more than, say, a bare foot walking down the street. You're taking the foot and you're elevating it. You're serving it on a platter."
But far from being symbols of female passivity—or devices that impede movement—spike heels can be interpreted as symbols of strength. They make the wearer taller, so that she or he (the shoes are de rigueur with drag queens) towers over the nonwearer the way that Mom towered over her little boy. Nor do they mimic feminine curves; they are sharp, pointy, masculine.
"Submissive men" who buy Leg Show are into "the highest, most dangerous, most hobbling heels because they see them as a symbol of feminine power," Hanson explained. "Because they could be hurt by those shoes. They could be pierced. And they like being walked on with them."
You don't have to be a psychoanalyst to see how childhood experiences shaped Hanson's readers. She can even pinpoint the decade a man grew up in by the type of hosiery that excites him. Men who were toddlers in the seventies (when their mothers wore pantyhose) are turned on by pantyhose; older men prefer garter belts.
Nor are boys alone influenced by the earliest bonds with Mom. Children of both sexes are originally matrisexual, Nancy Chodorow writes in The Reproduction of Mothering, and remain so for most of their preoedipal period, or until they are about four or five. Freud, in fact, found that a girl's infantile attachment to her mother has a major impact on both her succeeding oedipal attachment to Dad and her eventual connection to men in general.
Hanson doesn't just grill her readers about the origins of their sexual desires; she has also probed her own. Brought up in Seattle by parents who were part of a secret fundamentalist religion, she remembers Barbie as her beacon. Just as aspiring doctors send their Barbies to medical school or aspiring models pose her on runways, aspiring pornographers—well, the doll, Hanson says, made Hanson what she is today.
Hanson was nine when Barbie first appeared, and her parents, members of the Constitution party, a right-wing group similar to the John Birch Society, refused to let her have one. They considered the doll—along with rock 'n' roll and Mad magazine—to be part of a conspiracy to sexualize "American youth and thereby weaken it, by making it promiscuous," she recalled. "With my parents, it was always hard to tell whether