Ask Ugly: I hate my big, ugly feet. How can I come to terms with them?

Health
By Liam

Hi Ugly,

At 12, I started to feel ashamed of my feet. They were a size 10—bigger than most girls’—and my toes were dark and rough. (I’m black. Melanin can and does show up everywhere. Even through my toenails.) I tried to squeeze my feet into smaller shoes and filed my toenails, which sometimes led to ingrown nails and infections.

When I was 15, my mom made me wear colored nail polish and covering my toes took away a lot of my fear. I’m now 36. For the past 10 years, I’ve worn nail polish on family vacations (because my in-laws can’t see those ugly piggies) and during pregnancy (because I don’t want to be treated badly for being ugly). During my second pregnancy, I was even afraid to go to the emergency room for preeclampsia because I wasn’t strong enough to do a pedicure myself. Luckily, I didn’t let that stop me from seeking life-saving medical attention.

My GP recently referred me to a podiatrist who said my feet are healthy and normal – just ugly! I dread the day when my children will finally notice my toes and express their curiosity. How can I accept my ugly feet? I feel torn between trying to love myself the way I am and doing beauty work so I can look better to others. Let me know if I am crazy about nothing.

– Obsessed with the toes

To paraphrase Oprah, Toe-tally Obsessed: Are you crazy, or were you crazy?

Yes, your fixation on your feet seems extreme – even detached from reality. I can guarantee that no one has ever judged your toes as harshly as you have, and I can almost guarantee that you have never in your life been stopped because someone didn’t like your feet.

But also… I don’t know a single woman who doesn’t have a somewhat detached relationship with some part of her own body, whether it’s the size of her pores, the size of her nose, arm sizewrinkles, whatever. This is what beauty culture does! From the moment we’re born—literally—it trains us to find ghost flaws in our physical selves. It teaches us to spend time and money “fixing” our bodies, or to focus our thoughts and attention on hating our bodies, or both. Sometimes the features we worry about harm us in measurable, material ways. See: fatphobia, ageism. Often, they don’t. See: feet.

More from Jessica DeFino’s Ask Ugly:

Still, as someone who also wears a size 10 shoe, I can relate. I used to panic at proms, my toes falling out of strappy sandals that were too small. I dreaded taking my boots off in front of new boyfriends, afraid they’d notice our stompers were the same size. I once blocked a match on a dating app who said he liked feet—not because I thought it was weird, but because I Certainly He couldn’t love mine.

And it strikes me that the concern we both share, Totally Obsessed, has less to do with beauty than with femininity.

Writing about the (false) construct of gender binarity in About womenSusan Sontag said, “‘Masculinity’ is identified with competence, autonomy,[and]self-control,” as well as strength and power. Aesthetically, these qualities are associated with bigness: big brains, big muscles, and certainly, big feet. Femininity, on the other hand, “is identified with incompetence, helplessness, passivity, noncompetition, niceness.” Aesthetically, these qualities are associated with smallness: soft voices, “frivolous” interests (like beauty), petite bodies.

To be a good girl or a good woman, you have to be – in the gender essentialist sense – as small as possible.

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It’s a standard that’s been around since the 10th century, when foot binding first emerged in China. The practice involved binding the feet of prepubescent girls tightly enough to stunt their growth and alter their shape, leaving them forever small. (You may have had a similar wish when you stuffed your feet into shoes that didn’t fit and filed your toenails.) It “symbolized a girl’s willingness to obey, just as it limited women’s mobility and power, kept women subordinate to men, and increased the disparity between the sexes,” according to Britannica.

Feet are still fetishized today. “Americans search for foot fetish-related terms an average of nearly 1.5 million times per month,” according to a spokesperson for FeetFinderan online marketplace for feet pictures. More than 700,000 people visit wikiFeet per week. Celebrities are starting to sell their soles: Singer Lily Allen launched an OnlyFans account dedicated to feet last month, and model Karrueche Tran did the same in March. I predict that foot beautification will be a major growth area for the cosmetics industry this year, and millions of women will, unfortunately, be just as concerned about their not-quite-wiki-worthy kickers as you are.

You also mention that your toes are particularly melanated, Obsessed, which reminds me of something RichĂ© Richardson, professor and chair of Africana Studies at Cornell University, told me earlier this year. “Light is feminine in the Western mind and dark is masculine, and that binary logic tends to have serious implications for black and other ethnic women,” Richardson said. She said that the literature of Toni Morrison, for example, “highlights this tendency to devalue and defeminize black women based on their dark skin.”

When we take all this into consideration, and when we consider that black women in America are almost three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women. I can understand why it occurred to you to postpone it Preeclampsia treatment over a pedicure. I’m glad you didn’t. Because while some people would have us believe that overcoming sexism, racism, or colorism is an individual responsibility—that it’s as simple as trying harder, looking prettier, and pulling yourself together—it’s not.

A few years ago, Self magazine published an article about ways to reduce maternal mortality among black people, And a coat of OPI Big Apple Red wasn’t one of them. Instead, solutions included large-scale projects like accurate data collection, combating implicit bias among medical professionals, and subsidizing maternal mental health services. Hospitals even recommend removing nail polish before surgery, since visible changes in the color of patients’ nails can indicate problems with their circulation or oxygen supply.

To be fair, Toe-tally, you’re not asking how to fix systemic inequality. You’re asking how to deal with personal insecurity.

Some ideas: When negative feelings about your feet arise, remember that the standard of smallness was invented to encourage your subservience. Remember that “ugly” feet have gotten you through what sounds like a wonderful life.

It’s not often that I get to promote beauty products, but outside of the hospital environment, I’m perfectly fine with continuing to paint your toes. Hey – if that’s what keeps you from obsessing over this particular hang-up in stressful moments, or wasting precious brain space, go for it. It would probably suit you (no pun intended) to get used to the bare-nails look, but take it at your own pace. There are worse beauty standards to uphold.

As for how to handle your children’s future questions about this issue, they may never ask. But what if they inherit your extra large, “dark and rough” dogs? The best thing you can do for your children is to show them that your – their feet are fine, normal, nothing to worry about.

Finally, you say you’re trying to love yourself the way you are, Obsessed. That might be part of the problem. Like striving for podiatric perfection, loving every last inch of your body is, in my opinion, not a reasonable goal. (Can anyone really Love (a foot?)

Forget about love! Face reality. Are your toes beautiful? No. Will you ever get a devoted following on wikiFeet? No. Will it make you live a lesser life? You guessed it: no.

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