Selling feet pics makes boundaries blurry

I talked about selling pictures of my feet online for months before I actually set up the account. As a graduate student, I was missing the steady income of my office job and quickly burning through savings on $20 packs of Marlboro Reds. My TikTok was inundated with videos of girls like me, making serious bank monetizing their arches on the World Wide Web, marketing it as an extremely lucrative side hustle.

It wasn’t just me. Over the last few years, selling feet pics has gone from niche kink to buzzy income stream, boosted by platforms like FeetFinder and an algorithm that rewards young women for whispering the words “passive income.” Over one million videos have been posted on TikTok with the hashtag “feet.” Despite the surge in popularity, it’s unclear how much a beginner can realistically expect to earn. FeetFinder claims its top creators rake in serious money, highlighting stars like “SeducingSole,” who reportedly earned $200,000 in 2023.

Obsessed with research, I found myself deep in Reddit threads, trying to figure out how to actually make money on sites like FeetFinder. It was way more involved than TikTok made it seem. Your profile has to have a personality. Buyers want to feel like they’re supporting the girl next door. To stand out, you need a bit of a gimmick, like wearing the same red heels in every photo or taking pictures in mud. Consistency helps people remember you. You also have to promote yourself, whether that means making a dedicated Instagram or posting on r/feet with your account name. And while it’s possible to make money without it, showing your face brings in way more. That was my one hard no.

I was completely unwilling to show my face. The idea of strangers recognizing me, or worse, someone I knew stumbling across my profile, felt like a personal scandal waiting to happen. The thought of commodifying myself in such a blatant way, essentially putting a “for sale” sign on my identity, was enough to make me balk. Yet, after weeks of lurking in forums, I tried to convince myself that anonymity was possible. Plenty of people claimed to be making money without revealing their faces, so why couldn’t I? After months of deliberation, a glance at my bank account and the painfully low number was all the motivation I needed.

Something I should establish early on here: My feet are ugly. I am not a woman blessed with long, finger-like toes and a high arch. My feet are remarkably babyish. My short, stubby toes curl into each other, sprouting from my fat foot. My nails are almost always unpainted, wide and short, my pinky nail practically just a sliver. I stay away from sandals, only wearing flip-flops at the beach. But with the rise of the $690 The Row flip-flops, toes out all over New York City, I figured there must be someone out there who liked my kind of feet, especially if they were packaged in the right way.

Creating an account online to become part of the podiatric photography cartel is incredibly easy. I made my username “Ogre_Girl,” alluding to the state of my toes. I hoped that my feet fell into some sort of fetish category. To finish making my profile, the website had to establish that I was over 18 years old. I sent in a photo of me holding my ID up to my face. The instructions said it would take 48 to 72 hours to confirm my age, and I accepted that I would have to wait a few days before making any money.

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It took seconds. I was in. All I needed to do was pay a subscription fee. “What was $5 when I had the potential to make so much more?” I thought. I set a reminder to cancel the payment before the end of March. My credit card thought the charge was suspicious, but I pressed on, heaps of money on the horizon.

The need for a profile picture brought me back down to earth. Showing my face was still out of the question. My feet looked even more unsightly through my iPhone’s camera lens. I snapped my feet from all angles, each photo more repulsive than the last. I slipped on my only open-toe heels (black slingback with beading on the toe strap), positioned my camera and set a timer for three seconds. I took one step backward and waited as my phone took the picture. That was the best it was going to get.

Remembering everything I had learned from my research, I carefully crafted my bio to sound as relatable as possible while using a fake name, of course. I presented myself as a young woman whom men, or really anyone, might feel compelled to look at. I wrote:

“Hi! My name is Eve. I am in graduate school and hoping to make a few extra dollars. I am addicted to making New York Times recipes and have become a pretty good cook. I never like to show my feet because my toes are short, stubby and ogre-like (hence the name). I am a sandal avoidant, but indulging in some extreme exposure therapy!”

I added a couple more pictures of my feet to my account. It was all very abstract, a joke, a story, something to laugh with my friends about. “So a couple of pictures of my feet are online,” I reasoned, “No, big deal.”

I received my first message right away. A user asked:

“Hiii, do you take requests for leg pictures? I’m looking for legs that have strawberry skin.”

I looked down at my legs. They were unshaven and pale. I’d be willing to send photos of my legs, I responded.

“Do you have strawberry skin?”

Was he referring to Keratosis Pilaris (KP), often referred to as ‘chicken skin’, a common condition causing small bumps on the skin? (I didn’t have it.)

“I don’t think so!” I replied, “But I have a good personality.”

Cruising the site, you start to learn about the different niche desires people have that you, as a foot content producer, can cater to. There are foot fetishists who want a video of you stepping on the camera, to simulate the experience of being stepped on. There are people who have a hankering for high arches or for feet covered in lotion.

FeetFinder has a page listing active buyers. Their pages often feature reviews from other sellers and a list of their specific fetishes. To attract people to your page, you have to reach out to specific buyers and persuade them to buy a photograph or video from you. My opening message was always, “Hiii!!!!!”.

Many of the people I spoke to wanted a teaser photo, something that could lure them in. Why would they pay for a picture or video if I was giving them out for free? “Scammers,” I thought to myself, ignoring those messages entirely. Others really just wanted to talk. They wanted to know you were there, you were listening.

It had been a couple of days, and I still had not made any money. I grew jealous of the girls on my For You page, raking it in. On TikTok, I saw a video of a girl selling her dirty gym socks, claiming she makes $500 a day. I knew I needed to amp it up.

The “Hiiii!!!!” messages were flying all over the place. I reached out to every active buyer I could find without a specific fetish. Someone responds with a voice message.

“I am just heading home from work.” His deep voice came out of my computer speaker. I listened intently with my roommate as if it were a true crime podcast. He lived in Seattle, and he seemed normal, at least from what I could tell—we started to talk.

“I’m watching ‘Real Housewives‘ right now,” I replied over text, my voice feeling too intimate to use. “But it’s late here, so I’m going to start getting ready for bed soon.”

I learned that he used to live on the Upper East Side. “1000 years ago,” he said. We chatted about work. He asked if I used any other sex work platform. I started to build an image of him in my mind: red hair, freckled, pale skin, a slight beer gut, maybe around 40, single, no kids.

We texted back and forth for days, without any mention of personalized photos or videos, and the more I thought about it, the less I wanted to send them. I began to consider what it would take for me to actually send over a photo. That a man in Seattle would have seen my feet, feet that I’m too afraid to show my acquaintances in the summertime, wrapped in a sandal. A man with a username of a random amalgamation of letters and numbers would own a photograph that I had taken only for him.

He wanted me to be a person, but being a person was too much, too private. He wanted softness, charm, just enough vulnerability to feel like I wasn’t just taking his money. He wanted to feel like I needed it, needed him — That I enjoyed our conversations, that there was something special about our exchange. I didn’t want to give him that. I wanted to make money without having to perform intimacy.

Selling pictures of your feet is sex work. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t naked, or that no one touched me, or that it was just my stubby toes. There’s no way to divorce the transaction from the implication: someone is getting off, and you’re getting paid. The boundary between body and product gets blurry. You start to learn that even the most innocuous-seeming parts of your body can be eroticized if someone decides they want them badly enough.

I had spent $5.54 on the subscription fee and made zero dollars in return. All I had to show for it was engaging in awkward conversations. It was all a little sad, not just because I hadn’t made any money, but because I’d let myself believe that I could sell intimacy without actually giving any of it away.

I stopped speaking to the voice on the other side of the country. I stopped going on the site completely.

The next three days, the man messaged me each morning: “Hello?”

I felt guilty for not replying.