THE END OF THE YEAR brings evaluations and ratings in many arenas, including social media: Instagram’s “Recap,” the much-anticipated “Spotify Wrapped,” and of course “Grindr Unwrapped,” a chart showing the state of at least a certain segment of the queer community. As a young Italian gay guy, I always look for what my compatriots are interested in. In 2024, for the second time in a row (the feet statistic was only introduced in 2023), Italy topped the list for foot fetishists. The nation of marble Adonises and Renaissance grandeur is also the capital of #feet.
This isn’t just about Grindr stats. It speaks to something deeper—something that may be wired into the DNA of Western visual culture. Feet aren’t just a fetish category. They’re the foundation of how we see, desire, and structure the male body. They’re the most subtly eroticized feature in art history and visual culture, from Greek statuary to high fashion, from the camera angles in porn to social media thirst traps.
Why do feet carry such a fetishistic weight? Tracing how this works, and how foot-power has long been tied to visual hedonism, may help untangle the kink from its taboo. To answer that, we need to go back to the origins of the male body as an object of desire, sculpted in stone long before it was captured on camera. From the pedestal onward, feet teach the eye what seduction and arousal feel like: weight, balance, contact, the tantalizing line between exposure and concealment. And this is a lesson that survives in every medium.
Feet as Visual Anchors
From the beginning of Western visual culture, feet have played a central role in anchoring the male body within space and desire. Look at The Laocoön Group (c. 40–30 BCE). The twisted agony of the Trojan priest and his sons is famous for its contorted expressions, but the true weight of the sculpture lies elsewhere: the feet. Their feet are planted in a way that grounds the entire movement, making them a critical tension point. Their suffering is all in the upper body, but their feet hold, resist, and bear the weight. Seen closely, their marble toes seem almost bruised by strain; a big toe lifts slightly as if searching for purchase, the Achilles tendon taut like a drawn bowstring. The serpents are spectacular, but the drama is clinched where sole meets plinth—the choreography of pressure and letting go that makes the body believable.
Or take Polykleitos’ Doryphoros (original bronze, now lost, ca. 440 BCE), the most famous example of contrapposto. The figure’s weight shifts onto one foot, setting off a chain reaction of perfect tension up his body. His sculpted musculature is hypnotic, but where does the gaze start? The stance, the foundation, the way his body negotiates balance through his feet. The foot is not a leftover extremity; it’s the hinge of grace.
Nowhere is this sense of the foot as a visual synecdoche for the power of the body clearer than in the Barberini Faun (ca. 220 BCE), perhaps the most explicitly sensual of all classical statues. Here a satyr lounges, legs spread, the entire body an invitation. His pose is relaxed, almost post-coital, yet his feet—splayed, flexed, visibly tensed—subtly direct the eye upward. He isn’t just resting; he’s exhibiting. His entire body is sculpted for pleasure, and his feet are the first thing that catches your eye. They are neither passive nor rigid—they suggest movement, readiness, presence.
A Renaissance marble that draws on this Classical tradition is the David (1501–1504). We all recognize the poised intensity of Michelangelo’s masterpiece, his furrowed brow, his impending action. But his feet are where his body feels real. They are oversized, veined, textured: Unlike the smooth idealization of his torso, his feet are alive. They root him in physicality. They hold that perfect tension of youth and vitality, of a body about to move. Michelangelo’s chisel carves a cartography of veins across the dorsum; nails carry a faint, almost crescent shine; the big toe presses forward as if testing the future—almost crashing us or holding us in place, as Michelangelo precisely studied it to be seen from below. Before sling and stone, before gaze and glory, there is contact.
Marble, unlike skin, cannot blush or get warm, so sculptors found ways of eroticizing it through tension and touchpoints. Classical feet are not simply there to keep heroes upright; they conduct the sculpture’s electricity into the viewer. They’re not just anatomical necessities; they’re compositional tools—deeply erotic ones.
The Gay Gaze
Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida (1980), introduced the concept of the punctum: that unexpected detail in an image that involuntarily arrests the gaze—the thing that hooks you. Feet function as one of the strongest punctum points in art, photography, and film. They blend sensory intimacy with visual power. Positioned at the bottom of the frame, subtly arched or flexed, guiding your gaze up the body, feet direct our eye. This is not incidental. It is visual seduction. Feet are puncta because they arrive as surplus, extras, and then eat the frame from within.
If Barthes names the sting, Leo Bersani in The Freudian Body (1990) explains the charge: Sexuality loosens the self, and the fetish, this “partial object,” condenses intensity at the edges where control yields to relation. Put simply: Barthes gives the hook, Bersani, the voltage, defining the practice of attention that relocates intimacy to ankles, arches, heels. Bersani, read alongside Freud’s theory of the fetish object, is consistent in exploring the idea of something always present yet hidden in plain sight, charged with desire precisely because it’s on the edge of exposure, between visibility and the impossibility of being seen—or the forced concealment, almost an imprisonment, of the shoe.
Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (in 1975’s Screen journal) famously defined the male gaze—the way women’s bodies are broken down into fragments, eroticized for the straight male viewer. Director Quentin Tarantino, notorious for his foot obsession, perfectly exemplifies this: his shots fragment the female body, reducing it to fetishized parts. But queer desire plays by different rules. So, what happens when the gaze shifts? Enter the male gayze.
In queer desire, fragmentation isn’t about passive objectification—it’s about fixation, about reverence. Instead of centering penetration or dominant masculinity, the male gayze lingers on unexpected focal points: feet, hands, necks. It finds pleasure in the body’s edges, in what is visible but not always noticed. It’s almost a devotional kink: an ethics of attention in which the act is to dwell, to tend, to aspire. The kiss on the heel, the unlacing, the tying back up: a charged and desecrating ritual, not residue. If nakedness is one kind of erotica, opacity is another. Too much light bleaches desire; too little kills it. The sweet spot is half-seen, half-felt—the tension between underexposure and overexposure as the hottest foreplay.
Fashion designer Tom Ford’s advertising campaigns are a great example. A flexed foot in a high-fashion ad can carry as much erotic weight as a fully nude body because the male gayze is about æsthetic pleasure—hunger, obsession, control. Going further, the sock can be seen as a curtain, and curtains build theaters. What looks like a minor accessory becomes so significant to many: how its fabric holds humidity, retains salt, records pressure. A sock can then be an index of where the body has been and whom it has touched.
In queer photographic scenes, whether domestic or staged, the sock works less as accessory than as interface: It translates touch into image. Many of Wolfgang Tillmans’ most beautiful shots make this legible as intimacy studies. Some of these were recently displayed in his solo exhibition at Centre Pompidou, defying the most “vanilla” viewer with a desecrating purity. In these large images, socks and insteps read like weather reports of intimacy—creases, humidity, elastic burns. They isolate heels, ankles, even knees in shallow domestic space—limbs cut from context yet still connected by light, by ribbed cotton. The picture hums with withheld weight, a weather map of bodies that just exited or are about to exit the scene. Tillmans’ point is neither the garment nor his subject but the microclimate of touch it remembers.
Johnny Abbate’s Stolen Socks series (figure at right) refuses to let memory stay abstract. The works pair Polaroid images shot from the photographer’s vantage point—his socked feet foregrounding a nude standing at the bed’s edge—with the actual socks worn by the model in the photograph sealed into the same frame. The pieces of cloth function then as a relic, something that has touched the icon and serves as its replacement—its presence in absence. It’s not just “proof of contact,” it’s an ethics of transmission. It shows how desire circulates from body to cloth to image (simulacra) to viewer. The fetish object isn’t a substitute; it’s a carrier.
As Jean Baudrillard would argue, what circulates here is not representation but simulation—a sign that no longer refers to the original body, only to other signs of touch and proximity. The relic doesn’t recall an absent subject; it generates its own presence, an erotic hyperreal in which the aura is produced through iteration. The photograph and the sock are not copies but simulacra that feed each other, performing what Baudrillard called “the ecstatic proliferation of the image.” Queer photography history backs it further: Peter Hujar’s tactile plasticity, Robert Mapplethorpe’s tough rigidness, Bob Mizer’s beach-body tableaux. Even when feet aren’t the subject, they keep hijacking the scene: a heel digging into sand, a flexed arch redirecting the eye upward, an ankle that quietly governs the pose.
Feet in Contemporary Media
In the digital era, this fascination has intensified. Fast-forward from classical sculpture to the Grindr grid, and feet remain one of the most explicitly fetishized body parts. Social media and the amateur porn site OnlyFans have turned foot fetishism into a curated digital art form worth billions. The porn industry has long relied on the staging of feet—angles, lighting, close-ups. The flex of a sole, the point of a toe, the tension of an ankle, especially how they twirl and contract during the orgasm shot, also referred to as the money shot. And let’s not forget the images of accused killer Luigi Mangione’s moccasin-inspired loafers, his bare ankles exposed above the shoes, that circulated all over X and TikTok.
Such platforms didn’t invent the fetish, of course, but they’ve have taken advantage of us foot freaks by industrializing it. Even celebrities know it—and play with it. Ricky Martin has not hidden his use, both as viewer and viewed, of the foot-fetish site wikiFeet, archive and encyclopedia of VIP’s soles. FeetFinder helps connect supply with demand in the creator industry.
Generative artificial intelligence has recently flooded timelines with feet—sometimes as the butt of a joke (the program included too many toes!), increasingly as erotica. The real story here isn’t “good versus bad rendering,” it’s how AI operationalizes the fetish. Make the foot credible and the whole body becomes believable. In Baudrillard’s terms, AI images can be read as third-order simulacra—circulating signs with no privileged original. It’s kink 4.0: a loop of search, sight, arousal, rating, refinement. The platform doesn’t just host the kink; it trains it. Under that regime, the sock’s crease pattern is data; the damp outline on tile is metadata; the “almost-step” is a reusable prompt. The partial object is now programmable.
As we have seen, the arc is continuous. Classical sculpture staged the foot as the body’s anchor. Photography showed that the foot could steal the scene through exposure control. Online platforms standardized that theft into genres. AI feeds it back as a set of adjustable sliders. Same device, new interfaces. The erotic power of feet is not an eccentric detour; it’s the spine of an image culture that has always asked us to finish the picture with our bodies.
Feet have never really been “just feet”—they’ve always carried more weight than we’ve acknowledged. They exist between movement and stillness, exposure and concealment, reality and fetish. They are our roots, they move us. From pedestal to platform, from marble grain to pixel noise, the image plugs in at the foot—and so do we. So let a part stand for the whole and let pleasure stop asking for permission from identity. That’s the queerest flex: building an erotic world on what holds us up.
Sergio Interdonato is a Milan-based freelance writer, editor, and curator. As an artistic director, he manages press relations for contemporary art projects and exhibitions.
