Here's all you need to participate in the web's sloppiest shoe fetish: Your own two feet, a phone with a camera, a fresh pair of Nikes (though anything will do in a pinch), and a few snack packs of messy, gloppy, sexy pudding. Are you ready?

Start filming the shoes. Allow the camera to contemplate their sensual appeal: crisp laces, exclusive colorway, soft leather upper. When sufficient time has passed—you'll know when you're ready—introduce the pudding, slowly and with care, showing off its packaging and label. Then take the container in your hands, rip it open, and deposit the soupy payload in your sneaker's throat.

Take a deep breath. Calm your nerves. You've been waiting a long time for this, and you'll want to savor the moment.

Now put your foot in the shoe.

Move it around.

Feel the squishy chocolate between your toes.

Isn't that nice?

Use other ingredients if you're feeling adventurous. Fancy tomato sauce?

Cover your entire outfit in pudding.

Take a saw to your sneakers if you must.

To paraphrase a common refrain from the comments sections of these videos: What the fuck did you just watch?

If so-called "unboxing" videos, in which omniscient offscreen narrators slowly and sensually open sealed boxes containing pristine new products, are the late-night Cinemax to society's collective tumescence over consumer goods, the videos above are something like BDSM. To the young man (unsurprisingly, based on anecdotal observation, this proclivity belongs almost exclusively to young men) who destroys a pair of Dunks with a host of viscous foodstuffs and then uploads the video to YouTube, expensive new shoes are objects to be idolized, but also dominated, microwaved, humiliated, slashed with a kitchen knife, willed into submission. Yes, like virtually every other seemingly inexplicable thing on this great big internet, pudding sneakers are about sex.

The videos achieve their unique and unsettling vividness by incorporating elements of two other fetishes: "wet and messy" or "sploshing," a well-documented preference for sex covered in Jell-O, shaving cream, baked beans, et al; and sneaker destruction, which, as a Vice interview with a "seasoned shoe destroyer" detailed earlier this year, is exactly what it sounds like.

Sneaker culture is as fertile ground as any for fetishism. Its most ardent exponents regularly fixate on limited runs and brand-new colors with near-sexual intensity, waiting in long lines and paying exorbitant prices to pick them up, and it's not difficult to imagine some Hypebeast comment-section regular literally masturbating into his Nikes. (Indeed, those videos exist if you're looking.) Multiply that obsessive impulse with the sadism behind crush videos, add a touch of wet and messy, and pretty soon you're filling your size 10s with all the banana pudding they can take.

I asked lovinsneax1, an astoundingly prolific YouTuber—he has destroyed hundreds of pairs of sneakers over the past five years using everything from chocolate to a blow torch to his own urine—to help explain the appeal. "In general it's all about trashing sneakers for me," he emailed in slightly mangled English. "The newer and more expensive the better. I can't tell you why, it's just that I enjoy—also in a sexual gratification—trashing sneakers, especially Adidas and Nikes." (In the interest of protecting his offline identity, I didn't ask lovinsneax1 where he lives.)

Though he created two of the pudding videos above, lovinsneax1 insisted that grub doesn't hold any particular fascination for him; it's just one weapon in an arsenal of many. There are certainly more efficient means than food if utter destruction is the only aim: in this video, for instance, he melts a Nike Air Max 90 over an open fire; here, a different guy pulverizes an Asics Tiger with an M-80 firecracker. And when you mess around with food, you have to deal with what comes next.

"Playing a pair with food ruins them entirely as everything starts to mold within a few days, even after cleaning. So the only chance is to bin them directly ;-)", lovinsneax1 wrote. "Why food? It's just one way to trash them. After killing dozens of pairs it's just the alternation. I love to kill a fresh pair, independent of the method. Can be buy burning, cutting, ripping, writing, muddying or messing up with food."

In one memorable video, lovinsneax1 is in red and white Nikes, flirting with the edge of a wooded creek. Gingerly, he dips in, then scoops a bit of mud with one foot and smears it on the toe of the other, dragging them both through the dirt a bit, and dips in again. After a few more minutes of dipping and smearing, we realize this is all a tease. Lovinsneax1 plunges ankles-deep into the water, and the cameraman, wearing a clean pair of Air Force 1s, starts breathing excitedly.

The bucolic setting is unexpected, but until this point, you're still watching a relatively ordinary sneaker destruction video. Only after a jarring, Godardian jump-cut is the awful truth revealed: a mass grave dozens of sneakers deep sits in the underbrush just beyond the shore, and now the Air Force 1s are stomping all over it.

That video alone would have cost hundreds of dollars to produce if the sneakers were purchased new, and there are hundreds of other clips like it. Fortunately for lovinsneax1, he doesn't have to pay for all of them. Most of the shoes, he said, are donated by fellow enthusiasts who enjoy watching him work, though he admitted that he's still spent "a lot" of money on what can only be a very expensive hobby. (He declined to give a precise figure.) Some shoes are tortured beyond the point of wearability after he's done with them; others he continues to take out in public. "I thought [wearing trashed sneakers] would cause attention," he said, "but in fact nobody really cares."

If you didn't already know what you were watching, you might mistake his vast collection of films for the work of an obsessive video artist. At anywhere between five and forty minutes each, they require patience, and after watching dozens of clips over the past several weeks, I'll confess an uncomfortable thrill at seeing such gleaming commercial goods so thoroughly battered. Lovinsneax1 sometimes scrawls all-caps slogans in Sharpie on his prospective victims, lending the appearance of anti-consumerist agit-prop: "FUCK SNEAX." "BYE BYE." "DRECKS." "KILL ME." Slyly, on a pair of Adidas: "JUST DO IT."

His intention isn't so subversive. "It's because it's despiteous to write on an expensive, fresh sneaker," he said, sounding more like Instagram rich-kid Param Sharma than Barbara Kruger or Ed Ruscha. "There are lots of people who would love to wear such a pair but can't afford. Maybe it's this objection which makes it that horny to use a sneaker for something completely different than just wearing." He doesn't continue his passion through the lens of art, he added, but he would be open-minded if a gallery came calling.

If that last quote about people who can't afford sneakers makes you angry, all the better for lovinsneax1. "I also like to read all those comments from people who can't understand and who suggest to donate these shoes," rather than destroy them, he said. "No, I just love to trash them...:-)"

[Image via Lovinsneax1/YouTube]