History of the Sexiness of Legs

Dec 18, 2025
12 min read

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/TjO0mq37KR8

Legs are one of the most overtly sexualized part of the human body outside of the primary reproductive organs. So how did we all come to the modern collective cultural decision that legs are attractive? Because research does back up the fact that we all seem to agree that legs are very nice, and that they make us feel certain things that we need to talk to an adult about. But these two weird spindly stalks of people flesh that hold up the human body and allow us to balance, and dance, and run, and stand, and kneel, and all sorts of different things, well they weren’t always available for spectators, at least in the Western hemisphere. Though it’s possible, however, that even during the moments of our history when they were hidden away, legs were still at the center of our thoughts and imaginations.

I’m Kevin Lankes, and I’m going to flash some ankle at you as we go through the history of what makes legs sexy, and why. And I’m going to try to do this video without getting banned from YouTube.

Showing off your legs was a big deal in a lot of human history, and not exclusively just Eurocentric history, either. Though there is a really fun story about how the Victorian-era decorating trend of using table skirts was directly related to the extreme modesty of the time and so what some modern lay people tend to think about that is even furniture legs were considered too sexy to look at. And JD Vance would probably agree with that. Unfortunately, this is also probably a double myth, a myth-ception, if you will, because Victorian-era fashions and prior fashions of the 18th century, where this idea is also prevalent, had a lot more to do with trends among the wealthy socialite class and were more determined by means and status than by modesty. Things like the fact that simply having a wardrobe that’s made of more material announces that someone is wealthy, because you could afford more fabric, to the practical fact that longer sleeves and stockinged legs would provide an absorbent layer for body oils and sweat. The other thing is that Victorian dresses actually did often have skirts that showed ankles, and even low necklines and sleeveless designs, they simply only wore those for night-time events and not during the day because sunscreen wasn’t invented yet. I do have a couple of sources below in the didgeridoo where you can find out all about the nuances of Victorian fashion in context if you’re interested.

But lots of cultures did have some interesting leg stuff going on, a lot of it directly related to the overt sexualization of legs and even fetishizing legs or parts of legs. And, you know, we definitely still do that now. So we do have to have a conversation about the fact that a lot of the history of the attractiveness of legs really centers around objectifying women, and dear viewer, that’s not what we’re here to do today. We will be talking about legs as they pertain to attractiveness in cultural contexts from across the centuries and today, but we’re also going to get into the science of choosing partners based on what the research says about all of our legs, including data around leg length to body ratio, or what researchers are calling LBR. It turns out that men prefer women with longer-than-average legs, and they also favor women who have a higher LBR ratio—and, interestingly, women’s preferences in men are not the same. But we’ll get into that later in the video.

Just to clarify some terminology up front, leg fetishism is called crurophilia. And any form of fetishism to a particular body part or parts is classified as something called partialism.

And we cannot talk about the fetishizing of legs without bringing up one of the most widespread global practices for at least the last few thousand years, and that is hair removal. There’s a lot of cultural pushback on this one, because it gets wrapped up in the conversation about objectifying women’s bodies, and there’s certainly a lot to talk about there, and of course it’s true that there’s a major element of overt sexualization and forced oppression in the story of women shaving their legs. What I’m looking to explore for this video is, how long has it been happening and what are some of the reasons why?

We’re starting here because it turns out this is the oldest leg-centric beauty practice on the list. The first razors for hair removal were made of seashells and possibly date back 100,000 years. Around 3,000 BCE, the ancient Egyptians used sharpened copper or bronze to shave hair from their bodies. They also used pumice stones, or made a paste from beeswax that functioned pretty much like modern waxing does. Egyptian women removed the hair on their heads and pubic regions, as did lots of other cultures around the same time, some even removing every single hair on their bodies. The Romans used pumice stones like the Egyptians and improved upon prior shaving implements with the novicela, which is sort of a thing that looks like you’re shaving yourself with brass knuckles. And Roman men who were athletes or just rich would have slaves take off all their body hair with a device called a strigil. There are several reasons we come across for removing hair in the ancient world, some of them are focused on hygiene, others on a cultural symbolism of purity, and sometimes it just comes down to a sense of changing fashions.

You start to have a gap in the Middle Ages where people in the western world were hairy and proud of it, but then in the Elizabethan era, we get back to female hair removal at least, with the trend started by Queen Elizabeth of removing women’s eyebrows.

One fascinating idea I came across is that it’s entirely possible that Charles Darwin reignited the fervor around modern hair removal. After Darwin published his 1871 book The Descent of Man, European folks got caught up in the idea that only our primitive ancestors were hairy, and it was in fact much more civilized to practice hair removal, and that this was a matter of natural selection and securing a mate and successfully passing on our genes.

Ensuing fashion trends continued to dictate hair removal after that point, with women’s skirts becoming shorter and shorter through the decades, and bathing suits allowing for a great deal of exposed leg skin. (1941 bathing suit pic) We have fully shaved legs around World War II, when nylon and other fabrics were hard to come by because there was a shortage of pretty much everything, and legs were now bare a majority of the time.

We can’t talk about leg fetishes and partialism without touching on one of the most extreme and widespread cultural practices from a historical context, so of course, we have to talk about foot binding and lotus shoes. Maybe this isn’t what you thought you were getting into when you clicked on this video. If it’s not, stick with me because I promise this whole thing is really fascinating and informative.

The origins of the practice of foot binding are thought to have come from a 10th-century dancer who enchanted the Chinese Emperor Li Yu, and the practice quickly became associated with eroticism and spawned a cultural tradition that ran rampant in China for a thousand years. The size of women’s feet was classified into three categories, and anyone in the third category was said to have very sad marriage prospects, indeed. One story written around the year 850 which is before foot binding was a widespread cultural practice relays the tale of a king who searches for the owner of a very small shoe so that he can marry her. And yes, if you’re thinking it, this story is thought to be one of the main inspirations for Cinderella. It is worth noting that in later years, women would wear shoes with tiny fake shoes on the bottoms, and their outerwear would be long enough so that just the fake tiny shoes would show.

But, since we’re talking about shoes, we have to mention one particular style of shoe that’s said to accentuate legs and be particularly sexy for onlookers. And those are high heels. To a modern eye, high heels highlight the curves of one's legs, the run of the calf, and they make legs appear longer, and even though all that’s true, they were likely not invented for the purpose of sensualizing the people wearing them. One of the primary motivations for the invention of high heels is thought to be that some royal personages wanted to be taller, and therefore present with more authority. And that’s plausible because it’s a very firm and constant motivation in the course of human power structures. Here’s Louis the 14th, for instance, wearing his best set of Jimmy Choos, along with some other people we suspect are wearing heels and wishing they were a bit taller. Turns out there’s nothing new about finding taller, longer legs attractive.

And we do have research that seems to confirm this aspect of high-heel appreciation. A study often pointed to in leg research from Wroclaw University in Poland found that men find longer legs more attractive. And very specifically, legs that are five percent longer were found to be most attractive, followed by legs that are ten percent longer. The ideal female leg length, according to the men in the research study, was found to be 1.4 times the length of their upper bodies.

Another possible origin of high heels is primarily practical, and that was to keep Venetian noblewomen from sinking into the filth of the streets in the 15th and 16th centuries. Either way, both men and women wore high heels in Europe for a couple hundred years. It stopped due to changing fashions and also because they were primarily associated with nobility and regular people stopped looking up to nobles and more down to them at a certain point (because of the chopping off heads thing). And they did become more associated with femininity over time.

A third possibility is that high heels were actually invented solely for men. How about that? The reason being that the heel part would keep your feet securely hooked into stirrups while on horseback. This is the idea behind the Persian Galesh that predates other Western styles of high heels. Also, cowboy boots tend to have that heel in the back. Just saying, all you Texas conservatives out there wearing high heels.

We can trace a direct line from high heels to the topic of our next exploration into the attractiveness of legs, which is the phenomenon of pin-up girls. Pin-up girls very often wore high heels in their photos. Seen here is one of the most iconic pin-up photos of all time, featuring Betty Grable, arguably the most famous pin-up girl who ever lived. This 1943 bathing suit picture featuring her quote, “million dollar legs,” catapulted her over Rita Hayworth’s 1941 pin-up photo published just before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Grable’s pin-up would be the most ubiquitous picture on all available wall space in all the barracks of World War II.

Because pin-up girls often wore high heels in their photos, we have all the accentuations of legs that high heels come with, and we also have a certain conditioning response in the men viewing them and in society in general. The history of pin-up girls is pretty interesting, and this really is another one of the times society overtly sexualized women as a genuine reflection of their value as people. The situation began in the 19th century with female actresses and marketing for theater productions and burlesque shows. The actresses themselves started making little business cards with pictures of themselves on them, as a kind of visual promotional material, to advertise a show. And these ended up tacked to walls and mirrors pretty much everywhere in homes and bars, and they became so prolific and mainstream that this was just one of the most common ways to advertise. This is why pin-up girls during the 20th century were often really big movie stars. And hey, it still pretty much is the only way we advertise things. (images of celeb women posing for promotional materials for movies)

So what we like about high heels is probably the fact that they make legs look longer and more accentuated, because science says we like longer legs in general. The reasons for this might have something to do with what Darwin said in the 1870s, about the science of choosing a mate. In general, human beings evolved to find certain physical characteristics attractive in potential partners because they signaled a measure of health and fitness for reproduction, which was a physically taxing process, especially if you’re the one carrying a pregnancy to term. So characteristics that we came to believe signalled long-term health translated directly to overall safety for an individual and their family or future family.

And this part isn’t just speculation or theorized concepts from evolutionary psychology. We know factually that longer legs are associated with the reduction of serious health conditions. Multiple studies have shown that longer legs can mean less chance of developing coronary heart disease, diabetes, blood pressure problems, and cancer. Not only that, but how tall people are is, in general, directly correlated to a certain population’s nutritional status. For some reason, growth is stunted in the length of the legs more than it is in the upper body.

A study from many decades ago now found that any interruption in the release of two key hormones during adolescence, from trauma or extreme stress, could do a number of things to the body, including the possibility that someone could have a longer torso, or shorter legs relative to their overall height, creating a sub-optimal LBR. It’s possible that our brains are wired to see this as an evolutionary cue that a potential partner went through a particularly unhealthy period early in life, or even more recently.

And in terms of attractiveness, LBR could be more important than a lot of other health indicators. Another study from 2018 published in Royal Society Open Science found that LBR was more important than any other physical limb trait linked to good health. It does seem like we may not even care about any of those other factors at all. Things like arm length in relation to the torso size, and also whether or not the elbows and knees divide your limbs directly in half or not, these are both also physiological indicators of healthfulness. But in the 2018 study, there were no standouts in terms of preference for either of those. Just LBR alone was a major factor in defining what someone found attractive in a potential partner.

This study also gave us the important fact that I’m sure a lot of my male viewers were waiting for, and that’s the female preference for male leg length, or male LBR.

Before we get into that please make sure to like this video if you’re enjoying the content, and please subscribe to the channel so you can have more of it going forward. And hit the notification button so you get alerts when I come out with something new.

It turns out that women most prefer men whose legs are half the length of their entire body. So not the same as the other way around, where men prefer women with a ratio of 1.4 times leg length to overall height. This is actually one for one. So, all you men out there watching this, your legs should be half the length of your body. Go get that tape measure.

Now, shorter legs than this though, were seen as not as attractive. And again, this could very well be an evolutionary need baked into the desire of the beholder. Because some research has linked shorter legs with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. A really wild study that measured 89% of men in a single town in Wales showed us that men with shorter legs are also more likely to have higher triglycerides, and that means a higher risk of stroke. This study also found that longer legs are linked to better cardiovascular health and less insulin resistance, so better outcomes related to diabetes risk.

So what do we know about why people think legs are sexy? For a lot of human history, different parts of legs were considered attractive, and different levels of revealing those same legs could be a problem, though the Victorian ankle thing really is a myth. You probably wouldn’t ever see a bare leg in public, but people saw stockinged ankles all the time.

There’s also some very problematic history at play. There’s something especially creepy to me about the idea of foot binding and other mechanisms for constraining growth like corsets, that point to a concerning level of idolizing youth and doll-like appearances. And I definitely have to recognize how gross of a direction that seems to be going in.

Overall, what we like about legs probably comes down to an evolutionary cue for healthfulness. The cultural exposure of legs and hair removal means that we can see more of them, and fully assess these evolutionary cues. It is odd though that this one evolution cue seems to be way more important to us while certain other indicators of healthy bodies are entirely ignored. But there’s obviously something deeply baked into the human consciousness about this because legs have been a focal point for attractiveness for thousands of years.

And I think my biggest question at the end of this is; was there ever a time when we were really into knees? Not like, the backs of knees, because they’re pretty okay, but like the knobby bits up front? If you’re not just a “leg man,” but actually a “knee man,” let me know in the comments. I’ll see you next time.