Shyheels

I remember seeing this story a while back. It’s certainly an impressive feat - as indeed climbing all the 14,000 foot peaks would be in any sort of footwear. But I don’t see what is being accomplished here in any broader sense. I don’t see how it’s altering or challenging stereotypes or doing much of anything besides getting her some odd-spot publicity. I like wearing heels, but I just don’t see the desirability of climbing mountains in them. it would be like me deciding to perform the Swan Lake Ballet in my Scarpa Mountaineering boots. It might be possible, but what would be the point?

Congratulations on the milestone! That’s a lot of walking in high heels. I’ve never kept track of any of my mileage. You would have some interesting insights on heels and durability and the training necessary to be adept at walking in them. i like this thread by the way. Although I might not respond I always read and enjoy your posts.

Yes it’s encouraging. I think too that my recent efforts to try to learn to walk in 12cm heels has paid dividends in my being suddenly much more at home in 10cm heels

Leave for my next tour on Wednesday. I am doing three - this is not my main line of work but rather a useful side hustle. The first one was in Scotland and that was where Charles II was relevant, him being a Stuart king and his coronation portrait (in heels) hanging in Hollywood House. My other two are in the Lake District and along Hadrians Wall - not much relevance for bringing up Charles II. And I don’t think Wordsworth wore heels.

Back home again after three days of scrambling around in work boots with a very heavy camera bag. Rather than plunging back into practicing in my 12cm stilettos I'm taking a day or two at leisure, in 8cm block heeled ankle boots. Gosh they are easy to walk in! And yet still satisfying in terms of being in heels.

Not really. They were all pretty relaxed within their own spheres. Nobody ruled the roost. It was just the ingrained Pavlovian response to the notion of a guy in heels - in this case King Charles II, long dead. They were all quite decent sorts and if they'd seen a chap in heels they might have smirked to themselves, and each other , but nobody would have done anything mean or said anything out of place. Whatever inner thoughts, leanings or curiosities they might have felt about heels - if they had any at ll - would have remained within themselves.

Indeed. There was an element of “thou dost protest too much” about this. I’m sure there is an element of fascination here, and a secret longing simply to step away from the rules of the herd.

Oh I agree. Perceptions are changing. It’s just the tourist groups that I end up leading can skew my impressions - they are so tightly wound and abstemious. When the waiters offer coffee after a meal they positively blanche (caffeine!) and at the whiskey distillery on the Scotland tour they primly decline the offered tastings. Their attitudes towards heels were perfectly aligned with everything else

No opportunity even for mid-heels today - a day of gadding about on an assignment that requires steel-capped work boots. I considered bringing a pair for after hours at the pub I’m staying at but after I hefted my bulging camera bag, with the tripod lashed to the outside, I thought better of it!

Indeed not boring at all! So much more fun than flats - and quite liberating to step outside the pigeonholes. it always strikes me as funny to think that if we were to read in National Geographic about a tribe of South Sea islanders who’d developed all these complex and contradictory taboos about a style feature on their footwear, we’d smile and find it quaint but amongst ourselves we take it so incredibly seriously, as though it were a natural law, something encoded in our chromosomes: women wear high heels, men do not.

Yes! That’s one of the things about heels that fascinates me. There is sort of this “official” view these days that they are tools of the patriarchy, designed to hobble and objectify women, and must therefore be discarded and abandoned. on the other hand high heels are worn with panache by some of the most powerful women in the world who spend small fortunes on designer heels and speak of the sense of empowerment that comes with putting on a pair of lofty stilettos and striding into a meeting. what’s the story? Nobody waxes lyrical about their hiking boots or a pair of loafers but you can fill a book with quotes about the transforming magic of high heels. Heels are a fascinating cultural icon

I suppose it is odd that there are so many men on a high heel forum. We’re we’d a pretty normal lot really, whatever our out of the ordinary fashion tastes. I was always curious to try wearing heels - perhaps it’s the people-watching travel writer in me and my fascination with the foreign and exotic. Heels looked fun, stylish, a challenge and had the additional allure of the forbidden. I originally was just interested in trying 8-10cm chunky heel boots - a kind of edgier version of the hiking boots I’ve lived in for ages. I tried them and really liked them and was emboldened to push the envelope a bit further into the world of stilettos. And now trying 12cm stilettos- the black diamond slope of high heels!

I smile to think of the three of us, all very different, living in three different countries and on different continents, doing much the same things … I agree - 7cms is a minimum

Yes the story of how heels came to Europe and became a masculine fashion, later to be repudiated during the Age of Enlightenment is fascinating. I’ve done a fair bit of reading and research on the subject since I first learned of it and when I tell people about it they are invariably interested, even if they scoff at the idea of men in heels. Humans are a strange species

I’ve not been doing overly much myself, just wearing my 12cm heels while writing or otherwise pottering about. I do like mid heels too and have a couple pairs of boots with 8 to 9cm heels which look nice and are so easy to wear. I’m always tempted to go with them and not just out of laziness either. This is the style that originally attracted me to heels and is still a favourite

Yes narrowboats are susceptible of movement although it is generally very subtle. Living on a boat as I do I am quite used to it and tend to forget about it entirely - as I say, it really is very subtle - so it may be that I am better in heels than I imagine I am; that if I was on a dead-level rock stable surface I might be more capable of walking fluidly in 12cm heels, although I expect I am still a good ways off the sort of effortlessness that one needs to carry off the style. in general if a narrowboat is pitching noticeably, something is happening - usually it’s some clown in a rental boat speeding by at a rate of knots and throwing up a wake, or you’ve tied up at a lock landing, really close to the gates of a big lock and someone’s thrown open all the paddles, or else there are some big winds blowing.

Sometimes on the boat I can find it a bit odd. If the water level in the canal drops, which happens fairly often, the boat will be on a slight list (or something more severe if you’re unlucky or don’t know not to moor your boat in certain places) If it’s just a slight list you sometimes won’t detect it until you put on your heels and suddenly feel as though you’d never worn heels before. And if you’re just learning in 12cm heels it can be quite challenging

I know the kind of sloping surface you’re thinking of. Some of the cinemas are still like that here and would indeed be awkward in very high heels, I am at present eating lunch in a village in the Yorkshire Dales that would be a nightmare in heels of any sort - and even a bit chancy in hiking boots. Sloping irregular cobbled streets (large cobbles and many cracks) and made extra slippery by rain and mud …

Even the two centimetre difference between my 10cm heels and the 12cm ones is more noticeable than I’d have expected. I notice it while I’m sitting at my desk writing - but in a nice way

Wow - that’s quite a week! I smiled at your experience with low seats in high heels. I had the same but sitting on a low settee in my 12cm heels and spent the whole time trying to figure out how to sit and where to place my heels so I didn’t look like a seated preying mantis with my knees jutting up under my chin. And then how to get up again! Without calling to mind something struggling out of a wallow. I can’t imagine doing that in 13cm Hot Chicks! Standing in a queue in 13cm heels would be a serious challenge too! Definitely an earned rest this week! But well done!!!!

Definitely doing very hard work this week. I can’t believe I still have another two days to go, and then a week later I comeback to do all this again …!

Leading tour groups is a really fraught business. You simply never know which way they’ll turn. The only safe thing is utter neutrality in just about everything. From the outside it looks like really easy money but it really isn’t.

I know what you mean. I could probably get away with knee boots with chunky heels - but I’ve also learned that elderly American tour group people are utterly unpredictable and can either like or hate you for the flimsiest and wackiest of reasons.

One of the additional strings to my bow as a freelance writer and photographer is escorting tour groups - giving lectures etc. I don't do a lot of it, three or four times a year, but the gigs are always nice ones and takes me to interesting places. I used to go all over the world, as with my other assignments, but these days, having grown weary of flying and all the attendant hassles, I stick to Britain. At any rate, I am on such a trip now. Yesterday I was taking to my group about Charles II. In addition to talking about the politics of the Restoration I talked about his coronation portrait - now hanging in the throne room in Holyrood House in Edinburgh. Aside from his holding a sceptre and orb, as symbols of newly restored royal power, he's wearing four inch heels. I mentioned this fact to see the reaction. It was dispiriting, but not surprising. My group, 24 elderly Americans, smirked, sniggered, mocked, and cooed and ran through all the trite schoolground mockery. There was something so drearily predictable, unthinking and Pavlovian about it. I explained the history of heels, how they'd been a masculine fashion and how the cultural shifts in the Age of Enlightenment, with his emphasis on science, philosophy, comics and political thought changed men's fashion forever, while women, seen as ineducable, were allowed to keep their pretty colours, laces, silks and heels. My group were quite interested, I could see that, but then, as though on replay came the same smirking, cooking and mocking yet again. It was like they were on a continuous loop, stuck in a rut. Part of me felt like telling them I had a pair of 12cm stilettos in my room I am practicing with, but I need this gig.

I agree. They were originally designed as apres surfing wear in Australia, and in my days as a student at the University of Sydney they were standard lounge-about and study wear. Everybody had them. They were inexpensive and comfortable.. The fact that they now command big prices never ceases to amaze me. Some years later when I was living in Melbourne, Uggs had slipped down the social scale a bit and were often being worn by the rough crowd in lower socio-economic neighbourhoods - the sort of rather sleazy types who wear track suits everywhere today. One such suburb was Heidelberg, in the city's inner east, where Ugg's popularity was such that they became derisively known as "Heidelberg stilettos".