Worship

What is worship?

Worship (Dutch: aanbidding) is the kissing, licking, smelling, massaging, or tending of one specific body part as a form of surrender. The word names the act and not the body part, so it applies just as well to feet as to boots, muscles, or hands. What makes it special is the ranking: whoever worships declares something precious.

What worship means in practice

One body part gets all the attention, and the rest of the body ceases to exist for a while.

That is literally the description researchers give it. In Archives of Sexual Behavior, Jennifer Rehor surveyed 1,580 women from the kink community about more than 126 acts, and lists worship as “kissing, licking, smelling, enjoying a specific body part.” Of that whole group, 61.20% had done it in some form, which puts it in her ranking between posing for erotic photos and role-play around professions.

A common scene looks roughly like this: one person sits or stands, the other sits lower, and for twenty minutes nothing happens except attention on one spot. No build toward something, no second act added. That the scene is not working toward anything is, for many people, exactly the point.

Why the word worship and not aanbidding

Because the English word is about worth and the Dutch one is about veneration.

Etymonline traces worship back to the Old English weorðscipe, made up of weorð “worthy” and the suffix -scipe. The original meaning is “the condition of being worthy, dignity, distinction, honor,” and only late in Old English does the meaning “honor paid to a divine being” get added. The old use still sits in worshipful, and English magistrates are still addressed as Your Worship.

That difference is not academic. Aanbidding puts the emphasis on who kneels, worship on what gets declared valuable. Dutch has no single word for that and so sticks the body part in front of it: voetaanbidding, laarzenaanbidding. The English word can stand on its own, and that is why the scene keeps it.

Why people do worship

To make the ranking felt without anything having to happen.

• For the one who worships, the relief is that there is only one thing to do. That task lasts as long as it lasts, and nothing else is expected of you but attention. For many people that is the shortest route to the feeling the rest of the evening leans on.
• For the one receiving it, it is more uncomfortable than it looks. Sitting still while someone spends twenty minutes at your feet asks you to let that attention rest on you, and not everyone manages that right away.
• For the two of you together, this is one of the few forms where no one has to be skilled at anything. There is no technique and no risk that calls for experience.

Worship makes a relationship you already have felt, it does not create one. If that relationship is off, worship makes it more visible rather than better.

What worship looks like when it is paid for

As a category of its own, not as a fringe phenomenon.

For Archives of Sexual Behavior, Christian Grov and colleagues asked 495 clients of male escorts what exactly had happened at their most recent meeting, and grouped the answers with latent class analysis. Four kinds of meetings came out. The second largest, 157 people, or 31.7%, differs from the ordinary meeting precisely in the breadth of the touching, and body worship is named there in so many words. A third group of 76 people (15.4%) fell under BDSM and role-play.

Two caveats belong with this. These clients were almost all men, so the breakdown says nothing about women who book a gigolo. And the study counts acts, not meaning. What it does show is this: in a paid meeting, worship is a recognizable form in its own right, not something that turns up by accident.

What worship is not

“Worship is a fetish.” No. A fetish is a desire you have; worship is an act you carry out. You can worship someone’s feet without having a foot fetish, and have a foot fetish without ever worshipping.

“Worship is always about feet.” Feet and boots are the best-known forms, but the word names no body part. Hands, muscles, belly, armpits, and buttocks fall under it just as well.

“It’s a warm-up for the real sex.” The description researchers use says “enjoying,” not “preparing.” Most people who mention this mean it as the act itself.

“Whoever worships is passive.” In this setup the person receiving it does the least and most often struggles to sit still. Whoever worships sets the pace.

What I see myself

I’m Victor, a gigolo, twenty-five years into BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. Worship is the act most often underestimated by the woman receiving it, and I notice it always at the same moment: after a few minutes she wants to do something back.

That wanting to reciprocate is the interesting part. Getting attention without providing anything for it is more uncomfortable for many women than anything else on the rest of the list, and it is why I sometimes set a fixed length for it. An agreed duration takes away the question of whether it has been enough yet.

More reading about worship

On this site the two worked-out forms sit side by side: foot worship describes the Dutch variant with the history of the word alongside it, and boot worship the learning side, with the role boots play in that community. Service-oriented submission places worship in the broader category where it belongs. Beyond that, the research by Jennifer Rehor is free to read and the only place where 126 acts were surveyed among 1,580 women instead of a clinical sample.

Where this fits on this site

The role relationship worship belongs to is simply on my profile, and what exactly falls under it that evening we decide together beforehand. If you want to know how that conversation goes, it is on the page about the BDSM date.

Sources

• Sensual, erotic, and sexual behaviors of women from the “kink” community. Jennifer Eve Rehor, Archives of Sexual Behavior 44(4), 825-836, 2015 (PMID 25795531, DOI 10.1007/s10508-015-0524-2; full text read via PMC4379392). The largest non-clinical study of what women in the kink community actually do, with 1,580 participants, a median age of 34, and more than 126 acts surveyed. Supplies the description the questionnaire itself gave for worship, “kissing, licking, smelling, enjoying a specific body part”; the participation figure of 61.20% across the whole sample of 1,580 (table 10); and the breakdown in table 8 for the subsample of 1,394 women who answered the questions about openly sexual acts, with 66.28% who did it, received it, or both and 69.37% who took part in it in some form, within which worship was done more often to men (47.42%) than to women (28.62%).
• Patterns of Client Behavior with Their Most Recent Male Escort. An Application of Latent Class Analysis. Grov, Starks, Wolff, Smith, Koken & Parsons, Archives of Sexual Behavior 44(4), 1035-1045, 2015 (PMID 24777440, DOI 10.1007/s10508-014-0297-z; authors, volume, issue, and pagination checked against Crossref, only the abstract read, because the article is not freely accessible). Supplies the design with 495 clients of male escorts surveyed about their most recent meeting, and the four classes that came out of it: the ordinary meeting (200 people, 40.4%), the meeting with more touch in which body worship is explicitly named (157, 31.7%), the BDSM and kink meeting (76, 15.4%), and the erotic massage (58, 11.7%).
• worship (n.). Online Etymology Dictionary, Douglas Harper. Supplies the origin of the English word from the Old English worðscip, wurðscip, and weorðscipe, made up of weorð “worthy” and the suffix -scipe, with the original meaning “condition of being worthy, dignity, glory, distinction, honor, renown”; the finding that the meaning “reverence paid or due to a supernatural or divine being” was recorded only late in Old English; and the note that the original meaning survived in worshipful, which stayed in use as a respectful form of address for magistrates.

Related terms

Worship is a form of service-oriented submission in which one body part gets all the attention, and the two best-known versions are below.

• Foot worship. The best-known form, with the Dutch word history and the practical side.
• Boot worship. The same act aimed at boots, with the learning community around it.
• Service-oriented submission. The overarching category: serving as a form of surrender.
• Fetish. The desire worship is most often confused with, and why the two are different things.
• Foot fetish. The clearest example of that difference, with the figures alongside.
• Femdom. The relationship in which worship is most often arranged.
• Worship fantasy. The same scene from the chair of the person receiving it.