Topics Sex

Question Is a foot fetish perverse?

Accepted:
August 16, 2012

Comments

Saying that something is perverse often means that it diverts some appetite in a direction that not only defeats its "natural" function, but does so in a way that's harmful or unhealthy or bad. Pedophilia is a plausible case, but what makes pedophilia bad is not that it diverts sexual attraction from reproduction (I'm talking about cases where the pedophile is attracted to prepubescent children) but that acting on the desire is not a good thing for the child. We can judge pedophilia to be bad whether or not we call it a perversion, though most people would likely use that word.

What about a foot fetish? So long as the fetishist isn't violating anyone's consent, it's hard to see that there's anything morally wrong with indulging the fetish. Might there be anything else wrong?

There might, but actual cases can't be evaluated apart from the details. Suppose that the person's fetish interferes with the sort of emotional intimacy that often goes with more familiar sexual relationships. That might be unfortunate, but it doesn't seem inevitable, and obviously a lot depends on the people involved. To this we can add: whether someone has "normal" sexual urges and whether they're capable of emotional intimacy are two very different questions.

There is a familiar view that looks at all this quite differently. It's most familiar from Roman Catholic teaching, but it's found elsewhere as well. On this view, all sexual acts must be "open to the possibility of procreation," in the oft-used phrase. Sexual desire that doesn't meet this standard is "disordered," as some Vatican documents put it, and perhaps that's another way of saying "perverse." This point of view condemns: masturbation, fellatio, cunnilingus, homosexual acts; artificial birth control, not to mention various more exotic activities. It condemns them all for the same reason, and would certainly condemn indulging a foot fetish, but so what?

This is a big topic, so I will restrict myself to two comments. The first is that the point of view I've just described can only be defended by top-down appeal to highly contentious premises – premises that many religious believers don't accept, let alone non-believers. The second is that if something so evidently harmless and widespread as masturbation is "wrong," the view that entails this entails something so implausible that its credibility is severely compromised.

But our original topic was foot fetishes. What have we learned about that matter?

One thing is that apart from coercion or abuse, there's not any interesting moral issue about foot fetishes or various other "fetishes." (We could add: ordinary people are turned on by a surprising variety of things.) A related one is that at least one familiar argument to the contrary is dubious to say the least. Yet another is that while issues of psycho-sexual well-being might come up about some cases of foot fetishes, we can't just make up our facts, and facile generalizations get us nowhere. But perhaps the bottom line is this: the word "perversion" doesn't really help us here. It's a word whose emotional wallop far exceeds its analytical precision.

Question Is a foot fetish perverse? Accepted:August 16, 2012

Question Is a foot fetish perverse?

Accepted:
August 16, 2012