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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“What is that, some kinda weird fight club for podiatrists??”
— Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, regarding Shredder’s “Foot Clan”
Another round of men who think women exist to be consumed. 😛
I have been battling cancer for a while (treatment is going well) but I had the typical response to chemo of hair falling out. I am also a woman on online dating sites with pics of my bald self. I have discovered that some men have fetishes for women with bald heads, and they have even sought me out on Facebook. Those guys have been equally as incapable of approaching women respectfully.
I am actually fairly fetish friendly, but you hit the nail on the head when you say the fetish isn’t the problem – it’s being reduced to a body part or a fetish. I would *love* a partner who is into my bald head – head rubs are nice! But I don’t date assholes.
It would be funny to respond by sending an image of pig’s feet in regards to unwanted foot solicitations.
Creepy foot fetishists given a whole different meaning the phrase “hey I’m up here!”
True that. But manospherians think love — i.e., adulation and obedience from bona fide beautiful women, a steady supply of sex from them, and probably their paychecks — should be be both easy & peasy. And until that happens, they’re gonna scream about their frustration online and make threats against both beautiful women and the women who don’t meet their exceedingly conventional standard of attractiveness.
Seriously, I came to really dislike foot fetishism due to how annoying and obsessive many of the people who are into it can be.
Like, I’m really into art (by this I mean drawings, fan arts and this kind of thing, like you can find in pages like DeviantArt), and sometimes while browsing new pictures I like to play a game of “Spot the foot fetishist”, because literally (and I mean it) every piece of art they created will have the character shoving their feet or foot into your face. At first I kind of just ignored it, like I do with every other (non-revolting) fetish art I end up finding, but when 90% of them are like this, it gets old very quickly.
Never have I been so glad that years of dancing have ruined my feet for people like this.
I have a much more traditional and socially accepted fetish, but somehow whenever I start a conversation with “Hey, nice tits” it still ends badly. There must be something wrong with women.
My guess is the preponderance of Creepy Foot Fetish Dudes as the face of the foot fetish community is mainly due to two things:
1) Creepy Foot Fetish Dudes are the people who are likely to announce their foot fetish in public, so selection bias kicks in
2) Creepy Foot Fetish Dudes are likely to ask for feet pics apropos of nothing because they can justify it to themselves with “well, if you don’t have a foot fetish, feet aren’t a sexual body part, so it’s not like I’m asking for nudes!”
I don’t know. I’m not a member of the foot fetish community, but in my experience assholes tend to be the most visible members of their niche communities (especially communities around sex) for reasons like these.
“Yo. You have feet?”
With that sort of smooth talk, can’t imagine why he keeps getting rejected.
Good lord, the entitlement. “Women are deliberately FEETING at me!”
”Females”.
First word. First. Word. And you lost the people you were addressing. If i didn’t know better, i would say that’s considerate of you.
I hate creepy men thinking it’s ok to force their fetishes onto others, and acting like doing it is an OK thing to do. Sometime ago I got a horrible note on DeviantArt from some creep who described a sick and disturbing scenario from some B-movie complete with a YouTube link and asked if I was interested. (here’s my post of it on r/creepyPMs)
It genuinely scared me, because I’ve no idea if he actually wanted to drag me into some sick role-play or if he deliberately chose to send me that just to “put me in my place”, but this, and the fact that he linked a commercial movie showing his fantasies on proud display is what’s cemented my view that fiction and media isn’t harmless and in this case actively enables these creeps.
I’m sorry if I’m rambling now, but I was just looking at an episode of the TV-series “Das boot” (set in WW2) and I was just so angry because three episodes in, there’s a scene where a female character working as a bartender in a brothel is brutally raped by a german sailor out of nowhere (to jaunty 40’s dance music in the background no less), just because “rape happens irl” and this is exactly what I was ranting about in my posts on this blog a few days ago, where rape scenes are wantonly forced on female characters just because “realism” or proving the story is dark and gritty, and it doesn’t matter that it’s the bad guys doing it, because this s**t only serves to desensitize people and diminish the impact of sexual crimes in real life.
And the whole foot fetish thing where women are just reduced to a body part comes from the same place as hack writers having heroine’s raped because they think female trauma only count if it’s tied to their genitals, and this whole sick idea of reducing women to bodies and not persons is just accepted in society, and that’s why creeps feel they can do this.
I’m sorry for the wall of text, but I just needed somewhere to vent and it’s been so frustrating to feel like basically everyone I’ve tried sharing this with are basically saying “It’s just fiction, and fiction never harmed anyone”, except it does and I’ve been experiencing it firsthand and I don’t know what to do. I just feel so powerless when even when every individual I’ve spoken to have condemned the guy who creeped on me, but all of society and media freely provides him with fetish fuel and countless filmmakers gets viewers and profits for doing so.
@Scanisaurus
Fiction is bad at telling people to do things. Fiction is really good at shaping how people see the world.
@vaiyt
Exactly, I couldn’t agree more, it’s just so insane that we have raw data on how commercials and propaganda campaigns affect people, but fiction is “just harmless fun“.
What I see when I see the prevalence of the s**t like what I just describes, is a society that’s collectively decided that rape is simultaneously a crime so horrific that all other crimes against women pale in comparison, but also not a big deal and something people should just get over as long as it’s just threats or descriptions/depictions of it. I remembered a quote from a reviewer on imdb on another war-movie, Come and See, writing:
and I think that’s what got to me in the scene I described in the Das Boot TV-series, because it felt just like what the reviewer described, a rough scene just added for grittiness contrasted with happy music in the background, and the most frustrating part is that it felt exactly like something I’ve already seen before when a female character on Downtown Abbey got raped to beautiful background music, and so many countless other tv dramas that do exactly the same thing to their female characters to the point it’s not more than background noise, and it scares me that so many people just accept this as a normal and inevitable part of storytelling.
Like, even when I’ve talked to an older woman I know who is a staunch feminist, when I asked why there had to be so much rape in every piece of media, she basically brushed it of with “that’s how it is”, and neither she nor her friends had ever thought about it, and I just can’t help seeing the similarity between people saying “misogynistic fiction is harmless” and “creepy PMs and sexual harassment” is harmless.
I have a friend who is both very traditionally feminine-looking (he’s easily mistaken for a girl if you don’t know he’s cis male) and Latino and he exists in some unholy intersection of creepy guys who fetishize feminine men and creepy guys who fetishize other ethnicities and with some of the stuff people send him, I kinda question how he gets anything done without being constantly harassed.
Something different, but I think relevant to the blog:
heise, a news site which mostly – but not entirely – focuses on computer-related topics just published an article celebrating 100 years of voting rights for women in Germany.
You can read it here, but it’s in german:
https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Missing-Link-Weimar-1919-Meine-Herren-und-Damen-4356582.html
And behold, if you take a look at the comments you will notice that things really don’t change across countries and cultures:
A good deal of them are whataboutism and other nitpicking, and of course many of those are positively rated.
Several persons try to make the point that men in Germany also have equal voting for only 100 years, which misses the point that women had NO right to participate in politics at all*.
Another one complains that men died during the revolution, which has nothing to do with the topic.
Some blame women indirectly or directly for Hitler.
All in all there is not a single main topic in the comments that is positive about the article. Not even in the slightest, like a “good thing” without following with a BUT. They complain about something, or the comment is completely unrelated.
At the very least some of the bluntest comments are in the red.
All in all basically the same kind of stuff that turns up every time and everywhere someone makes an article about voting rights for women or suffragettes.
But on the other hand, 100 years of voting rights for women in Germany.
So YAY!
*And is not entirely correct: the elections for the Imperial Diet were equal and free for all men over 25, despite most states having voting rights tied to income and taxes or no elected parliaments.
If a woman’s feet happened to be unkempt, you know what, sure as s–t this creep would complain about that, too.
If I was wearing a pair of expensive, strappy heels, I’d want my feet to look well-groomed.
@ Victorious Parasol:. That’s a succinct way of putting it.
The problem isn’t that the guy in the OP is a foot fetishist, as others have noted. It’s his sense of entitlement that has coiled around his brain and fucking strangled it. Like creepy guys who can only get sex from prostitutes, that asshole will be paying for it from now on, and that is how it should be. People who think of potential sex partners as things don’t deserve sex partners at all.
My friend is trying to sell her old shoes on feebay right now and she has got so many creepy questions about them, like, do they smell of feet, can I have a picture of you wearing them, and the worst one was someone asking if she could have sex wearing them before they buy them… She said no.
Ah, yes, reducing people down to body parts and using “females” as a noun… and then getting upset because most women don’t appreciate it and blame them for feeling that way. Always a winning strategy.
Otrame, that’s Weatherwax’s Law: sin begins with treating people as things.
I remember decades ago, finding out that treating the men I was attracted to as human beings was a tremendous advantage. Eventually I branched out into treating people in general as human beings. It’s remarkable how much of a difference it makes.
There’s no difference between asking for pics of feet and pics of boobs, because the asker/viewer is the one who is sexualising. Boobs are just bags of fat for producing baby food, but for some they’re sexual. Feet aren’t objectively pretty, but again sexual to some. So, it’s as creepy and inappropriate to ask a stranger or a platonic acquaintance for foot pics as it is to ask for boob pics.
How is it hard for people to understand this?
And, that’s it, after 7 hours I’ve finally got through 10 days of WHTM posts. I’ve been hiding offline because mental health stuff.
@ Scanisaurus
Yup. Most male writers see female characters as Chekhov’s guns, and the firing is always some form of sexist ickiness. No point in placing them in the narrative at all unless they fulfill their only purpose (as perceived by objectifying dicks).