Do high heels empower or constrain? (I think they kill your back. Period.)

From Times Online
December 13, 2008
Do high heels empower or constrain?
High heels have never been higher, with women teetering on the brink from Milan to Manchester. Germaine Greer ponders whether extreme shoes empower or constrain women, and we ask leading female thinkers what heels say today about sex, style, politics and power

Germaine Greer

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.

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 them.

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.

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.


Copyright 2008 Times Newspapers Ltd.