The Politics of Horniness: A Study in Internet Anthropology

It seems strange to me how people seem to forget that it has its own anthropology. Given the infinite number of niches one can occupy, it seems inevitable that communities arise, each with their own vocabulary, strictures, taboos, cultural patterns, and general ethos. And one obscure Reddit community, for instance, can reflect something odd about the cultural landscape at the present moment.

DuckDuckGo is a particularly useful search engine for online ethnographic research. Not only do you not get your more fucked up searches mingled with your Google search history, but given the anonymity of it, you aren't forced into a filter bubble. Furthermore, the search algorithm is just screwy enough to send you to the wrong place sometimes.

I don't even remember what I was looking for, but I knew it had nothing to do with feet, or with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and yet first page of search results, there it was. WikiFeet, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Huh.

It was a remarkably active community. Which made sense -- if there are active forums dedicated to leaked nudes of celebrities, revenge porn posted by grumpy exes, upskirts of Korean secretaries, the bikini shots of girls of questionable age, etc., then the population of foot fetishists, which is larger than many imagine, would concordantly have its own forum for porn that isn't porn as such, but is consumed pornographically. Especially given the fact that most people aren't particularly bothered about covering their feet.

I wasn't quite sure what I was expecting, but it was mostly innocuous shots of the young congresswoman at official functions.

What was less innocuous was the comment section, and what I found so fascinating is that despite the fact that, according to at least one recent survey I'd seen, Americans as a whole had a generally positive impression of the representative (although men surveyed leaned slightly against her, with 52 percent having a "strongly" or "somewhat" unfavorable perception), the dedicated foot fetish community had a decidedly different opinion.

“Why do Socislists [sic] ( OPPS [sic] I MEAN LIBERALS ) look like this. While Conservative Women Actually look Hot.”

Of course, she had her defenders too, and there were also a few old souls who actually were able to separate her ideology from her feet, but interestingly, she didn't seem to have any fans of her politics who disliked her feet – granted, a quick overview of the forum suggested that its users skew strongly rightward (I thought about doing a detailed analysis of this, but the idea of putting together an Excel sheet based on a fetish website was unspeakably depressing) – but this shows that Internet denizens on the left are likewise largely unable to separate their political stance from their dicks.

This is nothing new – how long have Fox News et al been propping up archetypally blonde conservative commentators? Or how long have thirsty right-wingers lusted after Mediterranean bombshells in the IDF armed with Uzis?
 
As I was preparing this piece, I was informed by an acquaintance that there had been an actual incident in which a supposed quasi-nude of AOC was actually debunked by the Wikifeet community as a fake. The investigator who reported his results to Vice went into frankly clinical levels of depth. And it makes you wonder why this level of forensic scrutiny isn't being as applied as it should be to things unrelated to things that give Internet men a funny feeling in their pants.

Of course that happened, I thought.

But alas, all of these things have been exacerbated. We live in a world in which a mass shooter in New Zealand screams “Subscribe to Pewdiepie!” and the head of the Gambino Crime Family was killed not by a rival mafioso, but by some 24 year old QAnon dork.

And just today I found out that Elon Musk released a Soundcloud rap about Harambe. Shut the fuck up.

This is of course the danger of being extremely online. Everything is real, everything is false, and above all else everything seems a parody of everything else.

Perhaps this truly is the modern incarnation of the Athenian agora, as those early '90s net-optimists said it would be. But it isn't in the way they thought it would be. Because let us remember that in those open squares under the sunny Peloponnesian sky, while Plato taught his pupils that he had nothing to learn from the mountains and city life made man free, most of the gawkers around him were probably watching a guy eat dog turds for drachmas.