Foot Worship

What is foot worship?

Foot worship (Dutch: voetaanbidding) is kissing, licking, massaging, smelling or caring for someone’s feet as a form of submission. The act is the point, not the foot: whoever does it takes the lowest spot in the room and turns his attention to the lowest part of the other person. No sex is involved.

What foot worship means in practice

Two people, one chair, and half an hour in which nothing else happens.

The usual picture is this. She sits, shoes off, and reads on. He sits on the floor, washes her feet with a warm cloth and then works toe by toe: pressing, kneading, the occasional kiss. After twenty minutes nothing about the room has changed and everything about the relation inside it has.

That is exactly the difference with boot worship, the nearest neighbour of this term. A boot feels nothing, a foot does. So foot worship works both ways: one gives attention, the other gets a massage, and both of them notice when it tips from one into the other. For many women that is the reason this is the first form of power they dare to try.

What makes the ranking is the height. No rope and no order is needed to make clear who sits where; the furniture already does that work.

Where the word comes from

From a gesture that was bitter earnest for centuries.

The Etymological Dictionary of Dutch shows that aanbidden is a literal translation of the Latin adorāre, from ad “to” and ōrāre “to pray”. Middle Dutch aenbidden meant “to direct one’s prayer to, to request” in 1380, and alongside it the weak anebeden already existed in 1240. So the word was religious for centuries. Etymonline notes for the English adore that in the late fourteenth century it meant “to bow before” and that the weaker sense “to be very fond of something” only came up in the 1880s. On this page the old meaning holds.

And then the find that Dutch itself offers. In the newspaper archive of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, voetaanbidding appears zero times. Voetkus appears 2,020 times, and the oldest source is the Oprechte Haerlemsche courant of 29 March 1678, with a report from Rome dated 5 March about the audience of prince Radziwiłł with the pope: he let him rise “nae de Voet-kus” (after the foot kiss), “daer d’Ambassadeurs anders gemeenelijck gaen sitten” (where the ambassadors otherwise usually sit). So the act is ancient and the word for it is new: what the scene borrowed from English already had a name in Dutch for centuries, only there as court protocol.

Why people do foot worship

For submission you can switch on and off again.

The appeal is in the simplicity of the task. There is one thing to do, it lasts until it is done, and there is nothing to figure out.

• For the one on the receiving end it brings attention without anything in return. You do not have to lie there looking good and you do not have to do anything back; that is rarer than it sounds.
• For the one doing it the gain is in the clarity of the role. The ranking is visible in the posture, so it does not have to be acted.
• For a couple it is one of the few forms you can stop halfway through without anything having failed.

Foot worship does not create a desire that was not there. A woman who finds her own feet ugly spends this half hour thinking about that idea and not about anything else.

How people do foot worship

Almost always starting with care, because that asks nothing of the receiver.

There are three forms you meet in practice. Care is washing, oiling, massaging and sometimes painting nails, and that is where nearly everyone starts. Attention is kissing, licking and smelling, and that step is agreed separately because it carries a different charge. Order is the same act inside a protocol, on a signal and for an agreed time, and that sits closest to service-oriented submission.

The order is nearly the same everywhere: shoes off, wash, massage, and only then the mouth. That is practice and not etiquette, because the first steps clear away the objections that stand in the way of the last.

What foot worship is not

“It is the same as a foot fetish.” No. A foot fetish is a targeted arousal by feet; foot worship is an act in which someone puts themselves below. They often occur together, but you can worship feet without finding them attractive.

“Feet are dirty.” Feet are no dirtier than hands, but they do carry something hands do not. According to the clinical description of tinea pedis in StatPearls, about 10 percent of the population has athlete’s foot, which passes on through direct contact. No reason to skip it, but a reason to look before you lick.

“It is sex.” Usually not. Nothing has to come off and no one has to come, and that is exactly what makes it a walkable first step.

What I see of it myself

I am Victor, gigolo, twenty-five years in BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. Foot worship is most often requested by women who say they “don’t really have anything with BDSM”.

The questions are almost never about me and almost always about her own feet. Whether they are good enough, whether I don’t find it dirty, whether she should go to the pedicure first. That is the real threshold.

The second thing is the tickling. Almost no one accounts for it, and it is the most predictable reason such a half hour ends in giggling. The answer is pressure instead of stroking: hold firmly and work slowly.

And the third is time. Five minutes feels like a gesture, twenty minutes has become something else, and almost everyone notices that turning point.

What you can do yourself

• Agree whether there will be talking and whether you watch or close your eyes, because that changes the experience more than any act does.
• Wash the feet before a mouth comes near them, with warm water and soap, as the first step of the act itself.
• Look at the skin between the toes. Flakes, itching or splits mean there is no licking; massaging can simply carry on. Untreated tinea pedis can, according to StatPearls, lead to cellulitis, pyoderma or bone infection.
• Solve tickling with pressure, not with pushing through. Someone who is ticklish stays that way, unless the touch becomes heavy and slow.
• Agree a time, wider than you would think, because short defeats its own purpose here.
• Talk afterwards, because with submission the reaction sometimes comes an hour later; see aftercare.

More reading about foot worship

On this site the boot variant is on boot worship, foot fetish is about the arousal instead of the act, and the power of crawling describes what the posture does to people. Off this site, the Etymologiebank gives the origin of the verb, and in the newspaper archive of Delpher you can see for yourself how ordinary the foot kiss was in Dutch newspapers.

Where this fits on this site

Foot worship is not on my list as a separate service, but it works as a calm opening to an afternoon with a clear division of roles. How such an appointment is built up is on the page about the BDSM date.

Sources

• ITALIEN. Roma den 5 Maert. Oprechte Haerlemsche courant, 29 March 1678, via the newspaper archive of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (OCR read word for word). The oldest of 2,020 sources for voetkus in that archive, against zero sources for voetaanbidding. Provides the sentence in which the pope let prince Radziwiłł rise “nae de Voet-kus”, “daer d’Ambassadeurs anders gemeenelijck gaen sitten”, and with it the finding that the foot kiss was an ordinary step in a diplomatic audience in the seventeenth century.
• Aanbidden. Philippa, Debrabandere, Quak, Schoonheim & Van der Sijs, Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands, 2003-2009, via etymologiebank.nl. Provides the finding that aanbidden is probably a literal translation of the Latin adorāre, from ad and ōrāre, the Middle Dutch source aenbidden “to direct one’s prayer to, to request” from 1380, the older weak verb anebeden from 1240 that stayed in use into the sixteenth century, and the note that it used to be a separable verb.
• Adore. Douglas Harper, Online Etymology Dictionary. Provides the meaning of adore in the late fourteenth century, “to worship, pay divine honors to, bow down before”, the origin via Old French aorer and Latin adorare “speak to formally, beseech, entreat”, the sense “to honor very highly” from the 1590s, and the weakened sense “to be very fond of” only from the 1880s.
• Tinea Pedis. Pramod K. Nigam, Hasnain A. Syed & Dahlia Saleh, StatPearls Publishing, NCBI Bookshelf (NBK470421), updated 29 October 2023. Provides that athlete’s foot affects about 10 percent of the population, that the infection arises through direct contact with the fungus, that Trichophyton rubrum causes about 70 percent of cases, that the picture begins with itchy scaling and cracks between the toes, and that untreated tinea pedis can lead to cellulitis, pyoderma and osteomyelitis, particularly in people with diabetes or a weakened immune system.

Related terms

Foot worship belongs to the worship family within BDSM, of which boot worship is the best-documented form.

• Foot fetish. The arousal itself, with the figures on how often it occurs and where the clinical line lies.
• Boot worship. The same submission aimed at the boot, where the receiver feels nothing.
• Service-oriented submission. The broader term in which a task is the form the surrender takes.
• Trampling. The same foot, but on your body instead of in your hands.
• Humiliation. The angle where the lowest spot in the room belongs, including the origin of that word.
• Aftercare. What is supposed to happen after half an hour of submission, even when nothing hurt.
• Worship. The overarching word, with the question why English builds it from worth where Dutch says veneration.