What is it about women's feet? They are the part of a woman’s body that men most often fetishize. A study on the frequencies of different fetishes concluded: "Feet and objects associated with feet were the most common target of preferences [...] We found podophilia prominent (about half of Feticist groups subscribers) in our sample" (Scorolli et al. 2007).
That finding is in line with many others:
- Podophilia was common in a sample of male adolescents and young adults with either autistic disorder (AD) or borderline/mild mental retardation (MR): "Partialism (a sexual interest in body parts) was common in the AD group: four individuals got sexually aroused by body parts (three by feet, one by bellies) compared to none of the MR group" (Hellemans et al. 2010).
- A former escort girl and stripper "reported that [her] most frequent requests were (1) those involving a foot or shoe fetish, (2) those to sell to the male client her underwear, and (3) those to urinate into her underwear before selling it to the client" (Cernovsky 2015).
- Online searches that include the term "fetish" most often co-occur with the term "foot" (Anon 2007)
- The Austrian psychologist Wilhelm Stekel noted that ''the most widespread form of partialism is preference for feet” (Stekel 1952, p.169)
Female feet have been eroticized even by Victorian writers like George du Maurier (1834-1896):
"That's my foot," she said, kicking off her big slipper and stretching out the limb. "It's the handsomest foot in all Paris. There's only one in all Paris to match it, and here it is," and she laughed heartily (like a merry peal of bells), and stuck out the other.
And in truth they were astonishingly beautiful feet, such as one only sees in pictures and statues—a true inspiration of shape and color, all made up of delicate lengths and subtly modulated curves and noble straightnesses and happy little dimpled arrangements in innocent young pink and white. (Du Maurier 1894, p. 174)
The cause?
There has been a lot of speculation. Ramachandran and Hirstein (1998) attributed podophilia to accidental cross-talk between adjacent regions of the cortex:
In the Penfield homunculus the genitals are adjacent to the foot and, as one might expect, we found that two [amputee] patients reported experiencing sensations in their phantom foot during sexual intercourse. [...] (One wonders whether foot-fetishes in normal individuals may also result from such accidental 'cross wiring'—an idea that is at least more plausible than Freud's view that such fetishes arise because of a purported resemblance between the foot and the penis.)
Actually, Sigmund Freud proposed three hypotheses. He listed them in a footnote and apparently had no strong opinions on the subject. His first hypothesis was that feet are fetishized because they are strong-smelling. His second was that “[t]he foot replaces the penis which is so much missed in the woman.” Finally, he suggested that foot fetishism arises from male desire being redirected away from the female genital area because of “prohibition and repression” (Freud 1920, n19).
The third hypothesis seems to me the most interesting. A young man may focus on a woman’s feet because he cannot look too long at other parts of her body either because of social discomfort (in the case of her face or her breasts) or because they are concealed by clothing, so he looks at a body part that is exposed and freely observable. This is especially a problem in societies where an unmarried woman is expected to cover herself when seen by a man from outside her family (i.e., neither her father nor her brothers). Only her face, hands, and feet may be seen, and sometimes not even her face. Her feet thus become a focus of male erotic interest and sexual fantasizing. With repeated reinforcement and conditioning, they may even become a primary source of sexual arousal.
The reinforcement and conditioning hypothesis has two problems:
1). In Western societies, socks and other footwear have been worn indoors and out since the eighteenth century, and women’s arms, legs, and upper chests have become denuded since the early twentieth century. If feet no longer rank among the top three areas of naked female skin, shouldn’t podophilia be a lot less common nowadays?
2). Although puberty seems to be key to development of podophilia, a survey of foot fetishists showed that about half of them remembered feeling attraction to feet at earlier ages:
45 per cent thought that the fetishism was linked to pleasurable experiences during childhood. Many men had their first feelings of sexual pleasure with a member of the family's feet (fathers, uncles, brothers), the experience connected to innocent activities such as tickling or washing feet [...] (Peakman 2013, p. 379)
The mental circuitry thus seems to be already in place by childhood, at an age when sexual fantasizing is still rudimentary at best.
Hardwiring?
Perhaps some of that circuitry has become hardwired, through a process of gene-culture coevolution. In societies where young unmarried women had to conceal most of their body surface from public view, foot fetishizing may have developed as a safe form of premarital eroticism. That kind of social environment rewarded “good boys” who played by the rules of premarital sexuality, while penalizing “bad boys” who didn’t. The first group would tend to have a certain mix of hardwired sexual predispositions: not only inhibition of overt sexual interest but also displacement of sexual interest into areas that are not socially penalized. Over time, and with each passing generation, those predispositions would have become prevalent in the gene pool.
That sounds weird, but we see such hardwiring in the courtship behavior of other mammals, which typically try to attract a potential mate through behavioral patterns drawn from other areas of social interaction, such as between a mother and her infants. In some cases, courtship can incorporate stress-induced behavior. Feelings of stress cause the male to preen himself, and preening thus becomes a regular and expected part of courtship, at which point there is strong selection to make it a hardwired component of the behavioral sequence (Manning 1972, pp. 112-118).
That kind of opportunism seems to characterize much of our sexual behavior. Kissing, for instance, was initially done only between a mother and her infants or as a gesture of respect between a subordinate and his superior. It then became sexualized in some societies but not in others (Frost 2015). Did podophilia follow a similar evolutionary path? Did it begin as a side effect of sexual repression and later became incorporated into love play? Like kissing, it may have developed as a safe alternative to sexual intercourse. Unlike kissing, it has not reached the same level of social acceptance. Keep in mind that even kissing is frowned upon in many societies.
To test this hypothesis, we need cross-cultural data. Is podophilia more frequent in those societies where, at least until recent times, most of a woman’s body surface was hidden from the gaze of male strangers?
References
Anon. (2007). The AOL Search Data: Self Identified Fetishers. Accessed September 4, 2019
https://web.archive.org/web/20070221135508/http://www.aphrodisiology.com/aol-fetishes
Cernovsky, Z.Z. (2015). Fetishistic Preferences of Clients as Ranked by a Sex Worker. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy 42(6): 481-483.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0092623X.2015.1070779
Du Maurier, G. (1894). Trilby. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. January 88(524): 168-189.
https://books.google.ca/books?id=8s4aAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
Freud, S. (1920). Three contributions to the theory of sex. Second edition. New York: Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Co.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14969/14969-h/14969-h.htm#p18
Frost, P. (2015). Not everyone does it. Evo and Proud, July 18
http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2015/07/not-everyone-does-it.html
Hellemans, H., H. Roeyers, W. Leplae, T. Dewaele, and D. Deboutte. (2010). Sexual Behavior in Male Adolescents and Young Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Borderline/Mild Mental Retardation. Sexuality and Disability 28(2): 93-104.
https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/1092003/file/6745031
Manning, A. (1972). An Introduction to Animal Behaviour. 2nd edition. London: Edward Arnold.
Peakman, J. (2013). The Pleasure's All Mine. A History of Perverse Sex. London: Reaktion Books
https://books.google.ca/books?id=fSl4uVXe1GIC&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
Ramachandran, V.S. and W. Hirstein. (1998). The perception of phantom limbs. The D. O. Hebb lecture. Brain 121: 1603-1630.
http://www.williamhirstein.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/PhantomLimbs.pdf
Ribeyrol, C. (2015). 'The Feet of Love': Pagan Podophilia from A.C. Swinburne to Isadora Duncan. Miranda 11
https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/6847
Scorolli, C., S. Ghirlanda, M. Enquist, S. Zattoni, and E.A. Jannini. (2007). Relative prevalence of different fetishes. International Journal of Impotence Research 19: 432-437.
https://www.nature.com/articles/3901547?ref=dod-jptc.org
Stekel, W. (1952). Sexual aberrations: The phenomena of fetishism in relation to sex (Vol. 1) (Trans., S. Parker). New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation.
