High-heeled Footwear - Feminist Attitudes Towards High Heels

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:

    With a new familiarity and a flesh-creeping “homeliness” entirely of this unreal, materialistic world, where all “sentiment” is coarsely manufactured and advertised in colossal sickly captions, disguised for the sweet tooth of a monstrous baby called “the Public,” the family as it is, broken up on all hands by the agency of feminist and economic propaganda, reconstitutes itself in the image of the state.
    Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)

    The protection of a ten-year-old girl from her father’s advances is a necessary condition of social order, but the protection of the father from temptation is a necessary condition of his continued social adjustment. The protections that are built up in the child against desire for the parent become the essential counterpart to the attitudes in the parent that protect the child.
    Margaret Mead (1901–1978)

    She stood breast high amid the corn,
    Clasp’d by the golden light of morn,
    Thomas Hood (1799–1845)

    in small war on the heels of small
    war—until the end of time
    to police the earth, a ghost
    orbiting forever lost
    in our monotonous sublime.
    Robert Lowell (1917–1977)