By David Futrelle
An anonymous fellow recently turned to Yahoo Answers with a plaintive question: Ladies, why won’t you let me love your sexy feet?
More specifically, he asked: “Why do some women try to make their feet look attractive, but think a foot fetish is weird?” Apparently he was a little miffed that these women continue to tease him with their toes.
Females why do you go to extremes to make your feet look good, cute, sexy, attractive and just plain beautiful but when a guy with a foot fetish likes you for your feet you think its weird? When you tell yourself you want your feet to look good, why are you doing that, whats the purpose?
There are some girls that go to extremes to have the sexiest looking feet, you walk around in high heel shoes, or open toed shoes showing off your feet, but these same girls think that a foot fetish is weird, so how the hell are you going to go to extremes to make your feet look sexy and show off in public but think that the very people that are obsessed with the very thing you tried so hard to make sexy is weird?
Foot Dude, just listen to yourself a little more carefully. Because the answer is hidden in plain sight in your questions. For example, right here:
when a guy with a foot fetish likes you for your feet
No one, not even a woman who has a foot fetish herself, wants to be reduced to a body part. Women don’t object to people who think their feet look good; they object to people who like a certain body part better than they like the person with this body part.
And think a bit more about this line as well:
the very people that are obsessed with the very thing you tried so hard to make sexy
There’s nothing wrong with having a foot fetish. There is something wrong if you rush to tell every woman with “sexy feet” how sexy you think their feet are, how obsessed with feet you are, and, even if only by implication, how horny their feet make you.
Foot fetishists have a reputation for leading with their fetish, and the wording of the question here suggests that you, Foot Dude, may be one of these men. Women really don’t like it when men they don’t know, or with whom they have only a platonic relationship, show up on their doorstep (real or viritual) babbling about how hot their feet are.
They would have a similar reaction if someone showed up babbling about their lips, their ears, or their asses. The body part isn’t the problem. The problem, Foot Dude, is the unwanted intrusion of your sexual thoughts into their lives. Would you like it if, say, an ear fetishist came up to you and started babbling about how much your ears turn them on? No one wants that.
For some reason, foot fetishists seem to have more difficulty than most in remembering this basic tenet of sexual etiquette. I don’t know if they’re actually worse about this, or if it’s just that people notice it more from them because their particular fetish seems weirder than, say, the more common fetish of someone who likes big butts and can not lie.
But if you ever take a stroll through the CreepyPMs subreddit, filled with screenshots of creepy, unsolicited private messages that women (mostly) get from men (mostly), you’ll notice that a strikingly large number of them involve feet.
Here are a a couple of cringeworthy examples of this particular genre of creepy PM that I plucked from the subreddit because I think they help to make all this a little more understandable. Also, they’re sort of hilarious. (Click on the pics to see the original posts.)
If you have a foot fetish, and the person you’re asking for “a feet” pic knows you have a foot fetish — and if you’re asking them for foot pics, they know — asking for foot pics isn’t somehow less creepy than asking for pictures of their genitals. They know you get off on feet, so it’s as brazenly a sexual come-on as if you asked for a pic of them goatse-ing themselves.
Foot Dude, there are women online who will be happy to sell you their foot pics. It’s not hard to recognize them because their online profiles say things like “I sell foot pics” or “DM me for foot pics.” Go to them rather than bothering random women or, equally bad, women you know.
Hell, doing research for this post I ran across a variety of subreddits devoted to free foot pics of all sorts, including one in which foot exhibitionists display their feet with one sock on, and one sock off for the pleasure of Foot Dudes just like you. I had no idea that was even a thing.
Now let’s go back to a slightly different sort of creepy foot PM:
The problem here, Foot Dude, isn’t that this poor man is being discriminated against by a woman who’s maybe a little squicked out by the idea of someone huffing her feet. She has every right to be squicked out if she is.
And even if she’s actually into this particular fetish, she has a right to be annoyed. Because the real problem is that he’s trying to pull her into a sexual conversation — and one that is 100% turning him on as he thumb-types out his comments — without her consent.
It’s basically the foot fetishist equivalent of sending an unsolicited dic pic, or pulling your dick out in public, flasher-style. Even women who are huge fans of dicks don’t like it when dudes they don’t know drop pics of their particular dicks into their DMs unsolicited.
It really doesn’t matter why some women “go to extremes to make [their] feet look good.” Some do it because they like to look put-together in general; some do it because they like the ritual; some like the feeling of cleanliness and smooth skin; some even do it because it makes them feel sexy. And I’m sure there are all sorts of other reasons.
But, Foot Dude, they’re not doing it for you in particular, and if you want to appreciate the “sexy feet” of women you see out walking around in the world, do it discreetly. If you want to talk about your foot fetish, find some other foot fetishists to talk about it with. Google is your friend.
Now, if you want to find a woman who appreciates your foot fetish as much as you appreciate her feet, and you don’t want to pay them for the privilege, well, that’s probably going to take a little more work. No one ever said that love was easy. In the meantime, refrain from pestering women you don’t know about their feet, no matter how sexy you think they are.
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Yes. Also? We should entirely resist the normalization of agricultural work as the same as any other work, covered under the same minimal wage laws and labor, and labor organizing protections as any other work.
It is exactly and precisely because of the mindset that buying agricultural labor is just like any other transaction that made white force Black slaves to harvest their fields in exchange for housing (but no money). If only we can keep agricultural work stigmatized as fundamentally different, we will never have agricultural slavery again – just as we will certainly never have sex slavery in the world if only we can sufficiently stigmatize personal sexual services.
Stigmatization: it’s not the hero we deserve, it’s just the hero we need right now.
That happens in the US too. It’s not because of decriminalizing sex work. It’s misogyny and entitlement.
I’ll provide an alternative viewpoint: https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/decreasing-human-trafficking-through-sex-work-decriminalization/2017-01
https://web.stanford.edu/~perssonp/Prostitution.pdf
Just in case Scanisaurus feels like we’re only arguing against the criminalization of sex work from a point without supporting arguments.
Scanisaurus, under capitalism all labor is in some ways coerced, and we’re all selling our bodies and/or minds in some way. We all make tradeoffs.
By putting sex work in some whole other category in your mind from other kinds of work you end up essentially arguing that sex workers can’t make or aren’t making the choices that they in fact are making, assuming that most of them are coerced, and essentially erasing their right to choose what to do with their bodies. I think that is ultimately patronizing and disrespectful to them. And that does conflict with the comments policy.
You say:
There are a lot of jobs that are stressful and dangerous. There are a lot of jobs that require people to be alone with others. Is sex work more stressful or dangerous than, say, working as a window-washer on a high rise?
I know women who have done sex work, and they chose it for rational reasons. They were able to screen their clients and earn a decent amount of money in a short amount of time. For them it WAS a much better choice than their alternatives, and they were no more “forced” into it than anyone else in a capitalist society who has to work in order to pay the bills, which is pretty much all of us.
All of the sex workers I’ve talked to or listened to say that decriminalization is the best way to ensure their safety. And to cut down on trafficking.
And you know this how? Keeping sex work confined to a stigmatized black market certainly hasn’t stopped trafficking.
In my baby barristering days I spent a lot of Saturday mornings at the old Bow Street Magistrates Court. It’s hard to describe the atmosphere there; but there was a nice community of ‘regulars’.
For example, the police would arrest a couple of the Covent Garden buskers each weekend (it was practically on a rota); and all the other buskers would turn up, in full costume, to support them.
Similarly, the working girls (as they self described) would be picked up and charged with the charming offence (now thankfully abolished) of “being a common prostitute”; and their friends would also come along.
It was ridiculously, and almost embarrassingly, performative. The women would plead guilty, they would get a nominal fine, and the court clerk would add it to their account with the court office; which they’d service at £5 per week.
But we’d all chat about every subject under the sun. One thing that occasionally cropped up were variants on the ‘how can you represent someone you know is guilty?’ theme; but especially in relation to people like paedos etc.
I would explain about our “cab rank” rule; that is, that barristers aren’t allowed to pick and choose clients. We have to represent anyone who asks us.
The women thought that was horrible, and really felt sorry for us. It was an interesting perspective.
It was a real lesson to me though that sex work is a complicated issue. No one knows that more than the women themselves. They had systems in place to try to take care of each other; both whilst at work and generally. Some stories of how people ended up in the profession would break your heart; others were as free a choice as any other job. As mentioned, it’s complicated. But whatever the objective reality of the situation, I’m a firm believer that the only opinions that matter are those of the women themselves.
Out of the studies Catalpa linked, one didn’t mention the nordic model at all, and the other did acknowledge that it was the best of the systems currently in use at combating trafficking and coercion. That study did suggest a combination of the dutch and swedish models, where there are licenced sex sellers but buyers are still penalized from buying it of those who aren’t, and if a community were to implement this model and it proved better than the nordic model at combating trafficking, I’d be willing to change my stance on sex purchase.
However, even if I were to accept that it should be legal to buy sex and for volunteers to work in the open, I will never be able to accept that “selling sex is just another job” or saying that all jobs in capitalism technically involves selling your body, because I don’t find being forced to work as a janitor or window cleaner comparable to someone being forced to sell sex, because sex without consent is rape, and comparing it to any random job with health risks or bad work hours only serves to diminish rape.
Also, I’ve never denied that there exist people who sell sex of their own choice, and I wouldn’t consider a person who choose to sell sex rape, but if they’re forced into doing so it is, and I don’t consider people who only technically agree to it due to the threat of crushing poverty truly consenting any more than someone “consenting” to sleeping with their boss due to the threat of being fired.
But if there are persons who sell their bodies without any underlying abuse or poverty, I’m not denying that they are truly doing it out of their own free will.
Lastly, the last study Catalpa linked have done far more to make me understand your position than any of the complaints on my wording and picking apart my word choices instead of my arguments, and I will not defend my stance on sex work further here if you can acknowlage that I was arguing in good faith out of what I genuinley believed to be the best approach to protect vulnerable people, and if you think I’m wrong I can accept that, but I don’t want to be labled as a hypocrite or hear that my arguments are disingenious just because you disagree with them.
Asking you not to use a slur was not an attempt to refute your arguments, but rather because sex workers deserve basic human decency. Asking you to stop focusing on women was because this is a feminist space and I hope I don’t have to explain why using ‘women’ instead of ‘people’ in your discussion of people exploited for sex is problematic and makes us uncomfortable. None of this was about you or your arguments, it was about protecting the groups you’re slurring and making sure this is a space they feel comfortable.
So if we don’t acknowledge that you were arguing in good faith (which is irrelevant to the discussion), you’ll continue to violate the comments policy?
@kupo
I feel as if you are deliberately trying to read malicious intent into everything I write, regardless of what I write
I was genuinely unaware that the word “prostitute” was considered a slur, as the similar equivalent isn’t considered that in my homeland and I’ve constantly seen that word used in mainstream english-language news and articles, even in text written by feminists. But most importantly, I stopped using that word to refer to people selling sex when you asked me to.
And If I’ve defaulted to women too often for your liking, as I’ve said, it’s because this issue predominantly concerns women. I’ve seen Alan Robertshaw referring to people selling sex as women or girls several times in his comment, and the study Catalpa linked exclusively wrote of the sex workers as women, yet I haven’t seen any comment on them.
I consider myself a feminist, and I have been making the arguments I have because after seeing so many misogynist comments both in the sites this blog documents and plenty elsewhere where MRA’s and Incels demand the right to have a female body for their disposal on demand, and it has made me feel that treating the right to buy sex as something normal would only increase these people’s entitlement towards women’s bodies. If you can tell me why my concerns on this point are unfounded I’m willing to listen.
I’m sorry if I worded myself poorly, I have no intention of defending my stance further here, however, I feel the fact that I am arguing in good faith should matter to the discussion, because I’m actually trying to hear your counter arguments out when you come up with them, and if you’d read my comments in other threads you’d know I’m not here to try and troll anyone and I sought this place out exactly because I was hoping for civil discourse on feminist topics.
I’m not demanding anything from you, I’m just asking that you try and please acknowledge that I didn’t want or intend to de-humanize sex workers, and if I did I apologize, but it wasn’t my intention and I hope I can still share my thoughts on this blog without facing hostility if I say I have every intention to follow the comments policy and listen to the arguments you make if you disagree with me on something.
How would you prefer that I approach voicing my discomfort with what you say, then? Because you read into my asking you to not slur people as an attack on you, and it’s not. It’s just asking you to show respect. Your intention doesn’t have to be malicious for your words to be harmful. I don’t imply malice by asking you to stop.
Alan was talking about individuals he knows, not sex workers as a whole, but he’s pretty damn sexist himself in a lot of things and I do call him out when I see it happening. But since he was talking about specific people he knows, there was nothing to call out here. I was a bit uncomfortable with the way he seemed surprised that sex workers are goid conversationalists, but I don’t have the energy to fight every little thing and I have given up on Alan giving a fork what I have to say.
As for whether you’re here in good faith, I personally am not trying to have a conversation with you about whether sex work is valid. I don’t want to change your mind or debate it with you, I just wanted to ask you to treat sex workers with respect and dignity because your comments were making me uncomfortable.
@ kupo
Where did I expressed any surprise that the women were good conversationalists? I’ve had friends in that profession since I first started going to pubs; and that was from a scandalously early age. No one understands more than I that people are just people; and you can find great conversation anywhere.
If I was to find anything surprising, it would be that the women felt sorry for barristers because they thought we were being coerced.
@Scanisaurus
Dude you said something shitty about a group of people that are already shit on enough and got called out for it. Apologize, stop doing it, and move on.
I’m sorry, but it came across that way to me when you kept telling me about it even after I stopped using that word.
But I fully understand how bad harmful words can be. The main reason I’ve reacted so strongly to those saying “prostitution should be just like any other job” or that “all jobs are exploitative in capitalism” is because I’m a woman whom have been struggling a lot with depression lately, and this depression is due to me having been unable to find an entry-level job for a long time now, and at this point I’d gladly take a job as a janitor or at McDonalds if I could, and the implication that people in my position might as well give up hope of any better work and could just as well start selling our bodies instead, and that people buying sex from people only selling it out of poverty aren’t doing anything wrong made me uncomfortable. I realize that’s probably not how they meant it, but that’s how it came across to me when I first read it.
With the whole depression and all, I’ve felt like I don’t have any skin lately and it’s been hard for me to find a good place to vent my feelings without fear of being harassed or creeped on, and I came here hoping it would be a safe space. If I’ve made you feel uncomfortable, I understand and I apologize, and I hope that if I word myself badly in the future you can bear in mind that I don’t want people here to feel uncomfortable when you correct me on my wording.
@Alan
Re-reading your comment, I think I misinterpreted the part where you said it was an “interesting perspective” and “a real lesson.” My apologies; I should have read the comment again before posting remarks about it. I will work on that.
@ kupo
No worries! And I do appreciate you stopping me putting my foot in it. Well, as many times as I would otherwise. 🙂
Believe me, if we thought you were a troll, you would be receiving a significantly different reception.
In general, you’re right. This place is wonderful for its nuanced discussions on all sorts of topics.
However, no one owes you a debate. You cannot expect to barge in on a discussion with whatever topic you please and demand that people spend time and energy to refute your points before they are permitted to request you use more inclusive language.
This topic in particular is a complex one, and one that may cause distress to many, and it is not acceptable to expect the commentariat to put in the emotional labour to dig into every spurious claim you put out and provide you with sources that meet your specific standards.
The study was not written by me, and also uses the term prostitution. I never claimed the study was completely unproblematic. You cannot expect the same standard of expected linguistic care to be applied to sources written by outside parties as you can of words you personally wrote right this very moment.
Except that you are denying that voluntary sex work exists. Under this paradigm you’ve established, you’re claiming that all sex work is rape (at least within a capitalist society). Since all labour under capitalism is to some extent coerced, all sexual labour must be considered rape. (And therefore sex workers must be protected from themselves by having this choice forcibly taken away from them.)
Though even if this premise is accepted, what makes you think that people who are in a situation where they are forced to engage in sex work in order to provide for themselves would be in any way protected by laws which force them to operate in secrecy? How are they protected or helped when their options are limited to work outside of society’s protection?
Why do you keep repeating this as though anyone here is trying to argue for this point of view?
@Scanisaurus
Counterpoint: I’m a woman, I’m unemployed and depressed over that fact, and if it weren’t for the police sting operations, I’d be sucking dick for cash. I’ve been a janitor, and I’d go on the game in a heartbeat before doing that again.
A janitor sells their body too, and at a much poorer rate. Moreover, janitorial work actively and inevitably damages the body in question by its very nature, while the physical risks of selling sex come near entirely from the criminalization of the activity.
@Catalpa
@Dalailama
You have completely misunderstood what I’m trying to say, did you miss the point where I wrote:
But if there are persons who sell their bodies without any underlying abuse or poverty, I’m not denying that they are truly doing it out of their own free will.
Also, not even under capitalism is all labor forced. Yes, not having an income of my own has been stressful, but an even bigger reason for my depression is that it’s taken a huge toll on my mental health to sit alone in my home with nothing to do, no one to interact with and not feeling like I have a purpose in life, and I’ve tried seeking out volunteer work. I get that it can be hard for people who haven’t been unemployed for a long time to understand, but work is more than just getting a wage and I believe that even if society would give out a universal basic income, a great deal of people would still chose to work. Maybe not the worst and most physically or mentally draining jobs, but they would still want to work with something, and even now I there is plenty of people whom could live off their family or savings and don’t need a wage to support themselves yet still work.
I’ll try to be as simple as I can:
I don’t think a person with other income options of equal monetary worth available to them choosing to sell sex is abuse or rape, but I still think people feeling that they must do it out of poverty and lack of other income options is abuse.
My original answer would be to have better social security and a social safety net to prevent them from ending up in that situation in the first place, and even if you think all forms of sex work should be legal, that doesn’t automatically mean people driven into it by poverty should be considered acceptable.
I hope this clarifies what I meant.
I didn’t want to start a debate, and if i’d known beforehand I’d never have posted my honest opinions on the matter in this comment section. And I wasn’t trying to barge in or derail the conversation in any way, if you go back to the first page you can clearly see that my first comment mentioning selling sex, after several comments on a completely different topic, was a few short sentences in reply to Otrame’s comment, and then I went back to the first topic I was originally discussing again.
I only started writing long comments on this subject after everyone left here switched to arguing against me, and I tried to explain my position and back up my arguments, but after realizing my opinions on this matter aren’t welcome here I promised that I wouldn’t try and defend them further in this forum and I have already tried to apologize for any discomfort my comments have caused, what more do you want from me?
I still disagree with you on many of your arguments, but all this arguing has been just as stressful and draining for me as you feel it has been for you, and I don’t want to argue it more either. I already tried apologizing in my previous comment and I’ll try it here again:
I didn’t want or intend to derail the conversation or cause discomfort for the people here, but if I did, I apologize.
I am trying to apologize an move on, can you accept my apology, bury the hatchet and not keep making more posts on how wrong I am if I say that I will not try and defend my arguments further here?
If you still feel that these opinions have no place on this site, feel free to ask David to delete my comments on sex work if my apology for making the comments isn’t enough for you.
Coerced and forced are not the same word. I don’t doubt that there are many, many folks who would happily pursue work outside of a capitalist framework, and even outside of a culture which indoctrinates us to associate our self worth with the value we are able to produce.
However, that does not remove the coercive threat of destitution which looms ever present within a capitalist system (nor the pressure exerted on us to be productive and self-sufficient).
For example, if there was someone who really, really wanted to sleep with their boss, and had some really great sex, and then afterward the boss was like “great, I won’t have to fire you”, the situation would still be coercive, even if it wasn’t forced.
Given that there are currently incredibly few job opportunities which pay an hourly rate even remotely comparable to sex work, I expect that almost all sex work would still be considered rape under this definition.
I by no means believe that people being driven into sex work due to poverty is acceptable.
However, the fact that there are people driven to sex work by poverty is not an argument in favor of legislation against sex work. It’s an argument in favor of a more equitable economic system and better protections for the vulnerable.
Arguably, it’s also an argument in favor of the legalization of sex work, since laws which drive sex workers into underground operations result in much higher rates of violence towards sex workers. Otherwise, on top of being sexually abused, the people forced into the business due to poverty also must endure being physically abused if in a system that stigmatizes sex work.
Sure thing, can do. I accept your apology. No hard feelings. I will stop arguing with you as soon as you as soon as you stop trying to defend your arguments in this thread.
But I’m not going to give you the last word if you tack your apology onto the end of a post that is full of you defending your arguments here. Sounds fair?
@Alan:
I noted that. It is, indeed, a funny juxtaposition of the workers who take the principled stand that the service worker in their own profession must be able to pick and choose clients and the workers who take the principled stand that the service workers of their different profession must not be allowed to pick and choose clients.
Both stances are ethically defensible. Indeed, I see the first one as ethically mandatory. This grows out of the very different jobs and the very different contexts in which the work is performed. But it’s still a funny juxtaposition.
@Catalpa
I realize I made a bad definition, what I should have said was “other options with a wage you could reasonably live on“, as opposed to equal value.
My mistake.
Now I didn’t realize me writing clarifying explanations to stuff I felt was misinterpreted came off as defending my arguments, but if you see it that way I’ll just leave this topic on the note that whilst a lot of different work situations can indeed be coercive I still think forcing a person to have sex against their will is a worse crime than forcing a person to do physical labor against their will.
Fair enough, and I hope this post doesn’t come across as defending my views on the matter.
If not feel free to correct me.
That’s a reasonable viewpoint to have. I’m off the opinion that sex work is a more complicated issue than could be encompassed by that viewpoint alone, but I can see where you’re coming from. There are definitely horrifying abuses present in the system.
It’s fairly apparent that continuing this discussion will just cause more bad feelings on both sides. So we’ll leave it there.
Thanks for at least considering the other point of view and taking a look at the links I provided, even if you disagree. I hope this experience doesn’t sour you to this community.
Thank you for being willing to listen to my explanations and accepting my apology, I don’t have any hard feelings.