I'm more than a WikiFeet
And other links for your Sunday
Last week, my friend
texted me. “Do you know you have a WikiFeet?”Yes, I do. Back in 2019 (the night before I questioned Joe Biden at an LGBTQ presidential forum), I had dinner with the journalist Olivia Nuzzi. She was a delightful dinner companion, patiently listening to me discuss concerns about my career and accepting the lack of late-night vegan options in Cedar Rapids. At one point, she made a joke about having a WikiFeet.
I consider myself criminally online, but I didn’t know what WikiFeet was.
She pulled out her phone and showed me a photo-sharing website dedicated to feet pictures of celebrities and celebrity lites. It’s a foot fetish website, but publicly sourced. Every foot gets a ranking; Olivia has 4.38 stars.
“I bet you are on here too,” she said. And there I was, with a 2.75 rating.
I was furious. A 2.75? Why wasn’t I ranked higher? Why did someone go through all the trouble to take my pictures from my Instagram, put them on the World Wide Web, then give me a mediocre ranking?
If you are assigned “female” at birth, you have one of two options for what you can be: hot or smart.
At birth, I was assigned “smart.” My first pair of glasses came six years later. But the label didn’t protect me.