Monday, June 02, 2008

Owwwww!

Beware: you can bruise your feet with high heels.

This happens to me so infrequently that I forget about it every time, but during some circumstances -- like jumping around on a stage at the Holiday Inn during Guelph Pride -- I manage to damage my feet in an incredibly painful way.

It feels like a constant burning inside the ball of my foot, which becomes a sharp pain each time I take a step. Since my foot doesn't actually swell up or anything when this happens, I assume that the bruising is of some tissue deep inside...a muscle or a joint or something.

The last time this happened was when I tried to break in a pair of very high feather mules. The deceptive thing about this is that the pain doesn't actually start until a few hours later, so you've got no warning that something's wrong until it's time to recover. And that takes days of hobbling around and inspecting your foot for gangrene.

So be careful, girls...feet will only take so much.

4 comments:

VanillaJ said...

High heels were designed by hateful men who want to prevent you from running away. go figure.

Adam Thornton said...

Well, they were apparently first designed to keep feet from slipping out of stirrups (hence cowboy boots) and were unisex until the 1800s, valued for the posture and height effects on both men and women.

But anyway, I'm not convinced that the post-18th century, female-centric design is either primarily hateful or intended to prevent women from running away. There are plenty of reasons why women wear high heels.

Yes, most (if not all) of those reasons are in a response to fasion norms, but heels do more than just immobilize you. They're sexy accessories that accentuate the leg-line, thrust your chest and butt out, and give you "a walk." I imagine that vast majority of men are more interested in those aspects of heels than they are in preventing women from running.

Kimber said...

My chiropractor "tsk tsks" me every time I tromp into his office wearing any kind of heels. I try to argue with him using similar points to yours, but he just snorts and says that high heels make women walk like chicken. I suspect his wife only wears birkenstocks. (shudder)

Adam Thornton said...

"Walk like CHICKEN?" Why I never!

Heels certainly aren't good for your feet...but if we stopped doing everything that was bad for us, we...

...well, I can't imagine what we WOULD do.