IN MY SHOES: For The Want Of A Shoe
The New York Times asked a panel of experts that included a podiatrist and a professor of gender and women’s studies why women wear high heels – specifically, “[w]hat liberates women and what shackles them, when it comes to shoes?.”
Predictably, Marlene Reid, a spokeswoman for the American Podiatric Medical Association, alternated between admonishments (“most women do need to make healthier shoe choices”) and platitudes (“women should not have to choose between fashion and foot health”). While she insists that “[k]eeping your feet healthy and comfortable does not mean giving up fashion,” she slams every fashionable shoe style as being unhealthy (“the instability of stilettos can cause ankle sprains, some sandals can produce heel pain, and platforms can bring on tendonitis”) without giving a single example of a healthy shoe that is also fashionable. ‘Cause there ain’t none. It’s an either, or proposition.
Bowdoin College professor and Helen Gurley Brown biographer Jennifer Scanlon gets it:
[W]omen know, either from personal experience or from watching other women wobble, that shoes are not now, or are they likely ever to be, just about walking, and they certainly are not just about health. One can lament this fact, but really, isn’t this what consumer culture (our culture) is about: negotiating risks (think of fast food, or alcohol, or sexy shoes), and assessing rewards (think of pleasure, or fashionability, or satiating desire).
There’s “walking shoes” and “taxi shoes,” and never the twain shall meet. If ever they do, it will be more revolutionary than building a better mousetrap and women will be sashaying down the path to the inventor’s door (after getting out of a cab that leaves them as close to the front door as possible).
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