High heels: why do women wear them even if they make you suffer? The sociologist's point of view
Lisa Wade is a sociologist and professor from Occidental College who also currently teaches at Loyola University in New Orleans. At the center of some of his research are the history of high heels and the social reasons why women are attracted to them and continue to wear dizzying shoes, despite the fact that they hurt. Attn.com, an entertainment and information site attentive to social changes, interviewed her, touching on the topic in an interesting way.
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What Lisa immediately highlights is that the heels were not invented specifically for women, but rather, they were initially used by men in war: the Persians would be potential inventors, having devised an extension of the shoes to stay firmly in stirrups going horseback during battles. Fascinated by this ingenuity, the European elite began to emulate them and the French king Louis XIV himself was particularly passionate about it, to the point of trying to block its spread to the lower classes with some laws to keep it a privilege for the rich.
Obviously this did not stop its popularization, so in the period of the Enlightenment the richest stopped wearing them and mocked men and women of lower classes who did it. Throughout the following history there were ups and downs in the spread of the use of heels, but to date we can say that their use by women can be linked, like many other fashions (see for example the habit of men to shave your chest), to eroticism.
The fact that in this historical period heels are a symbol of the female gender reveals many things about the state of our current society. First of all, the fact that in this period the mix of female and male genders is increasingly pronounced lead to the use of heels as one of the ways to emphasize one's femininity and the difference between genders.
This speech is even more complex. Somehow, a woman who wears heels and therefore takes care of herself and her femininity would play a reassuring, albeit unconsciously, role on people. High heels and anything else that could make a woman attractive to a heterosexual man, like makeup, send unconsciously reassuring messages like "Don't worry, I know I'm still a woman and you're a man."
Women, for their part, continue to suffer the pain of high heels because with them they feel more "powerful" through two mechanisms. According to the first, being the woman used to being considered inferior in a patriarchal society, she seeks her own power through the approval of men. According to the second, in a society where women are taught that - alas - to be successful they must be like men, the height gained with the heel makes one feel a sense of masculinity and power.
