Living & Arts

Heeless heels backward step toward foot binding

In print | April 17, 2008

Fashion is so saturated with extreme and ridiculous designs that sometimes nothing seems to faze me anymore. But I recently came across a shoe that made my jaw drop. It wasn’t the $3,500 price tag. Or the fact that Victoria Beckham has a pair made from snakeskin (in fact that was actually the only normal thing about this whole story). It was the fact that these were high heels that have no heel. Instead, the walker balances weight on the wide platform base that makes up the sole of the shoe. I tried to imagine what someone would look like walking in something like this. They’d have to tip-toe of course, and sort of teeter back and forth on each leg like a bipedal goat. Or a woman with bound feet.

Bound feet! I get nauseous whenever I think about them. Not only because it involved various amounts of bone breaking and flesh rotting to a girl’s foot starting at around 5 years old, but also because that would’ve been my fate had I been born 100 years earlier. Luckily for me, I was born in 1985 and got to wear light-up Beauty and the Beast sneakers instead. Nearly a century after the practice was officially banned, what still remains of this millennium-long tradition is its symbol of the vicious strength of Imperial China’s patriarchy, a spot in the Mütter Museum that showcases medical anomalies, and the severely twisted idea in some people’s minds that there is something particularly alluring about the feet of Asian women. True story: onetime a cab driver, upon seeing two Chinese girls enter his cab, told a friend and me that we “must have nice feet.” Puh!

There was a perverted contradiction between the exterior and interior of bound feet. Hidden from view by ornately embroidered silk shoes, these pointy crescents were lusted after and perceived of as another erogenous zone on a woman’s body. But what a man did not see was the foot when a woman took off her bindings, a foot that was severely deformed, putrid, broken, rotting. Talk about a hot mess.

While the severity of this dualism exists only in the history books now, it is easy to draw parallels with the high heels of today. And this heelless heel just seems like a step back towards foot binding. Wearing high heels makes the foot appear smaller, elongates the legs, and forces the wearer to walk in smaller, delicate steps. Not unlike a baby deer! With years of wearing them, high heels can start to deform the foot as well, leading to corns, bunions, blisters and varicose veins, not to mention damage to tendons in the legs. Foot binding for the rich and inane.

But all the same, I’m not one to completely reject high heels. They can confer a great deal of power and authority to women in the work place. And although they may be debilitating in some ways, high heels adding length to the body can inspire confidence in the wearer in a way that other shoes cannot. But in my mind, I don’t know how to reconcile these conflicting sides. On the rare occasions that I do wear high heels, I get self-conscious that I may appear uncomfortable. As a result, I always find myself walking more upright and with a deliberate sense of ease, just to prove to myself and others that wearing heels doesn’t have to be painful or limit mobility. Then again, I did say “rare occasions.”

The historian Dorothy Ko’s revisionist history on foot binding suggest that foot binding was a choice fueled by women’s desires as dictated by the fashion system. The same holds true today with high heels. But isn’t it largely men who have developed this fashion system? In that case, how free is this decision-making? Her account of foot binding also suggest that people viewed the body, like the mind, as something that could be disciplined and worked in order to achieve their desired goals. But should these goals be achieved at such a painful price?

I don’t know how to go about answering these questions. In the end, I guess it’s just one of those contradictions that makes high heels so equally repulsive and desirable. In the meantime, it’s finally getting nice out and the grass is particularly plush this year. Which means bare feet as much as possible.

Meagan is a senior. You can reach her at mhu1@swarthmore.edu.