For Many Women, High Heels Are a Way to Elevate the Spirit
Much has been written about the sway women’s feet and shoes have over the male sexual psyche. A worthy rival is a woman’s own fixation with her soles and its adornments.
Take Juli LaVene’s head turners. The real estate leasing agent recently lunched (after having bought six new pairs of shoes) at an Italian cafe. She wore slides with a clear plastic band over the top of the foot, a rhinestone-studded black toe knob (a thingy between the big toe and second toe), all of which sat upon a sculpted silver heel. Men and women alike gushed unabashedly over her shoes.
“I love shoes,” said LaVene, who lives with her husband in West Hollywood. “You know the old commercials where the woman is mopping the floor in high heels? That could be me. I have little heels on now, and I am in sweat pants and a tank top, and I am alone. I keep shoes by my bed. I don’t even go to the bathroom without my shoes on. I won’t go barefoot.”
Like millions of women, La Vene, 30, favors heels.
“Heels make me feel better . . . it is the height thing,” she said. “They make you feel sexy, and men like that. It can be transforming.”
Indeed. Every little girl grows up believing that shoes have the magical power to transform her life, thanks to more than 500 versions of the Cinderella story, originally an Egyptian folk tale. Shoes afford a quick reinvention of self, a shedding of the past and an ushering in of the future, said Lynda O’ Keefe, author of “Shoes: A Celebration of Pumps, Sandals, Slippers & More” (Workman Press, 1996). Shoes decorate, adorn and selectively expose a woman’s feet, the fetishist’s metaphor for the female form (i.e. toe cleavage, the sole as hourglass, etc). As clothing sizes go up and down, shoe size is a comforting constant.
They are both a pedestal and a tool for empowerment.
“Put on high-heel shoes and instantaneously you look taller and you can look down on the man you were looking up to,” O’Keefe said. “You can’t cower in a pair of high-heel shoes. You have to take an aggressive stance when you wear them. Your legs are instantly longer, ankles appear slimmer, calf muscles appear tauter and you attain an hourglass figure.”
The waist looks slimmer, the backside protrudes, the chest thrusts out, and a pedestrian gait becomes what anthropologists call “the courtship strut.”
“I have seen men drool when a woman walks in a room in an incredible pair of high heels,” O’Keefe said. High heels are a paradox: Worn too long, they can cripple; but worn for effect, they are sirens of sex appeal.
The assertion that high heels subjugate women by making them vulnerable or that women wear a fetching pair of heels to satisfy male taste doesn’t fly with many devotees. These days, women want to wear Manolo Blahniks and Timberlands, O’Keefe said.
“I like to wear high heels once a week,” said Susan Haydena, novelist and owner of 130 pairs of shoes and boots. “I do it for myself. I feel elevated literally and figuratively. I feel more womanly wearing them. I get chills when I go in a shoe store.”
“I figure any guy who gets my shoes gets me,” said Maria O’Brien, a West Hollywood acting coach who once broke her foot wearing 4-inch heels. “I dress in outrageous shoes because I love them.”
