Shuesday: Speaking of ridiculous

Recently, in the Times:

Are high heels all about sexual advantage, since they elongate and exaggerate the female form? Or is there another explanation? What liberates women and what shackles them, when it comes to shoes?

Anna-Marie Fitzgerald, a book publicist who lives in London, is co-editor, with Phoebe Frangoul, of Pamflet, a feminist fashion and pop culture zine and blog says:

Elongating the leg and squashing the toes, a skyscraper shoe is an addictive, paradoxical combination of pain (ouch), power (taller, but you can’t walk) and beauty (a peep-toed sigh). That Louboutin under-lick of red is a tantalizing hint of flesh, the stiletto spike a phallic shadow and in one’s pinched toes — sensation there lies an exquisite kind of torture. We can’t honestly wonder at the agonies of the 19th-century corset or foot-binding when we’re obsessed with “the shoe,” can we?

And, as Jennifer Scanlon is author of “Bad Girls Go Everywhere,” a biography of Helen Gurley Brown, and a professor of gender and women’s studies at Bowdoin College, says:

As Helen Gurley Brown realized, women are no better — and no worse — at making decisions big and small than men are. They simply have more shoes to choose from — and make a wider range of choices. Who’s going to draw the line on just how high a heel is practical, or healthful or sexy?