Shoes

One of my friends just stopped by the office wearing pointy shiny black heels instead of her usual slightly scruffy flat shoes. It is amazing how big a difference it makes. These shoes say professional, adult, in control. I actually find her quite intimidating in them.

Which I suppose is rather the point of heels: to look professional, intimidating, elegant, feminine and/or sexy as the occasion requires. And it works. But they bother me. Not so much when women choose to wear heels occasionally when dressing up, but when women choose - or are expected - to wear them day in, day out, because they won't look professional enough without them, or because they won't feel attractive enough.

I don't really believe in everyday shoes in which you can't run for a bus, or climb a ladder, or run away from an attacker or kick him in the nuts without falling over. Quite apart from the physical damage that wearing them all the time does to you, high heels trouble me because they seem to me to be on the same spectrum as foot-binding - painfully turning women into helpless but beautiful objects. And we barely even notice that high heels and pointy toes are lined up in our brains with a woman being well-dressed, attractive, worthy of respect. And because we want to be these things, women conspire the eagerest to hobble ourselves, as we conspire in so many ways to become dolls.

As Germaine Greer puts it:
“Yet if a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got? If she never takes off her high-heeled shoes, how will she ever know how far she could walk or how fast she could run?”