This and that
Gustav said:
umm
it accentuates the buttocks, lengthens the legs and tightens the calves
One wonders how much social conditioning comes into that. Because, like I said, I don't recall ever hearing anyone assert that high heels are comfortable.
Something I noted to Codanblad implies a certain contrast:
Has it ever occurred to you that there is beauty among humans that doesn't lead to fucking?
And that's at the heart of it. While women are judged on their looks in matters of socialization, education, and hiring, apparently if they play along in the least, they're asking to be fucked.
I made this point because I regularly encounter women in business attire that includes high heels. I don't think a lawyer in a thousand-dollar suit is suggesting with high heels that anyone should try to penetrate her.
So the contrast is
why a woman would wear high heels:
• Because she's horny and wants someone to have sex with her.
• Because she perceives such shoes as part of an expected "uniform".
In the vast majority of cases, I'm going to go with #2, or even a third, more obscure reason that, in wearing high heels, a woman increases her apparent height and projects a notion of power or authority that may or may not be real. What, for instance, is the current rule of thumb for those who would "dress for success"?
Anyone remember Robin Williams' lesbian joke from
Good Morning Vietnam? We don't call them dykes. We call them women in comfortable shoes.
Feminism 101: A woman is expected to tart herself up in order to be taken seriously, although, since she is tarted up, she is not to be taken seriously.
This is true almost exclusively because phallocentric society has such a broad definition of what constitutes tarting or slutting it up.
• • •
A note for Codanblad:
I haven't been ignoring you, but rather, in light of
#132, I intend to give you room to work and maneuver. Part of the reason is that you really do seem to be trying. At the same time, I confess I find the obligation to take certain ideas seriously wearying. And, to be sure, you appear to still be thinking too much about yourself. Rubbing salt in the wounds? That would suggest the point is excessive. Do more harm than good? Absolutely correct. But you'd still say it to your mates, and still make it about you: "
anything to have prevented it from happening".
No. You know what, man? There's
nothing you or anyone else could have done to prevent it from happening. Woulda-coulda-shoulda
disappears once the reality is upon someone close to you. One of the first things you realize when it's someone close to you is that none of that matters. As a practical matter, it's a strange place to be. Part of you wants to bolt; this is more than most of us, as friends and family of rape survivors, are prepared to deal with. But another part will beg for impossibility:
What can I
do to bring about healing?
It seems a contradiction. There is nothing
you can do to bring about healing. To the other, though, there is a lot you can do to help.
When you stay, you accept certain burdens that can, if you let them, drive you mad. They're dynamic obligations that never present themselves in any definitive sense. But at the same time, they are insubstantial in a certain context: it is absurd to complain about them. After all, when it's not your ass that requires surgical repair, or your blood that needs to be tested over and over again for HIV, or your wardrobe, reputation, musical taste, hairstyle, manner of talking to people, and essential self that is put on trial in order to defend a rapist, you're the
lucky one.
When we stay, we accept our burdens gladly. And if we cannot do that, we should abandon ship and never pretend for a moment that we do so for any other reason than our inability or unwillingness to stand with our friends and family in hours of dire necessity.