[[ IN DEFENSE OF THE WALK-LIKE-A-WHORE FOOTWEAR ]]

          If I were a whore and I wore a pair of "decent" flats, will it change who I am? If I were a nun and I wore a walk-like-a-whore sandals, will I be no  different from the girls of the red light district?

          He-who-I-wouldn't wanna name said that he effin' hates girls wearing those sandals. He associated them with whoreness. He said the monster media is to be blamed. He must hate me. I own a pair of the sandals he condemns.

          For a vertically challenged girl like me, another few inches I get from high heels is a big deal already. In a sea of tall people, I gain a sort of "equality" and sometimes more than that. I hate to have to look up and being looked down when talking to tall people. I hate it when it rains and my flats get soaked in the filthy runoff water. Thus, I am so grateful that heels were invented.

         Since ancient times, heels were already in existence. Most of the lower class in ancient Egypt walked barefoot, but figures on murals dating from 3500 B.C. depict an early version of shoes worn mostly by the higher classes. In ancient Greece and Rome, platform sandals called kothorni, later known as buskins in the Renaissance, were shoes with high wood or cork soles that were popular particularly among actors who would wear shoes of different heights to indicated varying social status or importance of characters. During the Middle Ages, both men and women would wear pattens, or wooden soles, that were clearly a precursor the high heel. Pattens would attach to fragile and expensive shoes to keep them out of the mud and other street “debris” when walking outdoors. In the 1400s, chopines, or platform shoes, were created in Turkey and were popular throughout Europe until the mid-1600s. Chopines could be seven to eight or even 30 inches high. The Venetians made the chopine into a status symbol revealing wealth and social standing for women.

          If there was a woman in history who single-handedly made the heels the woman's best friend is Catherine de Medici of the fashionable City of Florence. At the age of 14, Catherine de Medici was engaged to the powerful Duke of Orleans, later the King of France. She was small, not quite five feet, relative to the Duke and hardly considered a beauty. She felt insecure in the arranged marriage knowing she would be the Queen of the French Court and in competition with the Duke’s favorite and significantly taller mistress, Diane de Poitiers. Looking for a way to dazzle the French nation and compensate for her perceived lack of aesthetic appeal, she donned heels two inches high that gave her a more towering physique and an alluring sway when she walked. Her heels were a wild success and soon high heels were associated with privilege.

          Men wore heels too. n the early 1700s, France's King Louis XIV ,The Sun King, would often wear intricate heels decorated with miniature battle scenes. Called “Louis heels,” they were often as tall as five inches. The king decreed that only nobility could wear heels that were colored red  and that no one's heels could be higher than his own. During the course of the century, a cultural kind of foot fetishism manifested itself in various media.

          In the post-modern context of the 1980s, the feminist rejection of fashion started to lose much of its grassroots support. The idea that fashion, specifically sexy shoes, were not simply oppressive but offered pleasure to women became more widely accepted. Critics, particularly feminists in the 1980s, argued that fashion can be an experiment with appearances, an experiment that challenges cultural meaning. This change of heart about high heels perhaps was provoked by counter-cultural street fashion of the early 1980s as well as by feminist debates about pleasure and female desire, which indirectly changed the way fashion was understood. Women now claimed they were wearing high heels for themselves and that heels gave them not only height but also power and authority.