Also, with heavy squinting I cannot make out what is going on with the monstrous thing at the bottom of the illustration. The turkey head I recognize, but what is that blob with insect legs and a crab claw supposed to be? No banana for Slug this week.
I totally agree. When I see a woman in high heels all I can think of is how stupid she looks. You may as well hang a sign around your neck saying “I’m so shallow and gullible I’ve bought into the notion my looks are more important than my well being.” I simply cannot take a woman in heels seriously.
Heh heh … I agree, it looks like a weird insectoid alien. But I think it’s the usual turkey-headed Cecil, moving his left arm rapidly to point at the three illustrations on the right (of the woman with “78%” by her foot, the high heel in the middle, and the sawed-off bunion) while at the same time he is bent over and drooling while looking at the hot high-heel-wearing leg on the left side.
Okay, now that it is pointed out, I see the glasses and the beak (that’s what that is). But what is that squiggle on his head between the glasses and the hat? I saw those as eyes, and then the glasses as teeth, and was getting some horribly racist caricature out of it.
And then there’s the body, being both oddly shaped and facing outward with him craning his neck backwards. Plus, the “arm” appears attached at his waist.
My observation, Cecil says
While I have no doubt high-heeled shoes are responsible for damaging feet, that quote does not state that the height of the heels is what causes bunions.
Bunions, for those not aware, are caused by forcing the toes (primarily big toe) into a tight-fitting shoe that distorts the shape of the foot by pressing the toe inward. This stretches the ligaments of the foot and rotates the toe so the back edge of the toe bone protrudes out sideways, which then rubs against the shoe and becomes inflamed. This HURTS. Both from the stretching ligaments, and the rubbing.
The thing about “high fashion footwear” that should be noted is that most of these shoes have very narrow, pointed toes. Thus wearing those shoes force the toes inward, and cause those bunions.
Perhaps walking around on your toes also forces the toe to shift and contributes to bunions, but I’m not seeing it.
No doubt at all, though, that wearing high heels puts more weight on the ball of the foot, and thus gives more impact to that area when walking.
Really? Maybe I’m in the minority, but as a guy I have never found heels to make women more attractive. A woman is just as attractive in heels as she is in anything else. I never understood what the point was.
Interesting experiment, but I think it uses measurements that are fundamentally wrong for the question.
How is “stress” defined? Is it instantaneous stress (what the experiment measured) or cumulative stress - i.e., each step with that shifted weight taken throughout the day, or the year? I think the latter is far more important for health purposes, and what the generic statement likely refers to.
I think a far better measure would have looked at the results: are women in high heels getting 100x more of the cited corrective treatments? On that score, we have an apparently straightforward answer from the research (the 75% versus 25% number, or 3x more) and adding the experiment doesn’t particularly contribute.
I love my high heels because no matter what I weigh, my shoes are always awesome.
I don’t care if other people think I look stupid in them. I didn’t ask what you thought.
So the point might be: some people like high heels*.
The posts in this thread so far make me wonder: If women allegedly only wear high heels because we stupidly bought into some commercial standard of beauty that we were brainwashed to believe in, and 100% of the males in this thread think high heels are unattractive, where does this supposed message that high heels are sexy come from? Steve Madden?
I will never understand why high heels is the item of clothing that people choose to pile on about.
*High heels force the bulk of your body weight to the balls of your feet. This causes accentuation of the calf muscles and it also forces you to arch your back just a bit to maintain balance, which has the effect of popping out the booty and boobs. It is my opinion that men who think high heels are unattractive are dead inside.
Heels make the legs seem longer and arches the calves to make the legs look shapelier.
edit: I am a male and I love the look of a woman in high heels. I do think they should be used sparingly for health reasons though, I knew a girl who even barefoot had to walk on the balls of her feet with her heels in the air because she had shortened her achilles tendon with heels.
I have to agree that Cecil kinda missed the point on this. A better experiment would be to install some sort of weight or g-force sensors in the toe and heel areas of flats, sneakers, and various heights and styles of high-heels. And have test subjects walk 100 yards or so on flat ground and up and down a moderate slope and then analyze the results.
Such tests (perhaps a project for the Mythbusters?) should be able show the relative level of force applied to the front and rear of the feet across a fairly broad spectrum of shoes and their wearers. This would be a more realistic simulation than standing still atop a pair of scales.
Next step is to try to develop a profile of the average woman’s daily activity in heels. Some will wear sneakers to work and change shoes once they arrive, remaining mostly sedentary aside from walking to meetings, making copies, or answering nature’s call. At the other extreme, some women wear heels all day, commuting via public transit (running for the bus, walking flights of stairs to subway platforms) and work in retail where they’ll be on their feet all day.
Once you’ve found this “average” profile of time/distance spent sitting standing, walking, climbing, running, crouching etc. You can figure out the amount of force or stress applied to the ball of the foot and create a reference value for each type of footwear.
It wouldn’t surprise me in such an experiment to find that the average woman inflicts 100x or more stress on their feet in a day in the average pair of heels over the average pair of flats.
I’m 5’9" and love being even taller, so I think heels are pretty awesome on occasion.
That being said, there are heels (2") and then there are heels (6"), just like not all flats are the same either.
Most guys’ shoes have at least an inch elevation in the heel, while women’s flats can range anywhere from totally flat to an inch or more in the heel. The ballet shoe fad has probably done just as terrible things to women’s feet, what with absolutely zero arch support and thin as hell soles. Flip-flops aren’t much better, but at least they have some padding unless you get those leather ones. I find those kinds painful to wear, compared to a flat with proper arch support and padding or even a well-made heel.
That’s a huge part of the problem, wearing crappy shoes where your toes are jammed together, the heel isn’t positioned properly to allow for easy balance (it needs to be under the ball of the heel, not at the back of the heel), and the arch isn’t supported well.
Good idea, but our budget for experiments was limited. I checked on the sort of setup you are talking about would cost about 20 to 50 times what Cecil gets reimbursed for the column. We were nonetheless curious just from the standpoint of balance if nothing else, because in our martial arts, Fierra and I work very hard to try to have a correct balance on both our front and rear feet, as well as the ball versus the heel. I also do a lot of standing, especially when I teach my class at university, and have noticed the tremendous increase in pain even when I’m mostly standing still.
We also thought it was interesting that even when we wore the same shoes, we had very different weight distributions in the shoes. Which corresponded to the level of pain we feel. Fierra can dance all night in 4-inch heels, whereas I can just about make it through an hour of normal walking. I put much more weight on my front foot than her in all cases.
Also, although it was not explained in detail in the column perhaps, I did acquire several technical papers where just such experiments as you suggest were done. Both the peak and the time-averaged stress levels were compared in these experiments, and in no case was the difference in stress ever greater than 4:1.
Surely it depends on what she’s doing and how long she’s wearing them for?
If a woman was doing a marathon in heels, I’d think it was pretty stupid, but the only time I seem to see women in heels these days is indoors, or exiting/entering a vehicle.
Being on your tip-toes just a few minutes each day as you walk between meetings is unlikely to cause the kinds of injury cecil listed, so why not if you think they look good?
You’re not looking in the right places. A remarkable number of women wear high heels in work settings that force them to be on their feet all day, like hair salons. And I mean 4+" high heels.
People can wear whatever they want, I suppose. However, I’d argue that normalizing a style of professional footwear that causes health problems when their use is not kept to an absolute minimum is not a great thing for society.
It is a fact of life that professional women are to some extent driven to “look good”. Due to the nature of workplace competition, an unfortunate corrollary to this fact is that this leads to substantial social and professional pressure on women not only look good, but also to look as good as or better than their female colleagues.
In a culture where “looking good” requires the use of footwear that causes health problems when used for substantial periods of time, this ends up being a pretty serious problem, particularly for women who for one reason or another are less able than average to wear the shoes in question without injury. I must emphasize that there is a huge variation in individual tolerances for sub-optimal footwear construction: shoe fashions that impose little more than a minor inconvenience on some women will leave others blistered and bleeding within an hour. And I’m not even touching the long term effects here, which again can range from mild impairments to completely incapacitating deformities.
It wasn’t too long ago that heeled footwear was pretty much mandatory for professional women, and I don’t think it’s really out of line to say that anyone who seriously wants to go back to that way of doing things is basically some kind of human monster. The question is, how do we balance any individual woman’s right to wear what she considers to be snappy footwear in her workplace with the general right of professional women to be free from the expectation that they do the same? It’s a heavy quandary and there’s no one real right answer.
