The answer: no, it is not. "When you wear beautiful but uncomfortable
shoes, your feet hurl. Cinderella's feet didn't hurt because her
shoes-albeit glass-fit her properly. And who knows? Maybe those
glass slippers had a contoured foot bed.
ANew York City mother of two young daughters, Janet, told me how
excited she was when she received a gift of Jimmy Choo heels-her first
pair ofluxury shoes. She had befriended a woman at her children's preschool,
Julie, and the two of them joked about Manolos and Jimmy
Choos. Janet didn't realize it, but her new friend was not just joking
around. She was very affluent and actually owned many pairs of shoes
from these designers. The day before Janet's birthday,Julie had her personal
shopper from a trendy boutique called Scoop deliver a pair of
Jimmy Choos to Janet's apartment.
"So I open the box," Janet tells me. "Inside were these incredible
shoes. This woman had bought me gold Jimmy Choo heels! I didn't think
I could accept such an extravagant gift. I tried to give them back to her but
she just said, 1En joy them; just think of me when you're enjoying them.'"
"But here's the thing," Janet continues, getting serious. "The pair
she had bought me weren't my size. They were a 7 and I'm a 7 .5. So I
went to the store and explained that I needed a size larger. But they didn
' t have any left in any size. But then I saw that the store had another
pair that I loved even more but only in a size 6. So I exchanged my pair
for that pair. I have to shove my feet in them. I love them. They are the
sexiest things. They are very strappy.
JANET KNOWS not to wear her heels except on rare occasions, and
Carol learned the hard way not to even bother with her new pumps.
Some women, however, are determined to wear their fashionable
shoes no matter what the cost. A forty-four-year-old woman who lives
on Manhattan's Upper West Side, Olivia, works in the fashion industry.
The names inside her shoes are Chanel, Manolo, Prada. "I don't
wear heels every day," she says, because they slow her down. Also, one of
Olivia's heels tends to hurt because of a bone spur (a not-uncommon
phenomenon in which there is extra bone growth on the heel, caused by
aging and! or poorly fitting shoes, discussed in the next chapter).
"[A] woman's choice to mold her body does not make her a victim.
If bigger boobs are what she wants, it's her right to choose both as a
feminist and as an individual .... We BUST girls are not immune to
feeling insecure about our bodies, but we're smart enough to know that
we don't need to be victimized by it."
Concurred Debbie Stoller, Bust's other coeditor:
"Unlike our feminist foremothers, who claimed that makeup was
the opiate of the misses, we're positively prochoice when it comes to
matters of feminine display. We're well aware, thank you very much, of
the beauty myth that's working to keep women obscene and not heard,
but we just don't think that transvestites should have all the fun .... We
love our lipstick, have a passion for polish, and, basically, adore this
armor that we call'fashion.' To u s, it's feminine, and, in the particularwaywe
flaunt it, it's definiteJy feminist."
This new feminist credo of the 1990s was that women have the
power to exercise personal power and therefore to ~~choose" to bare
their bra straps and to get an eye lift if that is what they want to do. This
(~girl culture" was supposed to be a form of feminine strength and
power. It's okay to flaunt your femininity, young women were told, as
long as they were culturally hip, ironic, and knowing enough to recognize
that they were referencing RuPaul and not Donna Reed.
We like to imagine that if we wear fashionable shoes, others will perceive
us as strong, sexy, and in control. But when a woman is a slave to
fashion, it is quite likely that others regard her as a victim of her own
making. Is that really worth the price of a case of Band-Aids and corn
pads?
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