Worship My Feet, Bro: The Hyper-Masculine World of #JockFeet

King Alpha Lad, a straight British “muscle alpha,” sits spread-legged on the chair and flips off the camera. Muscles bulging out of his tight black tank top and gym shorts, he shoves the soft, waxy soles of his feet into the frame, taunting viewers with the caption, “You were born to serve under the feet of a superior master and worship my alpha physique and soles!”

Elsewhere on his Twitter page, he lifts weights, takes gym selfies and slides his “big sweaty moist stinky gym feet” out of his well-worn athletic shoes into the light where they may be worshipped and admired by mostly gay men via the hashtag #jockfeet.

In general, #jockfeet videos feature muscular, brooding and dominant alpha jocks who taunt the camera with their feet and demand monetary tribute from their fans. Sometimes they come off as straight — sometimes, they don’t — but either way, there’s almost always an aspect of humiliation and worship. In some videos, jocks will tease their submissives or viewers with lines like, “Guys like me don’t deserve to pay for shit. That’s why I have scumbags like you.” In others, they’ll make them sniff their dirty, stinky socks or clean their sweaty feet with their tongues.

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Meanwhile, Twitter accounts like @Str8JockFeet offer foot massage videos for the more vanilla crowd, while @GiantJockFeet appears to specialize in photos and videos of “hot jocks taunting little people” with their massive stompers. OnlyFans is home to countless #jockfeet accounts, but Reddit and Pinterest are full of pages like these too, all of which pay homage to the smelly, shapely feet of jocks and the apparent dominance they convey.

Lance Hart is one of the biggest names in fetish content, and #jockfeet are a common theme in his gay fare. An indie porn performer who went from a running a small clip store to building Pervout.com — a budding empire of fetish sites that often feature intersecting themes of BDSM, roleplay and feet — he tells me #jockfeet videos are a popular, lucrative staple. “One day, about seven years ago, completely out of the blue, someone asked me if they could pay me for pictures of my feet,” he says. “I didn’t see that coming. I honestly didn’t think I had good feet in general. I’ve probably made a quarter-million dollars since then off my feet.”

Why the big bucks?

Well to start, there’s the pedestrian reason — a lot of people fetishize feet. A 2006 study found that foot fetishes are the most common sexual fetish, and that 47 percent of body-part fetishes center around feet and toes. The foot content people like to see is pretty similar, too. “Stinky feet content [where the odor of the feet is centered in the dialogue and action] sells better,” Hart explains. “Foot-jobs are great. About half [of fans] like some kind of domination — for example, make him smell my feet — but the other half just want to see feet. Most interact in a way that seems like them being super into feet is very normal. Like it would be weird if they didn’t obsess about male feet.”

“I’m a HUGE soles guy,” says Casey Cooper, who’s been creating content for two years now, first on the male foot lover’s site MyFriendsFeet and now for himself on OnlyFans. “A lot of my angles and pics revolve around the soles of the foot, because that’s the part of the feet that attracts me the most. Nice, smooth, clean soles on a huge muscular man is what gets me.”

There are lots of theories around what triggers foot fetishes, and they all seem equally valid. The fetish tends to emerge early in life and may have something to do with anything from the fact that feet are always covered to the idea that, as children, we crawl around on the ground and get used to seeing the approaching feet of our parents as a sign of comfort and maybe that gets tucked away in our brain somewhere.

There’s also the very science-y notion that says that our brains map out our bodies by how close appendages are to each other. For example, our fingers are close together and on our hands, and so, those nerve signals hit at the same place in the brain. This theory comes from Vilayanur Ramachandran, and a study he conducted on phantom limb syndrome. In one of his experiments, many people who had lost a foot also reported that they could experience sexual pleasure from thinking about their missing foot.

If he’s right about brain mapping, it would make sense why: In the womb, since our feet are tucked up near our genitals, the brain maps out the nerves of the feet and the genitals in the same centers in our brain. So, then, when we see feet — or our feet are touched —  it may trigger an arousal response in our genitals.

Feet are powerful erogenous zones, too. As anyone who’s had a foot massage can attest, a strong knuckle in the right place on the ball of your foot can make your knees buckle. They’re both the base of the body and the filthiest part of us. Many cultures have taboos around putting your feet next to someone’s head, and yet, the baring of feet is also a sign of intimacy.

A foot fetish definitely has a submissive element to it. A certain “Mary” poured oil over Jesus’ feet and then used her hair to wipe them clean in the Bible. And when a foot fetish is combined with a submissive disposition, the pleasure of feet may not be associated with physical pleasure at all, but the emotional pleasure response of doing the “dirty work” of worshiping the lowest part of the body.

But while foot fetishes have long been a staple of the heterosexual diet (cue the joke about a man with Flintstone dick — you need to use your feet to make it run), they’re rarely seen in the context of a female athlete — not a lot of cheerleaders, joggers or basketball players make men smell their feet (at least not on camera). So, then, how does the #jock trope fit into the gay male foot fetish?

”Generally, hot athletic bodies are always a win,” says Hart. “Adding a jock attitude to the scene helps win over a certain portion of the market.”

Cooper offers his experience as a foot worshipper for a more visceral answer. “I love worshiping hot muscular guys with hot feet!” he says. “There’s something about worshiping a huge, muscular jock that really gets me going. For me, knowing how hard they work in the gym to perfect their bodies is a huge turn-on. They deserve to be serviced and relaxed because of how hard they work; so when they have nice feet to go along with those muscles, it fuels my foot fetish because I want to be the one to help them relax, service their feet and make them feel like kings!”

By the same token, “alpha men” — like jocks — turn him on because they love the worship he wants to give. “Knowing that they get just as excited about getting worshiped as I get when doing the worshiping, I can’t describe the feeling… it’s euphoric,” he says.

The alpha male is revered (at least his physique) in most gay porn and straight porn. He’s the height of masculinity and power, but most of our sexuality is really solidified in our childhood and early teen years, so it makes sense that the jock of our high school days would still represent the apex of masculinity.

But he also represents another kind of erotic tension that’s exciting — i.e., I noticed a lot of #jockfeet content creators who were marketing to gay men would tag themselves as #straight. To that end, I asked author and podcaster Conner Habib what the connection might be. “Homoerotic encounters that don’t consummate,” he suggests, explaining that the idea of straight men repressing their desires through jockhood mirrors the suffering closeted gay men go through — they both want something that’s not “okay” to have, and that taboo can be achingly hot. As for gay men’s general fascination with feet, he suspects it has something to do with seeing feet under the shower stall wall in the locker room.

This tension between the masculine ideal and the danger of lusting after it or falling short of it is apparent when I talk to Cooper. “I also have a tickling fetish that I incorporate into my work as well,” he tells me. “Tickling big muscular jocks’ feet is a huge turn-on. The best way to describe it is a big strong alpha man can kick my ass in a regular scenario, but tying him down and tickling him, making him powerless and giving me the power and control — that’s what turns me on.”

For me, all of this conjures a link between the proliferation of teen movies through the 1980s to now, where the jock is a stock character who represents both the oaf and the raw power of the hormonal alpha male. For many gay men I’ve known, these movies offered an erotic subtext for those who were still closeted. There’s an entire documentary dedicated to Nightmare on Elm Street 2, and how the homoerotic elements of the plot — which centered around a high school gym coach who was also engaging in BDSM and possibly queer activities — ruined the career of the lead actor Mark Patton. The theme of the movie was one of body horror — a teen boy realizing that he’s gay — and it’s tied directly to the jock trope.

It’s not all psychodrama, though. A lot of it is just the appeal of returning to youth, of worship and celebration of the male form at its peak and the idea that we can control something that threatens us. As it turns out, you can bring a powerful man to his knees and render him helpless by showing him some tenderness and touching his feet — you just have to put your best foot forward.

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Sovereign Syre

Sovereign Syre is a writer, comedian, adult performer, internationally published poet (not a joke) and prolific podcaster (totally a joke). She is currently the co-host of the historical podcast ILL REPUTE! documenting the lives of controversial women along side Siouxsie Q. James, and the co-writer of digital shorts on Unholy Bible Study.