another in the long line of feminist rants

[freckles_and_doubt]

strawberryfrog and short_mort are getting married on Saturday, and I wanted some new boots to wear to the (semi-formal) wedding, my current bootedness tending to the big and clunky. This means that I spent an instructive half-hour wandering around Cavendish yesterday, looking at shoe shops.

I hate shoe shops*. They are universally filled with overpriced objects of shoddy workmanship in dubious taste which I wouldn't put on my feet with a ten-foot pole**. But today I had my nose particularly rubbed in the current recurring fashion trend in women's footwear, which is towards obscenely high, thin heels. You know fashion is hitting the silly season when footwear looks more like an alien artefact, all thin curves and mysterious functionality. This year the spike heel is apparently In, in a big way.

High heels - particularly such enormously high heels, some of them four or five inches - are very, very, extremely, incredibly bad for you. Apart from the dangers of slipping, turning ankles or simply falling over because of your unbalanced centre of gravity, the raised-heel position throws the whole body out of kilter. In addition to ankle problems, knee problems, shortened calf muscles and achilles tendons, shin splints and bruised balls of the feet, they can cause back and spine damage because in high heels the way you walk, and the way you hold your whole body, is simply unnatural. Ye gods, they can cause menstrual and fertility problems! I've never worn particularly high heels, but even lowish wedge heels are implicated in several of my interesting falls, slippages and other evidences of ungainliness, and thus in my weak ankles, buggered knees and floating splinters of ankle-bone. This weird little page suggests that even dominatrices should consider slipping the extremely high heels off once their partner is safely blindfolded, to avoid muscle strain.

All this being the case, one has to ask why the hell contemporary fashion gets away with foisting these atrocities on hapless womanhood, year after year? The high heel is a serious fetish, at least superficially because it extends both height and leg length and forces the wearer to take little steps and sway their hips more while walking. Yay, sexiness. Not. But I think it's more than that: it's not an accident that high heels are worn almost exclusively by women, with male forays mostly into things like cowboy boots, which are at least a development from practicality (a heel stops the foot from slipping in the stirrup while riding). Nope, our culture codes the high heel as female/sexy because it underscores the whole bloody construction of woman as object. A woman in high heels is vulnerable, teetering, not quite in control; she cannot run, or even move fast; the heel traps her into immobility, and hence uselessness. She is an object of display, her very helplessness testament to the power of her (male) owner who can afford to keep her around as a non-contributing trophy whose value is in her long legs and decorative sexuality. The fact that her five-inch heels also damage her really only contributes to this construction. Western society gets all superior about Chinese foot-binding practices, but, guess what? We do it to women too, cripple their feet because of a perceived notion of beauty and passivity.

*retires to contemplate a new career in fashion-activism, including but not limited to pushing models in high heels off catwalks by judicious application of banana-skins*

* a tendency I apparently share with Douglas Adams.
** assuming the mechanics of such an action were even possible