By David Futrelle
The best way to ask a random woman on the internet for feet pics is, of course, to NOT ask her for feet pics.
The worst way? Well, check out this horrible thing I found in a Twitter thread of women sharing the worst online interactions with creepy dudes.
I’ve read a lot of screenshots of a lot of shitty interactions but the passive-aggressive chutzpah of this one kind of stopped me in my tracks.
Here’s a dude who’s either 1) using his grandfather’s cancer as an excuse to pester a woman for feet pics or 2) pretending his grandfather has cancer in order to get feet pics. I suppose option two is marginally better than option one, but they both fall into the category of “completely unacceptable.” It’s like deciding which kind of poop you want in your poop sandwich.
Dudes, if you’re doing anything even remotely like this in your interactions with women, you really need to take a long, hard look at your life. And if you still can’t imagine your life without feet pics, find a woman who is selling them, and pay her for her time and trouble. If you’re broke, there’s something called Google Image Search, which can give you as many pictures you could ever need of whatever particular body part or parts you fetishize.
I mean, Jesus Christ dudes, get it together.
H/T — Thanks to @twenty_yards on Twitter for sharing this message, which was sent to a female friend of his.
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Sure, you could probably find plenty of feet pics online, but then you wouldn’t get to make a woman feel uncomfortable, so what’s the point?
If I got a message like that, I’d probably ask for the contact information for his parents so I could tell them he was using this as a ploy.
Happy to help, Chris.
This post reminds me of the niceguys of reddit. What a goldmine
@moggie
BINGO! making her uncomfortable is his no 1 priority
It’s gotten to the point where if I’m watching a show on Netflix or wherever and I see a performance by a woman actor I’ve never seen before, if I think she did a good job and want to see if she’s been in anything else, I go to IMDB and search there, not in a general search engine. Why? Because I don’t want to see “[actor name] feet” appearing in the search suggestions, thank you. YKINMKATO. Or maybe I’ve been a bit sensitised to it since reading Mara Wilson’s book.
Moggie-Well said. The thrill these men get from harassing and pressuring women to do something that they do not want to do is what motivates them. The pictures are secondary.
There was a King of the Hill episode wherein some creep persuaded Peggy to display her feet (size 16, and therefore a source of ongoing self-consciousness) on what he claimed was a body positivity website. Admittedly, the target was a naive Baby Boomer circa 2000 (as well as a sitcom character)–but has anyone tried this angle of approach in real life?
As my domestic violence counselor from long ago told me, abusers try to control your life because they can’t control their own lives.
@Full Metal Ox
I totally related to Peggy in that episode because although I’m of average height, my feet are size 10 (gasp).
That’s what happens, I suppose, when most of your family is tall with big feet: you might inherit your grandmother’s average height but the rest of your family’s big feet. Sigh.
My mother gained an entire shoe size after she turned 65. Please, Great Goddess, can we have an understanding that my feet will stay as they are — big but no bigger? Thx.
Most worrisome to me is how there are people out there in the real world who think there’s not a damned thing wrong, creepy, or weird about what they’re doing.
Once on craigslist I posted a pair of thigh-high red vinyl boots I wore one Halloween years ago. I get rid of stuff all the time on there, no biggie. But THIS posting garnered me so many guys’ emails asking me out, asking me for nudes, sending me dickpix (with no words in the email… just an erect peen). Oh, and some responded with “A/S/L?” as though that had a damned thing to do with anything. It was posted in the shoe section of the ‘sale’ section, so these buckos were cruising the effing shoe section for women.
Yeesh…foot-creepers who need fetish photos in order to feel less sad about their grandpas’ alleged cancer diagnoses. What next?
It’s things like this that make me circumspect about posting photos of my own shoes.
Wait… they want what now? why? and this is a widespread request?
…
…
I mean, there was that one time when my girlfriends and I were sitting on a curb and I took my booties off, because I was feeling particularly good about my feet that day, and proclaimed that I had the awesomest feet in the whole wide world, which my friends were all “shut up, dashapants, no you don’t” but then two minutes later some guy passing by stopped dead in his tracks and was like “awesome feet!” and I was vindicated, so far be it from me to deny the power of pedicure over the minds of menfolk, but it wasn’t like he took out his phone to immortalize the experience, so I’m at a loss, why would anyone want pictures of feet? As wank material it is rather weak sauce. And I’m not sure the request would make me all that uncomfortable. I’d probably be more like “how many feet? please be very specific, I don’t let just anyone see the full extent of my measuring tape.”
@Carrie V,
A/S/L???
(I’m sure I’ll recognize that abbreviation the minute you say what it is, but my mind is going blank on what those letters stand for there.)
Maybe “Age, Sex, Location?” I can’t inmagine they were asking about ?American Sign Language.
@Bina:
Hey, don’t knock it! When my grandmother was in her final illness last May, the only thing on my mind was which online women I could hit up for nudes to take my mind off it with a good beat-off sess– oh, wait, no, I didn’t, all I felt was grief: all-consuming, annihilating sorrow. What is wrong with these people?!
@dashapants
Sincere and profuse apologies in advance if your post was pure sarcasm.
Right, now that’s out of the way, foot fetish – wow. One of the oldest recorded “kinks” and apparently still one of the most popular. It’s a big one!
Apparently there’s even a YouTube clip of Jordan Peterson “explaining” foot fetishes. That, I can happily miss.
dashapants:
I think it’s the part that Moggie mentioned earlier. It’s actually about exercising power over women. The pictures are just trophies that remind them of the bit that really gets them off.
Ok, feeling old, but….
A/s/l, especially when it has the slashes, is indeed “age/sex/location”. Back in the early days of IRC (internet relay chat) it was basically the first question anyone ever asked of you. So this person is probably a creepy older dude trying to chat you up like it’s 1999.
@Moon Custafer:
I had the same initial thought you did; I could see a hand fetishist wanting their object of desire to sign in ASL.
But what if the only cure for his grandad’s cancer is pictures of her feet tho?
@Mish
It was mostly sarcasm. Though, I have always kind of considered foot fetishism an archaic thing, harking back to the days when men would glamorize any sort of thing that resulted in effective foot hobbling for women, as it would restrict their ability to run away (foot binding, high heels, etc.). I am a bit taken aback by the modern foot obsession, and more specifically that it’s not being treated like a kink, but like a totally ordinary everyday preference, like being really into artisanal cheese or something. LIke, why of course I’m into toes, m’lady.
Jordan Petersen, you say. Is there nothing that cult-mongereing dipshit did not attempt to incomprehensibly rationalize.
Okay, I have returned from hearing what JP has to say about feet, and his empirically unsupported assertion is that since the brain delegates more power to representing more sensitive body bits and since the circuits for feet are nearby to the ones for genitalia, there can be accidental overlap, resulting in feet being sexualized.
Which of course makes me wonder why I am not lusting after man toes. I guess maybe my brain just stores feet next to knitting?
Also, JP neglects to reflect on the fact that he’s talking about body’s self-image, so then in a dude brain the virtual representation of feet would be next to virtual representation of dicks on the sensorium, so that might be a good argument for playing footsie under the table but not an argument at all for why dudes are obsessed with lady feet, as they are not storing a map of someone else’s feet in their brain next to the map of their own junk.
True fact: Tetrapod limbs originally evolved as a result of sexual selection.
Everyone handles grief in their own way, I guess.