Mark Dery on Madonna’s Versace toes
The following comes from an essay by Mark Dery published on “BoingBoing– A Directory Of Wonderful Things”.
In this surreal essay Dery more specifically hyperanalyzes the fetishism of toes, particularly the big one: “So what does Madonna’s big toe mean, exactly? Sex, duh.
According to the New York Post’s ‘Page Six’, Madonna wanted Mario Testino‘s photos for the Versace ads to be “provocative and sexy,” flaunting how good she looks at 46.
Groping for deeper meaning, we remember that Madonna is a lapsed Catholic, so maybe Anthony N. Fragola‘s 1994 essay, “From the ecclesiastical to the profane: Foot fetishism in Luis Buñuel and Alain Robbe-Grillet” in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, can shed a little light: “Buñuel believes that sexual compulsions and deviations originate from the repressive teaching of Catholicism that equates sex with guilt,” writes Fragola.
L’Age d’Or is the cinematic equivalent of the 39 lashes, administered with relish by an ex-Catholic who devoted his creative life to scourging the church as well as the unblinking, ungulate herd that filled its pews.
The movie is Buñuel’s mordantly anti-Catholic ode to l’amour fou (“mad love”), the libidinous frenzy the Surrealists prescribed as shock treatment for repressed, repressive bourgeois society; the infamous toe-sucking scene, still crazy after all these years, is its centerpiece.”
Source: BoingBoing
Thanks to danielillo