The Golden Age of Feet
While some people are not able to imagine making love through the feet, the fact is that foot fetish has been around for thousands of years. From Europe to China, and from Confucius to the crusaders, the feet have been objects of sex and sensuality.That appeal of the foot continues today. It has even been heightened, thanks in part to the popularity of the Internet.
And so, the question on everyone's mind must be, how did earthly feet become so heavenly exulted?
Certainly, we humans are pre-disposed to sexualizing the feet because of our biology. Our feet produce the same pheromones that our armpits and genitals produce. In case you didn't know, pheromones are what cause humans to be sexually attracted to one another.
We know that our ancestors had a lingering erotic affair with the feet. Ancient erotic literature and art from the East certainly featured glowing illustrations of the feet as part of the lovemaking routine.
In ancient China, foot binding was practiced purposefully to create a second, albeit fake, vagina. Painful though it is, foot binding made the soles hypersensitive. Adjustments to their gait (bound feet women made smaller steps) also meant that the vaginal muscles remained tight.
While foot binding is now considered sado-masochistic, Confucius did somehow contribute to the acceptance of the practice by exulting the small feet in his writings.
Christian artists in the Middle Ages also eroticized the feet. Back then, the norm was to depict sexually ambiguous human figures, and it was considered tasteless to paint the genitals (notice the fig leaf). The feet became the ultimate symbol of sexuality and sexual demarcations as well. The female feet were small and curved while the male feet were also curved, but larger.
The angels, considered to be sexless beings, were depicted with long wings to hide their feet.
However, it wasn't sexual repression that made foot fetish popular in Europe. It was the outbreak of STDs which, curiously, occurred every 300 years.
In the 13th century, the returning crusaders from the Holy Land brought home, not the Holy Grail, but the first wave of STD epidemic. The 16th and 19th centuries, meanwhile, had people grappling with syphilis epidemics.
No condoms were available during that time, and so forms of sexual gratification other than the coitus act had to be practiced. Foot fetish thus became very popular.
Thankfully, Europe's art and literature movement throughout that time had a lingering fascination with women's feet, thus reinforcing the behavior. Painters used the feet as artistic symbols of sex and sexuality. Troubadours, meanwhile, waxed poetic about the attractiveness of women's feet and wrote about them in books like the Romance of the Rose.
Like in China, small feet were also preferred in Europe, especially in the royal courts of France and Italy. European-style foot binding was even practiced.
It wasn't until when mercury was used to treat syphilis that foot fetish became less popular - at least in the arts.
The global AIDS epidemic in the 1980s revived the popularity of foot fetish. Sex materials for soft core and hard core pedal sex boomed in the wake of the outbreak.