CrushedVamp

Well, if you can't afford the luxury car, you can at least afford shoes that depict them I guess...

Yes, I can see The Vivian Effect having that kind of fashion pull, kind of like how the show Sex in the City made high heels fashionable for a while. The sad part is, Over the Knee Boots could actually help some types of figures and not make people look like prostitutes either. Over the Knee boots really make a pair of legs look so longggggggg when coordinated right. Pair them with a pair of skinny jeans, whether the same color or contrasting, and then add a bit of a high heel to them, and the wearers legs suddenly look miles long. As for sweeping generalizations: I call people out on them. I am not a jerk about it, but when people say, well, everyone is saying”, I might stop them and say, “Wait? Everyone? Really? No, who really says this”. Soon they are back-pedaling and typically when they get done, its is not “everyone” but in reality, at most one or two people. And I do it so that people realize their judgement mistakes, that making sweeping generalizations is hardly accurate. We had a woman at our church who wore knee High Boots a lot but for a very specific reason. She weighed about 97 pounds, was about 4’-11” tall and had seven kids… but she was going to protect them. Just inside her knee boots she carried her 9mm Kimber!

I am almost certain that if my wife did not already like wearing high heels, I would wear them. I just really like how people look in them. And it is historical as well. While I would NEVER try to compare myself to @mlroseplant as I am not him, if I did wear high heels that is who I would most be like. We are in a strange situation here. Island life is so unique that it has to be lived to understand and never explained. It is just so different what living on an island is like; from the difference in crime, to just how people talk, walk and drive. It is so different. I dislike talking about same-gender relationships but for some crazy reason island life brings that out it seems. It is crazy how prevalent it is here, and this is a working-waterfront. So, islanders as a whole are very agreeable people despite being pure fishermen thru and thru. But I am not sure my wife would understand. Maybe because it would take away from "her thing" or maybe just because she is introverted so deeply, but I doubt she would like it.

I think high heels make a poignant point by themselves, with a lady, but even more so upon a man. But that being said, I think when an outfit matches the heels not only in color, but also style, it often becomes not a match that can be easily stated, but someone just knows, together that works. Your post on 08/18 kind of proves what I am saying. You just look put together in that photo, but it is the totality of it @mlroseplant

I am sorry in that I did not see this post until now. I cannot top your post in terms of ignorant statements, but I can debunk the ignorant comment. My wife wears her thigh high boots sometimes. It is not often, and has to be a specific event like us having a dinner date out or something. She would not wear it to a church function for one of our daughter's granted, but at times she likes to be wild and emboldened. A sort of, "look what I am wearing, Hun" kind of thing that makes our marriage fun and exciting. The fact that she is married and never once been a soiled-dove speaks volumes to the ignorance that the above reply states. I will say that she is going for a "wow" kind of factor, and perhaps... dare I say... a suggestive look? She typically wears them with a black miniskirt for a certain look since its telling: "I am wearing a darn short miniskirt". But she has done the same kind of emboldened, out-in-public look before while wearing fishnet stockings and seamed stockings with her high heels. I remember once I was surprised to see her wearing them, knowing full-well we were going out but we had just found out we were about to have our fourth child, so she explained it away easily. "I know I'll be sporting a baby-bump soon, so no more wearing sexy outfits for you, so why not be bold?" It was a statement I could not argue against. But again, yes my wife wears thigh high boots, and no she is not a soiled-dove, is married, has five daughters, even goes to church every time the doors are opened, and just believes life is short so have some fun. My only caveat to this is: it is really hard for her to find thigh-high boots that fit. She only has two pairs.

The food ones are kind of speculative though. Yes, you are right that you are indeed paying for it up front, or at least by an X-number of meals, or x-number of months, but unlike coffee or wine, you know what you are getting. In that regard it is just a replenishment of what you consume, and most likely at a fairly consistent rate. But with prepared meal delivery like with Hello Fresh, that is not the case. You don't know what you are getting for meals, and that is the whole point of the service. You don't have to think about what to have for dinner, proportion size, or even calorie amounts. Its done for you, you simply have to decide; do you eat what is presented for a given day, or something else? In that way it is even more wasteful. We tried it, but the meals were too small for us.

What about adding a snowplow to a stiletto? (Teasing) Here is a picture of my wife in some 3/4 platforms. This is her preferred type of shoes as she has many of this type in various colors and styles.

Subscription service is a little different for food because there is a predetermined end-date to the service, but it definitely is speculative. In fact, more so because you must like how it looks, tastes, like the quantity of it, and quality... not to mention feeling like eating that food on a particular day. It can't be sent back and that it just it, it's not. It is thrown out when people don't like it, or if not in the mood for it; throw it in the refrigerator for later, and then in a few days throw it out. But if you are not in the mood for it, just head to town to the nearest pizza shop. Next week another package will come with food you might like... But in that, there is an ultimatum from the speculative food delivery services like Hello Fresh and others... you either eat it, or throw it out. You liking it only really matters so that you continue the service with them. I bet the amount of food thrown out in such a marketing and delivery system is HUGE. I looked but could not find the amount probably because its kind of a new way for people to get meals. But for those interested, in the USA anyway, food waste is 43%.

These heels are probably far more subjective than the others I have posted. but TO ME anyway, they are kind of ugly. Other may not view them so harshly. At first I thought they were just strappy heels worn with gold glittered socks, but nope; that is the shoe itself! I guess they are heels made to look like you are wearing gold sparkly socks? Not sure why a person could not just wear gold, sparkly socks without having the two combined? Maybe I am missing an obvious point. This may not explain it for you and I understand it, but these are my wife's preferred type of heels. For better or worse, she likes peep-toed high heels, with a 1/2-3/4 platform to them with 4-5 inch heel. She can wear higher platforms, wear higher heels with some having 1 inch platforms to them, but that is the combination she likes. As for why. It has to do with her ex-husband who was very short. He forbid her to wear high heels at all even though she LOVES heels simply because she would have been taller than her if she wore them. So for 15 years, no high heels were an option for her. Then she met me. I am taller at 5'-11" so it does not bother me if she is at, or slightly taller than me. Maybe it is a deep-seated phycology thing where she feels her and I are at the same level physically and figuratively speaking, but since she was forbidden to wear high heels at all from age 20 to 35, really her prime years, now married to me, it is an out of control shoe fetish for sure! Don't get me wrong, she has other shoes other than this, and wears them, but this combination is her preferred type.

I am not sure how I feel about that either. In one sense I understand personal responsibility and the need to make quick decisions, but I also know life gets hectic, especially back when I had five young daughters. Sure, I want the wife to have a surprise come in the mail, but then she has FIVE YOUNG DAUGHTERS. If she does not send the shoes back, we have to pay for shoes she does not want. And worse, they are a shoe that a computerized bot has chosen for her from an algorithm from previous purchases. That not only makes that sent item dubious, but now that a pattern has started, more shoes she may not like. That requires more shoes being sent to us, and more chances of them not being sent back. At the time she was a mother of FIVE YOUNG DAUGHTERS. And the shoe company banks on that. Literally, that people will forget to send back their sent purchases. So it is kind of a questionable sales tactic to me.

What makes these flip flops that are fish-shaped even worse is the person wearing tree shaped socks with them? (I think they missed the school lesson on grouping like things).

I think confidence, in no matter what social norm you are defying; becomes emboldened on an increasing trend because freedom is scary. Wearing high heels, wearing leggings, wearing skirts and dresses all set boundaries… yes set because it sets the boundary further back then what people expect. It is further back than what people’s own boundaries are and says, “for me, it is fine for men to wear these things”. That challenge to their boundary is infuriating, but it brings on this huge question; What are you going to do about it?” For some of us we quickly learn… NOTHING. People do nothing. Most we find… just accept it. The worst offenders though… yep, they are all just talk. Big deal... So then you realize, “if they are all just talk about wearing high heels, then most others things they will be all talk about as well”. And they will. Some of this knowledge naturally comes as we age, but for those who have taken bolder steps, quickly learn they can be bold in a lot more things. Sadly, for some; when we set boundaries… meaning we push them back and include more areas than most would like wearing high heels, it becomes a mirror because they realize they cannot confront their own fears. Deep down inside they want the confidence that many of us have, but just cannot find it in themselves to just not care what others in society think or say about them. That is downright angering to them because they are frustrated with themselves. I set some boundaries this week and the result was predictable but sad. A real estate agent wanted me to extend the contract or they would level a $1000 service fee on me. I said no. No extension and I am not paying your fee because that is extorsion. They replied they worked hard, to which I said, “real estate is a service-based industry and is results based, not work based”. They countered that I was bullying them, but the truth was I countered in a way they did not expect, nor could they argue against it. And that is what you get when you set boundaries: anger. They claim only 5% of people have this level of confidence, but its because we are two steps ahead of people. I knew I did not need to pay that $1000 BS fee because to clear up the issue would mean going to the real estate commission... a ding on their license to sell property. $1000 is not worth it for them. Just as people who wear high heels know, no one is going to do anything about them wearing high heels...even in church. News flash: there is no consequences for defying most societal norms other then getting snide comments that are meaningless. Freedom is always great for any person, but whether extending freedom of speech, freedom of dress, or even freedom of wearing whatever shoes you want: it becomes very scary to other people. They are not mad that you are embolden enough to wear high heels in public; they are mad because they are scared to go against social norms themselves.

Try looking up: Shoe Dazzle Just Fab Hello Stiletto

Oh exactly! I can get pretty grubby, and that is the whole point for us. When we are not doing that, and out for dinner, groceries or church, we want to look nice. We want that separation. It really does not take that long to take a shower and then put on nice clothes and get that, "I just feel better about myself" feeling. The ironic thing is, for most things I have learned that what we think other people are thinking about us is completely wrong. They actually don't notice anything because most people are so self-absorbed in their own problems and motivations. But it is NOT that way with how you dress. People notice and often make wrong assumptions on those motivations on doing so. For my wife, she wears high heels because in her previous marriage her husband was short and if she was to wear them, she would have been taller than him so he forbid her to wear them. It is not that way with me, so she has a lot of them. In fact, at one time, she belonged to (3) shoe of the month clubs. That is where you subscribe to an online shoe-store, they look at the styles she has bought in the past and send her a new pair once a month. She has 15 days to either keep them or send them back. But now she only belongs to one as we have a much smaller house. In our old house, she had her own walk-in closet we called her "shoe barn".

@higherheelsFor us it is hard to parse out people’s attitudes on whether or not it is just my wife wearing high heels, or because we dress nice. It does not help that we live in a very rural area. Just so you kind of know what I mean, my town is comprised of 433 people living on 5 square miles of island. My state is the same size as Ireland, yet has only 1.3 million people. We have to drive 30 minutes to get to a town that has 2000 people, and a one and a half hour drive to get to a town with 30,000 people. So it is pretty rural here. Most people here do not dress up, and by that I mean frumpy t-shirts/sweatshirts and jeans and sneakers. I believe a person feels as they are dressed so my wife and I dress nice, it is just me in dress pants with a button down shirt and dress shoes, while she is in a dress; often in high heels. So they see us dressed up and think we are just trying to impress people. But that is not us at all. In fact, I really dislike people who are fake. The one time my wife wore high heels with jeans was at a local pizza place, and our waitress commented that “she had to hurry to get a check so we could go home and have “relations” because any woman who wore heels, that was what she was looking for”. The ironic thing was, we had five young daughters at the time and we had let the oldest babysit for the first time and just wanted a few hours alone on a date. I don’t even think we had “relations” afterwards. It just struck me funny that she thought a woman wearing high heels was expecting to do that. Kind of presumptuous, I thought. Note: waitress did not use the word "relations", but rather the real word. Relations is used here only so auto-censors are not triggered.

It is insidious. It allows for laziness on many fronts (like constructing a simple email), but even worse in terms of creativity. My wife deals with it as a school teacher; much of what the kids now give her is AI generated homework. BUT... she is no better, she uses AI to generate her teaching materials, which means pretty soon she will be AI outsourced. There is some good coming out of it. Because of our new AI clothes washer/dryer there is no longer a need for two machines, nor the need to take out the laundry after washing just to put in the dryer and dry, and even with that, no inefficient drying of the clothes. With our AI clothes washer/dryer it keeps checking the moisture content and either stops the drying process or keeps it going until the clothes are dry... all while using a heat pump to do it cheaply. Now... if only AI could fold and put the clothes away!

Of all the times we have gone out with her dressed up, and this includes such places as clubs, hockey games, fancy restaurants, etc; there was only once she felt uncomfortable around a man. He was a very large man, in his 70’s at an expensive restaurant and just kept staring at my wife’s legs. I mean eyes locked on them, head down, eyes not blinking, staring for 45 minutes straight. It was just really creepy for her and I. But most times men just take glances because we typically dress nicely which is not often seen where I live. I get that and could care less, but this was just flat out creepy. Not that I was too worried. You guys know me, my wife almost always wears an anklet and so do I, but my anklet holds a 9mm Kimber. :-) I love guns so I always conceal carry…

I thought these were kind of ugly, and to be fair, not very practical unless you are headed to a Steampunk Convention. The steel contraptions look like they would catch on any fabric every encountered.

I remember in the 1980's there was a segment on 60 Minutes about women... gasp... changing into sneakers to commute to work in the bigger cities then changing to their high heels. 60 Minutes was and still is a news show that featured longer running stories, about 20 minutes long instead of 2 minutes like most news shows. Anyway, I remember it because it was a huge deal back then. The women were like, "you wear high heels on city streets and in subways and on busses then and see how you like it", while the men they interviewed hated the new trend. Those men would really hate the trend now... women just wearing sneakers all day, even in the office. My wife lives in her heels, but it is actually other WOMEN who curtail her efforts far more than men. They tend to have snide words about her wearing them, going as far as to call her a "slut" for wearing them. I think it is just jealousy myself that they feel guilty for dressing like a slob, or insecure that her husband might look at my wife. I am not really sure, but by far other women make wearing high heels for my wife more of an issue than it really should be.

It has already been done. A group of what they call "The Group of 40" used AI to spread misinformation about a political issue that I won't name. But basically, since AI uses Wikipedia almost exclusively, they exploited Wikipedia which changed AI which thus tainted the information to throw a favorable outcome. Sadly, a lot of people fed into this targeted hype. (Below not directed at your quote Cali) I fear AI, but I also understand that the same arguments against it were the same ones that hated electricity because it would ruin the kerosene trade. Or hated the internet because it would take out the newspaper industry. Or hated digital photography since it would take out the film printing industry. In the end, two things are the most scary for people: Freedom and Change! Generally, with new technology it swings like a clock pendulum in the annuals of time. It has great potential, but swings way too far to one side and gets out of hand, so checks and balances are put into play. That keeps it from being outright banned but also held within reason. Think of nuclear technology here. I don't want the guy that drinks beer and lives in a trailer to heat his place with a fusion nuclear heater granted, but I am glad I got an Xray last night for my broken hand. Over time new technology will temper itself out. Everyone take a deep breath. The world does not operate in a vacuum; everything will be alright in the end.

As a writer myself I know what you mean, but have found some limited uses for it. I have a fairly big printer (Plotter) so AI does a really nice job of taking a smaller sized photo and then scaling it up without any distortion even in poster sized pictures. It's kind of nice now to be able to take a thumbnail image and print it out at 3 feet by 5 feet and have it look good. The other thing I like is that in the United States anyway, the Supreme Court ruled AI Images are not able to be copyrighted, so I can use AI pictures for book covers and not have to worry about models, model releases, etc, and later being sued. Like @Mr. X but a little different, we just bought another house and wanted to see what the place would look like differently. Since we were swapping rooms, as in the kitchen being the living room and vice versa, it was nice to take pictures of the rooms then just make it a kitchen based on different kitchen styles of architecture. It was just Mr X did, but with rooms, and it was nice to see what we ultimately envisioned.

For me... and just me only, I like the contrast of the white socks, but I would like to see a white top. A kind of "black and white is always right" kind of fashion statement that is a staple of the world. But I admit I like contrast on my fronts. An ex-wife of mine always insisted her socks or hosiery always matched her shirt. I am not saying what she did was right, but that was her fashion rule for herself.

I agree. While I do not wear high heels, I do try to have a style and choose to match whatever shoes I am wearing to whatever I am wearing for a shirt. For me, this is within reasons, I do not tend to match purple shoes with a purple button up shirt, but for most other colors outside of pastels I do, like green shoes with a green shirt or a blue shirt with blue shoes. It really does not take such details to make a statement.

Hey thanks for everyone's help. Being a novel this can certainly be tweaked, but in taking into account what people said, I rough drafted it as such. In some light banter on the phone where she was talking with the Code Enforcement Officer while standing next to a building contractor, the CEO made mention of seven inch heels. She scoffed that the builder could not build a house level, so that was out of the question. Later in the novel when he comes to her office with heels purchased for her, he buys four-inch heels. She makes note that she typically wears 3.5 inch heels to work. In that scene she quickly comes to realize he has increasingly creepy affections for her by making a contractors life deliberately a living hell. This results in a fight where she tosses the bought heels back at him in total disgust. Here it sounds ridiculous but over 3000 words works well. In novels there is a technique known as lampshading which is a quick fix to explain an anomaly in prose, and here I lampshaded this all by having her explain that high heels and short skirts only works for male buyers, and goes against sales if it is a couple. Just a quick way to show some of her own flaws that she will do a lot for a sale. Does it work or not? It is hard to say, it is a writing technique that semi-works, and readers tend to accept any answer as, "yeah, I guess", and move on. But feel free to add more advice. I can always change the novel

So, I am asking for help. I am writing my latest fictional novel and I am looking for a pair of heels to be described in my book that is being given as a gift. A little background here is this. The woman is a real estate agent and dressed fashionably all the time. Early in the book she converses with a code enforcement officer where a little mild innuendo banter takes place. She asks for a favor, and he says he will do it, but only if she wears her highest high heels for him. Older than her by 20 years, as time marches on in the book, he gets creepier and begins to show his affection for her. Except she has feelings for a client now. He gives her an unexpected gift which is high heels, but what should the gift consist of? What would be an ideal heel height? What would be a good price point? In other words what sort of shoes would someone want to buy for a lady he was interested in. Something a bit suggestive, but not overly slutty. The more details you can give will be better, like color and style such as peep-toed or sling backs, etc. I am really not sure what would work in this situation. There are no bad answers here, just asking for some expert help. I struggle to correlate centimeter heel height to inches, so if it can be stated inches, all the better. I was thinking 7 inch heels, but wonder if those are over the top as a gift in this situation?