The Truth: Calloused Cheese Fuzz

Yellow, thick yellow soles rubbed together ecstatically. Cut. Cheesy bright heels pressed tightly together. Cut. Horny toes curling in excitement. Cut. Yellowed screams of pleasure. And always soles, thick yellow soles. Cut. The disturbing images of a typical Czech porn film. Cheese feet in a rush of love. Callous eroticism for connoisseurs and lovers of the strange. Worldwide. Cut.

How did the tranquil country in the middle of Europe become a leading global porn nation today? At least in one cheesy niche: the hard-as-nails subgenre of foot fetishism.

Following the example of the USA, the sexual revolution broke out in Europe in the 1960s. In their wake, the European porn industry developed, especially in the permissive countries of Scandinavia. “Danish” or “Swedish” became synonymous with erotic depictions in sleazy films or magazines. At the turn of the millennium at the latest, the Northern Lights returned to their puritanical tradition, and from then on pornography was once again considered frowned upon. The Czechs, who were hardly tainted by Christian moral concepts but had recently been freed from communism, stepped into this pictorial gap. Today, in addition to genre names such as “Oral” or “Gangbang”, they have even created their own tile in the selection categories of the sexual product range: “Czechs”.

In the beginning there was footing. A tradition that goes back far into the country's historic underground culture. In the 17th century, the German Baroque poet Christoffel von Landwehr, with his first literary mention of the phenomenon “the Bohemian rubbish,” made it responsible for the Prague Defenestration, which triggered the Thirty Years’ War in 1618: “They couldn’t mess with each other.”

Fußeln originated in the lively pubs of Prague and soon spread throughout Bohemia and Moravia. The footed table can still be admired in a dark corner of the famous traditional Pilsen restaurant “U Žlutého papouška” (To the Yellow Parrot). Once the guests had had enough beer and dumplings, they took off their shoes and socks and retreated to the footwear niche, where the “Strouhání”, the rasplers, indulged in their passion.

The ecstatic rubbing of the calloused skin together took place regardless of age and gender, everyone was allowed with everyone else, no one was excluded, all “Strouhání” were equal, which made the new movement dangerous for the authoritative state, which soon banned footing and introduced drastic punishments such as bastinado. But the uninhibited, like-minded people continued to do it underground. At the beginning of the 20th century, “extremity flirtation” experienced a renaissance and was first scientifically examined by Freud’s Prague student Bohumil Hradubil, who described foot-tapping as “a strange but necessary instinctual discharge in the metapedic area”.

It was strictly forbidden during the violent rule of Nazi Germany, and under Soviet-style socialism it was considered counter-revolutionary. It was only by the resistant poet and later President Vaclav Havel, who was a passionate toe flirter, that under the table flirting was revived in 1968 during the Prague Spring.

And then the wall and the iron curtain fell. And with it all restrictions. The new freedom encouraged footholding. Which soon became a business. Because more and more tourists were taking part in the once underground hustle and bustle. And where there is desire, the exploitation mechanisms of the consumer industry are not far away. The soles became thicker and thicker, the films became more and more yellow, and the porn became more and more bizarre.

Jaroslav Hašek's famous quip “Give the Czechs the little toe and they'll take the big uncle” came true. Czech cheese foot porn flooded the world. In the meantime, however, there is a prudish countermovement inspired by the USA. Which is particularly double standards because most of the paying customers for foot porn are Americans. The anti-footers, however, want to ban or at least legally restrict the commercial exploitation of the once loving Bohemian peculiarity. In the future, porn actors who were previously barefoot should only wear black socks, which would take the erotic subgenre to the point of absurdity, as there is nothing more unerotic than socks during sex.

And so the global cultural war is raging in the cozy little Czech Republic. What twists and turns the eternally young Käsefusseln will take remains as open as a delicately laced sandal on a warm summer day in the golden city.