have you ever wondered why women go to allthe trouble not to mention the pain of wearing high heels? owowowowow. well fellas guesswhat? you started it. so starting in the middle ages wealthy menand women began wearing these platform shoes called chopines more for practicality ratherthan any lady gaga-esque fashion statement. the reason they wore these platform shoeswas to literally elevate them out of the poop
Heels , in the streets. in that regard thank goodnessfor the high heel. now fast-forwarding to the 1600s men were really the first ones toadopt heels as a status symbol, they were these shoes that you would wear if you werea very fancy and successful man and you wanted to show the world that you were literallyabove them. louis the xiv in fact loved high
heels so much that he came up with a signaturered bottom for all of his shoes. if you were a member of louis the xiv's court and youdid not get his prior permission and he caught you walking around with some red-bottomedshoes, well you would be out. we have somewhere here who has red-bottomed shoes and they mustbe going to the guillotine. louis the xiv why, why do you have such a strange accent?now the funny thing was women in the 1630s also started wearing high heels as a formof protest against men's more powerful positions in society. which now seems a little bit silly.they didn't know that hundreds of years later women would be wearing high heels all thetime and getting pump bump and callouses and broken toes as a result of it. and as womenbegan wearing high heels because they were
all like anything a guy can wear we can wearand better, guys were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, ladies, those are dude's shoes. okay? in orderfor men to differentiate their high heels from women's high heels, men kept wearinga chunkier platform style of high heel shoe, whereas women began to adopt the spikier moreslender heel that we think of today. but then when the enlightenment rolls around peopleare all like, 'we need to worry about our brains rather than our clothes. i don't evencare about high heels anymore.' and so with the enlightenment high heels feel out of fashionand nobody wore them for awhile until the mid 19th century when, and this is gettinga little dodgy, pornographers dressed up women in high heels to accentuate their femininefigures. and thus high heels come back slowly
into vogue and just for women so thanks alot mid 19th century pornographers. but it's interesting though that it's pornographerswho are attributed with bringing high heels back into female fashions because it was statusbefore sexiness but i wonder due to that connotation between female nudes of the mid 19th centuryand the high heels, if that's where we really start getting this connection between womenwearing high heels in order to feel sexy. some evolutionary biologists think that womenhave worn high heels now for centuries because it does something to our bodies that drivesmen bonkers. in 2012 some researchers at the university of portsmith determined that highheels in fact produce something called a super normal stimulus. woo-woo. an exaggerated secondarysex trait that you would normally find in
nature. secondary sex traits in women arethings like breasts and the shape of our bodies. and then these researchers determined thatbased on comparing women's bodies walking on a treadmill in flats and then in high heels---owowow--highheels do three things to women. it shortens our gaits, exaggerates the curve of our pelvis,poking out our breasts and our butts. and from all this, these portsmith researchersconcluded that perhaps women wearing high heels is a modern mating strategy. so to answerthe question of why do women wear high heels: guys started doing it and so women adoptedit and then it came back into vogue because of pornography and we associated female sexinesswith it so we continue to wear them and perhaps
undergirding all of this is some evolutionarybiology saying, 'hey ladies, you know one
way you can make yourself more attractivein the wild? put on a pair of these.' i think it's time for guys to reclaim the high heel.come on men. don't you want to, don't you want to walk a mile in these shoes? it wasgood enough for louis the xiv.
