When I was a child, my favorite game was dress-up. There I am, arrayed in my mother's cast-off finery, tottering in her high heels, the very picture of innocent, enraptured, incipient femininity. And then I grew up and started noticing that I couldn't wear high heels with any more dignity, or balance, than I could at the age of 6.
Which is a shame because the most beautiful pair of shoes I've ever owned — pointy-toed black suede heels that I bought for my oldest son's bar mitzvah — were so painful that my chief memory of the happy event was the cramps that attacked my calves during the Torah reading.
As far as I can tell, there has never been a time in the history of womankind that shoes haven't been a source of longing, envy and even lust. But not among men: Unless they're shoe designers, men don't think twice about women's shoes. No matter how much women are told that high heels elongate and enhance the shapes of our legs and add a sexy sizzle to our walks, I suspect men don't so much as notice shoes.
Go on, I dare you. Ask your brother, your buddy, your lover, your dog walker or even your husband: What do you think of my shoes? He will grunt.
Of course, the lion's share of women's shoe designers are men: the late Alexander McQueen, Versace, Fendi, Salvatore Ferragamo, Dolce and Gabbana, Gucci, Prada. The New York Times ran a feature in September on shoe designer Alejandro Ingelmo, calling his 5- and 6-inch high-heeled shoes "exquisitely crafted" and gushed and gushed and gushed. Actually, the entire press tends to go gaga over the most militantly degrading, expensive and health-endangering footwear. Then, of course, there's the king of sadistic footwear, Manolo Blahnik, whose pencil-thin, towering heels were popularized by the character Carrie Bradshaw on "Sex and the City." Notice, however, that Blahnik wears the kind of flat-heeled, wide-toed, arch-supporting shoes that your dad wears.
Let's take a little stroll (in flats, if you please) down the byways of footwear fetishes. In the 17th century, courtiers wore slippers, while the common folk, both men and women, wore heavy black leather with low heels. During the long reign of Queen Victoria, no fashionista would be seen clad in anything less than the ultrachic balmoral front-laced, flat-soled, ankle-high boot. Sneakers, sandals and sling backs were big in the '30s; in the '60s and '70s, we wore clogs, Frye boots and flat-heeled leather hippie sandals. I was among the army of women who, in the '80s, wore running shoes to work. And while it's true that chopines, whose raised soles were designed to keep feminine feet above the muck and filth of, say, Renaissance Venice, eventually grew to soaring heights, the footwear was outlawed because so many women miscarried after falling off the platforms.
But that was before the bad old days of Chinese foot-binding, a fashion that, by the 19th century, was all but a necessity if a girl wanted to find a husband in China. The idea, of course, was to make women more feminine and delicate — and to hobble them so completely that they literally couldn't go anywhere.
So it strikes me as bizarre that in the aftermath of feminism, American women, who are perhaps the most liberated women in the history of humanity, choose, of our own free wills, to cripple ourselves. Now we can barely stand at all, let alone march for our rights, in our 6-inch heels.
It's almost as if the successes of feminism to liberate women to pursue professional and academic satisfaction was so heady that we decided to hinder our own foot forward in the most literal way possible. We women talk the talk, but apparently some of us would rather not walk the walk.
