Foot fetish

What is a foot fetish?

A foot fetish (in the clinical literature podophilia) is sexual arousal by feet. It is the most common fetish aimed at a non-genital body part. Its strength varies widely, from finding feet attractive the way you find a back attractive, to needing feet to come.

What a foot fetish looks like in practice

Rarely the extreme people picture.

Most people with a foot fetish find feet arousing the way others find a neck or a back arousing. It is where the attention goes, and it does not decide the whole of sex. At the other extreme is the form where feet are the only route to an orgasm, and that group is small.

Exactly where the attention lands varies a lot from person to person. One notices shape and soles, another nail polish, stockings or shoes, and a third mostly smell. That explains why two people with “the same thing” do not recognise themselves in each other’s description.

How ordinary it is shows in the only large study that ever weighed fetishes against each other. Scorolli and colleagues counted 381 internet discussion groups in International Journal of Impotence Research, good for at least five thousand people. No other subject of preference came up as often as feet.

Why people think it comes from the brain

Because there is an explanation everyone knows, and it was tested and it fell.

The idea is old. In 1972, the catalogue for an exhibition at the Haags Gemeentemuseum carried a passage from the psychiatrist Havelock Ellis about “an almost natural basis for foot fetishism in the tendency to associate the foot with the genitals”, and the reviewer at De Tijd repeated that line. Dutch goes no further back than this: it is the first time voetfetisjisme appears in a Dutch newspaper.

The neurologist V.S. Ramachandran gave that idea a physical form in 1994. The cerebral cortex holds a map of the body, and on it the area for the feet borders the area for the genitals. Crosstalk between those two areas could explain the preference. He offered no experimental evidence for it, and the story went around the world anyway.

In 2014 it was measured. Oliver Turnbull and colleagues, in Cortex, had about 800 participants from the British Isles and sub-Saharan Africa rate 41 body parts for erotic sensitivity. The feet scored strikingly low, and the ratings of body parts that sit next to each other in the cortex did not correlate. Their conclusion is that the map theory finds no support. Where a foot fetish does come from, nobody knows.

Why people find feet arousing

For reasons that differ from person to person, and that is not an evasive answer but where the research stands.

The explanations people give themselves fall into three directions: the submissive (a foot is the lowest point, and attention to it is a posture straight away), the sensory (a foot responds strongly and visibly), and the forbidden (feet are supposed to stay covered).

• For the person with the fetish, the gain is a starting point that costs nothing and asks nothing. Nobody has to get undressed.
• For a partner, joining in often turns out much easier than expected, because it holds an ordinary act that gives her something pleasant of her own.
• For a couple, it removes a conversation that otherwise gets put off endlessly, because this is one of the few preferences you can try out in ten minutes.

There is one historical explanation that gets cited often and that you should take with a grain of salt. Giannini and colleagues proposed in Psychological Reports that interest in feet rises during epidemics of sexually transmitted disease, and counted a sharp rise in images of feet in pornography during the AIDS epidemic. It is a preliminary study, the authors call it that themselves, and it measures images and not people.

What a foot fetish is not

“A foot fetish is the same as foot worship.” No. Foot worship is about subordination and about who sits lower. A foot fetish is about where the desire points. Many people who worship feet have no fetish, and many people with a fetish have nothing to do with submission.

“It comes from the foot and the genitals sitting next to each other in the brain.” That is the best-known explanation, and it was tested in 2014 and not confirmed. Anyone who uses it anyway is using a hypothesis from 1994 without the 2014 measurement beside it.

“It is a psychiatric disorder.” Only when there is demonstrable distress or impairment, or contact with someone who does not consent to it. Exactly where that line runs is on fetish.

What I see myself

I am Victor, a gigolo, twenty-five years in BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. A foot fetish is one of the few things where people feel ashamed of something that, statistically, is the most ordinary choice they could have made.

The conversation about it usually turns on whether it is a problem. Not on what someone wants, but on whether it is allowed. For a preference that tops every count, that is a strange question.

The second thing is how small the wish usually is. What women tell me about this is rarely about a fetish of their own and mostly about a partner who has one, and the question then is never how far it goes but whether she has to do anything with it.

What you can do yourself

• Ask exactly where the attention lands, because shape, smell, stockings and touch are four different preferences hiding under one word.
• Try it small, with half an hour and nothing else, instead of holding a whole conversation about it in which nobody sees a thing.
• Agree whether it stays at touching, because the step from looking to licking is bigger than the step from looking to touching.
• Look at the skin before a mouth comes into it. The practical side of that is on foot worship.
• Draw the line at other people. A preference only becomes a problem once someone is involved who has not consented to it, and that is also exactly where the clinical line sits.

Further reading on a foot fetish

On this site, fetish explains the overarching concept with the clinical criteria beside it, foot worship covers the act, and trampling describes what that same foot does with weight behind it. Off this site, the paper by Turnbull and colleagues in Cortex shows how a popular brain explanation gets tested, and Scorolli and colleagues gives the best picture of how fetishes relate to one another.

Where this fits on this site

A foot fetish does not have to belong to anything to be allowed to exist, and for many people it is a calm way to begin a first date. How that is built up is on the page about the BDSM date.

Sources

• Reports of intimate touch. Erogenous zones and somatosensory cortical organization. Oliver H. Turnbull, Victoria E. Lovett, Jackie Chaldecott & Marilyn D. Lucas, Cortex 53, 146-154, April 2014 (DOI 10.1016/j.cortex.2013.07.010; PMID 23993282; author names and pagination checked against Crossref). Abstract read. Provides the first systematic test of Ramachandran’s explanation: about 800 participants, mainly from the British Isles and sub-Saharan Africa, rated 41 body parts for erotic intensity; the scores for the feet were strikingly low, ratings of body parts that lie next to each other in the primary somatosensory cortex did not correlate, and the authors conclude that the S1 hypothesis finds no support, partly because stimulation of that cortex in the existing literature produces no erotic sensation.
• Phantom limbs, neglect syndromes, repressed memories, and Freudian psychology. V.S. Ramachandran, International Review of Neurobiology 37, 291-333, 1994 (PMID 7883483). Only the reference and the description consulted. This is the work that contains the proposal that the proximity of the foot area and the genital area on the body map in the cerebral cortex could explain a foot fetish, and in which no experimental evidence is provided for it.
• KUNST IN DEN HAAG. Schoen Fetisjisme. De Tijd, 11 February 1972. Newspaper archive of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, OCR proofread. The oldest of five occurrences of voetfetisjisme in that archive; voetfetisj itself appears in it ten times and voetfetisjist nine times, all three only from the 1970s onward. Provides the review of Jurjen de Haan’s portraits at the Haags Gemeentemuseum and the passage the catalogue quoted from the work of Havelock Ellis about “an almost natural basis for foot fetishism in the tendency to associate the foot with the genitals”.
• Sexualization of the female foot as a response to sexually transmitted epidemics. A preliminary study. A. James Giannini, Andrew E. Slaby, Gale Colapietro, Steven M. Melemis & Rachel K. Bowman, Psychological Reports 83(2), 491-498, October 1998 (DOI 10.2466/pr0.1998.83.2.491; PMID 9819924). Abstract read; author names checked against Crossref, which lists the second and third authors in reverse order relative to PubMed. Provides the supposed connection between epidemics of sexually transmitted disease and interest in feet, tested by counting images of feet in mass-distributed pornography over a period of thirty years, with an exponential rise during the AIDS epidemic. The authors call it a preliminary study themselves.
• Relative prevalence of different fetishes. Scorolli, Ghirlanda, Enquist, Zattoni & Jannini, International Journal of Impotence Research 19(4), 432-437, 2007 (PMID 17304204). Used here only for the one finding this page needs, because /en/term/fetish and /en/term/boot-worship already carry the breakdown across the categories: 381 internet discussion groups with an estimated at least five thousand participants, in which feet and the objects that go with them were the most common subject of preference.

Related terms

A foot fetish is a form of fetish, and that page carries the clinical criteria and the history of the word.

• Foot worship. The act, with the practical side and the old Dutch word for it.
• Fetish. The umbrella, with the figures on how common fetishes are in the population.
• Boot worship. The variant aimed at footwear instead of the foot.
• Trampling. The same foot, now with weight behind it.