A foot fetish can be anything from a sexual fixation on a person's shoes to feeling aroused at the thought of someone touching, sucking, or otherwise pleasuring your toes. But why feet? It's not like they're close to your genitals.
It turns out, there are a few reasons why foot fetishes are so common, and it all begins in the brain. A fetish is a need or desire for an object, body part, or activity for sexual excitement.
This could include a focus on specific objects, like high heels or rubber, or non-genital body parts, like feet, aka podophilia. Podophilia likely originates from a particular quirk in the area of your brain called the somatosensory nervous system. The somatosensory nervous system controls how the brain perceives sensations like texture and pain.
You know how you can tell if something is touching your left foot vs. That's thanks to how the somatosensory nervous system organizes and categorizes various neurons in your brain. In fact, there's a map of this categorized system called the somatosensory homunculus , shown below:. Now, what's important to note here is that the feet neurons are located right next to the genital ones. So, for some people, there could be a co-firing affect going on, so when the neurons in your genitals are triggered, the ones in your feet get fired up, too.
(mh=uPf5l6n2X6C7y12T)16.jpg "Sluts in Normal")
There may be relatively frequent associations between the two areas, perhaps due to slight neural misfirings, which can make feet more likely to become eroticized," says Niki Davis-Fainbloom , sex educator at Miss Bloom.
