Beauty Liberates
You Can Pull My Stilettos Off My Cold. Dead. Feet.
This is not the conversation I thought we’d be having in 2017. Not a quarter century after Camille Paglia argued so passionately and persuasively that women derive power from sexuality, and that we should embrace that power. Paglia made feminism attractive to those of us who love art and men, and who’d otherwise be repelled by the butch and mousy dames who were so visible in the movement in the 1970's and 80's.
After reading Paglia I didn’t need to feel guilty every time I picked up Italian Vogue. She gave women like me the gift of understanding that beauty is not intellect’s opposite; that was truly liberating. I thought Paglia’s was the blueprint for the women’s movement for generations to come. I thought my daughter and her generation would be so much better because Paglia had changed feminism forever.
Unfortunately, everything old is new again, and that man- and art-hating feminism is once again raising its homely head. The latest manifestation of it is the Newsweek “thinkpiece” on the Trump women wearing stilettos:
There’s been no rest for the wicked just a week into President Donald Trump’s 17-day vacation, what with our late-summer flirtation with nuclear war. But the women in the Trump clan seem to have been able to kick back. Given the dearth of photographic evidence otherwise, perhaps they have finally been able to put their feet up.
This hiatus allows us to reflect on a minor Trumpian trend to which the nation has become accustomed since January: the ubiquitous stiletto pump. The vertiginous spike-heel shoe is not currently in fashion, but for Ivana, Ivanka, Melania and the Trump daughters-in-law, Carrie Bradshaw’s shoe of choice never went out of style. In fact, the female consorts of the Leader of the Free World do not set foot in public without first molding their arches into the supranatural curve that Mattel toy designers once devised for Barbie’s plastic feet.
No fan of Trump women here, but, boy, author Nina Burleigh clearly has an ax to grind.
First of all, stilettos as special occasion shoes have never gone out of style. Maybe, as Burleigh notes, Kristen what’s-her-face wears Chucks to red carpet events, but that’s just that woman’s eccentricities, ever more eccentric because between the heavy, unbending rubber soles and no arch support Chucks are not exactly orthopedic. They are rather adolescent looking, though, something worthy of overpriced plastic extremities of American Girl doll.
Secondly, what’s with observing Melania’s bunions under a magnifying glass?
The stiletto is a podiatrist’s dream, or nightmare, depending on your point of view, because devoted wearers ultimately require medical attention. “As you get older in these shoes, your feet are going to have problems,” Talley says. “I am not gonna say Melania is gonna have them soon, but sooner or later she is going have to come down off that high arch.”
I count on Nina Burleigh to inform us just when it happens.
Yes, yes, we know what spiky heels can do to our feet, especially when worn all day and fronted with a pointy toe. What else is really, really bad for the feet? Ballet. Yet thousands of adolescent girls master point shoes every year; and they do it with full agreement of their parents and guardians. Most of them will never become ballerinas. So what’s so wrong with grown up women deciding for themselves that the trade offs of wearing very high heels are worth it?
Burleigh has two targets: anyone associated with Donald Trump and beauty.
Trump women are public figures; they are big girls who, I’m sure, can handle whatever venom comes their way (except that Melania obviously dislikes her First Ladyhood). Satirize them all you want. Yet the way Burleigh imagines them as “rare political mountain goats” tells us more about Burleigh than the Trumps.
It’s not that she compared members of president’s family to animals, but that the particular animal, a goat, is an age-old stand-in for sexuality. The enegetic, wild beast with curved horns and pointy beard was sacrificed at Lupercalia, the ancient Roman fertility ritual. The statue of Pan having sex with a goat unearthed in Pompeii scandalized a recent art show in Britain. Horny goat weed is an aphrodisiac in China. Then, of course, there is the ubiquitous English adjective for last. Etc., etc.
Interestingly, Urban Dictionary tells us that g.o.a.t is an acronym for Greatest Of All Time. And so, deliberately or not, Nina Burleigh conjures up the picture of the Trump women in their carnal, animalistic, circus freak footwear, hopping from hump to hump, pleasuring their men in exotic, skillful ways — demonic excellence at service of a viced man who are about to unleash a nuclear war (see above).
Burleaigh has the following to say about the sexuality of the Trump family shoe:
American anthropologist and author Helen Fisher puts it more bluntly. “High heels thrust out the buttocks and arch the back into a natural mammalian courting — actually, copulatory — pose called ‘lordosis.’ Rats do it, sheep do it…lions do it, dogs do it. It is a naturally sexy posture that men immediately see as sexual readiness. [Heels] are a ‘come-hither’ signal.”
Or as Paul Morris, another psychologist cited in the piece, explained:
They are just buying into traditional binary views of male and female.
If we follow the last statement to its logical conclusion, attractive women who flaunt their sexuality are women, but all other women are not women at all. Maybe they are amoeba, maybe they are aliens from outer space. Or maybe Burleigh and Morris harbor the ultimate beauty prejudice, that only the beautiful are true women.
We all know what Burleigh is doing in her piece: she’s slut-shaming the first family women. Silly me, I thought slut-shaming was a taboo, and that progressive feminists fight it tooth-in-nail. Actually, no. I wrote a few months ago that the mainstream of contemporary feminism is nothing more than a naked powergrab.
Burleigh got so carried away with dehumanizing and objectifying her political opponents, she forgot to notice that Trump women are not the same person. I can get judgmental about Melania, a daughter of a petty Yugoslav Communist who posed for soft porn in New York City. If there is any substance to this woman, she sure does a good job hiding it.
Yet Burleigh groups Melania with Ivanka, an ambitious and not at all stupid mother of three who, by all indications, is religious. Why? Because Burleigh doesn’t like her shoes.
They are “Satan’s shoes”, apparently, the kind that, according to the article, require a woman to train early in life and train “rigor[ously]” because otherwise she’d trip all over herself and break her neck as every bride does when walking down the isle. YouTube videos are necessary to master the art of stiletto walk. Any woman owning Louboutins risks becoming a victim of perverts. Also she might turn into a conservative.
The worst thing about the heels is that men like women who wear them, which in author’s mind renders the wearers helpless and perpetuates patriarchy.
History and observation get in the way of Burleigh’s thesis
Oddly, after making this classic Second Wave pronouncement, Burleigh immediately ventures into the history of the vicious footwear. Turns out, stilettoes were first worn by one downtrodden… King Louis XIV of France. But King Sun wore them to be elevated and admired by his subjects; his high heels are symbolic of absolute power, not weakness. If a woman wearing pumps doesn’t, likewise, project confidence and power, she should work more on her public persona. Or perhaps they are not for her.
Ivanka is a prime example of somebody who knows how to work her heels. She towers over most men even without her shoes and is not too shy to add another four inches to her statue, which alone is an achievement on which feminists need to congratulate her. With her good-looking family and her daddy wrapped around her little finger, she is one of the most powerful women of our generation. I don’t particularly like Ivanka, but certain points need to be made.
Burleigh compares a stiletto weared to a “lame prey”, which could be tantalizing to a fetishist, and, therefore, a source of power:
Feminists have long grappled with the high-heeled shoe, and whether the stiletto telegraphs power (sexual or otherwise) or self-hobbled weakness. Stiletto pumps are the ultimate test of a certain type of femininity. They signal the taut combination of power and weakness that conservative women must cultivate in order to survive among ideologues who are crafting our tax-free “Handmaid’s Tale” future.
I freely admit to not reading Atwood’s dystopia, but for some reason I imagine her handmaids wearing Burkingstocks. I seriously doubt they are hiding stilettos under these red robes, altough, if I know anything about totalitarian societies — and I do — they probably want to.
I imagine the statist nightmare that is Gilead requires heavy taxation to perpetuate itself.
I’m not sure where Burleigh gets her idea that conservative women (and Trump women are not conservative) wear stiletttoes any more than liberal women. Can we get a sociologist to confirm it? Furthermore, progressive women have perfected a certain type of femininity where they play damsels in distress in order to then assert their political power (see the Matress Girl, for instance, or Sandra Fluke or the lady-employees of Google who were allegedly unable to go to work because a man said something not entirely to their satisfaction).
Public women wear nice shoes. Those on the shorter side prefer a higher lift. When female politicians don’t wear heels, it’s usually to make a statement, see abortion Barbie Wendy Davis with her pink sneakers.
My main problem with that last paragraph of Burleigh’s is not the stereotyping of conservative women of whom she knows nothing, but that she mentions in passing the feminists “grappl[ing]” with stiletto without explaining how. She does it because Camille Paglia destroys her argument. Watch:
The stiletto high heel is modern woman’s most lethal social weapon. First imagined in the 1930s but not realized until postwar technology made it possible in the early 1950s, the stiletto is a visual slash born to puncture and pierce.
While platform shoes increased stature for both men and women, from Greco-Roman actors to Venetian sophisticates on flooded walkways, the slanted structure of current high heels descends from the boots of early medieval horsemen seeking traction in the stirrup. Hence high heels have a masculine lineage, latent in their use by emancipated women eager to rise to men’s level.
But this quest for equality, dominance, or merely assertive presence at work and play is contradicted by a crippling construction: no item of female dress since the tight-laced Victorian corset is so mutilating. Pain and deformation are the price of high-heeled beauty. The high heel creates the illusion of a lengthened leg by shortening the calf muscle, arching the foot, and crushing the toes, forcing breasts and buttocks out in a classic hominid posture of sexual invitation.
The eroticization of high heels (still at medium height) was sped along in the 1920s by the rising hemlines of flappers showing off their legs in scandalously hyperkinetic dances like the Charleston. Alfred Hitchcock’s fetishistic focus on high heels can be seen throughout his murder mysteries, from his early silent films in London to his Technicolor Hollywood classics like Vertigo and The Birds, where Tippi Hedren (a former fashion model) demonstrates the exquisite artifice of high-heel wearing as well as its masochistic vulnerability, chronicled in a thousand low-budget horror movies. A woman in high heels, unable to run, is a titillating target for attack.
But the high heel as an instrument of sex war can be witnessed in action in a stunning face-off in Butterfield 8 (1960), where Elizabeth Taylor as a glossy call-girl, her wrist painfully gripped by Laurence Harvey at a chic Manhattan bar, implacably grinds her phallic spike heel into his finely leathered foot. This was at a time when stiletto heels, which concentrate enormous pressure in a tiny space, were banned from buildings with susceptible linoleum or hardwood floors.
[…]
At the Neiman Marcus department store at the King of Prussia Mall in suburban Philadelphia, a visitor ascending the escalator to the second floor is greeted by a vast horizon of welcoming tables, laden with designer shoes of ravishing allure but staggering price tags (now hovering between $500 and $900 a pair but soaring to $6000 for candy-colored, crystal-studded Daffodile pumps by Christian Louboutin). Despite my detestation of its decadence, this theatrical shoe array has for years provided me with far more intense aesthetic surprise and pleasure than any gallery of contemporary art, with its derivative gestures, rote ironies, and exhausted ideology.
Ladies and gentlemen, I rest my case.
