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The first little piggy to leave for market is the big toe. It is the first toe stubbed, the first stepped on by your first, inevitably clumsy dance partner. And it was the first feature that distinguished us from the rest of the hairy apes.
Yet poets rhapsodize about elegant hands, strong calves, broad shoulders, and luxuriant tresses, flat-out ignoring the hallux toe. Which, incidentally, means not just big toe but great toe. Formidable in size and strength.
Alas, one of mine curls up like an elf’s. All my sneakers have holes where it pokes up through the canvas, and I spend large swaths of each day trying to bend it downward, still hoping, sixty years on, to somehow straighten it. Mainly, my big toe has exasperated me. But ask a ballet dancer who is en pointe, those satin-ribboned toe shoes trading pain for beauty. She will sing its praises. Ask a baby who has rolled and wiggled for hours trying to grab his beloved big toe and pop it into his mouth. Ask Sue, one of the regulars on Gardener’s World; she has no arms, and I love watching her strong, slender bare feet clasp a hand trowel with her toes or use them to gently pry bedding plants from their six-pack.
The powers of the big toe have been lost on the world’s philosophers, artists, and playwrights. In Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, a patrician statesman uses the metaphor of the body politic and makes the big toe the leader of a rebellion against the belly, or rather, the Senate. “Being one o’ the lowest, basest, poorest,/Of this most wise rebellion, thou go’st foremost,” the toe is told. As the last to receive nourishment from the bloodstream, it is understandably the crankiest and most malcontent part of the body.
Freud made it worse, alleging that the upright stature the big toe made possible led to “the decline of the olfactory stimuli,” so that the smells of our bodies caused us to feel shame. And shame, he insisted, was what civilized us.
I am more inclined to think that shame was what made us neurotic.
The poor big toe’s rep continued to decline. Steeped in Freud, Roland Barthes outdid him, pronouncing the big toe “seductive-repulsive” and describing it as a “tumescent and miniaturized phallus.” No. The big toe is not a little penis. The clitoris may well be described in that fashion, but not the foot’s most callused workhorse. Big toes are plainspoken, humble, practical creatures, not a whiff of fetish about them.
“The human foot is commonly subjected to grotesque tortures that deform it and make it rickety,” wrote Surrealist philosopher Georges Bataille. “In an imbecilic way it is doomed to corns, calluses, and bunions.” Yet he conceded, in the same essay, that however easy it is to mock, the big toe is what made us homo erectus. It allowed us to stand upright and lift our eyes to the heavens. Imagine, if we were still scooching around on all fours, how hard it would be to click or text.
In a later essay, Bataille asked, “Where does the human body begin?” Other animals begin at the mouth and end at the tail, he noted, but the human body does not have a beginning, let alone an ending. Matthew Beaumont, reading him decades later, disagrees—and points down at the big toe.
Walking on two of those oft-deformed appendages freed our hands to make art, use tools, carry babies, and write literature. Walking, and all the activities it made possible, changed our brain. Without the balance our big toe ensures, we would be collapsing all the time. It bends itself backward to propel us forward. It grips the ground to stabilize us; it lets us run lightly up a flight of stairs or reach our favorite flavor on a high shelf.
We owe it a little grace.
Why are we all so conflicted about our toes? My mother’s baby toes crawled up onto their neighbors’ laps, making shoe shopping a delicate nightmare. She hated to bare her feet, hated those baby toes to bungle a sandal. I refused to be that self-conscious about my elf toe. Nothing feels better than wriggling your toes into warm sand or a tangle of soft grass. At work, back when I bought pretty shoes that pinched, I slipped them off so regularly, my colleagues used to steal and hide them. Which was funny only the first time. But to me, bare feet spell freedom; they wake the senses, ease the constriction of propriety, and let the feet breathe fresh air. I could never understand why older women in the department looked at me aghast, sometimes with a barely concealed shudder of disgust.
Even Beaumont, who lauds the big toe, notes that it appeared relatively late in human history and was, in his opinion, “developed too hurriedly. It is a botched job, a strangely Frankensteinian touch.” Yet—he insults his precious toe, then has the nerve to continue—“the grossest, the ugliest, arguably the most alien-looking and least human-seeming, part of the anatomy, is actually what makes us human.”
Adoni-bezek knew its worth. He began the Book of Judges by chopping off the big toes and thumbs of seventy conquered kings, throwing them permanently off balance.
As for the ingrates who despise their toes, I wish them fungus, and the full catalog of horrors one can find on Google Images. Remember: the best mischief happens on tiptoe. And the most creative challenges keep us on our toes.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
