I hereby declare this period of mourning on Women over. Has the cat been going around collecting all your tongues? Ladies, ladies, how can that be when there are men to nag, huh? There is hope yet. I'll start us off gently: shoes.
-Amy Lillard
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The way I see it, high-heeled shoes are the means by which the female gender can be divided.
Oh sure, there’s others. Careers, sexuality, hobbies, thong or cotton underwear, but really, the use and/or abuse of that bizarre paragon of female sexuality, the high heeled shoe, is the crux of the matter here.
This is important now because it seems that in the ebb and flow of fashion that dictates what we use to cover our nudity, the current style is the highest of the high heels. The heels that seem to draw a vertical line straight up from the ball of the foot into the heights of feminine glory and pain. The heels that balance a woman’s weight upon her tippy toes and a thin spike which seems logically bound to snap at the first moment of impact. The heels that… but oh, they’re soooo pretty!
So women can be divided by their use of the high heel. There’s Camp 1: the women that seem to have their feet molded in the classic Barbie doll shape, wearing stiletto boots and strappy figments of coverage to work, running confidently and against all odds to catch that bus as it threatens to peel away from the curb. These are the women that seem to demonstrate better balance as they navigate snow and ice in pointy heels, better than men slip-sliding in flat and supposedly practical shoes. These are the women who feel no pain, or are at least adept at hiding normal sensation from the public and themselves.
And then there’s Camp 2: the women who take mincing steps in their high heels, with feet swelling to double their size and blisters popping and bleeding, who scare children with their attempts to smile through clenched teeth and under-the-breath cursing. These are the women who whip out the pumps for important business meetings or interviews, forgetting that an ace performance will be impossible when you’re sweaty and limping from the walk to work. The women who purchase the cute dressy sandals for weddings, knowing that if they cry from pain everyone will think you’re just another weepy female at a wedding. The women whose feet, no matter how hard they try, will not mold to fashion but instead demand to be flat, free and frisky.
So what is it about the high heels? After a misguided day of wearing high heels, convincing myself that I’d be fine on the 14 blocks or so to bus stop/work and back, when my feet slowly bend back to their normal position and I can walk without the hobble, I realize the association of sexiness and pain. Because high heels are just today’s example of pain defined as beauty - witness the march of historical evidence in the form of corsets, rocket-launcher shaped bras, girdles, garters, strapless bra apparatus (apparatuses? apparati?), etc.
The culprits are many, of course. They include a society that defines women as objects and men as subjects. Not many inherently uncomfortable men’s clothes out there, are there? The usual suspects that are name-checked in an argument such as this perpetuate this standard: purveyors of entertainment, The Media, etc.
But it can be said that women preserve this diabolical tendency of fashion by succumbing to it. Tis true, my fellow lasses. I know I have walked through the aisles of DSW or Payless and been sucked in by the heels. They call to me, promising that this time will be different, that all that abuse in the past was just a mistake, that they regret it and will prove themselves improved… And I believe them. I slip on a pair and marvel at how they make my huge feet look downright feminine and purty. I ignore all the laws of logic and body makeup, all the medical evidence that shows the damage of high heels in the form of bunions, corns, and broken bones, all the pain shooting through my toes and calves, and I jump right back into bed with that abusive paramour.
The point is that I know what I should do but I don’t. And these are freakin shoes, people. How about the other damages women do to themselves in the name of socially accepted beauty – starvation, mutilation, and plastic surgery, to name a few? I can easily draw the line between succumbing to society’s shoe fetish and giving in to obsessions with big breasts and anorexia. But some can’t draw that line. Some are too young to draw that line. And that’s where the beauty = pain scenario is in fact the most painful.
