Adam Zmith’s Solemates: A History of Our Fetish for Feet is a prismatic look at connection, pleasure, and self-affirmation. It’s educational in its anthropology and emotional in its anecdotes, proving that what’s commonly considered to be a perverted niche interest can actually be a wide-ranging, innocuous one.
From the very introduction there is tender phrasing that promotes an expansive outlook: ‘I am promiscuous because I am curious.’ As Solemates progresses and we follow the contours of Zmith’s intellectual and physical curiosity, any conservative suspicions the reader has are quickly disarmed. Warmly, Zmith looks towards a collective unburdening. With nuanced questions and research, the great achievement of this book is its elegant, cogent, and funny direct address of societal shame projected upon the foot fetishist. Zmith communicates just how prevalent feet adoration is: history abounds with pedi-exalters.
Zmith charts a timeline that attests to a centuriesenduring focus on the foot and its connoisseurs. As a point of community, foot fetishism preserved and satisfied alternative vehicles for connection during times of STI-related ill health, such as gonorrhoea outbreaks in the medieval period and the 1980s AIDS epidemic. It was a focus of 3rd century philosophers’ love letters, of 16th and 17th century art, of 19th century literature. Caravaggio honed in on Christ’s feet; Thomas Hardy felt they offered revelatory insight into one’s personality and morals; Fyodor Dostoevsky projected romance onto them. See even the contortions of modern couture: fashion has a psychosexual, billiondollar hang-up with feet via the high heel (just ask Christian Louboutin and Jimmy Choo).
But despite such ubiquity of liberated references, a stigma remains. Zmith traces the foot lover’s modern shame back to the dismissive acknowledgement from intellectuals, starting in the Victorian period. Solely informed by heteronormative conventions and their white, imperialist power, they disregarded all that was beyond those bounds as unchecked deviance, not befitting the healthy, well-adjusted (read: straight) person.
From the limited illumination of German psychiatrist Krafft-Ebing in establishing sexual diversity, to psychoanalyst Freud’s reductive intervention, to the American Psychiatric Association formalising all fetish as a pathology in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the big daddy of all mental health textbooks), the stereotypes and rigid definitions were made from incomplete, surprisingly unscientific understandings.
Zmith unpacks the fallout from the work of these ‘beard strokers’ – the modern foot lover absorbed a distorted sense of original sin by way of their demonising generalisations (as they still proliferate in media to this day). But he honours the artists, performers, sex workers, and everyday enthusiasts doing innovative and playful footwork in both private and public spheres in the name of celebration. Not only are they not hurting anybody, they are actively providing a whole lot of joy.
Solemates collects the jetsam of institutional and cultural bias. As a preconception-shattering exploration, Zmith dignifies desire and locates freedom.
Solemates is out now, published by 404 Ink. Available here.
