For most of my adult life I’ve worn high heeled shoes. In fact, I would get so many comments on that fact that I used to joke that I had Barbie doll feet, so they weren’t capable of going flat. When I do wear flats, I feel like I’m walking funny. My friend mimicked my flat shoe walk one time and it wasn’t cute. Can you say “quack, quack”?
As I’m getting older though, the heels that I wear are definitely more of the wedge variety. I’m in awe of the women who can walk around in the spiked heels without grimaces on their faces. When the Taylor Swift concert was over the other night, we saw many women carrying their spiked heels as they hobbled out to their cars. Our Uber driver commented on the fact that he’s never seen women make it through any wedding without losing their heels for the comfort of their feet. He’s right. I’ve come home from more than one wedding or Christmas party and dumped my shoes into the garbage can before I even walked through the door to my house, vowing never to wear those shiny, pointy, expensive little torture devices strapped to nails, ever again.
When I was a teenager, I babysat for a little girl who when I would tell her to put her shoes on, she would politely say, “No thank you. I’ll just wear my feet.” She was on to something. I love walking around in my bare feet. I’m pretty sure that is mostly what nature intended. I’m pretty sure that our feet weren’t designed to sustain the pressure of a 4 ton elephant standing on them. Our feet don’t look anything like elephant feet.
I’m pretty sure down the line, high heeled shoes are going to be in the history books of shameful practices imposed on women, like the Chinese foot binding. I don’t think high heels are necessarily imposed on us, though. We like how we look when walk in them. We like the extra height and the extra wiggle it gives to our rears. Today’s feminism seems to be very much a Helen Gurley Brown’s Cosmopolitan oriented feminism. It says I’ll look as sexy as I want to look, but while I’m wearing these 4″ heels and long, fake eyelashes, I will also run this organization like nobody’s business, I will tell this news story and interview this sports star with “no hold back” brazenness, and I’ll stand up for my personal space and dignity with a big black #. You can look, but don’t touch boys, unless I say you can.
As an older, more conservative woman, I have to admit that I have mixed feelings on my perceptions of today’s feminism. Having a loving husband and three kind sons, makes me more sensitive to the male point of view than I have ever been in my life and I don’t want my daughter to think that her value comes from her looks. That being said, when I’m not just “wearing my feet”, I love strapping on a new pair of gorgeous, girly, glittery, elevated shoes in anticipation of good times ahead. I’m not even sure that there is any kind of statement or meaning or manipulation tied to wearing them, at least consciously. I think it is just a matter of feeling fine and knowing that I can take them off whenever I want.