Letter:
Dear Ms. P,
I feel that I should apologize to you. You really were an excellent teacher who put a lot of work into her craft. You cared about us a whole lot more that your co-lecturer, a famous poet and man who received endless accolades for his teaching despite the fact that he generally disliked children and/or women. We, who were both students and women, loved him for his blatant apathy. We cheered when he ignored our presentations in class to write emails and then gave us C’s. That man really was proof of how much society f-ed up girls: they’ll love a bad boy, even when he’s their sixty-year-old, balding, goateed English teacher who is married to a man. That must have frustrated you.
See, the problem with you is that none of us ever lost the memory of the first day we met you. The problem was that you, petit and blonde, came teetering into the classroom like a baby giraffe. We looked at you. You should have known that we would know that walk. The walk of when you’ve suddenly added four extra inches to your legs, so your glutes look tight, but your quads burn with a thousand fires. You hobbled over to the desk like a runway model. You put down your folders. We could practically hear your toes cracking, contorted and smushed in that patent leather tomb. Could you smell the danger in the air? You were the antelope with the broken leg, still looking cute as death prowled, and we were the starved lion. We hadn’t had juicy, fresh, dripping gossip in weeks.
But the horror wasn’t over yet. Julia, over in the corner, gasped and nudged her neighbor. She pointed down at your feet. Slowly, with wide eyes, we subtly torqued, bending our torsos over our desks to look down. To you, it must have looked like we were bowing. And that’s when we saw it: that flash of blood red. Louboutin’s. You weren’t wearing heels, you were Louboutin’s.
My god, we judged you for that. We talked about your rich daddy that must have bought them for you. We wondered how many pairs you had. We called you tacky and trashy and tasteless. You didn’t deserve that, especially not from us, prep-school girls on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. But, for this indiscretion, we withheld our respect for you indefinitely, you who were only a few years older than us, a professional young woman who was making her way in the world. I really hope Madeleine Albright never reads this.
You must wonder why I am apologizing to you now. It is certainly many years overdue. And I noticed that you stopped wearing those shoes. Our viciousness must have struck bone. But I understand now. I understand why you woke up that morning and made that decision. It wasn’t to please men or be a docile servant of the patriarchy. Well, maybe it still was but that wasn’t what you were thinking when you pulled those shoes on. When I’m nervous, all I want to be is taller and more imposing and more attractive and to fill up more space. When I’m nervous, I wish I were the sort of woman who can look men square in the eye and who can turn heads and who can be unapologetically loud. And there is a way to buy that ability: heels. And if you really need the confidence: red-bottomed heels.
Last year, I was asked to introduce a senior diplomat to a room full of 200 distinguished guests. That morning, when I woke up, I was Jell-O. But that’s not very feminist, so I had to pull it together. I put on some heels. When I walked up on that stage, I was 5’10”. My every step was accompanied by click, click, click like a ceremonial drum, safe and steady. I felt graceful and beautiful and calm. And I thought of you and how we robbed you of this moment on your first day of teaching. And, for that, I am very sorry.
Lecture:
The first recorded use of a woman wearing a high heel was Catherine de Medici in the 16th century. She wore heels to her wedding because she was only about five feet tall, which wasn’t sufficient to her. This fact makes me laugh because it is so transcendent of time. I see a lady named Catherine, maybe an Instagram influencer or a pastry chef, who is getting married to Chad, an investment banker, next May in a little chapel in Tuscany, and she’s concerned that her wedding stilettos will get caught between the stones when she walks down the aisle.
After Catherine, men caught on to the notion that one need not be limited by biology when it comes to height. In fact, heels were almost exclusively worn by men for centuries and were seen as tools to make themselves more masculine and assertive. It wasn’t until the 20th century – and the invention of a small piece of metal that allowed for a new breed of heel: the stiletto – that heels became gendered as women’s shoes.
And that moment of gendering is where the real problem starts. I illustrated the history of the high heel because it is important to know that heels were, first and foremost, meant to be a way to enhance your appearance, specifically in a way that makes you seem more powerful. Of course, there is an element of toxic vanity inherent in their conception – why couldn’t people just shift their perspective so that height didn’t matter when it came to authority? But height is tricky because it has a primal, biological function. The small, footed fish that first waddled onto land that exists in each and every one of us – it knows to be intimidated of something that is big. It also knows to feel safe when it is protected by the big thing. So, height is something we will always struggle to be non-judgmental about. Maybe, one day, we will escape that vanity. Until then, we have heels, which, I argue, are inherently an empowering and equitable tool.
Heels have been corrupted, however. Now, they are meant to be worn with black pencil skirts so that the sinews of one’s entire leg, tense and tight, can be seen by all who walk behind them. Now, they are a social expectation for a professional, working woman to wear every day to every meeting, despite the pinching and aching and blood-taut blisters. Now, they are the adorable ball-and-chains that keep a woman from dancing at a party and make her nervous that, god forbid, should she find herself needing to run away, she wouldn’t make it more than a few steps. We have taken something good, gendered it, and made it toxic.
But I am here on a mission to redeem heels. Firstly, we need to de-attach heels from gender. This is a movement that has already begun, and we should move full-steam ahead. Wouldn’t it be great if Michael Bloomberg could stop carrying a step-stool around the campaign trail and just buy a pair of Louboutin’s? I also believe that opening the world of heels to men would have a double benefit: there is no way men would allow themselves to be so uncomfortable regularly. I have to believe that money would flow into endeavors to find the world’s most cushy heel.
Secondly, we have to stop making heel-wearing an expectation. This is an argument you may have heard in regard to make-up – it’s only toxic if you make it so that people can’t choose not to wear it.
You may be asking: why undertake this project? Aren’t there other things that should be redeemed before we turn our focus to this? So, I invite you to pick up some heels – maybe start with kitten if you are a beginner – and find a long, smooth hallway. Just put them on and walk. Notice the sound, the echo, the way the world looks from a height that isn’t your own. Very rarely on this Earth do we get to change our physical perspective like that. Very rarely is there such an easy way to make us feel better about ourselves. Heels still have potential for human empowerment but, if, and only if, we choose to redeem them.
Working Notes:
I really tried to shift my tone when writing these pieces. I think I enjoyed the open letter a little more, because I felt it gave me a little more space to wax poetic and to do different things with tense and technique. It just felt like more of a creative endeavor to me. For the lecture, I tried to write it with the intention of it being spoken. I think that limited what I could do with technique but also meant I had to be more clear about the thoughts I was expressing. In sum, I wrote the open letter for me, if that makes sense, although I had an awareness that others would read it. For the lecture, I was very focused on what would be going on in other people’s heads when they heard or read it.