www.michaelmucci.com Now, the signature flash of rich red beneath a towering pair of Louboutins has elevated the French designer from fashionable to cult. You want the Louboutin power strut? Don't expect any change out of $800. Millions of women pay, or would like to pay, to join this cargo cult. They see that flash of red as a flash of power.
Christian Louboutin is as big a commodity-maker as Manolo Blahnik was before his wave crested with the tacky embrace of Sex and the City. The red flash is as big as the Jimmy Choo fad, which peaked a decade ago, and sexually more potent. Louboutin is even suing Yves Saint Laurent for trademark infringement after the YSL fashion house introduced red-soled stilettos in its last collection. Red soles are hot.
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The pervasive power display of women wearing stilettos, despite the style's innate and obvious potential to damage the wearer, is not an evolution that feminists of the 1970s might have expected. But the world is an infinitely more complex place than the one laid out by Jurassic Feminism. Anyone who still wants to see the world through the prism of gender fixation, where women are structural victims and men are structural oppressors, is locked into a fusty bigotry that the stiletto generations are walking away from.All the great recent advances made for women have been made by people - men and women working together. Most of the legislation that seeks to advance the progress of women has been passed by legislatures dominated by men. And no amount of government social engineering is going to stop women behaving badly to women, which happens all the time. Women bully women. Women block women in the workforce.
It's not all sisterhood. Often it is competition, exclusion and ridicule. This can apply with even more Darwinian brutality among teenage girls. Teenagers are also the most vulnerable to the Great Insecurity Machine, and that machine will crank into action in all its glory on May 2, the first day of Australian Fashion Week.
Already, the giraffes are beginning to gather. Soon they will be strutting and pouting down the runways in the tents at Circular Quay. The giraffes are the models with the one-in-a-hundred bodies used to project not just the clothes but the ideal of what a woman should look like. And they are so very young.
That's the foundation lie fed to women, largely by women, via the Great Insecurity Machine, the commercial fashion industry. It is the lie fed by women's fashion magazines - the most corrupt genre of journalism - and fashion designers and fashion retailers. The fashion industry may have a noble goal - to give people pleasure, make them more appealing, and more confident - but even more important is profitability and cash flow. Along with the accelerating speed of online commerce and social networking, the fashion cycles are quickening. The energy required to stay sharp and current is becoming more acute. Commercial survival trumps consumer pleasure.
Reality also trumps ideology. Which is why academic ''feminism'' is ageing so badly. The entire edifice of classic feminist ideology, and gender studies, is devolving into an intellectual artifice as grand as Marxism or complex financial derivatives. Academic feminism in the West has turned out to be little more than another flag of convenience for the left, in the way the Greens use environmentalism.
The most totemic book of the 1970s wave of feminism, The Feminist Mystique, by Betty Friedan, was written 50 years ago and published in 1963. It became the paradigm of the dubious methodologies and victimologies still being marketed on university campuses under the brand ''feminist''. Friedan was not a scholar; she was a journalist. She was not oppressed; she was privileged. She was not rigorously impartial; she was a hardline leftist. She was not honest, and sought to cover up her early work for the largest Communist-led union in America. She also mined the work of Simone de Beauvoir for her book but gave no credit. Above all, Friedan was a navel gazer. Her feminism was about middle-class, middle-brow white women.
These flaws were not hers alone. They can still be found embedded in feminist ideology. We are living in the middle of a massive global struggle over the rights and freedoms of women, a life-and-death matter for a billion women and girls, and secular middle-class Western feminism is proving irrelevant.
What drove the great changes now - called the feminist revolution in the West - was not a wave of brave and articulate women activists, though they had a role, but something far deeper and more significant: the vast demographic deformity caused by World War II. It took two generations to unwind this deformity. Part of that unwinding was the liberation of women from the expectation of domesticity. It happened because of the actions of millions of people, men and women.
Society is still trying to reconcile the distortions caused by the most important difference between the genders: the mothering drive. This is the bedrock on which family and culture is built. Yet women must assume all the risks of fertility. It is a fundamental inequality.
It makes today's fertility and power displays, all those flashes of teetering red, even more loaded with density of meaning.
