A Societal Outcast Takes A Stand For The Foot-Fetish Fringe -- Readers Beat A Path To Magazine

NEW YORK - As a societal outcast, Dian Hanson's credentials are impeccable.

At the tender age of 5, she already was taller than her kindergarten teacher. Growing up near Seattle, she ate health food when Wonderbread was in vogue. Her classmates wasted little time in turning her maiden name, Poesnecker, into Nosepicker.

It hardly helped that she was one.

By 13, she stood 6 feet in her patterned stockings. Her taste ran toward halter tops, miniskirts, leather gloves. If men were going to stare at her - and it seems they were - she wanted to be sure they'd have plenty to look at.

She discovered sex the following year.

By the time she quit school at 17 and moved in with her boyfriend, Hanson already was an expert on the lousy hand life often deals those who deviate from the norm.

And while that wasn't much help when she killed chickens, emptied bedpans or stocked shelves for a living, it has proven invaluable in her current position as editor of a magazine that caters to foot fetishists.

"I'm rather catholic in my own sexual tastes," says Hanson, 45. "But I have sympathy for outcasts of every stripe."

In her 10 years at Leg Show, she's emerged as a sort of patron saint for foot and shoe fetishists, a group badly in need of one.

"Foot fetishes are so widespread and so little discussed," Hanson says. "Sadism and masochism have a certain evil cachet, whereas foot fetishists seem silly and possibly pathetic."

They may have gained a modicum of understanding - if not respect - with the publication of "Footsucker," British novelist Geoffrey Nicholson's darkly comic tale of one man's search for the perfect foot, by way of Krafft-Ebing, Cinderella and Freud.

Soon to be released in paperback, "Footsucker" also appears headed for the big screen.

Will fetishism go mainstream? Nicholson argues that it already has.

"We live in a fetishized society," he writes. "We are accustomed to take the part for the whole. We are beset with graven images. We see a man driving a Rolls-Royce. We see a woman in a Chanel suit. We see someone consulting their Rolex. Is this really any different from seeing a woman in a pair of (sexy) shoes? It is not only in the sexual arena that objects speak more concisely and eloquently about people than they could ever speak for themselves."

In the year since "Footsucker" was published, an ad for Jim Beam whiskey has portrayed a man painting a woman's toenails, a Nine West shoe ad has depicted several men ogling a woman's sandled feet, and Geoff Nicholson and Dian Hanson have set up housekeeping together.

They met at the author's book party; curiosity had prompted her to attend - that and all the letters she'd gotten from Leg Show readers urging her to check out the book.

"It's so embarrassing," Hanson says of her romance with a self-described foot fetishist. "My friends say, `Do you have to be so cliche?' "

But in actuality, her life's journey has been anything but.

Hanson grew up in a family that she says "embraced weirdness" along with right-wing politics, conspiracy theories and paranoia.

Her father, a chiropractic and naturopathic physician, doted on his four children's health - "we lived in dread of `Colonic Day,' " Hanson says - and considered medical books on childhood diseases appropriate gifts for his offspring.

Her mother sent them off to school with raw vegetables in their lunchboxes and goat's milk in their thermoses. "I didn't know you could cook broccoli until I was an adult," Hanson says.

Not surprisingly, she was a shy, awkward child who preferred her father's medical instruments to toys and had no friends outside of her siblings.

Puberty changed all that. Now, she had boyfriends.

"I was hugely interested in male attention," she says. "My mother told me that if you had sex with guys, they'd lose interest in you. But I found out it was just the opposite. If I had sex with a guy, I couldn't get rid of him."

She moved in with a boyfriend just to get away from home; she no longer has contact with her parents. By 18 she'd gotten married, had a baby, given it up for adoption, and headed East to start over.

In Allentown, Pa., Hanson says she awarded herself a phony degree and got a job as a respiratory therapist, drawing on the medical background she'd picked up as a child and an earlier stint as a nurse's aide. Her work was fine, but her behavior had a way of getting her into trouble.

""We'd have a cute male patient, and I'd try to connive to see what was under his gown. Such behavior is classic among interns, but I was probably the only woman doing the same thing."

One night at a party, she met a publicist for a chain of adult bookstores.

"It was 1976. Hustler had just come out. He wanted to do a sex magazine, too. He went to New York and got offices and started doing it. I came along and tried to be a model, but I was too old, too big and not pretty enough," she says.

Instead, she tried writing articles.

She began getting assignments from the late Peter Wolff, who pioneered the use of photos of "real" women, as opposed to models, in a new skin magazine he called Partners.

When the magazine ran out of money, Hanson was unemployed for more than a year before she was hired to create Outlaw Biker.

"It was designed to be made easily by using pictures sent in from readers, of people's motorcycles and women showing their breasts," she says matter-of-factly.

Hanson added Future Bikers of America, made up of photos of babies in biker outfits, after realizing her readers weren't outlaws at all, but solid blue-collar churchgoers from the suburbs. The feature - and the magazine - are still being published.

"It's a rare woman who really understands the theory behind what readers want," says Hanson.

In 1980, she got her first look at Leg Show, which featured mostly women wearing nothing but toenail polish or very high heels. "I died laughing," she recalls. "I said, `Who's gonna buy this?' "

It was a question she began asking in earnest 10 years ago, when she signed on as the new editor. "It wasn't until I came here and started reading the mail that I saw how complicated and intelligent the readers were. I wrote editorials asking them what they wanted. No one had done that before."

Readers who'd been reluctant to share their fantasies with other men were only too happy to reveal them to Hanson, whose photo runs alongside her columns.

Even with her face hidden as a safety precaution, she cuts a striking figure with long brown hair, well-toned body and legs halfway up to her neck. Letters poured in, earnest, well-written letters, along with some complaints about too much nudity. ("It competes with the feet," Hanson explains.)

Her subscribers taught her well. Today, she can reel off an endless stream of fascinating foot-fetish facts: "Bottoms are preferred 2-1 over tops. The most popular feet are small and unblemished, with a high arch and straight toes. The second most popular are the aristocratic feet that are long and slim with long toes. Tastes vary, but no one likes flat feet."

With Hanson at the helm, the magazine's circulation has climbed from 75,000 to 125,000, making Leg Show by far the most successful entry in an increasingly crowded field that includes such competitors as Leg Action, Leg Tease, Leg Scene, Leg World and Leg Sex.

Hanson accuses them all of copying her format. There are other problems.

"It's getting harder to find girls who don't have tattoos," she says with a sigh.

Otherwise, she has few complaints. She still can't bring herself to walk into a newsstand and buy her own magazine.

"But if I weren't so embarrassed about it, I wouldn't enjoy it so much," she says. "And after 20 years, I can't imagine doing anything else."

Chances are she won't have to. Feet are by far the most popular fetish. Others include hair, armpits, pantyhose, cigarette holders, bellybuttons and Dian Hanson herself, whose feet are neither small nor aristocratic.

"I have body-builder's feet," she says sadly. "Size 11's."