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September 30th, 2023 
Awake Goy 
There’s an episode arc in Sex and the City where Charlotte peruses a shoe store owned by an exceptionally generous fetishist. In exchange for letting him enjoy the experience of slipping shoes on her, Charlotte gets to keep a few pairs for free. The shoes in question are sexy—a white heeled sandal—but not outwardly kinky. It’s unclear whether this shopkeep is inclined more toward the shoes or the feet. Maybe it’s the whole package.
Though kink-centric sites specialize in barely walkable shoes, like over-the-knee pleather boots or stilettos with arches, many foot/shoe fetishists are much more like this store owner: They like the shoes that women wear. And right now, they’re really into ballet flats.
Ballet flats are the shoe of the season, according to Vogue, Nylon, and even the New York Post. But it’s not as though they’re some hyper-new product—ballet flats have been around since the 1700s, and as an everyday staple outside of the non-ballet world, flats have come in and out of style since the mid-20th century. Much of their current moment in fashion draws in part from a broader “coquette” theme circulating TikTok and Pinterest, where young women are leaning into more classically girly aesthetics like light pink, bows, and lace. But they’re also just a sensible, business casual shoe, far more comfortable and walkable than heels.
The fascination with ballet flats isn’t just manifesting in the fashion world but in porn, too. According to recent data from Clips4Sale, a site where adult content creators can distribute videos geared toward various fetishes, ballet flats are the 11th most common subject of shoe-related clips, ranked among the creators and the people purchasing them. Searches for ballet flats surged 23 percent this summer, according to a representative from C4S.
On C4S, many clips feature ballet flats paired with nylons (a fetish in itself) or other office attire. Some involved women roleplaying as teachers, secretaries, or therapists. Many portray women stepping on men, specifically their genitalia. Most of them, however, focus strictly on the foot and shoe with no discernable theme or plot. Part of the appeal, it seems, is how the foot looks in a ballet flat, where the shoe's shape allows women to slide their foot or heel out of it easily.
That an average woman—maybe even a polished, relatively modest one like Charlotte—might wear these shoes in public is a factor here, too. Boots are the top shoe for both creators and buyers on C4S. Sneakers are their second-most searched by buyers, and for creators, they’re the fifth most popular to create. Like ballet flats, sneaker-related content intersects with many other fetishes: the top “sneaker” videos on the site involve women trampling men with their sneakers, making them lick or admire their dirty shoes.
Both the ballet flat and sneaker fetish exist off C4S, too. On Reddit, r/BalletFlatsNSFW and r/FlatsFetish are devoted strictly to ballet flat content, with 15.6k and 1.8k members, respectively. Though modest in size, both have grown dramatically as of late: r/BalletFlatsNSFW’s membership has doubled since 2021, while r/FlatsFetish was only established in November 2022. One niche subreddit created just over a month ago, r/balletflatsmush, features disturbing videos of women in ballet flats stepping on bugs, slugs, worms, and snails. Many of the posts emphasize how thin the sole of the shoe is. The group is small, with only 114 members, but the appetite for this content exists. In the subreddit r/bugcrush, ballet flats are similarly popular.
Of course, the specifics of why one might be erotically inclined toward feet and shoes vary. The majority, it seems, aren’t interested in something quite as extreme as witnessing living creatures stomped to death—though maybe they’d like to be stepped on themselves. Instead, with ballet flats, sneakers, and other everyday shoes, the fetish centers on the fact that they’re shoes women routinely wear. Stilettos and platform boots might be fun, but they likely aren’t on for eight hours a day, often until they stink, by the types of women the average man routinely sees out in the world.
As with any fetish, many of these desires may be formed by old memories or fantasies of some exotic scenario. But as the rise in interest in ballet flats among fetishists suggests, these desires are also shaped by the trends of what women today are wearing. If women are leaning into the coquette aesthetic in their footwear, so are the fetishists.
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