On your feet

Research shows that foot fetishism is the most common of all the fetishes. In 2006, America Online accidentally released a database of their members’ searches and some rough analysis showed that foot fetish was the most commonly searched for fetish. Some other studies by the University of Bologna showed that the most commonly fetishized part of the body was the feet and toes at 47%. They also found that of items of clothing, 64% were into shoes, boots and footwear. This was also reported in the Independent Newspaper). It is also interesting to note that there was an exponential increase in foot and footwear related depictions in pornography after the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic which mirrors a boom in interest in feet during the syphilis epidemics of the 16th and 19th centuries in Europe. Why feet? Well, Neurologists think that sensations from the feet and the genitals both end up in the same part of the brain, called the somatosensory cortex - and in some people there is neural crosstalk between the two, so stimulation of the feet causes sexual pleasure. Sometimes the effect is so pronounced that some people experience orgasms in the foot!