The Devil Wears Heels
I’ve always hated high heels. They are red lacquer foot coffins. Velvet torture devices in disguise. Instead of diving head first into my mother’s high heel collection like most girls at age 13, I bought my first pair of Vans, black and white checkered slip-ons with red cherries. They would be the proud first of an impressive Skate-4-Life-Can’t-Skate-To-Save-My-Life shoe collection including Converse “chucks” that my girlfriends and I used as a canvas for our teenage angst.
In the 90’s, pop culture positioned high heels as the epitome of impossible femininity. Jimmy Choo. Louboutin. The iconic midnight blue Manolo’s with the jeweled square buckle. ‘Sex and the City’s’ Carrie Bradshaw had over 100 pairs of designer heels. In season four, the fashionable columnist realizes she can’t afford the down payment for her apartment because she spent over $40,000 on shoes. Future-shattering foot decoration, cute!
But not just Sarah Jessica Parker’s character has a personality defining shoe fetish. Fran Fine in ‘The Nanny’ became a fashion icon known for her signature style of black kitten heels paired with fabulous designer skirts and mini dresses. In one episode, she swears she can’t walk in flats. Whenever Fran has to take off her heels, she is devastated because heels are not her style, they are her identity. The world’s most famous doll, Barbie, and high heels are so intertwined, the plastic beauty was born with arched feet.
It’s unclear where the woman ends and the heel begins. The ability to walk in heels becomes not second, but first nature. Something to be proud of. “OMG look at her wobbling across the pavement, she can’t walk in heels at all’ is the worst kind of insult. Why? Because high heels are a personality defining trait of a certain kind of woman. The ultra feminine, flawless kind who knows no pain, wakes up with a perfect face of makeup without wearing any, always smells like potpourri and never has a bowel movement. The kind of woman that is so perfectly sanitized she isn’t a human, but a male fantasy.
Heels elongate the legs, making the butt look peachier while physically slowing you down. Try running away from a predator in 8 cm stilettos. That makes them patriarchal instruments to pain women into submission cleverly marketed as tools of empowerment. Imagine a business woman, and you’ll see a woman in heels and a suit. But why would you need to be uncomfortable to feel powerful? Quite the opposite is true. Heels, like other forms of restrictive clothing from bras to corsets, keep women in a constant state of discomfort occupied with their appearance distracting them from solving Climate Change or sitting on the Supreme Court. Heels are tools of oppression.
Of course, I did not know any of this in 2003. Pre-adolescent me was also pre-feminist. My decision not to torture my feet was not a political choice, but driven by feeling. I simply desired comfort. My toes wanted to live in a penthouse where they could stretch out, not crammed in a West Village shoe box with a kitchen-bathtub for $4,000 listed as ‘charming’.
In a society declaring ‘beauty knows no pain’, comfort is revolution and my feet are Che Guevara.