Not pumped about pumps

I recently bought a pair of shoes that I hate. Of course, it didn’t start out that way. No love affair ever does. Cheetah print booties with a 4 inch heel that made my legs look like a toned little Victoria’s Secret model. Me-ow.

Purrrrr.

But after one night in Manhattan and I wish I had never laid eyes on these babies. My toes were scrunched and my heels were blistered. I thought blood was filling to the brim. So I began to wonder, as I cringed taking these babies off at night…what the f**k is the point of high heels?

In the 17th century, high-heeled shoes quickly caught on with the fashion-conscious men and women of the French court and spread to pockets of nobility in other countries. The term well-heeled became synonymous with opulent wealth. Both men and women continued wearing heels as a matter of noble fashion throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And while men wearing heels has subsided (lucky bastards), we women still suffer.

I’m of the mind that high heels do still depict a sense of wealth…the luxury to not have to walk everywhere you go, the wealth to pay someone to carry you from place to place. The negative and angry little feminist in me thinks that in some way, the male gaze perpetuates high heel wearing because a) your legs look sexy as all hell and b) you can’t run very far should he decide to try and “holla” as the kids say. In all honesty, this along with all fashion is silly. In my dream world, we should all run around in potato sacks and comfortable runners. In the real world, we have to deal with a whole lot of push pull. We women have a uniform and sometimes that uniform requires an uncomfortable shoe. If we have a problem with it, we can always stop wearing them and send that Jimmy Choo out of business. But until then, we might just have to suck it up (or buy smaller heels).