By Suzy Freeman-Greene
Melbourne Age,
Those sky-high heels aren’t so sexy when you’re falling over.
ON A Saturday night in town you’ll see them shuffling down the street — women in clunky shoes with lethal heels, their calf muscles straining. They take small steps. Footwear dictates their progress. And these shoes are about fantasy: a statuesque sort of glamour.
Hours later, you might see the same women walking barefoot, their shoes dangling from a hand or wrist. It’s as if tiredness or a few drinks or sheer unavoidable pain have lessened their commitment to holding it together in trophy heels. You can only channel a supermodel for so long.<!–more–>
Shoes are scaling dizzy heights again and just looking at them makes my feet ache. Cone-shaped stilettos tapering to deadly points. Thick-soled platforms. Elevated sandals with more straps than a bondage queen. Eighteen-centimetre heels (more than seven inches in the old measure) are apparently not uncommon.Vogue magazine reports that “frighteningly tall” shoes are a menacing symbol of this year’s fashion circuit.
Some seem more like instruments of torture than fun accessories. Two models recently slipped on the runway in their Pradas, “then struggled to stand upright, like Bambis on ice”. Another limped off with a grazed knee after plunging from Pucci’s “monster platforms”. Podiatric surgeons say prolonged wear of high heels can lead to bunions, damaged leg tendons and sciatica. Research has also linked heels to a greater risk of knee osteoarthritis.
Yet some see heels as the height of sexiness — reason enough to cross the pain barrier. Heels are a potent aphrodisiac, says Dr Gad Saad, a Canadian academic and author of The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption. “The height sensuously alters the whole anatomy — foot, leg, thigh, hips, pelvis, buttocks, breasts,” he recently told The Guardian. “Heels alter the angle of the buttocks by 20 or 30 degrees to create a more youthful and thus fertile-looking body.”
Feminists differ on the meaning of high heels. Some argue it’s perfectly possible to wear stilettos and preach feminism; glamour and political equality are hardly mutually exclusive. Some wearers say heels give them a feeling of enhanced power; a tall, confident, swagger. And height equals power in a man’s world, suggests academic Camille Paglia.
Killer heels might also be read as a knowing, slightly camp performance of femininity or perhaps as a way of signifying ample leisure time. After all, if you’re wearing them, you’re more likely to be sashaying to a cocktail party than working at a fast-food joint.
But feminist academic Sheila Jeffreys says she feels distress when she sees women in high heels. Jeffreys, a professor in political science at the University of Melbourne and author ofBeauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West, says men have traditionally demanded that women walk and dance in pain and have gained great sexual satisfaction from this.
“When I see young women struggle to walk and remain upright, I am enraged at the depths of degradation women have to bear in societies where lip service is paid to their equality,” she says.
Jeffreys and other critics argue that men dominate the fashion industry — and their extreme shoes work to constrain women at a time when they are becoming more powerful.
Yet Germaine Greer, writing in The Times, has said that it makes little sense to put women’s addiction to silly shoes down to men. If they buy and wear them, it’s their own choice.
While acknowledging the damage heels can cause, Greer says they have long been seen as sexy. On a more cautionary note, she tells of her short-legged grandmother, who always wore them. “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.”
My own choice is mostly to avoid heels. I feel silly teetering on stilettos and value my mobility too much. It’s this question of movement that troubles me most when I see young women tottering out on the town. What if they had to flee somewhere in a hurry? To me they look vulnerable rather than powerful.
Yet I sometimes admire heels from afar and am not averse to the odd shoe fetish. In my wardrobe, there are some apple-green, high-heeled pumps, bought in Rome 14 years ago. I rarely wear them — they’re far too nice for dirty pavements. But I often get them out to admire.
