I was 19-years-old when I first came to understand what a pantyhose fetish was. I mean, in theory, I knew. A pantyhose fetish is simple enough, an offshoot of a foot fetish it's when men (or women) found themselves getting an erotic charge from other people wearing pantyhose.

But, for me, it seemed like a bizarre way to think.

I mean, I kind of feel like if you've ever worn pantyhose yourself, it's impossible to sexualize them.

At least that's how it's been for me. They're itchy and I pop out of the top of them like a particularly over-eager sausage. However, while I academically kinda understood what the pantyhose and foot fetish was all about, I didn't experience one first hand until I was 19.

Picture a fall day. A young woman (yours truly) is trotting down the street, late as usual. She is wearing a new business suit with pumps and hose for her gig as an administrative assistant because that's the dress code.

As she scuttles along, an average looking youngish businessman stops her.

"Excuse me miss, may I ask you something?"

The young woman nods. This is her mistake.

"I have a foot fetish and pantyhose fetish. Is that something you might be interested in?"

As far as propositions go, this one was harmless enough, but the intensity of this guy, the gall it took to approach a stranger in the middle of the day and to think nothing of asking me if my kinks happened to align with his kinks... it all felt so strange. It was like his fetish for pantyhose and feet weren't just something he was into, but more like something that straight up compelled him on a daily basis.

It wasn't until I finally did some reading as the sexpert I now am that I began to understand that a passion for all things feet and pantyhose is surprisingly common.

Here's some insight into why so many men get highly aroused by women's feet and pantyhose:

1. Foot fetishes may be tied to the actual wiring of our brains.

Neuroscientist Vilanayar Ramachandran, Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California at San Diego, discovered a link between the brain and foot fetishes while working on research involving pain in phantom limbs. In trying to figure out how it is that amputated limbs can still cause patients pain, he discovered it had to do with the brain's own "body map". A body map is basically exactly what it sounds like, a guide that dictates which part of the brain control which part of the body.

So when people still feel pain after having a limb removed, he believes it's because their brain has failed to erase, as it were, this part of its body map.

Ramachandran was even more surprised to find that in some amputees, while they didn't feel any pain in limbs no longer attached to their bodies, they did feel sexual arousal there. His take is that in these cases, not only did the brain fail to erase the limb's from its body map, it accidentally rewired the map for pleasure in that area.

Guys, these patients were basically losing limbs and then having ghost orgasms, which is totally insane and, therefore, I love it!

Ramachandran, therefore, drew the conclusion that in the brain's body map of the area associated with genital stimulation and the area associated with the feet are directly adjacent to each other. So Ramachandran believes that it isn't much of a leap at all to believe that in people with a foot fetish, their brain has rewired their pleasure and arousal section of their body map to the foot management section!

2. A pantyhose (or tights) fetish is all about "perfection."

There's a reason that people who have foot and/or pantyhose fetishes are the most common of all kinksters. While the two fetishes are separate and distinct, there is some overlap, which makes sense if you think about it.

After all, pantyhose goes over one's legs, and legs are (typically) the home to one's feet.

Pantyhose fetishism is also related to an underwear fetishism, and in both, the person with said fetish may get a sexual charge out of seeing others wearing these items or out of wearing these items themselves.

If a man is into feet AND he's into pantyhose, he might be particularly excited by how easy it is to remove a woman's sexy high-heeled shoes when she's wearing tights or hose.

Additionally, many people find nylons to be so incredibly hot because of the way they transform the entire look of someone's legs into sheer (see what I did there?) perfection. Gone are bumps, bruises, and blemishes we all have, and in their place, a pair of stems straight out of a glossy fashion magazine.

Irresistible, no?

3. Foot fetishes might also be related to a fear of disease.

Don't freak out. I'm not saying your passion for feet or for women in pantyhose is "sick." What I AM saying is that scientists have found a correlation between rising rates of sexually transmitted diseases in some populations and an increased number of people reporting to have a foot fetish.

These researchers believe that when it's even less safe than usual to have unprotected sex due to rising rates of infection, the brain protectively sends us messages alerting us to the sexiness of typically "unsexy" things like bunions or the smell of a woman's shoe in order to keep us out of harm's while still granting us a path towards sexual satisfaction.

Safe and helpful, to be sure, if not just a teeny tiny bit gross...

It's also interesting to note that while pantyhose fetishes and feet fetishes are definitely related, they tend to attract people from different walks of life (*wink wink*) to the kink community.

A person who's into tights might not be into feet, and vice versa.

While scientific theories abound with regard to what causes these fetishes to develop, there are no definitive answers. It's most likely a combination of our own biochemistry, the world around us, and how we were raised.

I guess Lady Gaga is right... We ARE born this way.

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Rebecca Jane Stokes is a sex, humor and lifestyle writer living in Brooklyn, New York with her cat, Batman. She hosts the sex, love, and dating advice show, Becca After Dark on YourTango's Facebook Page every Tuesday and Thursday at 10:20 pm Eastern. For more of her work, check out her Tumblr.