A man that fancies women with blond hair may announce such almost anywhere. Established scientists frequently work thinly veiled references to the proverbial sexiness of blondes into their talks, to loosen them up, to render the seminar or lecture personal and memorable. On the other hand, I have never seen anybody but Quentin Tarantino put their foot fetish into their work; certainly I do not know of any politician or scientist “putting their or others’ feet in their mouth” this way.

Being into blondes is accepted – it makes you “one of the blokes”, a good pal. If you are into high heels however, things become immediately more icky, kinky, even pervert to some. This is strange when considering the demographics, since foot fetishism is spread widely and advertisers seem to know this well. How can we understand all this? I will try to clarify the issues via obviating the naturalness of such sexual orientations from an evolutionary perspective, but most of you will not like it, especially not if you are into blondes. Since I like to provoke in order to open eyes, lets play the Gaga of science (if that is what this means).

Hair colored blond, her feet jammed into sado-maso heels: optimizing attractiveness from head to toes – yes I put this here to get the most clicks ever – that’s what the whole title is about - mhuahahahaha!

Let me give you a straight forward “derivation” of foot fetishism in sex, sorry, six easy steps, some following from each other, but mostly working in parallel (after that I will relate it to blond issues):

1) When a woman reaches sexual maturity during puberty, her legs grow quite fast. Thus, long legs are one of the many aspects that almost universally attract men. Long legs signal the onset of childbearing age.

2) Short skirts, black pantyhose, and especially high heels are all there to optically lengthen the legs. Stiletto heels, long legs, femininity, sex, these are strongly associated for all of us who have been brought up with television and suchlike media.

3) Now add a little more male/female biology, one being able to perform reproductively several times a day, the other having to at least spend nine months and partially her own health. Obviously, male primates can spread their sperm more effectively by inseminating many easy targets instead of chasing around hard to get alpha females just to be rejected. Especially for males, sex is aggression. Testosterone makes us aggressive. Rape fantasies are very common among men, even if they do not admit it. High heels make you walk in a way – well – how can I say this – they say it stresses or “pronounces” your hips and what not, but recent results indicate that this is not quite effective as long as the males do not directly see the shoes, so lets be serious here: High heels impair and it simply looks easier to chase down – the male brain understands this regardless of whether you know or agree. The shoes render the female more vulnerable, an easy and safe target to mate.

4) I make this another separate item, as it is still more human biology rather than cultural: Sex always naturally (to humans) implies hierarchy, domination and submission – the old hair pulling always works (soft, dude, softly I say!). One party forces the other, and I do not care about how much you are in denial about any of this, or how much you have it personally hidden under a pile of make believe like the masochist who obeys his dominatrix.

4.5 or 3 again? Must be six in total or it needs changing the lame joke above) Again, these numbered items overlap a lot: she is already half conquered, slowed down by her gait in those shoes and all tied down by her “strappy heels”. We males naturally understand strappy heels, shackles, chokers; ankle chains are widely regarded as sexy. Straps and tying down and all this is one associative bundle.

Quentin Tarantino having dessert.

5) Now add more human culture: Sex associates with dirty, embarrassing, and forbidden, and as we just saw, aggression and establishing hierarchical positions. This is where the focus on long legs and high heel shoes can quickly turn into one of the many forms of pure foot fetish, nylon socks fetish, and so on. Feet and shoes are down there; they are usually dirty, embarrassing
and forbidden. In Thailand, you go to jail for depicting the King with a foot near him. Having somebody’s boot above your head is universally understood as your submission. Now you could object that it would be natural only if the male had the upper hand. But here comes the weirdness of human culture into play: Submission is especially embarrassing to us males. Having a shoe in your face is as embarrassing as being caught having any sort of sex, be it masturbating. It is a forbidden, dirty little fruit. Dirty feeling, embarrassment, dominance/submission, sex; these are strongly associated. A foot or shoe fetish is basically the ideal mix.

6) Feet are known to smell, not just because they are dirty, although this is of course all mixed up in our irrational human minds, so the smell and the “dirty deed” still work in synergy. Feet have the same apocrine sweat glands that genitalia have. For some reason, the feet’s sweat glands produce sexually attractive smells (pheromones). Perhaps this evolved in order to track females when humans were rare – a wild guess this, I admit, I have also no idea about whether all primates show this feature. Anyway, a male smelling a female’s shoes and getting excited is a perfectly understandable, natural thing.

BTW, FYI: Embarrassment drives a fetish into specialization; this holds the same also for females (starting with spreading “embarrassingly” wide during foreplay for example). What one gets used to over time is replaced by yet still more embarrassing related objects (ankles, soles, toes, socks, shoes) and practices (caressing, sniffing, licking, being pressed down by, being penetrated by, being forced to talk about it, …) in all sorts of combinations. So the fetish usually explores and very strange fetishes develop; with regards to foot fetishism there are for instance dangling, pedal pumping, and crushing (look them up on the net but better not while at work).

So let us summarize: However the details maybe, fancying smelly high heel shoes naturally derives from the fact that sexually mature (!) females correlate with long legs and all that. So, whatever you may blame them kinky footsy lovers for, pedophilia it is certainly not.

And this brings us to blondes. Fancying blonde hair - does that have an equally natural derivation? Well, it has, but sadly it is involving only the most negative aspect of all of the above, and that is the fact that males are aggressive and can spread their sperm more easily with easy targets. Blond hair associates with babies; nobody is more vulnerable than defenseless babies. This has been put in politically more correct formulations, like that babies correlate with cuteness and cuteness correlates with easy target, but babies are of course not just cute for no reason. Our perceiving cuteness, it being a quale at all, has evolved to protect our offspring. However they spin it, one thing is obvious: It correlates directly with sexually immature humans!

The blond or the smelly end? Quentin in “Inglorious Basterds” can’t be bothered to attend to the immature blond end of the deal and goes straight for the side with matured Camembert flavor.

I know you will mostly object to this, but I, a sober mind drunk on science, will nevertheless put it in these sharp and provoking terms, because science can emancipate, and today I would like to let it help emancipating the usually still as pervert child molesters stigmatized foot/shoe/leg/pantyhose/toes whatever fetishists: If anybody here relates to pedophilia, it is not them, as their preference is for mature females, even emancipated ones “wearing the boots”. It is those who like blonde hair that desire immature aspects, and who are, if we want to sink to this level of discourse at all, to be thrown together into one pot with pedophilia first.

(Disclaimer: This article is designed to provoke thinking and discussing about a taboo topic, which is generally greatly facilitated by a sober, scientific perspective. In the absence of hard evidence, “Just-so stories” inspired by our incomplete knowledge of evolution, which at times has gone rampant in the context of evolutionary psychology, should never be taken as more than inspired hypotheses. I nowhere claim that my thoughts, which admittedly are here about an issue that involves fields outside of my expertise if the latter is narrowly defined, can substitute for proper research, which might or might not, for instance, result in that from a culturally accepted sexual norm more deviant persons may in general statistically correlate with any particular form of norm violation, the latter being for example pedophilia. Any form of rape is a grave topic, so I like this disclaimer to be taken seriously.)