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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@Otrame
Paying for sex is how it should be? Sorry, but I disagree. Even if it weren’t for the fact that legalizing prostitution has been proven to increase human trafficking, I also think it’s dangerous because it only further cements the view that women are objects, resources to buy and sell. I’ve seen to much of incel rhetoric around the “sexual marketplace” and the idea of sex as a transaction to see buying a human body as something harmless.
@dust bunny
Indeed, and the equally bad part of Das Boot was the fact that before the rape of the bartender, the french brothel was depicted as just a fun-house aimed at adults, complete with sexy hookers happy to service the servicemen, with all the agency of a pin-up on the wall.
But the problem with Das Boot is that it caught me off-guard by having otherwise well-written female characters, like several female resistance fighters and a female german translator with a genuinely deep and nuanced story so far, so you can’t chalk this one up to writers not being able to think of women as people when they try to.
Similarly to the misogynism of Game of Thrones, it feels like Das Boot has compelling female characters on offer, but still forces this rapey sexist BS and pointless nudity onto female viewers as an “entry fee” in exchange for being allowed to see women partake in “men’s genres” like War and Fantasy.
I don’t want to get too deep into this, but I tend to believe that sex workers should be the ones deciding what’s objectifying to them because anything else denies that they are autonomous workers at all, which is shitty in and of itself. Not to mention some sex workers aren’t women, some of their clients aren’t men, and a large proportion of them are LGBT (speaking of which, happy Transgender Day of Visibility).
That said, ideally creeps like this guy would be rejected by sex workers also.
Hey, where do I send tips for possible articles? To any moderator, the email used to post this comment works.
Quoth the raven: Whaaa….?
Anon, and anyone else with tips, etc, send them to dfutrelle at gmail.
@Airis Damon:
It would be funny to respond by sending an image of pig’s feet in regards to unwanted foot solicitations.
Another option:
http://media.giphy.com/media/nbAp0uADFDxcs/giphy.gif
@Full Metal Ox
I like that, too.
I was thinking of metrical feet. Drop some dactyls and iambs on his arse.
OT, but is anyone else having a problem since Firefox updated itself to 66.0.2 where opening links in new tabs often produces a blank tab with the URL for a title and no network activity? The throbber doesn’t throb, the status line doesn’t appear and go through its usual sequence of looking up foo.com, looked up, connecting, waiting for, transferring data from … and it just seems totally inactive. Clicking in the address bar and hitting enter a few times in a row seems to usually goose it into action (the refresh button is greyed, though it is a refresh rather than a stop button, also indicating that the browser is not even trying to load the page) but gets tedious and annoying.
Oh, and the same thing sometimes afflicts new searches: control-T, click, type into search box, hit enter, sometimes nothing happens.
@An Impish Pepper
The problem with treating it as just any other job is that it denies the fact that the overwhelming majority are forced into it and have a history of abuse. Sure, there might be a small number of prostitutes who wanted to enter the sex trade and are comfortable with everything they do and able to freely reject any client setting off red flags, but a small minority being OK with it doesn’t justify the sex trade as a whole. It just reminds me of people in the antebellum south who justified slavery and argued it should be legal by pointing to a few house slaves whom were well taken care of by their owners and comfortable with being butlers for their masters, and ignoring the large mass of slaves that weren’t.
And the fact that not all prostitutes are women or all buyers men doesn’t make anything better. Abuse is abuse regardless of gender. And also, do you genuinely think that such an overwhelming number of trans people want to be prostitutes or that something inherent in their gender makes them want to have sex with strangers for money, as opposed to society and their own families ostracizing them to the point they cant get any other jobs or support and are forced to resort to sex work?
I’ll just share these links:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/violence-drugs-sexual-diseases-managed-zones-prostitution-failing/
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/prostitution-decriminalisation-new-zealand-holland-abuse-harm-commercialisation-a7878586.html
@ Scanisaurus
Hey, could you please not use the term “prostitute” here? I’m fairly sure that term is considered to be wildly derogatory to sex workers, and generally isn’t used in feminist discourse outside of SWERF circles.
@Surplus
I suggest checking if the bug exists already on https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ and if not, filing a new one.
@Catalpa
Wait, is “prostitute” considered a derogatory term? I just assumed “sex workers” was used for inclusivity since not all sex work fits the definition of prositution (i.e. stripping.)
@ Talonknife
Yes. The connotations are extremely offensive in ways that go far beyond the speaker’s attitudes toward sex work. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prostitute
@Talonknife
Unfortunately, I’m not very well versed or experienced in this area of feminist thought, but here’s some thoughts from someone more versed than I am (content warning for that link, it discusses the murder of a sex worker):
@Catalpa
I’ll admit that as English isn’t my native tongue, I don’t know the full history and nuance of the word “prostitute”, in Sweden the word prostituerad isn’t considered derogatory.
However, I don’t know how to easily discuss the sex trade without having a word to specifically refer to women who sell sex, because “sex worker” is a broad term that also encompasses strippers and camgirls, people who perform but doesn’t sell their bodies for money. If the term “prostitute” is wrong, which term should I use?
As for the article you quoted, the problem seems more to be how people will readily jump to dehumanize a woman deemed “immoral”, and using another term wouldn’t magically change that.
As for SWERFs, whilst I think demonizing women for selling sex is wrong, I think it’s ridiculously naive at best to say that selling sex is just another job, and I’m sick and tired of people trying to shut down discussion by trying to pretend that it is and anyone protesting abuse and trafficking gets lumped in with sex-negative puritans.
I’ll put a CW for talk of sexual assault on this post.
@Scanisaurus
Wow, so first they made a TV series out of Das Boot (????), then they just stick a rape scene in there? Welp, won’t be watching that. I mean, I wouldn’t have watched it anyway, but as a fan of the brutally depressing original 1981 film, I don’t think there’s much more to add than “war is so capricious and destructive that the myths of valour and pageantry that we tell ourselves are ultimately meaningless.” The whole point of the film was that submarine life was 90% dull grubby misery peppered with moments of pants-wetting terror.
I’ll stick with watching the Ioan Gruffudd Hornblower films. Something about the age of sail just seems a bit more… engaging.
Your posts about what your writing kinda mirror something that I’ve done lately, which is revisit the backstory of a character of mine who I created… jeez, 15 years ago now when I was 18 and just getting into the furry fandom. I had envisioned the character as a kind of a self-destructive rogue versus her older sister, who was a responsible leader of their little band of folks on the outs of society. My 18-year-old brain, lazily wandering the “traumatic backstory” centres of my creative mind, was like “well, seems like ‘violent sexual assault’ is a sure bet to mess somebody up!” Man, the one thing I hate about knowledge is that it isn’t retroactive; if I had known a fraction of what I know now about how pernicious rape myths are, I wouldn’t have been so foolish as to use it as an easy means of writing trauma.
Now the problem is that I have 15 years of character interactions written with that aspect of the character as context. The character has undergone a significant arc since the start of the storyline: kicking alcoholism, finally settling down with her on-again, off-again girlfriend, starting her own business, basically finding her own sense of self-worth after a lot of personal hardships. So to incorporate my more recent knowledge, I retconned the specifics of the event to rely less on rape myths and be more consistent with what it is reported many women face in terms of toxic relationships and I think the changes fit the character’s arc much better.
Still, kinda wish 18-year-old me didn’t write stupid crap like that in the first place.
re:
Men’s (particularly white men) comments on anything about not-men…. You hear the voice of “Charlie Brown’s teacher”, “wanh, wanh, wanh, wanh”, and in the background a whiny, desperate voice screaming “… me!, why aren’t you talking about meeeee!?!?!?”
OT, I finally got my Gravatar set up.
Do you even know why there is what you call “White Male Rage”? Every single day these kids are told they are bad, they are the “indian killers and rapers” and they enslaved Blacks, they’re the reason poor people go hungry, they have “privilege”, they’re “holding someone down”, they’re the reason women feel so horrible and on and on. Do you expect little white boys to just take that for life? Maybe you and yours do but the world winners don’t- that’s why they rule the world! When in fact the ones “holding someone down” are the parents of those who are taught the weakness of blaming others for their own situation they have created and continue to foster- teaching their kids to hate whites, hate police, hate the govt (unless it’s a check or an EBT card).
You’re the ones who started it, hating on white men and then when they fight back you get all victim bitch and start your whining.
@Scanisaurus
Might I ask why you keep talking specifically about women selling sex? Why not men or enbies? You repeatedly use the word women here, and I’m confused why that distinction is needed.
@Katamount
might as well put up a CW for sexual assault and mutilation myself
Yes, I haven’t gotten the chance to see the original, and I don’t know how the storyline of the TV-series ties into it, but in the new TV-series there are two parallel stories, one that follows a German submarine crew, and one that follows the sister of one of the crewmen, whom is a German translator in France which gets involved in the resistance.
Right in the first episode there’s a lengthy scene where the submarine crew visits the brothel before heading out with their submarine, and later on in the third episode the female German translator meets the brothel bartender, and upon hearing she’s Jewish decides to help her get a fake passport, but at the end of the episode the brutal rape happens, and to add insult to injury the episode ends right in the middle of the rape scene with no pause or stopping to show the consequences for anyone involved, it just fades out to jaunty dance music like the world’s most awful cliffhanger.
If anyone wonders why there are so few female WW2 buffs out there, I swear this is the reason, because in virtually all WW2 movies or TV-series all women are either omitted altogether, reduced to the pretty love interest that only shows up in rosy flashbacks, or this, threatened with rape just because It’S WhAt HappEnS tO Feeeemales iN WAr. Can anyone imagine young men getting interested in WW2 if all war movies featured male characters being sexually assaulted by their comrades in arms, threatened with rape upon capture and interrogation or having partisans emasculating them and and forcing the parts they cut off into the mouths of the men? All of this were things that actually happened in history, yet ever. single. war. movie. I’ve seen always omits this part of war entirely, because neither the filmmakers nor male audiences want to see that, and even in history books and documentaries male historians will write page after page with detailed descriptions of women being raped but barely even mention half a sentence on the sexual abuse men faced, despite modern day studies show up to 80% of men in war zones have faced sexual violence, and there is zero evidence things were any better 70 years ago, yet no one thinks this is a necessary or mandatory part of men’s history.
As for your character, I’m personally a lot more forgiving for what teenagers write, because it’s just one inexperienced person who’s target audience rarely goes beyond other edgelord teens, plus as you mentioned you had complete control and thus could retcon the worst parts, whereas the f***ed up part of Das Boot is that the series had several writers and producers, not to mention actors and a ton of other staff working at the filming and production, yet not one single person ever sat their foot down and said “No, this series doesn’t need a bunch of rapey sh*t in it, we can tell our story just as well without it”, or worse yet, someone did but was immediately shut down by a soulmate of Harvey Weinstein.
@Katamount – the new series is set about a year after the movie’s finish. Takes a big chunk of story from the follow up novel Die Festung (good read, that), which is where the whole resistance story line comes from.
It’s actually worth a glance at. Not superb, but faithful to the original movie in tone, at least.
@Scanisaurus
Couldn’t agree more about the WW2 issue. For all the issues I had with movies like Enemy At The Gates, at least it actually had a female sniper in it.
I’d recommend watching the Wolfgang Petersen film at least once. It’s not the most re-watchable film, but it leaves an impression on you.
@Kupo
Did you miss the part where I wrote:
In Sweden there’s actually a big problem with young refugee boys coming alone who gets pressured into selling sex, and it’s equally awful as all the other stuff I mentioned.
@Shadowplay
Since I haven’t seen the original movie or read the book that the new series is based on, but I find the new TV series absolutely atrocious in how it handled the brothel and rape scene. As I already mentioned, the first episode basically treats the brothel as a harmless fun-house with a bunch of gratuitous female nudity, a gratuitous scene of a woman randomly washing herself topless, and in the third episode they handle the rape scene awfully in a way that only served to fetishize and diminish rape, plus there was a lot of gross and unnecessary sexist banter between the submarine sailors with a bunch of nasty rape threats and descriptions of depraved sex acts on whores (their words, not mine). And I know rape and sexist banter happened among sailors in real life, but so did pooping and masturbation and the filmmakers sure as hell didn’t feel the need to force the viewers to watch that. It just feels like the director is actively punishing female viewers for just wanting to see a good war drama with nuanced female characters by including those scenes. I recommend reading this essay mentioning the TV-series (it’s in Swedish, but I hope you can use Google Translate).
@Katamount
Yes, for all the silly stuff that movie makes up I just can’t ever bring myself to hate Enemy at the Gates exactly because it’s practically the only WW2 film I’ve seen that features a female character that isn’t threatened with rape, has a pointless nude scene and actually gets to partake in the war. It’s basically that movie, and Indiana Jones.
I’ve also seen another old Soviet movie called The dawns here are quiet, and it also did a good job of showing heroic female soldiers, but unfortunately it also had a sleazy sauna scene full of pointless nudity. Urgh.
And then Call of Duty: WW2 had a short gameplay segment where you got to play as a female french resistance fighter, which was nice, but of course there was an army of angry man-babies having a fit over it in all internet comment sections.
It’s just all so frustrating, because if you look for a good war movie featuring a prominent character of the same gender as you, fulfilling these three criteria:
– No threats of sexual assault or rape backstory
– No scene showing any more nudity than what you’d see on a beach
– Actually actively participating in the plot and doing stuff
Men get hundreds of movies, video games, novels and comic books easily fulfilling these criteria and any range in tone and degrees of historical accuracy, but women are stuck with Enemy at the Gates, Indiana Jones 1 + 3 and a half-hour CoD mission.