The Marble Feet of Lola Montez
There was a contact ad in our local paper when I was a kid—tucked between the classifieds, probably near the used cars—from some old guy asking girls of any age to walk barefoot outside so he could lick their feet. Or in sweaty sneakers. Cash involved. I read every word with mounting disbelief and then threw the paper against the wall and ran outside screaming. That was my first encounter with the erotic potential of feet, and it did not make a persuasive case.
Feet divide people absolutely. For half the world they’re the inconvenient machinery at the bottom—dirty, perpetually cheese-scented, necessary for locomotion and otherwise best kept covered. For the other half, they’re genuinely erotic in a way that outranks most of the body’s more conventionally celebrated features. No middle ground appears to exist on this question.
The historical record is more interesting than it gets credit for. King Ludwig I of Bavaria was reportedly devoted—he had the feet of the dancer Lola Montez immortalized in marble, which is either the most extravagant form of tribute or the most honest thing any monarch ever commissioned. Quentin Tarantino has been enthusiastically public about his preference for decades and processes it openly through his work—the foot massage conversation in Pulp Fiction is not actually about foot massages. And then there’s Chinese foot binding: the lotus foot, created by compressing and reshaping the bones and flesh over years of bandaging, the female foot restructured toward a male ideal of miniature delicacy. The most extreme possible endpoint of the same fascination, wearing its ugliness in the open.
I’ll admit to having evolved on the subject. Something about a girl in battered Chucks, or white socks worn to a church service, or just the right pair of sneakers will occasionally do something for me that I’d have difficulty explaining at any normal dinner table. I’m not claiming this places me in refined company. I’m just noting that King Ludwig and I have more in common than I’d like.
What I keep wondering: is this distributed evenly across genders, or is foot fetishism essentially a male phenomenon? And how far does it go before it becomes something requiring its own diagnostic category? Medicine hasn’t even settled on whether it constitutes a fetish at all, which seems like a significant failure of the field.
I’m going to go lick some toes while you work through the answers.