Solemates E-Book

Adam Zmith

• Herausgeber: 404 Ink
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Inklings
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 110

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Why are feet so hot? When Jesus washed his bros' feet, what kind of love was he showing? Why did feet show up in poetry written during a medieval outbreak of gonorrhoea? How did early sexologists convince us that loving feet is deviant? And what did Victorian lesbians make of all this? These are the questions thrusting Adam Zmith into a history of toe-botherers who will guide the reader through the sex archives, the online forums and a millennium of art, with his trademark queer lens. Solemates will bring to light the history of this peculiarly popular kink. From Tarantino films to Bible stories, from Renaissance paintings to OnlyFans, Solemates is the rich and messy tale of our obsession with everything below the ankle, and what it reveals about how we view our bodies and our sex lives.

Leseprobe

Solemates

Published by 404 Ink Limited

www.404Ink.com

@404Ink

All rights reserved © Adam Zmith, 2024.

The right of Adam Zmith to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without first obtaining the written permission of the rights owner, except for the use of brief quotations in reviews.

Please note: Some references include URLs which may change or be unavailable after publication of this book. All references within endnotes were accessible and accurate as of September 2024 but may experience link rot from there on in.

Editing: Heather McDaid

Typesetting: Laura Jones-Rivera

Cover design: Luke Bird

Co-founders and publishers of 404 Ink:

Heather McDaid & Laura Jones-Rivera

Print ISBN: 978-1-916637-04-7

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-916637-05-4

404 Ink acknowledges and is thankful for support from

Creative Scotland in the publication of this title.

Solemates

A History of Our Fetish for Feet

Adam Zmith

Contents

Introduction: My Timeless Tradition

Chapter 1: Walk Softly and Leave Prints

Chapter 2: The Beard-Strokers

Chapter 3: A Particular and Quite Special Penis

Chapter 4: OnlyFeet

Conclusion: The Freak Inside

References

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Inklings series

Introduction: My Timeless Tradition

I loved feet before I loved fucking. It all started when I was really little. I was so young that feet were not a sexual desire for me at first. They were a special kind of curiosity. Feet were interesting to look at, and I loved to look. I watched out for the bare feet of cartoon characters like Fred Flintstone and I stared at the perfect specimens on the models in the Next clothing catalogue. One day, I wanted to touch. I was playing a game with another boy. I suggested that he play the king and I would be his slave. I told him it was my job to wash his feet. I held back from saying that I wanted to kiss them. I wanted to play with his feet, and I specifically wanted them to have power over me.

When I think about this story, I realise that I’ve had a foot fetish for as long as I can remember.

Exploring the history of our fetish for feet is another way to experience this curiosity. I’d like to understand why some of us have a foot fetish, and why we care about that. It’s a desire that’s well known and widely experienced. So I’d like to know all the different ways people enjoy feet, today and through history. I’d like to think about whether playing with feet is actually sex. I wonder why so many people find feet disgusting even though plenty of us want to touch them with our tongues. I wonder, in general, why shoes are important to people – from the collectors of valuable Nike trainers to the fashion obsessives who drool over the bizarre concoctions of Balenciaga and McQueen. I want to know how many kilograms of sweaty socks are sent between lovers through the mail each year. I’d love to hunt through all the kinky drawings from ancient Japan and the bloodied portrayals of Jesus’s torment, and have feelings about the unique connection I have to foot-lovers from different places and times.

When it comes to kink, feet can be – sorry – a first step. As soon as I started to look at porn on the internet, I lingered over the photos of the guys who kept their bare feet in shot while they wanked or fucked. I found websites just for me, often called things like ‘myfriendsfeet.com’. When I did start to get naked with men, I secretly looked at their feet. One of them was an amateur acrobat who moisturised his soles at the end of every day. He must have seen me watching him doing this one time. “I have to keep my feet tip-top,” he smiled. The fact that he cared about his feet gave me permission to say how much I liked them.

It is openness like this that has led me to seek out experiences and take risks in pursuit of pleasure. I am promiscuous because I am curious. I’ve had adventures. I’ve learnt how I fancy bodies, their smells, their holes, their warmth and their electricity. I’ve sniffed armpits and pissed on people. I’ve fucked in public. I’ve dropped to my knees so I could beg for cum. I’ve kissed four people at the same time. I’ve had to stop when the oxytocin made me shake. I’ve been someone’s good boy. I’ve hugged all night.

One desire has always persisted. I want to suck your toes. I’ll just lay here on the floor, and you can place your sole against my face, and press. Hard. Your feet are powerful and, ultimately, I am not. I am the puddle that you splash through, and I love how you destroy me.

Am I a freak? Why does my brain fire up at the thought of licking a hot guy’s foot? What the fuck is the point of that? And how long has this been going on?

The thing is, when you look, you see. I’ve noticed this in my own adventures. Sometimes feet are hiding in plain sight. We’re barefoot at the beach and the pool. We paint our toenails to attract the eye. We choose footwear that says something about who we are, and judge others by their shoes. People wear sandals, and god bless them. I’ve never followed the films of Quentin Tarantino, but I can’t avoid them – not because they’re popular but because they put feet into the frame. According to Tina Horn in her book Why Are People Into That?, “Tarantino may be pop culture’s most well-known real-life fetishist.”1 Horn recounted her reaction to a scene in one of Tarantino’s films in which a character rests her feet on the dashboard of a car, pressing her bare soles against the windscreen. “That’s not just a shot staged by a man who loves feet,” Horn told the friend who was watching the film with her. “That’s the work of a fetishist.”

Horn ought to know: she herself has a fetish for feet. As a sex worker, she’s seen it all, including the wildest desires, but she opened her first chapter with feet because everyone knows someone who is into feet. If it’s not you, you’ve probably joked with a friend when they said they’d welcome a foot massage in bed. More and more people are talking about feet, and their capacity for love. Celebrities are coming out! Ricky Martin, the singer and actor, told the audience of a TV talk show: “Don’t judge me… I have a crazy foot fetish. Like, crazy. It’s bad.”2 I watched him say this and I whispered to myself: you’re my brother. And then I clicked on the next video suggested by YouTube, about a sexy actor who I fancied: “Darren Criss Got a Pedicure at Ricky Martin’s House”.3 Darren explained how cool it felt to sit beside Ricky’s Grammy awards and have his feet taken care of. Apparently Ricky had thought that it would be nice to buy a pedicure for his house guests. How do I get into these parties?

Other celebrities are monetising. Kourtney Kardashian and her husband Travis Barker have regularly shared their foot love on Instagram. He praises her “angel feet”, which are regularly the focus of their posts. In one, her soles are pressed against his smiling face.4 In 2024, Lily Allen launched an OnlyFans account where she sells pics of her feet. “My toe daddies are very happy with the content that I am supplying,” she said on the Miss Me? podcast.5 Allen explained that after having been sexualised in the media from an early age, she was enjoying autonomy through her new business. “It’s actually really fun to be in power and in control of something that I find so silly,” she said. These celebrities are all very open, and that’s a relief to me. It’s an openness that has led me into countless conversations with friends and lovers and people ‘in the life’.

The more I ask, the more I find out, and yet the more curious I become. I’m just a pretty small person at the front of a timeline, fudging my way through la vida loca. And so are people like Dug, a very soft-spoken man from Ohio who I interviewed for Solemates, who also loves feet, which he describes as “a basic human-nature interest”.

Dug was four years old when this interest emerged in him. He remembers this decades later, when I spoke to him, as clear as the Midwestern sky where he grew up. One day, little Dug was playing with other kids and adults from the neighbourhood. “This one really hot neighbour caught me and kind of pretended to throw me to the ground,” said Dug, remembering how he manipulated the man without knowing how or why. “I was such a precocious little runt. I said to him, ‘Whatever you do, don’t put your feet in my face’.” The man did it, playfully – and inside Dug a fire was lit for life.

At college, Dug went to gay bars and propositioned guys with the offer of a foot massage. “I was very uninhibited,” he told me, and my heart trilled.

Another interviewee is Ajamu, who calls me “babes” and speaks with a gorgeous, friendly accent rooted in West Yorkshire. One day in 1992, Ajamu noticed that his lover had “a beautiful pair of feet”. Ajamu took a series of photos of the feet, playing with the light, the textures, the shapes. He grinned, as he told me that he became hooked on feet forever.

Later, Ajamu was sleeping with a footballer whose feet were worn and bashed. “There was still something about that one that was quite beautiful,” he remembered, describing how he sucked the footballer’s toes. “He totally freaked out. Because basically, he never had his feet or his toes sucked before or worshipped. Lots of people still frown upon their feet being sucked.”

The footballer allowed himself to feel some feelings, and he gave in to exploration. Ajamu played some more, and after a time the footballer enjoyed it. They both had pleasure together that way. Ajamu said, “For him it was a whole new experience…”

Not everyone is so easily open. Reed, a fun and fun-loving young woman with a gorgeous smile, tells me, “Feet have always been a thing for me.” With a sense of sadness, this normally bubbly person reflected: “But it’s definitely something that I repressed.”

Repressing this fetish seems to be an experience that is almost as common as having it. It was easier to tell people I like dick than telling them I like feet.

I want to know where this shame comes from. I want to know why it boils over into things like the online reaction to the presence of feet in reality show Love Island: the scene of a contestant with a foot fetish licking the soles of another contestant was cast as a “violation” and “baaaaaaad vibes”.6 I wonder where this idea that fetishists are deceitful comes from. So I want to spend time in the history of our fetish, and with the widespread idea that feet are gross or inelegant when unadorned. Spaniards still talk about what happened at Eurovision 1983, where their entrant, Flamenco singer Remedios Amaya, performed barefoot and received nul points. Our collective revulsion to these cultural moments can probably tell us a lot about how we feel about feet – that many of us are so naturally disgusted by them that a fetish is impossible to empathise with.

But let’s check that first; it’s worth starting with the question that everyone asks me: How common is a fetish for feet?

Sexologists of the past have some answers. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the first to catalogue our sexual desires, wrote in 1886 that foot fetishists make up a “very numerous class”7. Havelock Ellis wrote: “Of all the forms of erotic symbolism, the most frequent is that which idealises the foot and shoe”8. In the mid twentieth century, the great professor of sex from the USA, Alfred Kinsey, accepted that toe-botherers are “not rare in the population”.9 Kinsey also observed the special role that feet play in sex that doesn’t even involve them, noting, “The toes of most individuals become curled or, contrariwise, spread when there is erotic arousal. Many persons divide their toes, turning their large toes up or down while the remaining toes curl in the opposite direction.”10

Later, in 1976, William A Rossi, published a book called The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe.11 In it, he built on Kinsey’s observation with a theory about the enduringly common allure of the high heel: “It simulates the reflex position of the foot during coitus, especially at the point of orgasm or ejaculation. A tantalising question arises: Do both men and women subconsciously recognise or intuitively sense this ‘sexualised’ position of the foot in high-heeled shoes? And can this be one of the reasons for the sex-appeal of high heels?”

I am, evidently, not the first man to be excited about theories about our fetish for feet.

Social psychologist Justin Lehmiller, who asked 4,175 adults in the USA about their desires, discovered that men are more likely to fancy feet than women are. In fact, gay and bisexual men are four times more likely than straight women to have the fetish.12 Publishing his findings in 2018, he also found that in general, one in seven of us have fantasised about feet.