High heels and female fantasies

"You've got about three extra inches there, haven't you?" the conductor remarked while all of us waited. SEPTA must have a tacit policy for riders with extremely high heels: He'd picked up the lady's medium-sized suitcase without a word and carried it down the train's three steps to the platform. Now several of us waited behind her in the train's vestibule as she teetered laboriously down the steps, with the conductor poised to catch her if she fell.

She reached the ground, grasped the handle of her rolling bag, and all of us proceeded to the platform exit: two steep flights of concrete stairs.

She stopped while the other commuters passed around her and down the stairs. I— in my sensible blue polka-dotted flats— paused beside her.

"Do you want some help?" I asked.

"No," she sighed sadly. It was a far cry from the movies.

Catwoman strikes back

In the latest Batman film, Anne Hathaway makes her Catwoman debut slinking into Bruce Wayne's private chambers disguised as a maid, with nary a tremor from her platform stiletto boots, whose knife-like silver heels are an integral part of her arsenal.

A would-be attacker asks her if her shoes hurt. "I don't know, do they?" she replies, lashing out at him with her feet. She escapes with several break-neck martial-arts maneuvers and leaps out the window.

I remember my first pair of heels. I was in fourth grade in Mitchellville, Md., and some leather cowboy boots with blocky one-inch heels caught my eye. I thought their soles made a glorious, womanly racket in the halls.

After school on the first day that I'd worn them, I went grocery shopping with my mother. We were in the frozen food aisle when I noticed a curious pain in my feet.

The pain resumed every time I wore heels. So in eighth grade I got myself a pair of navy-blue suede Doc Marten lace-ups, which were still clopping at least until my sophomore year in college.

Jogging in stilettos

Other girls seemed less troubled by heels, so on formal occasions, I ditched the boots and tried to blend in. School dances were a parade of shiny, torturous, strappy pumps that we discarded in piles anyway, even before the chaperones could tell us to put six inches between our dates and us.

I was in my college theater program at Arcadia University in Glenside when Terminator: Rise of the Machines opened. I never saw it, but my female peers buzzed about the murderous lady robot who battled Arnold Schwarzenegger in stilettos. Someone claimed that the actress had prepared for the role by jogging in high-heels, and girls I knew boasted that they, too, were so comfortable in heels that they could easily do the same.

Perhaps not coincidentally, a popular boy was casting his own version of Batman, to be filmed on campus, and many women students fancied themselves in the role of Catwoman. Embarrassed by my own lack of sex appeal and endurance, I kept quiet and wondered how anyone could bear to wear heels when walking was so agonizing on its own.

Flats at the altar

A year or two later, a no-nonsense podiatrist diagnosed me with severe plantar fasciitis in both my feet. So by the time my wedding rolled around, I bought white flats that didn't show under my dress, even though I was shorter than five-foot-four.

Luckily, the groom was five-foot-seven and a traditionalist who appreciated our groom/bride height differential. Thereafter my first priority in footwear was good arch support.

But I suffered a spasm of doubt about the time I became a theater critic. In flats, I wondered, would I look sufficiently glamorous? That's when I started wearing high-heeled black leather ankle-boots.

Then, in 2010, I arrived at the Live Arts Festival's hottest show— Fatebook, by New Paradise Laboratories— to discover that the warehouse had no seats; the audience had to follow the actors around on foot for two hours.

And last year, after I suffered a badly sprained ankle, my doctor ordered me— again—to stay away from heels.

Sexy perspiration

So why does it seem that movie starlets can do anything in their heels? Rosie Huntingdon-Whiteley, the preternaturally gorgeous co-star of Transformers 3, survives the sacking of the Big Apple by giant mechanical aliens; and Rachel McAdams, in the climactic scene of the charming 2010 film Morning Glory, runs through the concrete jungle at top speed, scattering pigeons and suffering nothing worse than a sexy sheen of perspiration.

Things weren't always this way in Hollywood. At the end of Crocodile Dundee— which came out in 1986, when I was three— the blonde heroine impatiently kicks off her high-heels, the better to sprint barefoot over the urban pavement to catch up to her lover. Nowadays, for some reason, even imminent death by extraterrestrial apocalypse is no excuse to remove your pumps.

Women today talk constantly about female empowerment. We rage against men like Congressman Todd Akin, who presume to tell us what to do with our bodies. Yet every time I stride comfortably (if unfashionably) past my wobbling compatriots, I marvel at these post-feminists, who live in shoes that render them incapable of carrying their own suitcases or even just getting off a train without a man standing by to help them.

Helpless women need men. That's what heels are all about. But they're the antithesis of gender equality.♦


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