Fetishistic

I am 6’5” and my feet are proportionally large. I wear size 14 or 15 shoes, depending on the brand.

Occasionally, a socially indelicate acquaintance will ask me, “How big are your feet?” 

“Big enough to keep my balance,” I usually say. Sometimes I’ll add, “Big trucks run big tires.” 

A few years ago, this answer flipped a switch in the brain of one interlocutor. “Oh! Yeah! Right! That makes so much sense.”

When I quit drinking many years ago, I stopped going to parties for a while. I experienced some FOMO, but I also discovered upsides to sober isolation. For one thing, I no longer had to endure the elves of the world slipping their teeny paws into my shoes and traipsing through rooms to draw guffawing attention to the disproportion between their diminutive stature and my big boots.

The memory makes me glad I don’t have a foot fetish. I can’t imagine the awkwardness of speaking to someone, maintaining attention on their eyes and face, all the while fighting an urge to ogle their shoes. I suppose fetishists must make their assessments from a distance. By the time they’re standing to face-to-face with another person, they’ve probably already dismissed the target feet--or perhaps grown distracted by thoughts of arch and ankle.

Maybe the fetishists are the ones who insisted on wearing my shoes at parties, galumphing through rooms while they giggled at the absurdity of their small feet in the cavernous openings of my loafers. Perhaps the behaviour I view as a silly sight-gag drives these souls into lusty delirium. If it ever happens again, I may confront the person about their motives. 

In the past, when someone performed the clown-shoe gag at my expense, I often looked bored and asked, “Having fun?” 

“Just joking,” they’d usually say. 

Next time I'm going to grin and wink and raise my brows. Maybe nudge them softly with an elbow. “Whatever makes you happy," I'll say.