Does a Foot Fetish Say Anything About Gender or Sexual Orientation?

01 · Sexuality and Identity

Introduction

No, not automatically. A foot fetish describes what your arousal responds to particularly strongly. Whom you love, how you experience yourself as a man or woman, and who you are as a person are separate matters. Still, many people ask exactly these questions, and I can well understand why.

02 · Sexuality and Identity

When a Preference Becomes a Question of Identity

Anyone who notices that feet or shoes strongly arouse them can quickly begin to brood. Am I less masculine if I want to kiss a woman’s feet? What does it mean if a man suddenly appears in my fantasies? And why does all this feel as though it affects me at my core?

A fetish is often there very early and accompanies a person throughout life. No wonder many equate it with their very being. Yet this is precisely where a mistake in thinking begins, one that creates a great deal of unnecessary pressure.

03 · Sexuality and Identity

Four Levels That Should Be Kept Separate

Sex research distinguishes very precisely between several levels: an interest in a particular stimulus, the fantasies associated with it, actual behaviour, and the way someone understands themselves. These levels are related, but they are not the same. Studies of the concordance between interests and behaviour also show that the two need not coincide. Finding feet arousing says nothing yet about one’s orientation or gender.

In my book, I describe identity as something with many layers: personality, values, relationships, experiences, roles. Sexuality is one of them, an important one, but not the only one. A fetish belongs to a person’s sexual structure. It explains how arousal works. It does not explain who one is.

This becomes clear when one asks what remains if sexuality temporarily takes up less space, for instance because of illness, age, or a relationship crisis. Anyone who defines themselves solely through their fetish experiences this as an identity crisis. Anyone who understands it as part of a greater whole remains able to act.

04 · Sexuality and Identity

Foot Fetishism Exists in Every Orientation

I write primarily from the perspective of heterosexual men because that is my experience. Foot and shoe fetishes, however, play at least as great a role in homosexual contexts, sometimes with cultural expressions all their own. As early as the 1990s, a research group around sociologist Martin Weinberg surveyed 262 members of an organisation for homosexual and bisexual men with a foot fetish. Many of them lived out their preference in committed relationships.

I have seen this myself as well. For an experiment, I ran an Instagram profile for two years as a heterosexual man with a boot fetish. Of around 1,600 actual followers, about 1,500 were men, most of them homosexual. The subject connects people of very different orientations. It does not assign anyone a fixed one. Women, too, can have a foot or shoe fetish, according to everything I know and have experienced, but clearly much less often than men. That is the subject of a separate article.

05 · Sexuality and Identity

And What If the Fantasy Does Not Match the Orientation?

Some men with a foot fetish occasionally find a dominant man in their fantasies as well, even though in life they desire only women. This can be unsettling. But a fantasy is not a commitment. It can be play, curiosity, or the appeal of a particular power dynamic. When I advise a man to get to know his fetish well, this includes the honest question about such fantasies, entirely without judgement.

What a fantasy says about your orientation is something only you can find out. There is no time limit and no test for this. And it is also perfectly all right if the answer is: nothing at all.

06 · Sexuality and Identity

Submission Is Not Weakness

In my experience, a foot fetish is often connected with the interplay of dominance and submission. This unsettles some men further. Is it unmanly to lie at a woman’s feet?

I lived this side of myself for decades and later discovered my dominant side as well. What I learned in the process is this: submission in erotic play and strength in everyday life do not exclude one another. My wife is a strong, self-confident woman in everyday life and nevertheless did not want to take the lead permanently in sexual matters. The same applies to men in reverse. What happens in the bedroom is not a judgement on your character.

07 · Sexuality and Identity

What Remains

Your fetish explains what arouses you. It does not explain whom you love, how masculine or feminine you are, or what kind of person you are. Anyone who makes this distinction for themselves gains a remarkable freedom. The question “What am I?” is then replaced by a much more helpful one: “How do I deal with it?”