Manolo Blahnik at the Wallace Collection
A woman writes about the mandatory high heels for women issue:
It’s hard to imagine men enduring decades of pain and long-term physical injury just to “look the part” in the workplace – after all, many bemoan the necktie as too restrictive for the daily grind.
Now consider this: millions of women around the world, at all levels of the workplace hierarchy, have consistently spent their working hours tortured by blisters, bloodied flesh, foot pain, knee pain, back pain and worse, as a result of the pressure to conform to an aesthetic code – sometimes explicitly written into contracts or policy, more often subliminally expected as a societal and cultural standard – that deems it appropriate to wear high heels.
Strange, isn’t it. The cover story is that it’s all about aesthetics, but I’m not convinced. I think it’s part fetish and part disable them so that they can’t escape. I think the proportions of each vary with the individual.
Fascination with the footwear appears to be endless, with a new exhibition celebrating Manolo Blahnik’s work opening at London’s Wallace Collection tomorrow.
Fetish.
In my former roles as a newspaper fashion editor and TV fashion correspondent, I revelled in the regular opportunities I had to dress up in exotic footwear. However, motherhood and life as a freelance journalist based in a rural village have made it necessary to adapt to changing needs, so trainers, brogues and wellies now feature more frequently. While I find heels empowering and enjoyable to wear on the right occasion, I would challenge any employer who stipulated I was contractually obliged to do so.
That’s the bit that made me decide to do a note here. She finds heels “empowering”??? How? In what sense of the word? How can that possibly make sense when heels are necessarily disempowering? They’re hobbles. They’re also sexy (see: fetish) but they can’t not be hobbling too. They are radically different from normal functional shoes that we wear to protect our feet from broken glass and dog shit: they are deliberately and calculatedly not functional, but rather anti-functional. No one would voluntarily wear them to run a race or to escape from a bear or to walk a few miles. The highness of the heels in High Heels makes them anti-functional as shoes: the highness slows the gait and makes it at least somewhat painful, and increasingly painful with more time and more steps. So in what sense can they be “empowering”?
This must be the ultimate in libertarian choosy-choice empowerment feminism: modern day footbinding is “empowering.”
Maybe in this context “empowering” might be translated as “taller”?
Just guessing, as I have never worn high heels, but I did have a pair of somewhat thicker soled platfom-ish shoes when I was a young teen in the early to mid 70’s. Don’t ask. (It was a style back then. Bands with big hair and tall shoes. Couldn’t really do the big hair back then, so slightly-taller-than-I’d-ever-had-until-then-and- would ever-get-again was the best I was going to do. How I ever convinced my Mom, I’ll never know, though I think she had some inkling of the demands to be cool and fit in that teen boys faced.) Different animal entirely than heels, of course, but at that time being a wee bit taller than normal was noticible (at least by me). Practical? No, but I did feel a little different wearing them, because of the height thing. I thought they were “cool”, but whether I fooled anyone else, I dunno. It was the closest I got (and will ever get) to anything approaching “fashionable” footwear.
That’s my take on a possible meaning, anyhow.
How is is this not empowering?:
http://blastecho.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/KISS.jpg
YNNB: I’ve also seen increased height stated as an “empowering” aspect of women’s high heels – “now you can be *almost* as big as the manly men!”. Men in heels, however, have Napoleon Syndrome and are to be mocked. Unless they are challenging gender norms, obviously.
A couple of women at a neighbouring workplace wear hard-heeled, not necessarily high-heeled shoes. Their staff often hang out (bunk-off) close to my door. It scares them into immediate action whenever they hear them stomping along the corridor. I assume that they choose that kind of shoe for its “empowering” noise.
Ah, glam rockers. Doing more in their own misogynistic way to break down gender stereotypes than any TRA ever.
High heels are good because they stop your boot from going right through the stirrup when you are riding your tall horse Silver off into the sunset with Tonto on his pony doing his best to keep up beside you. If Silver were to shy at something and you got thrown with one foot through the stirrup, you could get dragged and trampled. Maybe even by Tonto’s pony. Nothing quite so de-dignifying or disempowering as that.
And no amount of purple language can put it right.
Coincidentally, last night I started reading a book on randomness and chance*, and heels are mentioned in an example** of the human tendency to draw false conclusions from correlated events. In the example, the author gives a brief background to heels.
The first mention of them comes from around 1000 years ago, and were worn only by the aristocracy as a sign of their status. Most people had to work and spend a lot of time on their feet in varying terrains, and so their footwear had to be practical. The aristocracy, however, didn’t work, and wearing such impractical items as heels was a way of showing others that they had no need to spend much time on their feet, much less have to hurry anywhere or cross a boggy field.
As wealth slowly flowed down, the emerging middle-classes adopted the fashion to reflect their own status.
So really, the original ’empowerment’ of heels was a ‘fuck you’ to the poor and working classes; a way of showing that they were too wealthy to have to do anything so menial as work.
*Dice World, by Brian Clegg.
** A Swedish scientist published a paper in 2004 in which he took two correlated events – the introduction and spread of heeled shoes and the increased frequency of schizophrenia (the earliest recorded mentions of both come from Mesopotamia around 1000 years ago) – and concluded that the wearing of heels is a causal factor in schizophrenia.
Today I was involved in a discussion of the new Quebec “Secular” laws* , and stated my position that despite the fact that hijab (or niqab or burqa) is definitely a symbol of oppression of women, I do not agree that the government should ban it. I was presented with what I suspect was suppose to be a “gotcha” question: Did I think that high heels were also a symbol of oppression of women. Perhaps the questioner was taken by surprise by my quick and unequivocal, “Yes of course high heels are a symbol of women’s oppression.”)
* I live in Ontario, but I can see Quebec from my bedroom window
I wear highish heels about once a semester, just because I like the feel of the heels clunking around. I know, it’s weird. But I think it says something that the day I choose to wear them is a day I know I will not be on my feet for a substantial length of time.
And more than that, I think. It makes it more difficult for us to do certain things that men can do in their flat shoes, thereby rendering us as less competition.
Omar: It’s actually a small block heel that prevents the rider’s foot from sliding through the stirrup in a crisis. With high heels, it would be impossible to keep the ball of the foot resting securely in the stirrup, and the heel (of the foot, not the shoe) lower than the toes. This provides precisely the balance and security that you need when Silver unexpectedly dodges a scary bird, or his own shadow. And if you do go out the side exit, you may find yourself walking three miles across the countryside in pursuit of your not-so-trusty steed, and you definitely don’t want to do that in high heels.
Cw: With English/Australian saddles, yes. But the Lone Ranger has the option of the closed American/Spanish stirrup, which is like a cut-off toe section of an outsize metal boot, into which the foot can go only so far and no further.
It is vital of course, when riding a horse, to avoid having one’s feet slip out of the stirrups, and likewise vital to keep downward pressure on both the stirrups at all times and to push-push-push downwards on the stirrup irons in time with the horse’s gait, as that rhythm changes as the horse moves from walk to trot to canter to gallop to gone berserk. (I speak from considerable experience of all 5 established gaits.)
One of my ambitions in life has been to own a Mexican saddle, for use in riding the high country of the Snowy Mountains of southern New South Wales. If you are interested, the pair below on eBay would be a good point of entry. Proceed from there.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/2-Vintage-Horse-Riding-Open-Shoe-Solid-Stirrups-All-Bronze-Mexican-Spanish-Orgin-/123716256246
@YNNB
#1
But one has to think about not only the height of the heel, but how much higher it is than the rest of the foot. So platform shoes still are different from “regular” heels.