Seduction and Repulsion

What is it that attracts us to certain things, and repels us from other things? I went and did a little research on why certain people are attracted to certain things. Using myself as an example.

I am really disgusted by feet, i don’t like to look at them, they make me feel uncomfortable.
Now, there are some people that think feet are something that can be considered attractive.

How does a fetish develop? A fetish can be caused by a variety of things. But something that kept popping up during my research was pretty logical. During sexual development, a child may latch onto anything that sparks the memory of one of their earliest sexual arousals or experiences.

This can also be explained by the psychoanalyze of Sigmund Freud. When a child is at the very young age of three the sensitivity becomes now concentrated in the genitals and masturbation becomes a new source of pleasure. The child becomes aware of the anatomical sex differences, which sets the conflict between erotic attraction, resentment, rivalry, jealousy and fear in motion. This resolved through the process of identification.
This goes on from age three to six.

So a person could have confused a memory of a foot, with a sexual memory.
Now to when the child enters puberty. It is a time of adolescent sexual experimentation. How do adolescents explore? You guessed it right, porn. The Impact of pornography on relationships, individual health and society are no secret. Because of how sex impacts the brain, pornography essentially short-circuits other systems, becoming not only addictive, but also undermining intimacy. When an adolescent is being exposed to all of these things it starts to associate things through pattern recognition, one may develop a fetish for a certain thing (feet) because it’s commonly paired with an advantageous characteristic. While i have no idea what on earth a foot would be associated with let me give u another example. Perhaps a sapiosexual may develop a fetish for glasses, as they are associated with intellect.

Now to go into the extremes of repulsion, there is such thing called Podophbia. Podophobia translates into fear of feet. The explanation of the fear of feet is almost the same as the fetish for it.

Some experts believe that a traumatic event or negative experience in the past (that had to do with feet) might have triggered this phobia. A child might remember being kicked by another person and hence come to hate or dislike feet intensely. Or some doctors believe that the fear might have been inherited or have genetic causes. It might exist without any explicable reason.


Souhaila Maalem