Ron Collins
Aug 27, 2017 · 3 min read

Just FYI, Rachel Darnall, I’m still reading on Medium but posting very little any more for a number of reasons. And I won’t be indulging this “clapping” nonsense because I see it as the (pseudo-)psychological profiling and data-gathering on Medium’s part which it so obviously is. So silly approval-gesturing via mouse-clicks notwithstanding, take it for granted that I continue to like, recommend and applaud everything you write as I always have.

That said, you have given a female perspective on heels and what they mean, and I take it face value as one woman’s absolutely worthy opinion. Wear what you want to wear, God knows I do, says the guy who would have to be caught and restrained to ever get me into a suit and tie or those loathsome and sissified “casuals” which seem so female-approved for men to wear. I wear my paint-spotted blue jeans and hole-y T-shirts for the same reason you pick a pair of shoes for whatever occasion: because I damn well feel like it.

But there is another angle that is seldom examined on this business of women and footwear: during those few times in life I have ever lowered myself to working in an office setting, a thing I have noticed repeatedly is the way women walk in their heels, not as a visual device of suggestivity but as an auditory one of power-signaling.

A gal has a way of walking in heels across a hard commercial floor so that everyone hears it, and can read her mood by it. There is a sound she can make with those things that says “woman in the room, she’s pissed off, and cross her at your peril.” It is an aggressive, disruptive, confrontational sound, and absolutely an intentional one. I have seen (and heard) this tactic of not-so-passive aggression used by women in workplaces so often that I have wondered each time if THAT was why a lady chose what shoes to wear to work: not for what they look like, but for what they SOUND like.

Women in mixed-sex workplaces have endless ways of signaling displeasure, disapproval and disdain. Fake smiles, strategic subject-changing at key moments, little phrases like “...and you’re telling me this be-caaaaaause….?” and the ever-useful “oh, please….” are things I came to take as expected norms of female conduct in indoor work settings, and frankly are among the primary reasons I have stayed away from them most of my adult life. I have found working alongside women, with notable and appreciated exceptions, to be an exercise in continual eggshell-walking that I have next to zero patience for, especially given that the egregious double standard of female-versus-male etiquette is so absolute and so universally enforced, mainly by men.

And in that context, the over-loud heel-stomp of an angry woman at work is about as intolerable a form of juvenile control-seeking as I ever tried to coexist with. If I had any such thing as a “CV”, it would show I haven’t tried very hard. Give me a job to do and men to do it with, and I’ll get it done, usually in its origins something meant to please a woman. But give me women to try and work with, and especially women wearing heels on a hard floor in an echoing commercial space, and cowed, emasculated men alongside them too afraid of their displeasure to ever, ever stand up to any woman, and I won’t last a week.

(BTW: go figure, but my mom swears she wore heels through three pregnancies because they helped her back not be so sore…..)

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    Ron Collins

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    Recognizing that women have no need of any special status granted them by men is as respectful of women’s abilities as it is protective of men’s