Feminist Attitudes Towards High Heels
The high heel has been a central battleground of sexual politics ever since the emergence of the women's liberation movement of the 1970s. Many second-wave feminists rejected what they regarded as constricting standards of female beauty, created for the subordination and objectifying of women and self-perpetuated by reproductive competition and women's own aesthetics. Some feminists argue that the high heels were designed to make women helpless and vulnerable, perpetuating the gender role of males as protectors of the slowly staggering women. High heels have also been blamed for reducing the woman to a sex object by sacrificing practical comfort in favour of an alleged increase in sex appeal. Some second-wave feminists, such as Judy Grahn, have tied high heels to menstruation rituals that various cultures have used.
Read more about this topic: High-heeled Footwear
Famous quotes containing the words feminist, attitudes, high and/or heels:
“Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name.”
—Andrea Dworkin (b. 1946)
“... he held it one of the prettiest attitudes of the feminine mind to adore a man’s pre- eminence without too precise a knowledge of what it consisted in.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Wedding is great Juno’s crown,
O blessed bond of board and bed!
‘Tis Hymen peoples every town,
High wedlock then be honorèd.
Honor, high honor, and renown
To Hymen, god of every town!”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“A great licentiousness treads on the heels of a reformation.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)