A few weeks ago, while running errands, I put on Lindy West’s and Meagan Hatcher-Mays’ delightful podcast “Text Me Back,” and caught this episode, where Meagan learns, in real time, that she has a WikiFeet page.
If you have been living a full and happy life blessedly unaware of WikiFeet, here’s your primer: Wikifeet bills itself as “the collaborative celebrity feet website,” though Wikipedia defines it more bluntly as “a photo-sharing foot fetish website.” WikiFeet was founded by an Israeli tech bro named Eli Ozer, and has been around since 2008. It gets between 200,000 and 10 million views per month depending who you ask. In January 2019, WikiFeet devotees nobly helped debunk a rumor that AOC’s feet were featured there — those feet turned out to belong to Sydney Leathers. Wikifeet and other foot fetish websites have gotten so popular that Gen Z has basically stopped going barefoot, ever.
Other than loosely following the AOC thing, I have never really paid any serious attention to WikiFeet. And I love being barefoot! Socks are so annoying and I rarely wear them between April and October. So my feet are in a lot of my photos. Still, as I listened to Meagan and Lindy discuss Meagan’s WikiFeet page as I pulled into the grocery store parking lot, I thought to myself, “Surely not my feet.”
Then I parked, thought a little more about the kind of men who have yelled at me on the Internet over the years… and picked up my phone.
And you better believe I’m dropping a paywall now—because if anyone is going to make any further money off my feet, it will be me.
