foot in mouth

There was this one photo buried in a spread in French Vogue at some point in 1983. Shot in black and white, this one photo showed a close up of Jerry Hall’s gloriously equine face, her blond hair falling in amber waves, her eyes slitted near-shut, her mouth painted a rapturous shade of what must have been red and delicately wrapped around the marble toe of a statue. The copy of Vogue has gone the way of all flesh; I carted it around with me for years until it got shucked off in some great purge of stuff. It was that photo, the one of Jerry Hall giving toe, that made me keep the magazine for so many years.

Toe sucking rarely gets its rightful share of visual representation. For all of the ways magazines can sell stuff through artfully composed shots of metaphoric kink—blondes or brunettes swilling long necks, sheeny-slick piles of emaciated models looking like they just emerged pansy-eyed in a post-coital swoon from a D/s dungeon, bent-over jeans models proffering round and mysterious butts that jut to invite the eye and more, jewelry hanging like gyves around wrists and ankles—toe sucking gets pretty short shrift. Perhaps only cunnilingus gets less visual air time, but then as pornographers world-wide have discovered, it’s hard to shoot the licking of a pussy. This is not the case with toe sucking. Toes stick out; they’re easy to suck; it’s a picture just waiting…and waiting to happen.

Toe sucking bears the inescapable taint of fetish. Toe sucking, like rubber clothes, like age play, like any sex act involving hats, seems to be a speciality act. It’s not, of course. No gear is required to suck a toe or ten. One needn’t even be particularly into feet to enjoy having one’s toes sucked, nor to suck them. That’s my position and I’m sticking to it.

I enjoy a good toe suck every now an then. I prefer mine in someone else’s mouth, just as I prefer being the salad tosee to being the salad tosser. I know it’s not an equitable thing, but all is not fair in love and war, and I’d rather be the one being eaten than the one doing the eating. In my mind, I’m the succulent dish, and I say this being a woman avowedly stuck in her oral stage. It’s the strange imparsability of the feeling. The toe in another’s mouth bears a paradoxical keenness and a blunting of sensation. It’s a feeling that’s bigger than itself, or bigger than my toes, anyway. Maybe it’s that my toes get so little notice except for pain that when they get a bounty of pleasure, such as they derive from being nestled like little white chocolate eggs in another’s mouth, they get a bit giddy with it. It’s a surfeit of feeling, the toe sucking.

The first man who sucked my toes was Vlad the Would-Be Impaler. He did it in a hot tub. I was a fool not to recognize his seduction for what it was. I still, 26 years later, kick myself for not fucking him. I don’t remember the next person or the person after that; there have been lots. Toe sucking was something I know I indulged in with many men (and a few women). But the next one who was really into it was the Goat Gatherer. He’d fuck me, one of my legs extended up his stubbly, chiseled torso, one of my feet stuck in his mouth. He said he liked toes, the way they felt, the way the smelled. I would always have a pedicure before seeing him. He’d rename my toenail polish.

“I call that one Biker Slut,” he’d say, looking at the scab-red polish on my toes. And then he’d put the whole fat row of them in his mouth. It was heaven underfoot, around foot, about foot.

I loved that French Vogue shot of Jerry Hall giving toe to some anonymous stature, much like I adore this new shot from Italian Vogue of Eva Mendes giving toe to herself. There’s something unabashedly naughty about the sucking of the toe, something sweetly verboten, something just left of vanilla in the toe suck. It’s like Vincent Vega says of foot massages in Pulp Fiction. “That's what's so fuckin' cool about them,” says Vincent, “This sensual thing's goin' on that nobody's talkin about, but you know it and she knows it.”

The toe suck, as Vincent’s partner Jules observes about the foot massage,  may not be the same as “stickin' your tongue in her holyiest of holyies,” but it feels pretty fucking close, pretty fucking close indeed. That is exactly what is so fucking cool about it. A toe suck is as close as you can get to oral sex while dressed. The intimacy, the tickle factor, the edging onto trammeling on kink, the smell, the unquestionable need to deny questions of hygiene for the sake of pleasure: the toe suck is the closest somatic approximation of tongue on holiest of holies.

The only thing possibly better is the open mouth on the naked arch of the foot, all wide warm maw, wet-hot pink and the barest scrape of the pearly whites. The ball of the foot against the bald pate. Or the press of the toes against a cheekbone. The cupping of chin in the arches of both of your feet. Or the two big toes together in a mouth, tongue swirling like a creemee around the both.

Summer is the time of feet. Enjoy them—your own and those of others.

Comments

[Little Jezebel]

Thank you for rephrasing my fantasies so eloquently.

And for making breathe hard.

And for calling my second hand bookshop to inquire for the aforementioned mags.

[ajooja]

My wife has never been into any toe-play, but she removed it from the menu forever after she had a dream about Michael Jackson licking her toes. :)

[chelsea g]

Ajooja, that is a completely understandable decision, however tragic.

kissykiss,
chelsea g.

[Isaak]

Hi
I've got a question: Shouldn't it be "All is fair in love and war"? Or did you play with it on purpose?

Great post.

[chelsea g]

Thanks, Isaak. I'd say I was playing with it, but really I misremembered the aphorism. I guess my unconscious is a ceaseless revisionist.

cheers,
chelsea g.

[Pete]

CG,
Both my wife and I love toe sucking, so it was fun to read your experiences.
Pete

[Karl Elvis]

I can't recall ever having sucked a toe.

Present yours, though, and I'm very, very game.

[minstrel hussain boy]

i have what we call "reservation feets." with a childhood spent mostly barefoot the calluses are hard and permanent. one of the things we used to do for a little spending money was to go down to the trading post where the drunks hanging out there would make bets on which of us kids could stand on the asphalt barefoot in the summer sun the longest. the winners would always kick down to the kid that won for them. i can barely wear shoes even to this day.

nobody wants reservation feets in their mouth. i've sucked my share of toes, but mainly because the suckee liked it, not because it was anything i'm into.

[J.J. Adler]

Ya know, I'm not much of a toe- or foot-focused kind of guy. On the other hand, I do know that rubbing my wife's feet gives her great relief, albeit of a stress-relief nature and not a sexual one. But now and again, I've indulged an impulse and wrapped my lips around her toes -- and before she recoiled with a "nooo, don't, that's gross" I have to admit I enjoyed the primitive urge to give her big toe some oral lovin'. Maybe it's an extension of my own oral inclinations, but I have to admit that this post got me to thinking... might have to explore that a bit more, maybe with a luxurious bath beforehand.

Hmm.

[lydia]

Sigh... i dearly love having my toes sucked but i hardly ever remember to ask for it or do it. It really is a truly unique and yummy pleasure :D.