Magical shoes?

[CassieJ]

I wonder what she would have to say about men choosing to wear heels. I think it is funny that feminist, who purport to promote women's right to choose, berate those that don't choose to tow the feminist line. I know a large number of women that wear heels because they love them. No man forces them into heels. What would feminist have to say about men adopting high heels for themselves? That would be an interesting discussion.

[bootsforme]

I think it's a lot simpler than that. When a woman wears high heels, she tends to be more dressed up, more made up. It's sort of accepted that heels are dressier. And I've always thought that women looked really sexy when dressed up. So every time that I hear a pair of women's stiletto heels go "tap, tap, tap..." down the hallway, I think "wow...she must be hot." ...And I'm never let down.

[Stilettoscot]

And I'm never let down.

I hope you don't hear mine one day...LOL

[Guy N. Heels]

Is there actually a scientiffic explanation for the attraction of high heels or do these powers (as I suspect) qualify as magic?

Even after wearing heels for so long, I still feel like the pied piper when I see heads turn.

Well, I suspect that it's a little of each. But first off, we're plagued with the question of just what is magic?

While my old girlfriend and I were together I was also doing an in-depth study of the Great Pyramid. I actually had models all over the place. So after a few months my girlfriend asked what good they were? I told her I used them to sharpen my razors. So she started storing her jewelry in them. When I later asked her why; she said it made her feel better?!?! So what was going on? Until this day I can't say, but there definitely was something happening. She said that her gold jewelry made her feel like a new person after she'd stored it in a pyramid for a week-end.

In like manner, I suspect that there's something similar happening with heels. Again, my girlfriend had sustained some terrible injuries in a car crash and had just emerged from the hospital when we met. Indeed, it was several years before I ran across a pair of Polly's that were just too cute to resist. Well I gave them to her but never really expected her to actually wear them. Still, one day she was so enchanted with them that she slipped them on and wore them over to my apartment. While she never again wore them outside of my apartment, she often wore them for me without my even asking her. Something about those heels truly was magical and we both knew it.

Much like the Pyramid, I think that with heels something happens that cannot actually be measured or quantified in any sort of scientific way. While I will readily admit that the entire subject is highly subjective, still that's not to say that it isn't so. Call it magic if you like, but when it happens I call it great!

[vector]

I hope you don't hear mine one day...LOL

HILARIOUS!!!!!!

Good one StilettoScott!!!!!!!!!!

[roniheels]

So every time that I hear a pair of women's stiletto heels go "tap, tap, tap..." down the hallway, I think "wow...she must be hot." ...And I'm never let down.

I hope you don't hear mine one day...LOL

Even if I did hear the tap, tap, tap of stiletto high heels and turned around and it was a man wearing them, I wouldn't be disappointed. On the contrary, I would just chalk it up to another man joining our cause and enjoying the thrill of wearing high heels.

[Puffer]

The Guardian, Tuesday October 28 2008

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2008/10/27/heels460x276.jpg

High heels just keep getting more precarious.

...

Even the high priest of foot fetishism isn't taken. "I think there's a limit," Blahnik says. "Anything over 11.5cm [4in] is just too much. You can't walk properly; it's no longer elegant." Four inches and a girl's going places, eight and she will have difficulty merely rising to her feet.

Either Blahnik or the author is poor at maths, or he has been misquoted: 11.5cm = approx 4.5" (and I think I've read elsewhere that he considers 4.5" a sensible limit). 4" is not nearly enough!

[Amanda]

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.

[vector]

Sorry to hear about your grandmother.

[Bubba136]

Links have quit working, Amanda.

[ShockQueen]

I definitely think there is some sort of magic in wearing heels, as it does make one feel more "dressed up". Ever since I have relegated my sneakers to the occasional use pile, I DO feel more dressy anytime I don any of my heels - it just adds another dimension to the whole outfit, and if it's done right, just makes it that much sharper instantly!

[Dawn HH]

Definately right you are, Shockqueen. Cheers--- Dawn HH

[Amanda]

Third Wave Feminist Defends High Heels

by Claire @ 1:03 am. Filed under Aesthetics and Meaning, Aspiration, Defining Fashion, Gender

No discussion that intersects fashion and feminism is complete without a debate on high heels - are they a symbol of enslavement or empowerment? Why, in spite of the well documented health problems they cause, do they continue to inspire lust - not to mention reckless spending - by both sexes? Hannah Betts gives a great overview of both sides of the debate, and includes her own perspective suggesting that the whole matter might be more primal than theoretical. From the Guardian UK’s, Are We Just Masochists?

Christian Louboutin's Orlan Ponyskin Sandals, $930 at Net-a-Porter.com

Yet many women - myself included - who consider ourselves vehement, lifelong feminists feel no desire to relinquish our heels. In 1995, when Germaine Greer and Suzanne Moore enjoyed a public spat, Greer poured scorn on Moore’s “fuck-me shoes”. “The thing is,” sniffed a feminist contemporary at the time, “some of us don’t have a problem with fucking.”

And there’s the rub - sex - festering away like the blister it is. When I last experienced heel lust - for a pair of sumptuous 4in Louboutins - my pupils dilated, I had butterflies, and my cheeks turned florid.

…Dr Gad Saad is associate professor of marketing at Concordia University, Canada, and author of The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption. “High heels may well be the most potent aphrodisiac ever concocted,” he says. “The height sensuously alters the whole anatomy - foot, leg, thigh, hips, pelvis, buttocks, breasts. Men are perfectly frank in admitting that high heels stimulate their sexual appetite, and women, consequently, assign to stilted shoes all the magic of a love potion.

“In particular, heels alter the angle of the buttocks by 20 or 30 degrees to create a more youthful and thus fertile-looking body,” he continues. I have a vision of scarlet-buttocked baboons grotesquely parading their attributes. “Not far off,” he concedes. Saad is nonchalant regarding the self-harm aspect, seeing it as merely one of many sacrifices made in raising mating status; considerably less threatening, say, than the lunatic risk-taking inspired by testosterone.

Clearly I have get my hands on Gaad’s book. I find it interesting how he openly discusses the motive of attracting a mate as central to these fashion decisions. While most fashion theory that I read endlessly debates the nuances of status, class, lifestyle associations, trickle-up and trickle-down aspirations, perhaps it’s been too unseemly or unacademic to go to the all-too-simplistic “women - the statistical majority of whom are heterosexual - buy and wear high heels because they make them look and feel hot and they know that men respond to that.” Betts goes on to share her personal perspective as a straight, liberated woman who enjoys wearing high heels:

Personally, the sacrifice is minimal. Naturally high-arched individual that I am, I am steadier in three or four inches than I am without. My feet are deformity-free, and I am yet to fracture an ankle, both of which eventualities would stop me in my tracks. I rather enjoy the subversion of taking the ostensible tokens of women’s oppression and transforming them into a strategy to exploit and enjoy. The literal danger of heels I can live without; their symbolic dangers make them ever more appealing.

Flat shoes may be pragmatic, but they do not come freighted with any beauty, mythology, or exotica. Heels are the totemic object craved by want-to-be women, be it the little girl, the transvestite, or the legion of tottering teens for whom no weekend metamorphosis is complete without a little unelevating elevation.

I’m so jealous of Betts’s naturally high arches and ability to effortlessly and comfortably wear high heels in everyday life. She goes on to discuss the heels issue as a matter of choice, but for some of us our fallen arches have made the wearing of high heels for more than an hour at a time a painful impossibility. Luckily for me I was lucky enough to come of age in the 80s and 90s with chunky and sporty shoes being in vogue and not the 50s and 60s where heels, hose and skirts were mandatory. I also happen to already be an inch shy of 6ft tall in bare feet, so the addition of 3 or 4 inches tips me over into ‘alienating glamazon’ territory.

Miu Miu sculpted heels, $650 at Net-a-Porter.com

But the layering of cultural meaning onto objects is a collective endeavor, not an individual one. We can have personal reactions and interpretations to the context in which we find ourselves, but we don’t get to create that context. As much as I may wish that I could wear my uber comfortable Ahnu athletic mary janes out on the town and be just as sexy as the stilletto girls, that choice actually serves to take me out of that particular game. And that game is hardly limited to bars - Betts goes on to discuss the undercurrent of sexual politics in the workplace:

Spikes will always be de rigueur in the boardroom because they constitute a form of armour, suggestive of a certain ball-imperilling bravura. The authority they bestow is compellingly ambiguous: an S&M adornment where each party remains tantalisingly uncertain who is the S and who the M.

Contrast this with the more traditional academic feminist view of high heels as exploitative and crippling:

Sheila Jeffreys sees the vogue as revealing an anxiety about women’s position: “Women have gained entry to the public sphere and occupations once confined to men in ways unthinkable in the 60s. Increasingly, they are being required to pay the price, what I call the ’sexual corvée’ in which they compensate men for their lost power by creating sexual delight for them as they totter about.”

For the record, my day job is the last place I’d ever wear heels, even if they didn’t hurt my feet. Some of us gain more advantage downplaying those undertones rather than heightening them. Thank goodness my work speaks for itself, and that my job doesn’t mind my wearing athletic mary janes. I can get away with this living in Austin and working a non-fashion day job. But were I living in Manhattan, trying to break into the fashion industry? High Heels would be required wearing and comfortable shoes would elicit Ugly Betty style condemnations.

Betts gives a historical example to illustrate sexual politics as being interwoven into class politics:

As ever, one does not get far in a discussion of power without a high five to matters of class. The heel first became a fashion phenomenon when taken up by 15th-century Venetian courtesans in the form of chopines. The chopine, a stratospheric platform ranging in height from 7in to a literally staggering 20in, required its wearer to be bolstered by attendants. It was the ultimate expression of the heel’s ability to empower by apparently doing the reverse.

You can view this same dynamic in action today by seeing which high-heeled women get out of cabs, limos, or SUVs in the valet parking, versus those aspiring to such but still clacking and hobbling along for many a city block to reach their destinations.

In a milieu in which aristocratic women were barely educated chattels, so cloistered that it was thought provocative for them to appear at windows, the chopine vaunted its wearer as the comparatively sexually assertive, economically independent individual she was. She may have been a working girl, but her footwear declared the Venetian courtesan as boasting the leisure not to street walk, but teeter beguilingly amid an entourage.

[Bootking]

I find it interesting how he openly discusses the motive of attracting a mate as central to these fashion decisions. While most fashion theory that I read endlessly debates the nuances of status, class, lifestyle associations, trickle-up and trickle-down aspirations, perhaps it’s been too unseemly or unacademic to go to the all-too-simplistic “women - the statistical majority of whom are heterosexual - buy and wear high heels because they make them look and feel hot and they know that men respond to that.”

Thanks Amanda for the article. How refreshing to get a different point of view on this topic instead of the same old fashion statements.