Where do you stand on shoegate?
Amale reader contacted me recently to congratulate me on the balance I achieved between “humour and arseyness”. This, he said, was usually harmonious and certainly thought-provoking – unless I was “ranting on about wimmin’s issues”.
Ah, I fear I’m about to go and do just that, curse me and my tiresome X chromosomes. Might I suggest he pass the port and wield his double-blade guillotine cigar cutter while I retire, with my monstrous regiment, to the withdrawing room?
Now, readers will know I am deeply reluctant to call myself a feminist. This is not because I dislike the ideology, just the etymology. Or to put in another way: I hate the outdated “ism”, which is millstoned with so many historic and retrograde connotations.
But now that footwear has become a feminist issue, I have no choice to use the “f ” word and declare myself on the distaff side. To whit: a receptionist at City finance company PwC was sent home without pay for failing to wear heels “between two and four inches high”. She countered that it was discriminatory because male colleagues were exempt, and is campaigning to have the law changed to make such demands illegal.
Meanwhile, in North America, photographs of a waitress’s bloodsoaked feet have gone viral. After serving in heels all day, she lost a toenail, but was told she was required to put the shoes on again the next day.
Is this a good thing? No, it is not. Is it sexist? Yes. Outrageously so.
It’s so outrageous that I can only infer it must be predicated on a gross misassumption on the part of men. Could it be they actually think heels are comfortable? There is a certain logic to it.
I mean, why would we women, the eminently sensible gender, voluntarily spend our hardearned cash on something that sensuously run our hands over the suede uppers, our ragged breathing swift and shallow, pupils dilating at This Season’s Ugly Wooden Block Heel, we give the impression that such footwear is the stuff of fairytales. Grimm fairytales, maybe. More like the Spanish boots deployed by the Inquisition to crush, twist and cripple.
Such shoes are torture, impossible to wear for more than half an hour, and make walking extraordinarily difficult. Christian Louboutin once declared: “I would hate for someone to look at my shoes and say: ‘Oh My God, they look so comfortable.’”
But, chaps, the thing is, we forgive such footwear its fundamental flaw – because it makes our feet look perfect.
Marilyn Monroe believed that if you gave any girl the right shoes, she could conquer the world. Sadly, she never did find her glass slipper, but for today’s women there is a shoe to fit every foot and mood, except if you are the Duchess of Cambridge, in which case a Norfolk blacksmith comes and nails a new pair of nude pumps to your feet every six weeks.
One girl’s wedges are another’s gladiator sandals or limited edition Nikes. Some of us can’t balance in Manolos (me).
Others have a prehensile grip that means they can run for a bus in heeled mules (also me).
There are women with bunions (Victoria Beckham and me, both) and fallen arches and pronating gait (don’t even ask) who are really happiest in lumpen clogs. But we don’t wear our lumpen clogs every day because occasionally we want to look down and see finely crafted perfection.
And we don’t wear heels every day because that would feel cruel and unnatural. Even the patron saint of chic, Cara Delevingne, says that she prefers trainers because she has to wear so many pairs of uncomfortable shoes on the catwalk and in shoots.
Expecting all women to wear heels at work is neither reasonable nor humane – during pregnancy, it’s particularly hideous – and yes, it ought to be made illegal. And until it is, any employers who insists on female staff looking like dolly birds should be named, shamed and publicly pilloried as the sexist Seventies throwbacks they are.
Oh, and as for those ball-breaking female chief executives you encounter in towering stilleto heels? They’re not parading about to look pretty; they are wearing them to feel angry.