High Heels: To Wear Or Not To Wear?

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1. Keep your eyes up.
2. Suck in your stomach and butt so your weight doesn’t shift backwards.
3. Imagine there’s an orange between your thighs.
4. Imagine you’re wearing heels higher than the ones you have on.
5. Think confidence. Think glamour. Think red carpet.
6. And run like a Hollywood princess.

And that’s how you run in high heels? Good advice for all the Carrie Bradshaw wannabes and participants of those crazy High Heel Marathons.

I thought High Heel Marathons were nuts and then, I saw pics of Italian policewomen who wear high heels on the job.

I also thought the Italian govt was nuts and then, I read about Christian Louboutin’s creation: mainstream fashion’s first pair of 8-inch stilettos.

Now, let me first state that I personally love high heels. Can’t help it. Like I’ve confessed before, I’m a product of today’s society. I wear heels five days a week and I love the way they make me look and feel (or rather, the way I’ve been manipulated into believing how I should look and feel) … as much as I adore them, however, I’m not addicted. There are limits to my heel-wearing – for instance, I’d never wear them out on a five-hour shopping stint or anything. I’m all for fashion but hey, I’m not a fan of pain.

High heels have been linked to a form of masochism. They’re likened to torture devices such as so-tight-you-can’t-breathe corsets used back then as ways to subjugate women … kinda like the hundreds worn by this crazy woman, Cathie Jung, to achieve her freakishly tiny 15-inch waist …

… I know: yuck. Just like the corset, high heels torture and impair women. The argument is, anything that deforms your figure, cripples your movement or harms your health is a form of masochism. And high heels – I must admit – fit all three. Wear them long enough and you just may suffer from incontinence, stress fractures, back and hip problems, broken ankles, pain in the jaw, neck and head, menstrual dysfunction and fertility problems (!!!).

My initial reaction was a big scoff … until I read about women going under the knife for the perfect feet (read: high heel-friendly). They’re sawing off their toes to shorten them, snipping off the last few toes to create that desirable ‘cascading’ toes effect, draining the fat from the ankles, injecting Botox into the balls of the feet for more cushioning so they can wear heels for longer periods of time, subjecting the lower calves to lipo so that the calves are slim enough to fit into sexy knee-high heeled boots, shaving down the ankle bones and narrowing the feet so they can fit into European-style shoes like Manolos. I hope you’re horrified right now cos I sure was when I first found out about this!!

Even in today’s world where people are reconstructing their entire faces and bodies, there’s just something so horribly extreme about feet surgery. Just like Chinese women who smashed their bones to “reshape” their feet so they could fit into the tiny three-inch Golden Lotus shoes back in the 900s …

… women today smash up their feet so they can wear Manolos and Louboutins (today’s Golden Lotuses) for longer periods of time and look good doing it.

Esh, can you blame them when you see Hollywood princesses wearing blue-soled YSLs with a 1.5 inch platform and 5.5 inch heel? That’s a whopping 7 inches already. That woman needs a crutch.

I feel physical pain just thinking about the extent women will go to in order to teeter and totter in those 8-inch heels. And we think we’ve achieved equality???

The more things change, the more they stay the same. No matter how far we’ve come, the fact is undeniable: most of us are still slaves to beauty. Or at least, what certain people tell us beauty should be, a large number of whom are men who will happily design 8-inch heels they themselves will never have the misfortune of wearing.

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Tags: beauty, cathie jung, china, christian louboutin, corset, foot binding, high heels, manolo blahnik, shoes, stilettos, YSL