sexual “partialism,” which is an erotic preoccupation with a nonreproductive body part. Feet, belly buttons, teeth, noses, eyeballs, earlobes, pinkie toes, calves, nipples—there are partialists for any type of localized real estate you can imagine, and their desire for this part exceeds (and sometimes even excludes) their interest in the genitalia. In any event, my awkward first experience with a disgust-challenged podophile who was willing to be intimate even with my feet encouraged me to read up on the curious history of foot fetishism.
It was none other than Havelock Ellis who first unraveled the mind-set of the podophile. * Unlike the subject of Sexual Inversion , Ellis’s sharp-eyed analytical focus on foot fetishists zeroed in on the heterosexuals among them. “In a small but not inconsiderable minority of persons,” he wrote in 1927, “the foot or boot becomes the most attractive part of a woman, and in some morbid cases the woman herself is regarded as a comparatively unimportant appendage.” † I know how she feels. Ever since Ellis dug his heels into the matter, case studies of foot fetishism have continued to find an attentive audience. Homosexual, heterosexual, and even bisexual podophiles have all made sporadic appearances in psychological write-ups. But as far as I know, there has only been one attempt in all of podophilic history to explain foot fetishism using evolutionary theory. And believe it or not, it’s not an altogether ridiculous Darwinian hypothesis, either.
The psychologist James Giannini put the idea forward in 1998. Giannini had discovered a revealing sociosexual trend concerning podophilia. Throughout the course of human history, the cultural eroticization of the female foot predictably peaked whenever there was an outbreak of venereal disease, and then just as predictably it leveled out again as the epidemics ran their courses. Foot love blossomed during the gonorrhea epidemic in the thirteenth century, for example, syphilis in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, and even AIDS in the late twentieth century. (As if the oppressive Inquisition weren’t bad enough, Spain was also suffering from a large syphilitic population just as the heresy trials were heating up. With all that was going on, it seems like an odd time for Spanish painters to begin specializing in portraits of women’s feet, but this is precisely when that artistic oeuvre really took off. New shoe styles showing a teasing bit of “toe cleavage” were also all the rage.) Even if you’re straight and into a lady’s lower extremities, you can’t very well impregnate her foot to spread your genes. Giannini’s claim was simply that if one’s arousal were primarily but not exclusively confined to nonreproductive parts, then less frequent contacts (or maybe less exuberant ones) with infectious genitalia could meaningfully reduce the risk of infertility or even death. If such outbreaks were common enough in our deep past, suggested Giannini, then people who were able to become sexual partialists would have an advantage over those concentrating all their attention on the body’s more dangerous hot spots.
* * *
There’s still that puzzling question of how the podophile could suckle toes from hooves as hideous as mine. I do try to keep them clean, but they are feet, after all, and one can’t always know exactly what’s going on down there with the fungus scene. In fact, never mind feet, it’s astonishing that we’re so willing during sex acts to put any body part in our mouths that doesn’t belong to us. Penises don’t always come out smelling of roses either, and consider the flourishing bacterial substrate that is the human vagina. This region can play host to more than four hundred different species of organisms, and healthy female anatomies contain numerous acids that combat yeast and pathogens and give vulvae their odoriferous punch. * Not only that, but in both sexes, there are distinct
It was none other than Havelock Ellis who first unraveled the mind-set of the podophile. * Unlike the subject of Sexual Inversion , Ellis’s sharp-eyed analytical focus on foot fetishists zeroed in on the heterosexuals among them. “In a small but not inconsiderable minority of persons,” he wrote in 1927, “the foot or boot becomes the most attractive part of a woman, and in some morbid cases the woman herself is regarded as a comparatively unimportant appendage.” † I know how she feels. Ever since Ellis dug his heels into the matter, case studies of foot fetishism have continued to find an attentive audience. Homosexual, heterosexual, and even bisexual podophiles have all made sporadic appearances in psychological write-ups. But as far as I know, there has only been one attempt in all of podophilic history to explain foot fetishism using evolutionary theory. And believe it or not, it’s not an altogether ridiculous Darwinian hypothesis, either.
The psychologist James Giannini put the idea forward in 1998. Giannini had discovered a revealing sociosexual trend concerning podophilia. Throughout the course of human history, the cultural eroticization of the female foot predictably peaked whenever there was an outbreak of venereal disease, and then just as predictably it leveled out again as the epidemics ran their courses. Foot love blossomed during the gonorrhea epidemic in the thirteenth century, for example, syphilis in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, and even AIDS in the late twentieth century. (As if the oppressive Inquisition weren’t bad enough, Spain was also suffering from a large syphilitic population just as the heresy trials were heating up. With all that was going on, it seems like an odd time for Spanish painters to begin specializing in portraits of women’s feet, but this is precisely when that artistic oeuvre really took off. New shoe styles showing a teasing bit of “toe cleavage” were also all the rage.) Even if you’re straight and into a lady’s lower extremities, you can’t very well impregnate her foot to spread your genes. Giannini’s claim was simply that if one’s arousal were primarily but not exclusively confined to nonreproductive parts, then less frequent contacts (or maybe less exuberant ones) with infectious genitalia could meaningfully reduce the risk of infertility or even death. If such outbreaks were common enough in our deep past, suggested Giannini, then people who were able to become sexual partialists would have an advantage over those concentrating all their attention on the body’s more dangerous hot spots.
* * *
There’s still that puzzling question of how the podophile could suckle toes from hooves as hideous as mine. I do try to keep them clean, but they are feet, after all, and one can’t always know exactly what’s going on down there with the fungus scene. In fact, never mind feet, it’s astonishing that we’re so willing during sex acts to put any body part in our mouths that doesn’t belong to us. Penises don’t always come out smelling of roses either, and consider the flourishing bacterial substrate that is the human vagina. This region can play host to more than four hundred different species of organisms, and healthy female anatomies contain numerous acids that combat yeast and pathogens and give vulvae their odoriferous punch. * Not only that, but in both sexes, there are distinct
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