Women Walk Tall?

Walk? In these? Are you kidding me?

My journey to pick up L’il Boo from nursery takes me through the business district of my fair city.  My stomping ground for years, I haven’t had any reason to go there the last few years because, well, I have no business there, so to speak.

Now I have reason to go there very often, everytime I walk through it all I can do – in between wincing – is wonder:  when did office heels get so fucking high?

Everywhere I look, women are unsteadily stomping – and I do mean stomping: doing that jerky stop-start walk that you have to do when, honestly, your heels are just too fucking high – around in shoes that, not so long ago, wouldn’t have been seen outside a strip club.  I don’t know why I’m surprised – it’s not as if I haven’t glanced in a shoe shop in the last year or so.  These shoes are all over them – great, pointy spiked heels, complete with a platform sole that is necessary to enable the wearer to – almost – actually walk on said heel.  And I know it’s not just here – I remember reading this from Australia a good while ago about the increase in ambulance call outs due to women, literally, falling off their stilts, sorry, I mean shoes.

But I don’t know, maybe I just thought that these shoes would be limited to town centres on a Friday night, brought out for that special night of the week when caution, good sense and good taste are largely thrown to the wind and young women everywhere strut their stuff in unfeasible heels and skimpy dresses whilst people of a certain age – like me – shuffle past them thinking only one thought: where are their fucking coats?  And maybe, seguing into: Christ, is she really not weraing tights?  Seriously, just contemplating looking at young people on a night out makes me feel cold.

Maybe I just thought, y’know, that professional women wouldn’t actually embrace shoes that bring to mind an entirely different profession altogether.  Because, y’know, they need to be taken seriously and all and arriving at the office wearing shoes that you can only walk like a cockerel in (jut, stomp, jut, stomp) would probably detract from that.  But no.  There are women – not lots, thank goodness, but enough – dressed in otherwise fairly sensible office attire wearing shoes so high and so built-up that people are staring at them.  Not admiringly, not lustily, but with painful curiosity.  As these women wobble along, eyes follow them, looking on with a mixture of amazement and incredulity.

Why, I sense the question in the minds of the onlookers, would anyone strap such things on their feet and then try and move?  There is a reason strippers can wear them and that reason is that they never have to walk very far and never on uneven surface; here, these shoes do not function as shoes, but as ornaments.  You see?

And sometimes I look at one of these women and – whisper it – I really fucking hate her for being so fucking stupid.  Yikes!

I know, I know, no judging.

I am a big fan of women of all persuasions, all appearances, all levels of patriarchal compliance.  Tell me any reason you like why you think women are shit and I will tell you precisely why you are wrong.  And I would tell you that women wear high heels to make their legs look slimmer and, more subconsciously, to walk more daintily, with more precision, with more thought and these things are attractive to women because patriarchy rewards them, rewards femininity blah, blah, blah.

High heels, yes, yes, I can defend.  I don’t like them, but I can defend them.

But I watch a woman wearing these monstrosities, these accidents waiting to happen, these laughably obvious impediments to walking that a woman has put on her feet to walk in without actually having had a gun put to her head, and I can’t help it.  My thought comes before I can squish it: no wonder men think women are stupid.