(No) thanks to the reader who alerted us to the gross/amusing oddity that is Feet Magazine.
The blog, which features unseemly extreme close-ups of toes and cuts on the feet of Hollywood stars (including this one of Denise Richards.)
The pictures on Feet Magazine are about 20 times larger than this one, of Scarlett Johansson's toes, ankles, and a very blue carpet. If you want to see what we're talking about, just start browsing here.
Why do people even want to see extreme close ups of feet? An ex-girlfriend who worked in brain mapping in DC explained one general theory: that in the map of your brain, the feet are right next to your sex organs on your sensory map. Some people, if we remember the argument correctly, have the feet part overlapping the genitals part and so they are extra-excited by feet. (It doesn't, to our mind explain why someone else's feet would be so thrilling, versus having your own feet caressed.) Perhaps we'd better let an expert explain this phenomenon:
From a review of the book Phantoms in the Brain, about research conducted on people who could "feel" their lost limbs and even experienced iches in nonexistent nooks that drove them crazy.
[O]ne of the more memorable examples was the woman who developed sexual feelings in her phantom foot. It turns out the parts of the brain that process sensory information for the feet are adjacent to those for the sexual organs (according to the Penfield map). Assuming that the latter brain area expands thanks to the sensory vacuum created by the missing leg, it seems reasonable to think that the feeling in the phantom limb might be a mixture between the two. This may also account for foot fetishes. Interesting.
Read more here.
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