Do you actually know anyone who likes toe-sucking? No, we thought not. Yet over the years, most women have experienced at least one over-enthusiastic lover heading down south during sex to pop one in his mouth as if they were gummy bears.
Now, it turns out, we weren't being unreasonable about telling them to please, put down our foot and hand us a towel, a study published in the neuroscientific journal Cortex has revealed feet are the least erogenous of all the 41 body parts examined.
In a feature published by The Observer, "the research, a joint project between two British universities and one in South Africa, is billed as the first "systematic survey of the magnitude of erotic sensations from various body parts"."
This challenges the notion that the feet - or certain areas of the foot - are closely linked to the genitals. In the study, 800 people, mainly from Britain and sub-Saharan Africa, took part and 75% gave the feet the lowest rating followed by the kneecaps (no surprise with the latter, however).
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What the study also revealed was that whereas people commonly assume men only have one erogenous zone and women have many, actually the two sexes share a lot more than you'd think. For men, the forearm was the least titillating, but surprisingly, their inner thigh scored reasonably well.
It also showed that two sets of people from different races, have the same erogenous preferences, which Professor Oliver Turnbull of Bangor University's School of Psychology, who led the study and worked alongside scientists from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, said that it indicated that sexual stimulation was hardwired, not influenced by cultural preferences.
The Observer reported him as saying: "The Cosmopolitan magazines of this world have been running half-baked surveys on this for years and years. But we wanted to look at the question of why the side of the neck is interesting if nibbled but not the forehead or head, when both have the same sensory receptors."
Phew. We'd much rather nibble on a neck than a foot.