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| Interspersed throughout this article will be various photographs of mine and my friends' feet. They are anonymous, but I would like to specifically thank Roma for suggesting I collect them, and sourcing half of them. |
Heads up, this is going to be a weird one.
My favourite podcast in the whole world is something called BigSoftTitty.png. I could not give you a sales pitch, it is formless and beautiful and stupid – something I like to call ‘personality driven’. The show is blessed with the illusion of structure through its recurring segments including, but not limited to, Crab News, Poop Time, The Boseman Daily Chronicle Police Report, Head Got Stuck and (my favourite) Self Suck Roundup.
Guess what Self Suck Roundup is about!
I have, in the 5-ish years of my listenership, developed a familiarity with the issues and concerns of those dedicated to the art of sucking their own dicks - not mere amateurs - but the people committed to the cause. Their issues and concerns are primarily chronic back pain.
This knowledge of communities surrounding sexual practices I have no interest in is a unique product of the internet age – I am hard pressed to imagine a pre-internet analogue to anonymously, undetectably and effortlessly spying on a discussion on a sexual practice I have no interest, or indeed ability, to engage in. A fascination with ‘deviant’ sexuality, has of course always existed – human beings have always sought out that which excites, shocks and confuses us. But I cannot help feeling that in the internet age, the average person’s access to fetish material has increased a thousand-fold, and with this increase in quantity comes an increase in variety.
My favourite podcast in the whole world is something called BigSoftTitty.png. I could not give you a sales pitch, it is formless and beautiful and stupid – something I like to call ‘personality driven’. The show is blessed with the illusion of structure through its recurring segments including, but not limited to, Crab News, Poop Time, The Boseman Daily Chronicle Police Report, Head Got Stuck and (my favourite) Self Suck Roundup.
Guess what Self Suck Roundup is about!
I have, in the 5-ish years of my listenership, developed a familiarity with the issues and concerns of those dedicated to the art of sucking their own dicks - not mere amateurs - but the people committed to the cause. Their issues and concerns are primarily chronic back pain.
This knowledge of communities surrounding sexual practices I have no interest in is a unique product of the internet age – I am hard pressed to imagine a pre-internet analogue to anonymously, undetectably and effortlessly spying on a discussion on a sexual practice I have no interest, or indeed ability, to engage in. A fascination with ‘deviant’ sexuality, has of course always existed – human beings have always sought out that which excites, shocks and confuses us. But I cannot help feeling that in the internet age, the average person’s access to fetish material has increased a thousand-fold, and with this increase in quantity comes an increase in variety.
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Potter Stewart is dead, but the rest of us aren’t. Occasionally, a video produced by Candy Coated Squeaks (a custom inflatable toy business) will go semi-viral beyond its intended audience. Comments on a video of someone wearing a blue, inflatable werewolf suit range from “what the fuck is my fyp” to “What flavour of autism is this” to “So we sexualizing animals now or what am I missing here get this shit out of my sight”. I want to highlight this last comment in particular, because the video is so completely and utterly benign. Neither the werewolf suit nor the inflatable deer being held have any suggestive holes, no genitalia (of any species, real or fictional) are on display, and no sex acts are being mimed. To be frank, I have childhood photos taken at Disney World that are more sexual – early 2000’s Spiderman suits did not leave a lot to the imagination.
But these commenters believe they can immediately sense the deviant sexuality present in the video, and find that sexuality is disgusting. Candy Coated Squeaks does operate within the culture of fetish, but after reading this Vice article, it’s pretty hard to have anything more than a distant affection for the inflatables community. The assumptions and fears surrounding the disgust of commenters are pretty indicative of the mainstream online response to any degree of sexual deviance – knee jerk, reactionary disgust more informed by assumptions than the context of the content.
In her essay The Leather Menace, Gayle Rubin writes that “Our sexual system contains
a vast vague pool of nameless horror. Like Lovecraft's pits, where unmentionable creatures perform unspeakable acts, this place of fear is rarely specified but always avoided.” I would argue that in the internet age Rubin’s vague pool is getting harder and harder to avoid, that it is comparatively easy to stumble onto content that implies sexuality outside of the norm. But this does not automatically equate to breaking down Rubin’s Charmed Circle[1] (the magical categorisation of ‘good’ sex and ‘bad’ sex), because the internet is the place where good faith goes to die. Instead, people avoid ‘bad’ sex by automatically distancing perverts from themselves – you can see this in the comments left on the Candy Coated Squeaks post, ranging from alienation and pathologisation to virulent condemnation.
With all this in mind, let’s talk about feet.
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Modesty around feet is not an invention of the internet age. In The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe[2], Rossi chronicles a broad history of the foot as an erotic object and observes that “millions of people, women especially, retain a self-consciousness about
foot exposure.” He also argues that “the self-consciousness women feel about their exposed feet” should be attributed to “the instinctual feeling about the foot's erotic character and the sense of nudity when the foot is bared to male view.” Rossi is largely uncritical of the gender politics he conjures, but I’d like to highlight the assertion that foot modesty comes from an understanding of one’s own feet as a site of sexual desire. I think that in the cultural perception of foot fetishists, we rate our own feet far too highly.
Before transphobia swallowed up mainstream radical feminism, Free the Nipple was a serious feminist campaign. It was an important step in combating bio-essentialism, and recategorising bodies with breasts as neutral, rather than sex objects. The argument was not that breasts should not be sexually attractive, but that they should not be obscene, or sex objects. This ability to understand our bodies as potentially sexually attractive, but not defined by this external desire, would have been a really useful cultural shift, and is useful to consider in discussions of fetish. Alas, the 2010’s were uniquely frustrating in terms of social justice movements, and tits are yet to be free range.
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Another joke, repeated ad nauseum, is the idea of selling foot pics for money. Everyone and their mother (or at least mine), has looked at the cost of living and joked about selling photos of their feet as a secondary source of income. It’s safe to say that people don’t quite have the same relationship to the idea of full-service sex work or selling full body nudes. Partially this can be attributed to the possible anonymity, distance from traditional sex work, and the increased vulnerability of the full body nude – but the element I would like to focus on is the automatic assumption of one’s own attractiveness. In the cultural imagination, foot fetishists are remarkably unfastidious.
I think this is what a lot of cultural anxiety around perverts comes down to – the fear that someone finds you sexually attractive in a way that is ‘wrong’. It is in this context that I think the concerns of kink/fetish communities and queer communities (pretending for a moment that these are separate groups, as opposed to cultures and movements with more overlap that difference) align. Look at the myth of the predatory queer – it’s the same paranoia.
To be brutally honest: at some point in your life, someone is going to jerk off to the idea of you, for a reason you cannot relate to. It is inevitable, and you (hopefully) will never know. It’s fine. Obviously, this does not cover harassment or genuine breaches of privacy. But we cannot keep treating benign and private sexual desire like it is harassment – there is nothing morally worse about fantasising about sucking on Ariana Grande’s toes than there is about me being crazy horny over Amar Chadha-Patel in The Decameron[3] (pictured below).
I think this is what a lot of cultural anxiety around perverts comes down to – the fear that someone finds you sexually attractive in a way that is ‘wrong’. It is in this context that I think the concerns of kink/fetish communities and queer communities (pretending for a moment that these are separate groups, as opposed to cultures and movements with more overlap that difference) align. Look at the myth of the predatory queer – it’s the same paranoia.
To be brutally honest: at some point in your life, someone is going to jerk off to the idea of you, for a reason you cannot relate to. It is inevitable, and you (hopefully) will never know. It’s fine. Obviously, this does not cover harassment or genuine breaches of privacy. But we cannot keep treating benign and private sexual desire like it is harassment – there is nothing morally worse about fantasising about sucking on Ariana Grande’s toes than there is about me being crazy horny over Amar Chadha-Patel in The Decameron[3] (pictured below).
As we enter this brave new world of online perversion, I entreat you to remember that the freaks and deviants did not invite you into their spaces – you sought them out. Treat them with respect, and chill out.
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By Marsh (he/him)
[1] This idea is from a later essay, Rethinking Sex, but I’m not doing full Chicago footnotes here.
[2] A useful resource for an erotic history of the foot, though I feel some claims within are occasionally spurious
[3] Okay actually if you take one thing from this article it’s that you have to watch The Decameron. It’s such incredible messy drama, and deeply queer.