Women Aren’t Supposed to Have This Fetish. These Women Do.

When Tina first realized she had a foot fetish, she was 16, drunk, and playing Truth or Dare. She was at a house party, sitting in her boyfriend’s lap, when her friend dared her to suck a guy’s toes. Surprised by her own willingness, she jumped up and sat on the floor. The guy leaned back in his chair, smugly sipped a beer, and dangled his sock-clad foot in her direction. She glanced around and giggled, embarrassed, before slipping his sock off.

“His feet weren’t the best-looking, more or less what you’d expect from a teen guy,” Tina, now in her 20s, told me. “They were sweaty and pretty stinky.” Everyone was grossed out, and she thought she would be, too. But then she grabbed his feet and went for it. Sparks flew.

Tina and her boyfriend, who are still together, never talked about it. “He doesn’t have a clue” about her real reaction, she said. Instead, she indulges it elsewhere. She’s a member of a Reddit community for women like her, where she scopes out men’s feet and chats with other female foot enthusiasts. She also hunts for porn—both straight and gay—that features men’s feet.

She’s had a problem there: It’s exceedingly difficult to find straight porn that shows women being aroused by men’s feet. Photos of famous guys’ feet, like the frequently barefoot Shawn Mendes, can be easily found on sites like wikiFeet Men, and some porn-for-women sites like Bellesa and Pinkabel.tv offer videos of women’s feet. But for Tina, it doesn’t scratch the itch. Sometimes, she has to find other ways to explore, like sniffing men’s dirty socks. (She declined to say where they come from.)

It’s not every day you hear about women with desires like Tina’s. Far more often than not, foot fetishists are depicted as men, and the vast majority of online foot content caters almost exclusively to their gaze. Remember Quentin Tarantino and his eternal, ever-public quest for feet? He famously sucked tequila off of Salma Hayek’s toes in From Dusk Till Dawn, had Margot Robbie display her dirty feet in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and gave Uma Thurman an entire foot-close-up toe-wiggling scene in Kill Bill. Elsewhere, 2022’s House of the Dragon showed Lord Larys Strong worshiping a woman’s feet, and a Fast and Furious sequel featured a guy filming himself sucking a woman’s foot after declaring “Dwight likes feet.” Even Thing, the disembodied male hand from the Addams Family, seems to have a foot fetish—in the animated film from 2019, he gets caught looking at photos of women’s feet on his laptop.

Meanwhile, we almost never hear from women who like feet, and their cravings for high arches and sculpted soles often go unexplored. The most we get are infrequent, off-the-cuff jokes and admissions from celebrities—Toni Braxton once revealed her foot fetish to Anderson Cooper, and Rosie Perez discussed her love for men’s feet during her time on The View. Shailene Woodley likes both men’s and women’s feet, a fact she bluntly proffered during an old interview with a Cleveland news station. Even still, there are few depictions of what these desires actually entail—no female Tarantino on her knees, lapping booze off a freshly painted toe; no French-tipped she-Thing perusing the annals of WikiFeet. In other words, women get no credit.

But they should. According to Dr. Justin Lehmiller, who researched various types of fantasies for his book Tell Me What You Want, plenty of women are into feet—about 5 percent of heterosexual women and 11 percent of bisexual or lesbian women, to be exact. Sure, these are lower rates than men—18 percent of heterosexual men and 21 percent of gay and bi men are aroused by feet, I’m told—but they’re not insignificant. Those numbers represent millions of women with desires begging to be explored.

How those desires play out tends to vary. Some women are only attracted to men’s feet, others only to women’s, and many have no preference for gender at all. Certain women enjoy the smell; others go wild for the shape; some idolize features like toe length or hair. One iteration of the fetish involves women having their own feet worshiped (think licking, tickling, rubbing, etc.). For some women, who the feet are attached to matters far more than the feet themselves.

Women’s introduction to the fetish also varies. Some are turned on to it by partners, others through sex work, and many by childhood experiences. Lisa, who I found on Reddit, discovered an interest in her own feet first. “I used to grind on the bottom of my heels and rubbing my feet in my groin,” she told me. A few of the women I spoke to said they need to think about or interact with feet in order to become aroused, but more commonly, they just admire feet, find them arousing, and occasionally work them into fantasy or sex. Not that it’s always easy to—like many men with foot fetishes, some women feel their fantasies are too taboo to share, and they often keep them to themselves.

The continued prioritization of men’s desire for feet doesn’t help. Reddit’s multiple foot-fetish subreddits are nearly all created for men—their homepages solely show pictures of female feet, and one of the biggest subreddits, r/FootFetish, warns that “Female nudity is welcome here” but male nudity “is not allowed.” Even the subreddits that feature men’s feet, like r/malefeettalk, seem to cater to men. “If you have a great gay or male foot fetish experience, this is the subreddit for you,” the site declares. Female fetishists need not apply.

That’s why in 2021, Julie, a 50-year-old foot fetishist in Australia, decided to create r/footfetishforfemales. The 1,000-member subreddit is filled with men posting images of their feet for women to appreciate, usually with their wrinkly soles on display. “Ladies, do you like two-day old toe socks?” wrote one poster above an image of his sock-clad feet. “Yes please let me sniff,” someone replied.

Julie has developed a keen eye for men’s foot pics. Men often reach out to her for advice on taking pictures of their feet, which she readily proffers. “Suggestive or arty and classy pics work better for women, so shadows, black and white, interesting angles, and composition,” Julie tells them. She doesn’t pay for pictures of men’s feet because she gets “inundated with freebies.” One of her favorite images features a man, mid-step, walking up wooden stairs; his muscular calves are on display along with the sole of his left foot. The composition isn’t too “busy,” Julie said, “plus you can see the cute underside of his toes and foot.”

Like Julie, Dana, 23, is always getting offered free pics of men’s feet. “So many men DM me, ‘Can I show you my feet?’ ” she said. “But I’m very picky. So I’m usually like, ‘No, thank you.’ ” Dana didn’t grow up with an interest in feet. But recently, when she posted her beaten-up old shoes on Facebook Marketplace for $5, a prospective buyer messaged her. “If you wear these a couple of extra days, I’ll pay you more,” he wrote. “I immediately picked up on the fact that he’s probably a fetishist,” Dana said. She decided to take him up on the offer. In addition to sending him her shoes, she also sent him pics of her feet. “They’re really pretty,” he wrote to her. No one’s ever told me that, she thought. Maybe I can have more success somewhere else. 

She told her boyfriend of four years that she wanted to sell pics of her feet, and he was supportive of her posting on Reddit. Then she had a realization. “Having my timeline flooded with beautiful women and really pretty feet just kind of sparked something for me,” Dana said. She began to be drawn to women’s feet, too. Dana thinks high arches are extremely sexy, as are women’s feet in Birkenstocks and heels. Sometimes Dana swaps feet pics with other women for free.

Many of the women I spoke to said they experience their foot fetish differently than men, who seem to be more turned on by out-of-context images of feet. “Men can look at a foot and be aroused. A lot of them will even masturbate to just feet. That’s not something that even computes in my head,” said Katherine, 30, who lives in Maryland. Julie concurred, explaining that she likes “what feet do” more than the way they look. Kaitlyn, another woman I spoke to, told me her attraction to feet only occurs if she’s into the whole man.

Women’s foot preferences vary from clean to dirty, hairy to smooth, and high to low arches. But most women had one thing in common: They kept their fetishes mostly hidden. “Because it’s such a taboo subject, I feel a lot of embarrassment and shame about it,” Kaitlyn said. “For the longest time I never knew women like me existed, and I thought I must’ve been the only one. I always assumed it would be for the best that I never tell anybody, so I never have.” But she wasn’t great at hiding it. “One of my exes actually confronted me about it, but I denied it,” she said. “I know he saw through the lie, but we never spoke about it again.” She still doesn’t feel comfortable telling people she’s dating about her fetish, either.

Katherine also feels ashamed of having a foot fetish, which is partly why she never tells her partners about it. “I see a lot of men with this fetish and I think they give it a bad name,” she said. “A lot of them are incredibly obsessive and intense, even creepy.”

Lisa, who is bisexual, got a firsthand account of the taboo when she searched for men who would be willing to let her taste their feet. The men were weirded out by her requests, so she changed tactics from professing her fetish to simply offering them foot rubs. Even that illuminated some stark gender differences. “I have a stronger desire for men’s feet, but women’s are super easy to get my hands on,” Lisa said. She thinks it’s because foot rubs can make men feel vulnerable and they’re less comfortable with the feeling than women.

Lisa has shared her foot fetish with some friends, and even rubbed and sucked some of their feet. When she met her now-husband, she decided she would ask him about his thoughts on foot fetishes before revealing hers, hoping he’d be more open than other men. He was.

Though men with foot fetishes are certainly also stigmatized, Kaitlyn thinks women are more so. “The kinds of women’s fetishes that are most generally accepted are those that in some way affirm or accommodate a man’s sexual desires or sexual role, like a woman submitting to a man,” she told me. “In my fetish, however, my own pleasure takes precedence. When a woman is in tune with her own desires, that threatens the status quo.”

It’s only a matter of time before the shoe is on the other foot.

Names in this article have been changed.