Necessary and appropriate
In Japan high heels are mandatory for women.
Japan’s health and labour minister has defended workplaces that require women to wear high heels to work, arguing it is “necessary and appropriate” after a petition was filed against the practice.
Necessary and appropriate for what, exactly? Knowing who is which sex without having to raise one’s gaze from the floor?
The remark came when Takumi Nemoto was asked to comment on a petition by a group of women who want the government to ban workplaces from requiring female jobseekers and employees to wear high heels.
“It is socially accepted as something that falls within the realm of being occupationally necessary and appropriate,” Nemoto told a legislative committee on Wednesday.
Easy for him to say.
Campaigners say wearing high heels in Japan is near-obligatory when job hunting or working in many Japanese companies.
Some campaigners describe high heels as akin to modern-day foot-binding…
Which they are. They’re a mild form of it, but they do bind and deform the feet, and they also inhibit women’s ability to move. The streets around the World Trade Center were littered with the damn things after the towers collapsed.
I didn’t know that about the WTC. Wow.
Every woman I know has referred to them with some variation of the phrase “torture devices”. The entire world has serious problems with mistreating women, but Japan seems to take it to an entirely new level.
I understand that many men (and plenty of women) consider that wearing high heels makes a woman more “attractive”. I won’t argue with aesthetics, but I do think that it is fair to ask for justification of the “occupational necessity” for the enhancement of attractiveness.
I count myself very fortunate that my choice of career (combined with luck of time and place) has allowed me to choose my clothing based on practicality and comfort, ~99% of the time. As for the excesses of Japan in this area as compared, for example, to North America and/or Europe, I see a difference of degree, but not a difference of kind. (Though I will note the win that some Israeli flight attendants had in this area a few years ago – which I think might have been mentioned here at the time – http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/200542 )