Freak Shoes
2021-05-23
Freakonomics rebroadcast an old episode about Shoes and health. There was a paragraph or two that were so funny and ridiculous that it made me stop the episode because i couldn’t believe they’d legitimately let these things go without being corrected. This was supposed to be serious right? We were supposed to take this seriously?
A disclaimer about the rest of the episode; it’s fine, and accurate in most places. Only one paragraph was hilariously out-of-touch.
Here’s the offending lines. Semmelhack is the guest, she’s a curator at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto.
DUBNER: When and why did women start wearing shoes that to me at least look to be painfully small and constraining?
SEMMELHACK: If you look at paintings from the early 17th century, like a painting of a bunch of Dutch people drinking, it’ll be women and men and their feet are all very clearly visible and there’s really no size difference between men’s and women’s shoes. But if you fast-forward through that century, all of a sudden the women’s feet are tiny in representation and men’s are much much larger. Some of it has to do with shifts in ideas about gender. Enlightenment thinking was attempting to establish that men and women were different. Some of that finds expression in fashion. By the end of the 17th century there’s this much larger thing happening within culture that’s suggesting that men are rational and that their clothing should sort of not betray any excess interest in the fancy things in life. Women are seen as naturally irrational and frivolous. The high heel fits into that perfectly.
There’s a few things here.
Men and women wore the same shoes in the past, and women only wear more petite shoes now because of social constructs
First, we have to acknowledge that women have smaller frames than men. They have wider hips, shorter shoulders, more fat, less muscle, and yes, smaller feet. Women are not just on-average-smaller men, they’re built differently. Or maybe it’s more correct to say that men are built differently, given the nature of the 23rd chromosome. Women don’t have smaller feet because of social constructs, they just have smaller feet. It’s not an issue.
The Enlightenment invented gender roles
There’s an odd anachronistic thinking that tries to purport that women and men were equals in all the world until the Enlightenment. But remember, she just got done talking about Chinese foot binding, which started in the Song dynasty - for those not up on their Chinese history, that’s the 10th century; a full 500 years pre-Enlightenment. It continued for so long that there are still elderly women alive with bound feet.
The high-heel was invented for women and is frivolous
The high-heeled shoes were initially male footwear. They grew out of riding shoes, and if you look at any paintings of royals from the mid-1700s back a few hundred years, you’ll see the kings, princes, and barons all wearing them. Perhaps not stilettos, but definitively high-heeled nonetheless.
A better explanation
Look we could sit here and pick her apart all day. But let’s talk reality. Why would common Dutch women go from being represented as wearing the same shoes as men, to suddenly having differences? Why would high heels be womenswear?
Because women wanted to do it.
Women compete sexually just as much as men. After the industrial revolution, increasingly-common women gained the means and access to luxury goods and specialty shoes, and could compete with each other in a sort of "beauty arms race". You don’t have to go far back to find very dog-faced women being the norm; therefore we can’t say that women just all-of-a-sudden got hit with patriarchy that somehow didn’t exist before then. Yet all women today have access to makeup, and let’s be frank, women today are all stunners compared to women in those Dutch paintings. If you don’t work on your appearance, you better have real natural beauty; otherwise all your rivals are going to attract more attention than you.
We could say this is patriarchy, that women choose to compete sexually. But that’s going to be a tough sell, given that all sexually-dimorphic animals do the same.
Anti-feminine Attitudes
The kinds of attitudes displayed by Semmelhack are sour to me, because it denies women agency. Neither men nor women had much freedom in the past, each was relegated to roles that were necessary for the survival of the people - and which conferred real advantages. Those roles don’t mean women were slaves, any more than it means men were slaves just because they overwhelmingly died at work, at war, in purges, or early due to living a life of hard labor that women never had to live through.
Women have always had agency, always made choices, always decided their fates. Trying to take that away in attempt for a modern Western woman to fetishize her invented victimhood is, frankly, gross. History is not a creative writing assignment, women are not your toys.
