When I was young, I saw on TV a man crossing stones on a river.  When he reached one that wobbled under his tread, he stopped and looked down at his feet.  The camera cut to a close-up of his black shoes, then back his slightly-concerned face.

This is a scene from the pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, when Commander Riker enters the holodeck and we meet Data for the first time.  This seemingly innocuous part of the episode just also happens to be my earliest memory of arousal by shoe.  I don’t know what caused that particular synapse to fire for the first time, but it’s as mysterious to me today as it was all those years ago, even though it has continued to fire relentlessly ever since.

Some have theorized that foot fetishes develop because the nerve endings in the feet relay messages to an area of the brain directly next to the center responsible for processing sexual simulation.  Perhaps the walls between the these two centers of the brain are thinner for some.  But whatever the reason, something about Commander Riker’s looking down and the camera demanding that I also focus on his feet at the same time etched the importance of men’s shoes into my neural pathways.

Interestingly enough, it was TV more than anything else that drove this fetish on as I continued to mature.  Cinematic moments like the climactic (forgive the pun) clock tower scene from Back to the Future, where Doc dangles from the courthouse with a cable wrapped around his foot, became the stuff of fantasies for me.  Another was the very brief camera shot of the train engineer’s boot lifting off the pedal as he tried to slow the runaway locomotive while under duress at the end of Silver Streak.  I would endure the entire movie, sappy romance and all, just to watch that one-second snippet of footage.

While I have not shared these experiences with anyone personally, I gladly post them for you as I explore and celebrate this secret but integral part of my life.  If you have gotten this far, I can only assume that you and I have something in common.

My journey began with two feet on a wobbly rock.  How did yours?