Why do I care that I have the worst WikiFeet rating I've literally ever seen?
I never thought much about posting my feet online ever since I stopped selling pictures of them for money.
I’d get a comment every now and then, a slide-up on my Instagram story — NO FREE FEET! It’s one of those things that people say because they’ve seen it on the internet, a verbal tic triggered by associated stimuli not unlike “Yass” or “protect your peace.” What they didn’t know is that my feet are free because they’re retired. Years after giving up my short-lived feet pics hustle, it recently dawned on me that perhaps there was a reason my efforts always felt like a grind.
In mid-March, I saw a tweet from Mackenzie Thomas that read: “I JUST FOUND OUT I HAVE A WIKIFEET. SOMETHING IVE WANTED FOR YEARS.” It was almost shocking to me that I’d never thought to look myself up on the platform, given my history of name-searching addiction (MOSTLY RECOVERED!) and proclivity for seedy corners of the internet. I clicked on Mackenzie’s profile, which she had linked in the tweet. 4.75; pretty good, I thought. Then I searched myself.
The fact that I hadn’t thought much about posting my feet to the internet meant that I was posting my feet to the internet quite a lot. Not just my feet — no, hardly ever. But an archive has been building slowly on my WikiFeet profile, boasting nearly 30 photos of my feet in various states of undress, at various angles and levels of zoom. And, at the top, my rating: 3.25 stars.1
Right, I thought to myself, I guess Mackenzie just has amazing feet. Like, one-percent feet. I navigated back to her profile, comparing toes and arches. One could see, even a non-practiced eye such as mine, how my feet appear somewhat inferior. But I’m not a vain person; I consider myself average in most respects, and I wasn’t afraid to come up the median in this area either. But, just out of curiosity, I decided to see how other women were faring.
The most vulnerable part of this whole disclosure is probably that I immediately searched up every friend I could think of that could possibly have a WikiFeet profile. There’s no use in knowing that my feet come up abysmally short in conversation with those of a Margot Robbie, a Halle Bailey, a Margaret Qualley. When I eventually looked up the Hollywood beauties in search of some possible aberration, it reminded me of the statistic that 12% of men think they could take a point off Serena Williams. Obviously, I find each and every friend I have in this mortal universe to be extremely beautiful. But also, I thought, normal. Like me.
But it turns out that no one was like me. My friends were lapping me, each one of their feet scoring full points above, even when they had clearly been more discerning about the visibility of their appendages online — some of their profiles containing only three or four photos. I searched anxiously, frantically, trying to find someone with a comparable score. It felt like trying to find a light switch in a cave.
I thought, well, it’s got to be mostly men on these platforms. Who do men hate? Taylor Swift; 4.98. Amy Schumer; 4.6. Megan Thee Stallion; 4.63. Monica Lewinsky; 4.26. Even Amber Heard, the victim of a months-long misogynistic smear campaign the likes of which I have never seen in my life before or since, makes out with a perfect five stars. I click back to my profile to inspect further, checking for damages.
I began to scroll through the photos. It was quite an impressive collection, spanning across seven years of my life and taken from multiple platforms. The photos were ones I had posted myself on my Instagram grid, screenshots of my stories, and selects from my tagged pictures. The maintenance man of my WikiFeet page is fastidious and motivated; not a visible toe appears to escape him, even when it’s covered with text or footwear. It’s unclear where my maintenance man stands politically, though he did include an anti-ICE post from my story where, with a good zoom, you can see 3-4 toes creeping shyly from the bottom of my jeans.
I say “maintenance man” in the singular because it seems logical to me that there is only one. Given the extreme undesirability of my feet in the context of the greater WikiFeet community, and my niche celebrity status, it’s hard to believe that multiple people would be keeping tabs on what my feet are up to. No, what seems likely to me is that there is one person who is committed to maintaining my archive on the platform, one person who is working quietly and dutifully, without the promise of reward. It must be something like monkhood, this thankless job. And, to me, it almost feels like love.
What reason is there to blur my boyfriend’s face with precision accuracy? Or to race to upload a photo I published just days ago in which a few toes escape my heeled sandals? Why, other than pure dedication to the archive, scroll through my feed far enough to find photos of me from college? The simple answer is perversion, but I don’t accept that. I know that my feet are nothing special. So then, it must be only the intellectual — the man for whom “beauty,” “symmetry,” and “arch” pale in comparison to values like truth, loyalty, and power — who can embrace such feet, who cares enough to contribute to the historical repository of near-universally reviled subjects, if only to say “This matters. I was here.”2
At least that’s what I have to believe so that I don’t shoot myself with a gun
This is the rating at the time of writing, though I’m convinced it was actually lower when I initially checked it a few months ago
If you are my maintenance man, I respect you but please don’t take this as an opportunity to reach out. I think it would scare me and I appreciate our relationship as it stands
well girl now i’m gonna go vote your feet up
also that photo is already on there which is horrifying because it means they’re a substack follower 😭