[“The Social Function Performed By Establishing What Is Clean And What Is Dirty Has Everything To Do

[“The social function performed by establishing what is clean and what is dirty has everything to do with shame and power; if people believed that while they are responsible for their actions, their feelings and fantasies are nothing to be ashamed of, they would be more difficult to control. It benefits the system of white supremacy for society to have a shared belief of what kind of person is civilized by their nature. It benefits the system of the patriarchy for society to have a shared belief of which ideas are pure and which feelings are perverted. It benefits the system of cis-heteronormativity for society to have a shared belief of what bodies make appropriate families, and what those families shouldn’t be doing in both public and private spaces. And all of these beliefs are perpetuated through the bluntest tools of repression, oppression, and policing, along with the threat of violence and ostracism as punishment for transgressing.

The entire premise of this book is predicated on the why. But ultimately, the answer to anything you could place in the That space of Why Are People Into That? is: Why not? This is the dialectic of desire: it’s worth asking and investigating why people are into that, and, at the same time, it doesn’t matter why people are into that. You don’t owe anyone an explanation of why you’re into that. However, on a very practical level, you can fight the ideas, internal and external, that tell you what you like makes you sick by exploring and discussing and experimenting with your why. Your why might help you to get what you want.

Sex is so overwhelming that we often grasp for prescriptive unyielding advice, but the stakes of pleasure are too high for us to allow ourselves to be fooled by reductivism. Desire, if you’ll forgive me, is slippery. It’s squishy. Like toes pressed against glass, it doesn’t hold a form. We should never expect that it should.

You might like feet because of being bullied as a child or because of a low-to-the-ground glimpse you caught of something that was supposed to be adult and private. You might have had a surge of hormones watching a sexy celebrity’s toes when you were sneaking a peek at an R-rated movie. You might like to torture feet, or huff them, or use them to put someone in their place. You might get off adorning them in expensive spa treatments and designer stilettos or squashing them into mud. You might emphasize their femininity, or masculinity, or androgyny. You might love them because they’re disgusting, because they’re beautiful, because you can use them to control, because they’re aspirational, because they’re what you were denied or what you were permitted. Your fear of being judged for being a foot perv may have calcified into an entire identity. Whatever the reason, if we think of the fetishist as a connoisseur driven to connect with other connoisseurs, we are better set up to explore the why while indulging in pleasures of our own and remaining open to the mysteries of desire. Understanding the fetishist as a tastemaker makes us more empathetic to lovers whose taste differs from our own. This can help us to compassionately see sex in everything, and to see everything in sex.”]

tina horn, from why are people into that? a cultural investigation of kink, 2024