Sometimes I wonder what happened to Jenny(name changed). I only knew her briefly, some time in those first few days at college before the rennet of shared interests curdled the milk of the new intake of freshers into the cheese of relatively stable social circles. Her interest was one that I had never imagined in my short eighteen years of life: she loved shoes. She showed me the seventeen carefully arranged pairs in her wardrobe and explained how difficult it had been to pack, since she had had to leave thirty-something pairs at home.
At the time I thought nothing more than that she was strange, if pleasant. I did not know then what I know now about calceomania and its corrosive effect on the lives of innocent young women. And how could I? It is hard to imagine now, but thirty years ago shoe addiction was practically unknown. A practising psychiatrist might be confronted with one, at most two cases in his or her entire career, and would have been at a loss when trying to consult the literature for guidance: where now there are several well-established reputable peer reviewed journals in the field of calceomanic spectrum disorder (ICD-10 V, F63.4), back then there were only the pioneering papers of Jakob Krummzaun, practically unknown outside his native Liechtenstein and even there little-read after his fall from grace in the 1952 'chastisement' scandal. (And it also must be mentioned that there were few attractive shoe shops in Vaduz at that time.)
There are several competing theories, each enthusiastically propounded by their respective schools of thought, about the breathtaking increase in shoe addiction since the early 1980s, of which 'Jenny' could be seen as an unfortunate pioneer. To mention but the most prominent: there is the post-deconstructionist, or 'French' school, which sees the shoe addict as compulsively acting out society's rejection of its own unbearable comprehension of its inherent lack of objective meaning by the imposition of a socially-constructed and sanctioned comprehensible unitary and supposedly universally valid structure of desired second skin ('deuxième peau désiré', in the words of Grenouillard) upon the inchoate multiplicity of sole and toe ('plante et orteil'), an imposition that must be indefinitely repeated since the second skin can never successfully 'superplant' ('superplanter', a French term that is hard to translate given its play on the words 'supplanter' and 'plante') the individual subjective foot and thus achieve a 'valorisation en pied d'égalité', another phrase of difficult translation which could be roughly rendered as an acceptation of its value on an equal footing. (Not to be confused with the French word 'footing,' meaning 'jogging.') And then there is the 'English' school, which posits that "some women are inordinately fond of footwear" (as Johnson puts it).
Whatever the reason, the social consequences of the exponential rise in calceomania were relatively minor until the economic crisis of 2008: in an apparently booming economy, most shoe addicts were able to serve their dependency without resorting to desperate or illegal measures. How quickly things have changed! Few of us will have failed to notice the discretely armed guards now posted in the doorways of most major shoe shops: a necessary response to the meteoric rise in shoe shop-lifting and armed shoe-theft. And since the scandal surrounding 'Missy' Lorula Sheannison's recent hit "Doin' Tricks fo' shoes" even fewer of us will be unaware of the phenomenon increasingly invading the seamy side streets around the corners from those well-guarded shoe stores: the swelling ranks of young women forced by their desperation to sell the only asset they have left – their own bodies – for the price of a pair of pumps. Recognisable by the shopping bags they carry to stash away their 'earnings,' which also give them one of their more unkind names: 'shoe bags,' these shoe whores are surely among the most pitiable victims of the crisis.
But what is to be done to help them? Are they indeed deserving of help, or are they simply a problem for the law-enforcement community? This has become one of the burning issues in recent municipal elections, with the predictable positions on all sides being adopted by the predictable members of the equally predictable parties. It is not yet possible to predict which supposed solution or non-solution will prevail. But one thing can be predicted: the controversy is likely to move to a new level following the recent reports of the opening of 'shoe houses' in the seedier districts of some of our big cities. In these combination shoe shops and brothels the sex workers are paid directly in shoes. Some will no doubt argue that they are safer in such a controlled environment than out on the streets. Others will simply be pleased that they are out of sight of the high street. Still others will argue that these dens of immorality and/or exploitation should be banned forthwith. But whatever may come out of the debate one thing is sure: we can measure our humanity and compassion as a society by the way we treat these most unfortunate of women.
I just hope that 'Jenny' is not among them. She's too old.