I found my private pictures on a foot fetish website… And a theatre celeb’s
Playwright Naomi Westerman found her private photos on a foot fetish website. Then she found pictures of the most powerful man in theatre…
I have no idea how a celebrity foot fetish website found my personal Instagram. Somehow a bunch of random snapshots in which I happen to be shoeless did it for some people. Not many people, to be fair: the good burghers of celebrityfeetdotcom rated me a measly one out of five toes – everyone’s a critic!
How did I find out about this? Well, let me tell you a shameful secret: every single person who works in theatre Googles themselves, and we all lie about it. When I started as a playwright eight years ago I never really expected to be written about but work came quickly, and a wave of reviews – mostly positive! – duly followed.
Because I enjoy pain, I set up a Google News Alert for my own name so I could monitor them all. Everyone told me this was a bad idea. And it turned out they were probably right because one day I received an alert informing me that my name had appeared on a website called Celebrity Foot Wiki, an encyclopedia comprehensively documenting, like dead butterflies pinned on a board, the feet of every woman nebulously in the public eye.
I clicked the link. Of course I did. And there they were: my bare feet, poking out from the bottom of my tartan winter pyjamas. It hadn’t occurred to me that this innocent snapshot of me relaxing on my sofa on the morning of my birthday could be a turn-on, something to be pored over in the grubbier quarters of the internet.
I did what every writer – perhaps every woman – does when we’re sexualised but nothing’s really happened: I turned it into a funny anecdote. This came in handy when I started R&D for my current play Puppy, a queer rom-com about two young women who meet and fall in love while dogging, go on to found a feminist porn company, and find themselves accidental political activists when they’re targeted by the government’s proposed porn ban. The play is a trenchant critique of the exploitative and often abusive mainstream porn industry, and the challenges of being a woman and an artist under a system that cannibalises everything we have – our bodies, our sexuality, our art, our trauma – into commodified content. All wrapped up in great British sex comedy. About dogging.
Discovering that a side effect of being a successful playwright is having your foot pics stolen by a fetish site felt like an effective metaphor for the play’s themes, and this became a topic of hot conversation in the rehearsal room. Everyone wanted to explore this site. We happened to have a piece of paper with our casting wish list in front of us, and so by sheer coincidence the first name we typed in was an extraordinary actress whose feet also adorned this website.
She’s a sharp-cheekboned goddess who has played everything from Shakespeare to gritty contemporary drama, and was our dream casting for one of the doggers. She apparently hasn’t been barefoot in many acting roles, because all the photos of her were red carpet pap pics taken at movie premieres or awards ceremonies, wearing stiletto sandals. (I’ve learned a lot about foot fetishism lately: some fetishists are purists and are only interested in bare feet. Some like toes. For some, their thing is the very specific “toe cleavage”.)
Female actors understand the pressure to look a certain way and she looks stunning and polished in every red carpet photo. But she happens to be married to the artistic director of one of London’s most prestigious new writing venues, one of the most powerful men in theatre. No one cares how male directors dress when they walk red carpets so it gave me a jolt to see this man in all his generic black suited-glory appearing alongside her on a foot fetish site.
And then that became the anecdote: “Did you know that ****** ***** is on a celebrity foot fetish porn site?” But it’s more than a funny anecdote: it’s meaningful. These photos likely originated on a legit image database, and the original caption probably read something like “[theatre director’s name] with wife.” When recontextualised on a fetish site, the caption simply reads “[actress name]”. Our director doesn’t even get an “and husband” credit; he’s simply eradicated. The world of porn is created for and by the male gaze.
When I told the artistic director in question all of this, he thought it was hilarious. But the more I told the anecdote, it became less comedic and more a rant about the semiotics of gendered power. I don’t exactly feel exploited by being on this site but I do feel grossed out. How can I demand respect as an artist when I constantly have to worry which new bit of me – professional, persona or physical – will be sexualised? Does the sexual nature of some of my work make some people think I was ‘asking for it’?
I don’t know the answers. But I feel it’s essential that we keep discussing these issues and the problems of gendered double standards. And that’s why I wrote Puppy, and why I’m happy to be able to share these complex issues and questions with an audience.
• Naomi is a playwright whose play BATMAN won the VAULT Festival Origin Award. Her new play Puppy is on until 27 April at the King’s Head Theatre