Almost everyone has a favorite body part when it comes to physical attraction--breasts, legs, buttocks. But favor feet and you're branded kind of kinky. That's why Clevelanders Doug Gaines and Gary Brett started an organization for foot fetishists (two, actually). They wanted to give them an easy way to meet their solemates. Hence the Foot Fraternity for homosexuals and the Foot Fetishists and Fantasies Society (FFF) for heteros. Both publish quarterly listings of members.
Started in 1985, the Foot Fraternity (216-229-4144) now boasts more than 4,000 "brothers."
Membership in the FFF, started in 2002, already numbers in the hundreds. Over 50,000 requests for info have come in from America's estimated one and a half million active foot fetishists.
For $45 a year, members can arrange to meet people like "Atlanta, age 33; ht: 5' 9"; wt: 175; ft: 11. Enjoys looking at close-up photos of bare feet. Looking for a special someone who wears penny loafers with no socks."
Most fetishists are extremely nervous when first calling. "I tell them I know what it's like. I am a foot fetishist myself. You're not alone," Gaines explains. Most callers are "thrilled and relieved" just to finally say it in the open. Gaines assures them that discovering pleasures and fulfilling them is healthy.
But Webster defines fetishism as a "pathological displacement" of erotic interest.
Fred Berlin, M.D., professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins and head of the National Institute for the Study, Prevention, and Treatment of Sexual Trauma, in Baltimore, sees this as "a very ticklish area." Foot fetishism is usually "quite compulsive." Those affected "usually can't get aroused without it" and are so narrowly focused that they "cannot live fully sexually." But as psychological disorders go, "it's not one of the biggies."
He advises psychotherapy, but it's not easy to discover what purpose the foot fetish serves. "Usually it goes back to childhood and something comforting involving feet."
"Even if I accepted that there's something pathological about foot fetishism, I don't believe it hurts anybody," says psychologist James Weinrich, Ph.D., an assistant adjunct professor at the University of California at San Diego. It's "premature" to call it one way or another, but his research focuses on two questions: If most fetishists relish body parts or objects exclusive to one sex (say, breasts or panties), why fantasize about feet, which are so similar between the sexes? And how come there are so many foot fetishists but no hand fetishists?
Don't ask us; we don't know either.
