It’s not merely that Jacob finds women’s feet attractive. It’s that, for him, “the feet were the breasts, the legs, the buttocks, the genitals.” Simply hearing the words “size 8” or “size 9” can get him excited. Like a man partial to a particular breast size, Jacob also has his ideal foot shape: a high arch, a wide instep and a staircaselike progression of toes. Once when he was stalled in traffic, the woman in the car next to him had her feet up on the dash — his version of a naked swimsuit model — and he climaxed seconds later. Distraught, Jacob ends up in the office of a nationally renowned expert on sexual disorders — a psychiatrist known for his empathy, even with patients like a necrophiliac who worked at a funeral parlor, a gynecologist voyeur and reviled characters like Jeffrey Dahmer and Michael Ross. Of Ross, who confessed to raping and killing eight girls and young women, the doctor explains, as Bergner puts it, that Ross was “a man who had, in effect, restrained himself except for those eight . . . acts of primal gratification — such a tiny fraction of the number that most adults seek and find.” Jacob can relate. “No matter where you go,” he tells Bergner, “there are people, and people have feet. Unless I lived in a center for amputees. That would be peace.”
more from the NY Times here.