Name: George R.
Age: 50
From: Illinois
Fetish: Pedal Pushing
When did you first realize that seeing a woman’s foot on a car pedal turned you on?
When I was a kid. I remember my mom driving barefoot sometimes. When I was in the backseat, I would lean in to get a better view of her feet.
What about it turned you on?
There’s something about how the foot operates the vehicle with all that control and motion. It always triggers something in me. Other car-specific scenarios also really turn me on.
Like what?
I like the idea of a woman’s car not starting. There was a scene in The Fog with Jamie Lee Curtis, who was very popular when the movie came out in 1980, where she was on an island in an old pickup that was stuck in the sand. I remember getting excited about that.
That doesn’t happen as much today with new cars. But in older cars like the pickup in the movie, the carburetor wouldn’t always start right away. Drivers would have to push on them. It’s so odd, but seeing or thinking about this scenario would make me feel completely nuts. I also wondered if I was completely nuts.
When did those thoughts start — that you might not be “normal”?
When I got into high school and people became more sexual. Guys would be like, “Look at the boobs on that girl!” I would think, “I’d rather see her drive a car.” Or, “I’d rather take her out on a road and have her drive her car until it got stuck.”
Did you ever tell any of your friends or girlfriends?
Never. I just thought about it a lot. I couldn’t help how much I liked it. Then one night, on the Fourth of July, my friends and I parked and walked over to a friend’s party. All of a sudden, a car drove by and got stuck in the mud.
A girl was driving the car, and the whole scene was breathtaking. A wave of excitement came over me. I didn’t even get to see her foot on the pedal, but it was still so exciting to me. I remember stopping for a moment and wondering what kind of excuse I could make to try to stay there. But I couldn’t think of anything, so I just continued to walk with my friends. Even 32 years later, I get excited whenever I think about this memory.
Yet you still never talked to your friends about your reaction?
No. But I did keep thinking to myself, Somebody else has to have this fetish, too. In the late 1990s, I would buy a popular foot fetish magazine called Leg Show. They published a couple letters from people who described something similar.
Then in 1998, I got the internet. I would go on a work computer that was kept in the back and look up foot and pedal-pushing sites. I know that at least one person found out and looked at me strange. I just thought, “Oh well.” A year later, I got my first home computer. That’s when I found the thousands of other people who have the same triggers as me.
Are you open about your pedal-pusher fetish now?
I don’t volunteer it, but I don’t necessarily hide it either. If you were to look through my likes on Facebook, it’s in there. I have at least a dozen, maybe two dozen, likes that are related to it. I also have friends on Facebook with stuff about the fetish in their names. So if somebody were to put two-and-two together, they could determine what I like.
What kind of names are you talking about?
I’m friends with women named Stacy Stuck and Mary Cranks. I don’t know if they’re using their real names, but I don’t care. That’s the stuff they’re interested in: Mary likes to crank her car; Stacy likes to get stuck and posts pictures of her adventures.
Do you tell your partners about your fetish?
Yes. I’m very open with the women I’m sleeping with. I feel like you have to share this with people if you’re going to be a partner to them. I’ve never had anyone tell me I’m completely whacked. I told my ex-wife about it; she would push the pedal for me, but she wasn’t into it. I had to prod her to do it. Then she started talking to a guy on the internet about it, and for whatever reason, he explained it to her better than I ever could. That helped our relationship sexually.
Have you ever been with a woman who also loves to get stuck?
I dated this girl in the summer of 1988 who found me on Facebook a few years ago. We reconnected on January 31, 2011. That’s when I discovered she’s legitimately into getting stuck, too — she had become really into four-wheeling. We message about it and send each other videos. I’m not as into the big truck aspect as she is, but people who go off-roading usually get a thrill out of being stuck, even if it’s not sexual.
Do you care about the shoes she’s wearing in the videos?
I actually like bare feet. A lot of other pedal-pumping people love women in high heels. But when I see heel videos I think, “How in the world can somebody wear those? They cut up your feet.” A woman wearing a nice set of boots looks better to me than a woman wearing high heels.
So does a girl who pretties up her feet. I like anklets and toe rings. It’s funny though, I saw a woman on Facebook who took one of those vacation photos where people pose with their feet up against some nice background. She had a toe ring on, and someone commented, “The 1990s called, and they want their toe ring back.” I laughed, but I still think toe rings look cool.
Have you ever actually been stuck with a woman?
I was 24 and dating a girl who still lived at her parent’s house. I took her back there, and we were making out in the driveway during a thunderstorm. She knew what I liked. She paused for a moment, pulled back and looked up at me sexually before asking, “Do you want to get stuck?”
That night, we went to a spot where we knew we could get stuck safely, but like I said, it was raining and very late. I was driving a 1983 Oldsmobile that would have been perfect for this situation. Ultimately, though, we chickened out. This was before there were cell phones so we got nervous about not being able to get help if we couldn’t get out. Her surprising me like that, however, was unforgettable.
With the dawn of driverless cars, do you worry such scenarios might become obsolete?
I keep seeing articles about driverless cars and think to myself, I’m no fan. It certainly wouldn’t be fun for me. I’ve noticed, however, that a lot of people in their 20s are into pedal pushing. I find that funny because they didn’t even grow up in a time when cars were hard to start. Nor have they seen many women in stalled cars pressing against their pedals in real life, just online. But I totally understand why they can’t help it. It’s why I laugh when people say they need to take Viagra. I’m always like, “Just bring me a woman and a gas pedal.”
Tierney Finster
Tierney Finster is a journalist, screenwriter, actor and model from Los Angeles, California. She is a contributing writer at MEL, specializing in love, sex, mental health, drugs, queer culture and the cannabis industry. She has written for publications such as Playboy, Purple, Dazed and Confused, Jezebel and Broadly and was the key researcher behind Sex On, HBO’s revival of its iconoclastic docu-series Real Sex.
