You’re listening to Burnt Toast! Today, my guest is Tracy Clark-Flory.

Tracy is the feminist writer behind the newsletter TCF Emails and the author of Want Me: A Sex Writer's Journey into the Heart of Desire. She’s also the cohost of the new podcast Dire Straights where she and Amanda Montei unpack the many toxic aspects of heterosexual relationships and culture.

I brought Tracy on the podcast today to talk about my feet, but we get into so much more. We talk about porn, sexual identity, and the male gaze—and, of course, how all of this makes us feel in our bodies.

My Feet Are On the Internet

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Episode 202 Transcript

Virginia

I am so excited. We’ve been Internet friends for a long time, and it’s so nice to finally have a conversation. I’m very jazzed!

Tracy

Right? I feel like we’ve talked before, but we have not, which is such an odd sensation. We’ve emailed.

Virginia

We’ve emailed, we’ve DM-ed, we’ve commented on each other’s things. But we have not, with our faces and mouths, had a conversation. The Internet is so weird.

Well, the Internet being weird is a lot of what we’re gonna talk about today. Because where I want to start today is feet.

Tracy

Why not?

Virginia

So I initially emailed you when I was working on my essay about my Wikifeet experience, because you have written so extensively about porn and the Internet’s treatment of women. And when I discovered my Wikifeet, one of my first thoughts was, “I need to talk to Tracy about this.” Tracy

That makes me so happy. I want to be the first person that everyone thinks of when they find themselves on Wikifeet.

Virginia

I was like, “I don’t know how she’ll feel…” so I’m glad you take that as a compliment.

I don’t even know where to start. Even though I wrote a whole essay about this, my brain is still, like, “record scratch moment” on the whole thing. Sojust talk to us a little bit where in your vast reporting on porn did you kind of become aware of fetish sites and what’s your read on them? What’s going on there?

Tracy

I think I first became aware of Wikifeet in 2008-ish when they launched, and that’s when I was a proper, full-time sex writer, on the sex beat, covering every weird niche Internet community. And then in the years since, I’ve unfortunately had many women colleagues—often feminist writers—who have ended up on the site. So unfortunately, you’re not the first person I know who’s ended up on there.

Virginia

It’s a weird thing that a certain type of woman writer is gonna end up on Wikifeet. Why?

Tracy

There are no shortage of women who are consensually volunteering photos of their feet online for people to consume in a sexualized way, right? So the fact is that this site is providing a venue for people to do it in a very nonconsensual way, where images are taken from other venues that are not sexualized. They’re stolen images, you know? Things that are screenshotted from Instagram stories, that kind of thing—and then put into this sexualized context. Not only that, but put into a sexualized context where there is a community around sexualizing and objectifying and even rating and evaluating body parts.

My take is that this violation is part of the point. Because there is having a foot fetish—great, have at it, enjoy. And then there’s consuming images that are nonconsensual. So I think that the violation is part of the point. And to the point of feminist writers, women writers online, ending up on it—I don’t think it’s an accident. Because I think that there is—perhaps for some, maybe not all—some pleasure taken in that aspect of trespass.

Virginia

Yes. My best friend is a food blogger, and I immediately searched for her because she’s way more famous than I am, and she’s not on there. And I’m glad, I don’t want her non-consensually on there! But I was like, oh, it’s interesting that I’m on there, lyz is on there. It is a certain type of woman that men are finding objectionable on the Internet. And putting us on WikiFeet is a retaliation or just a way of—I don’t know. It’s not a direct attack, because I didn’t even know about it for however long my feet have been up there. But it is a way for men to feel like they’re in control of us in some way, right?

Tracy

Oh, totally. And it’s because there is something interesting about taking a body part that is not broadly and generally sexualized, and sexualizing it. There is this feeling of a “gotcha!” in it.

There is something, too, about feet—I mean, I think this is part of what plays into foot fetish, often. There is this sense of dirtiness, potentially, but also the sense of often being hidden away. It’s secret, it’s private, it’s delicate, it’s tender. Feet are ticklish, there’s so much layered in there that I think can make it feel like this place of vulnerability.

I’ve written about upskirting. This was maybe like 15 years ago. But it’s these communities where men take upskirt videos and photos of women on the subway or wherever, and then they share them in online forums. And that’s very clearly a physical trespass. You’re seeing something that was not meant to be seen. So it’s quite different. But it’s feels like it exists on a spectrum of trespass and violation and taking sexualized enjoyment out of that.

Virginia

From someone who had no intention of you taking that enjoyment, who’s just trying to ride the train to work.

Tracy

Totally. And the foot thing, it just makes me think of all these different ways that women experience their bodies in the world. You can’t just be at ease in your body, because someone might think your feet are hot.

Virginia

It’s really interesting. I’ve talked about this on the podcast before: A little bit after I got divorced and I started having, weekends totally to myself in my house, it was the first time I’d been alone in my house in a long time. Obviously, usually my kids were there. My husband used to be there. And I had this strange sensation of being observed, even when I was completely alone in the house.

It’s just me and the dog. She’s asleep. I’m making dinner or watching TV or doing whatever I’m doing. And I couldn’t shake the sensation that I was watching myself, still thinking about what I was going to wear. It was so weird, and I realized it actually isn’t particularly a comment on my marriage. It’s more a comment on women are so trained to always feel observed. It’s really hard for us to actually access a space where we’re not going to be observed. It was wild.

Tracy

We adopt that perspective of the watcher, and we are the watched. We experience ourselves in that way, as opposed to being the watcher, the person who sees and consumes the world and experiences the world. It’s like we experience ourselves being experienced by someone else—an imagined man often.

Virginia

Yes, you’re always self-objectifying. It doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to please that gaze, whether you’re trying to protect yourself against that gaze. Whatever it is, we’re always aware of how