This little piggy

Dear Sasha,

I’m a straight female who recently got involved with a guy with a foot fetish. I’m not really sure where to look for educational resources on this fetish. I’m amazed to realize that, after all these years, this is in fact the first real live foot fetishist with whom I’ve been involved! I’m slightly embarrassed because I’m not sure what I can do besides sticking my toe in his mouth or attempting to manipulate his penis with my feet (a sorry sight indeed). So, in short, I’d love to learn what makes these guys tick, so that I can at least have a place to start in the next leg of this sexual voyage. I’ve always been very confident in my abilities to please sexually, so you can imagine this is totally killing my sexual confidence.

Dear Sarah,

May I just say, welcome to some extremely good times. So then, what makes the fetishist tick? And the foot fetishist in particular? You just have to read studies by neurologists like Oliver Sacks and Vilayanur S. Ramachandran—who both prove what a stunningly convoluted lair the brain is—to know that we may never have a definitive answer to that one. An interesting fact to note is that Ramachandran found that on the map of the brain, the feet are adjacent to the genitals. It’s obviously a little more complicated than “one wrong turn and the next thing you know you need a heel up your nose to get off,” but, for now, let’s stick to the basics, which in this venue, anyway, entail feeling okay with being a pervert and feeling okay about being with a pervert.

One thing you should know is that of all the paraphilias, foot fetishism seems to be the one with the most explicit distinctions. The person who enjoys the smell of a foot after it’s been in a nylon sock for three days will not have the same appreciation for it after it’s been in there for four days and will not like the smell at all if it’s been in a cotton sock. People who like toes will go crackers for one type (the longer second toe, for example) and be utterly repulsed by another (even toes all across). I had a client, when I was a stripper, who enjoyed watching me point and spread out my toes while I told him how much he looked like Superman (like I said, it can get pretty specific).

Find out just what kind of a foot man your man is before you go getting a pedicure, only to discover he likes a good hard callusing across the ’nads. If he enjoys groomed feet, and you’re not someone who gets regular pedicures, now’s the perfect time to ask him to start treating you to them. And if he likes shoes… oh girl, if he likes shoes…

We all like to appear connoisseurs from the word “go,” but asking about someone’s filthy particulars also suggests a certain erotic competence—the knowledge that everyone is different and that by inquiring, you have their special needs in mind. A piece of advice I can offer in the foot-job department, and not to seem like I’m throwing around the deliberately jaded “when I was at an orgy once” too much this week, but, when I was at an orgy once, I watched a woman give a fantastic foot-job by sitting on the floor with her hands balanced behind her and her legs up, while the man sat on the bed with his legs open. You get better purchase that way. You may also find the foot stretches and strengthening exercises on this site may be helpful training before you begin: www.bicyclesource.com/body/training/feet-stretches-exercises.shtml.

Got any questions for Sasha? E-MAIL: POULEDELUXE@YAHOO.COM