Amanda

Because we're trying to stay one step ahead og teh bad guys!!

Sorry, couldn't resist!

But don't you see, we are responsible for the existence of these "bad guys" in the first place.

These terrible actions of theirs are what's known in our intelligence circles as "blowback" or in other words unpleasant, direct feedback from people who have been oppressed, marginalized or had their assets plundered as a result of various overseas policies conducted by our governments.

They're a very small and sorry bunch and it's not them I wish to blame for having to stand around on tiptoe while some jobsworth security guard scrolls my possessions back and forth through the x-ray machine.

(Sometimes I have to wonder if they're not just marveling at the shoes. Some guys do you know!).

Half of the time they're too busy talking to a colleague about what they saw on TV last night to be able to concentrate on airport security properly anyway.

I can't say I blame them, it must be mind numbing and worse still they never catch any terrorists.

Airport security is yet another manifestation of the western mentality of treating the symptom in stead of the cause and failing.

Puffer, this thread is so not about flip flops and hygiene. Can we go back soon please?.

oops sorry, female. Also I truly can't wear them all or don't at all. I go through phases, the problem is I don't want to get rid of any, thinking I'll find an outfit for them.

Lol, you're not alone there.

Welcome Seia.

Amanda

But I am guessing you are a barrister by the way you write.

T&H

Or a paparazzi photographer with a guilt complex.

Any professional cobbler can fit steel tips on your heels. It's not an inexpensive job and apart from sounding more important, they last so much longer.

The only pair of high heels I remember with steel tips were a pair of slides with a 4 inch high heel that my mother had years ago (I use to wear them all the time when she wasn't wearing them and I could still fit in them). When she walked on the pavement, you could hear her coming a mile away. But I don't think I've seen a pair in the store with steel tips. If anyone knows of any high heels with steel tips, please let me know. Thank you.

I dread the snow. Mainly because it's not possible to see what's under it. If I have to go out in it I wear boots with laces to avoid twisting an ankle.

Enhancing

meringue

I would say that chap is definitely a sandwich short of a picnic. I also suspect he was put up to it by a third party. I'm very happy and proud to live in a country where such an accident would be seen as such and compensated by buying him a drink. The national health system would supply, free of charge some filler or other to renovate the chipped nose. Furthermore I would like to think that a legal case of that caliber over here would not be entertained by any self respecting judge.

You would be better off by far spending that money on properly fitting well made shoes in the first place. I believe in treating the cause not the symptom. I wonder if you can get Botox injected into that part of ones brain where the emotions reside?. That would be of far more interest to me.

Hey I have some of those pumps in both Black and Tan.

Comfy Glamour shoes, I love them.

Wore these shoes today from Office with a matching top and another tight black skirt.

I'm wearing Blue Vivienne Westwood Mary Jane pumps. I might wear them again tomorrow that'll save me posting when I should be working

I'm surprised how little feedback I've received from the women on this board...

I'm hoping some gal out there will help me give these to the wife, perhaps for valentines day?

I think they're awful.

(sorry Roz but it's my honest opinion)

I agree with shrimper, you should get a pole to go with them or at least a piece of rope and a chair.

I agree with all of the below with the exception of footwear advice.

I might add that contrary to those guidelines, your appearance can get you even more noticed for your business skills.

Conservative, professional and in the best possible taste of course but It's undeniable.

Skirts: Too little is too much. Skirt lengths should be no more than one hand-width above the knee.

Tops: Make sure there is at least one-inch of room between body and fabric and that it is long enough to conceal your midriff. Stomach, breasts, back and shoulders should be covered. Fabric should not be overly thin and a bra should be worn (with no straps revealed).

Dresses: No halter tops or cleavage-baring necklines. Avoid overly snug fits. Hemlines should hit no more than one hand-width above the knee.

Trousers: Shun overly tight or hip-hugger trousers or jeans that expose the midriff. Stick with neutral colours.

Shoes: Heels should be no higher than two inches; toe should be closed. Avoid shoes with straps, bright colours and patterns.

Hair: Keep your hair sleek and off your face. Avoid the high-maintenance, over-processed look.

Make-up: Keep it clean and natural. Avoid heavy eyeliner or evening lipsticks.

"Clothing and appearance are visual shorthand," RoAne concludes. "The point is to be noticed for your business skills, not your short skirts or push-up bra.

"If you want a job, dress the part. If you want to show off your body... well, that's what your free time is for."

Al

I've not been fortunate enough not to suffer from hairy feet.

My mothers advice to me was to try anything once, however, I don't think I could bring myself to invest in these:

http://www.gwapasila.com/uploaded_images/Nike_human_shoes1-752128.jpg

I fly quite a lot and rarely crash, in fact I don't remember crashing at all. Because of this I'm really not worried about having to take my heels off in the event of a crash. However my heels vs flying pet hate is having to tiptoe around at the security checkpoint while they reverse my bag, shoes and coat in and out of the x-ray machine, sometimes for a second look at the bag behind my own. The inconsistency annoys me just as much as the hobbling. I've noticed that in some queues it's not requested that one takes ones shoes off while others do. Some airports it's manditory and some random. I learned a lesson recently while in a hurry to make a connection I made the mistake of wearing ankle straps with tiny fiddly buckles and admittedly too long nails. I had to pass two of those checkpoints in one connection after having already cleared one to get to that airport in the first place. There I was bent double on a bench with my ransacked possessions scattered around me in a heap while the more hurried my efforts in fastening, the madder and redder I got and ended up trying to run with them flapping. I do hope that Mr Obama will deliver us from this bogus War on Terror so that things can resume as normal in a civilized fashion.

Because fashion doesn't care about us..

I'm trying to figure this out. Around here, it's cold and snowy. Not surprising being the middle of winter. So I go into the malls or stores, and women are wearing pumps, ballet flats, and even flip flops! And there will be several inches of snow outside. Even more strange is they often wear them with bare feet (I know, because some of their shoes have peep toes). Meanwhile, I'm wearing my steel toed boots with tube socks, and staying reasonably warm. So please tell me I'm just missing the part where they switch shoes. I would think if they are actually wearing said shoes, I can't imagine how that wouldn't be dreadfully uncomfortable, wet, and probably not too good for the shoes.

The only appliance I ever used for my heels is those little plastic cups you can buy from dance wear suppliers. I keep them in my handbag just in case I have to protect an unsuspecting unscheduled floor somewhere. They render most metal stilettos harmless.

I would like to think that there are other parts of my physical appearance or personality that people find attractive aside from my choice in footwear.

Perhaps that's a foolish assumption.

Maybe if I wore a size smaller or larger I might have more chance of catching my dream man.

I suppose I'll simply have to experiment.

Thanks for the insight.

If I see a woman wearing a particular type of hot shoes which really arouse me, what are the chances that another woman could wear them with similar effect?

So for example, if you have 10 20 year old college girls, with half of them size 7, a quarter size 6, and another quarter size 5.....with mostly similar figures.......what are the chances they could wear the exact same style/brand/year/model in same or slightly different sizes and generate the same effect and results for me?

In other words I think, can high heels generate a fairly uniform effect among women, even when they don't have the exact same size, figure, measurements, etc?

When I was younger, I used to think there was a unique effect or something special about it from woman to woman, but as I get older I think maybe I am not completely correct???

I would advise you to channel all that energy and passion into something else.

Want everyones any anyones advice..think we've been here before.

Scenario:

wife and two great kids

My wife knows of my issues if you call it that! but my two children! 17 and 20 don't!

now to be honest they may have a tiny inkling that their dad may not worrry too much on dress code i.e womens jumpers ,sleepwear etc

Is it to late to talk to them and let them know about my heeling/freestyling/cross dressing! have any of you dealt with this before?

your advice would be much appreciated...

i have reached a point in my life where the frustration of being secretive is driving me mad..i have deliberately left out two pairs of heels in my room just too see if i get a query on where they have come from! but as yet nothing!!

Feel like tossing a coin!!! just ohh i dont know...ARRRRRGGHHHH!!!!! WILL I WONT I WILL IWONT I!!!!!

I was getting ready for work on monday morning when I realized that my husband had taken all on my non high heels. In there place were five pair of 5” heels in all different colors. I called him and he told me that all of my other shoes were locked away in a foot locker and they would stay there until spring. He also told me if he saw me wearing anything but the high heels he would take all of my pants and leave me only tight slutty leather skirts to wear. So I cannot leave the house unless I am in five inch heels. Has anyone had this happen? And what would you do?

In the event of such an unlikely occurrence, I imagine I would quite magically become single again almost instantaneously.

Germaine Greer div#related-article-links p a, div#related-article-links p a:visited { color:#06c; } Heels have gone about as far as they can go. Nine-inch heels with four-inch platforms is usually the cut-off point. We’ve witnessed this moment before, in the Seventies, in the Eighties, and in the Nineties. Now is the towering shoe moment of the Noughties, which will be followed by the inevitable fall. Women in Westfield may be gazing hungrily at fabulous displays of kick-arse shoes, but nine out of ten of them will be wearing Ugg boots. Few of them will have the spare cash to invest in shoes that can be safely worn only in bed. You can shop online for high-heeled shoes for baby girls aged nought to six months, which seems rather early to be introducing someone to a fetish, unless it’s meant to work as aversion therapy. Shoemania can have serious consequences. My mother gave up her valuable scholarship and went to work as a milliner’s apprentice because she hated having to wear flat shoes to school.

Ever since the courtesans of Ancient Greece signalled their presence by the clacking of their shoes, high heels have been sexy. The margins of my surviving schoolbooks are filled with drawings of f***-me shoes. As an eight-year-old whiling away the long hours of watching over my baby sister I would prop my feet on dominoes set on their ends, and twirl my newly leggy self in front of my mother’s full-length mirror, yearning for proper high heels. Sadly, long before I was old enough to wear them, I had grown too tall. Like Jackie Kennedy, Princess Di and now Carla Bruni, I found myself restricted to kitten heels or downright flats.

Most of my mother’s considerable store of energy was spent on browning her legs so that she could display them to good advantage in slingback cork-soled white kid wedgies. High heels made her Swiss-Italian bottom look cute and curvy rather than plain broad. Even now, at the age of 93, she sees herself as a red-headed version of Betty Grable, whose legs were insured by Lloyd’s in 1943 for $1 million. One and a half million American troops owned a copy of the pin-up photograph of Grable as a bathing beauty, wearing a one-piece bathing suit – and high-heeled shoes. For a century beauty queens swayed along countless catwalks sporting the same improbable combination of swimsuit and heels. Even Paula Radcliffe wore four-inch heels with a bathing suit for her appearance on the cover of The Observer Sport Monthly.

When the New Look came in and skirts fell to ankle-length, heels went either down to utterly flat or up to four inches. My grandmother, whose legs were the shortest in the family, was never to be seen in anything lower than four-inch heels. By middle age her calf muscles had shortened so much that even her bedroom slippers had to have heels. One day she lost her balance and fell, breaking her hip. Three weeks later she was dead, only a few months older than I am now.

Multimedia

• Pictures: The Highest of Heels

In the Sixties and the Seventies we mostly wore boots. The best were made to measure, right up to the knee (because nothing is less flattering to leg or thigh than boots that are too short) with a stacked leather heel. The cheapest were Biba suede, with a very silly heel. The Eighties were the Diana years. It was not until Diana had given up being seen at the side of the Prince of Wales that she could add on the extra inches and show a shapely leg in Jimmy Choos. Heels then shot up at a dizzying rate; they were already at nine inches in 1993 when Naomi Campbell fell off the super-elevated Ghillie platform shoes she was wearing for Vivienne Westwood at the first Anglomania show. Westwood knew perfectly well that the notion that high heels might empower a woman by bringing her eyes level with a man’s was rubbish. By dropping on to her bottom in a froth of plaid and petticoats Campbell made exactly the connection between taboo and tradition that Westwood was hoping for.

The success of the TV series Sex and the City since 1998 derives partly from the accuracy of its basic tenets that chocolate and shopping are more satisfactory than sex and that all women hanker after extravagant shoes. Improved engineering had by then made Manolo Blahnik’s dizzier heels wearable. Just. Women who wear trainers to travel to work will change into serious heels when they get there, unless they are salespeople or factory workers or nurses. As well as carrying a complex set of sexual implications, heels are a way of signalling vicarious leisure.

Some say that foot fetishism gains ground when intercourse becomes too dangerous. Lap dancers, strippers and porn stars wear the highest platforms of all. An Italian urologist has declared that high heels “directly work the pleasure muscles that are linked to orgasm”. What is more, “They influence and work the pelvic muscles and reduce the need to exercise them.” However, she also admits that she adores high-heeled shoes and “wanted to find something positive about them”. You’d be rash to trust to your Christian Louboutins to cure your stress incontinence. Comments on an osteoarthritis sufferers’ website indicate that despite the known facts about the stress on the knee caused by wearing high heels, women have no intention of giving them up. Those now unfashionable psychoanalysts who explained women’s psychology as a perpetual struggle between narcissism and masochism might have had a point.

It makes no more sense to put women’s addiction to silly shoes down to men, than it does to blame men for cosmetic polysurgery and female genital cutting. If women spend fortunes on dreadfully uncomfortable shoes it is their choice – except maybe in Italy where the Italian police have kitted out their 14,750 female officers with high heels.

On a visit to China in 1994, I witnessed the ultimate foot fetish. As an elderly woman came gliding towards me, peeping under the hem of her blue silk trousers I could see her broken feet, tiny black satin points that seemed barely to touch the earth. I had never imagined that so cruel a mutilation could produce anything so graceful. Cramming a dancer’s feet into pointe shoes and making her dance on them is hardly less barbaric, and the results far less beautiful. In July 2007, Louboutin designed a series of crazily high-heeled shoes in which the wearer must walk on the tip of her big toe, to be photographed by David Lynch for an exhibition called Fetish at the Galerie du Passage. The designer is now under pressure to produce a version of these entirely unwearable shoes for commercial sale.

Footbinding is no longer practised but, as soon as China opened to Western commerce, Chinese girls rushed to spend their hard-earned yuan on high-heeled shoes. For ten years Japanese girls have been hoisting their bottoms higher off the ground by wearing the highest heels of all. Closer to home, women are prepared to spend hundreds of pounds on shoes they would never try to wear in public. While feminists have been struggling to set women free, high heels have conquered the world. N

Vivienne Westwood, fashion designer

The shoe is theatrical, beautiful, and clothes and accessories have the effect of giving one a role to play. To walk in very high heels with an in-built platform you need to draw the body up straight and centred. One can’t help but feel powerful, beautiful, when wearing

Amanda Foreman, historian, author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire

These fashions are a way of limiting women at times when they are getting more powerful. In the mid and late-19th century, the bustle and corset became the style of the times – fashions that limited the female form. In came a physical restriction that created an idealised version of women.

You don’t need to be a psychiatrist to figure it out, but fashion is largely controlled by gay men, who can ultra-feminise the female form through their designs. Now, there are fewer power struggles than at any point in history, but fashion doesn’t reflect the power of women being free: they are still constrained.

These shoes are obviously not for the working woman, they aren’t designed for cobbled streets. They’re not real life, but a little fantasy. You have to ask as a purchaser, what do these do to me as a human being? These shoes should go back in the box – they are ridiculous and essentially disempowering.

Multimedia

• Pictures: The Highest of Heels

Alexandra Shulman, editor, British Vogue

Designer brands have done particularly well with accessories over the past five years. Big shoes were an obvious next step. They can’t get much higher, so I think it’ll calm down now.

Heels can be comfortable no matter how high. A great shoe designer can make a skyscraper – with careful balancing and skill it’ll look easy to wear.

People will always notice shoes – I personally think it’s from too many people spending too long looking down at the floor – so they’re worth investing in.

I have always worn heels, but you can see that in some people it really changes the way they feel. It’s the same as putting on a new dress – something that takes you out of the everyday.

Men do find them attractive – wearing heels is certainly not all about women and other women. Attraction is part of the attraction.

Lady Antonia Fraser, historian and author

The thing that fascinates me about high heels (which I adore) is that men have also worn them as a fashion statement – not because, like Sarkozy, they were physically challenged. Although it is often said that Louis XIV wore high heels to enhance his height, this is quite untrue. He wore them because they were elegant.

How I wish I could wear one of those fabulous pairs of black stilettos with flashing red soles by Christian Louboutin. But I’m afraid the result would be the following: “Lady biographer bites dust.”

Plum Sykes, novelist and fashion journalist

When you hit 30 you lose your edge. I am 38 now, and these weird space-age shoes look cool and trendy and are a way of getting that back to some degree. Younger girls can handle the extreme pain, they can take more shocks to the system. These shoes are exhausting.

The girls who are meant to wear them are walking out of their house, getting straight into a chauffeur-driven car; the shoes come off, and then they’re back on again, straight on to a nice soft red carpet where they walk for 20 yards. They, unlike us, don’t need really to be able to walk.

This type of trend is not a classic version of beauty. Men want women to be sexy. They’d be happy if we were all Gisele Bündchen, but that’s just not fashion. Men don’t like to be towered over by women, so it’s really only for gay men and other women.

Camille Paglia, academic and author

High heels with exposed legs are a distinctly modern fetish, part of the Jazz Age legacy of rising hemlines and manic, hot-to-trot dancing.

The Fifties stiletto heel put the wiggle in Marilyn Monroe’s walk: it was so teetering that it gave women’s hips a mesmerisingly seductive sway.

In our time of amplified bosoms, liposuction and Botox, pretty feet are the one thing that can’t be faked. Male-to-female transsexuals can get it all chopped off, but they’re still stuck with those big, bony feet. Today’s ultra-high heels are unforgivingly candid about legs, too – showing off great ones and cruelly exposing thick ankles and knock knees.

Height does indeed equal power in a man’s world – which is how shrimpy Napoleon’s name ended up on a complex. I don’t blame women for boosting their height – it’s a shrewd social strategy to see and be seen. But long-term mutilation of a crucial body part is inevitable for the compulsive fashionista.

I don't see a problem with it. I mean, it doesn't really make sense why a person wouldn't just get a comfortable pair of shoes if they're going to dance or something. I imagine if everyone took their shoes off there would be quite a stench though. Not everyone's feet smell like roses.

Lol Eggnog,

Imagine how smelly it would be if it was all guys wearing heels.

I understand from some of the above postings that there are guys who are unhappy about women posting in the guys thread so for me that clarifies things nicely. I think what HH fanatic says is perfectly true. Strictly guy stuff is guy stuff and everybody stuff is for everybody. I apologize for posting in this section but the other sections are hardly used and with very little in the way of interesting topics. I would suggest if you enjoy female feedback on any postings or threads then you would be better off posting them in the everybody thread. That's enough from me in here. Thank you. Amanda

Having read some of the recent above postings, I found myself having to look back at the photographs once more. I didn't remember seeing anything disgusting at all when I first looked and sure enough there wasn't. I really can't understand why you're all making such a fuss. This post is in a forum dedicated to Ultra high heels and fetish things, therefore this is the sort of thing that belongs in it, surely?. It's no worse or even anything near as bad as some pop music videos that can be seen on TV. This guy is trying to express his passion for heels in a place that was designed for just that..... Ok he looks strange in my opinion but not disgusting or filthy. That's my opinion anyway.