Well Heeled

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“We are each born into paradox: the paradox of the infinite-imagining mind and the finite, cause-and-effect body. So much of our suffering arises from the fact that we can imagine ourselves as gods-immortal, omniscient, impervious to harm-but we cannot be them.”

—Dana Levin, The Kenyon Review

 I was walking home this week along one of my usual routes and happened to glance up when a woman in her thirties and her friend were walking up ahead. There was nothing particularly unique about either woman, a brunette and a blond, the blond pushing a baby stroller. Normally I would dismiss even the most compelling woman pushing a child for the obvious reasons but on this day I happened to notice she was wearing four inch platform shoes. The irony was bewildering to me. I felt celebratory for her command of her sexuality and power post pregnancy but also simultaneously felt she was teasing at loosening her marital bonds. Obviously, I was drawn to the heels and their sexual undertones but it was how they were worn that really got me thinking. I kept walking wondering what it is about heels in particular that illicit such strong reactions in men and why women across a broad spectrum choose to wear them, despite their often painful commitment. Why is it they are such a loaded form of expression? Can high heel ever just be shoes?

Since 2000 I have noticed a marked increase in the height of women’s heels. Even more intriguing is the continued hyper sexualization of younger and younger women with high heels playing a powerful role in that. The photo above was shot this morning through the window of a store called Forever 21. Aside from the idiocy of the store’s name, it is obvious the store is making a clear connection between youthful vigor and high heels. Of course on a very superficial level, heels provide height to women who by pure biology are predominantly shorter than men. Even the term high heels is now a reference to a range of shoes from stacked platforms to stilettos. Karen Kay of The Guardian UK says; "A pair of heels allows me to view the world from a different vantage point. I can look people in the eye, so those who previously looked down their nose at me must view me on their level – a psychological benefit that comes into play socially and in the workplace."

I’m not interested in using this venue for a discussion on the legacy of feminism, the male gaze or a dialogue on ‘taste’. There has been much written on those topics. If you want to read about them a simple Google search will provide a plethora of background. No, my interest is very specifically on the nature of power. The history of high heels goes back to at least the Egyptians 3,000 years ago. The high priests, kings and queens wore ceremonial leather stacks that were arguably the first high heels. In ancient Greece heels were used in plays to provide a clear distinction between character’s social status. In the 18th century, Louis XIV established an edict that no person in France could wear heels taller than his own. As a show of  belligerence, Marie Antoinette wore 2 inch heels to guillotine in 1783. Power and the high heel are fused at the hip. Clearly, it would be disingenuous of me to suggest it is merely status, power or physical height extension that is at play for women wearing high heels. Sex and titilation are the obvious elephant in the room and where there is power there is sex.

In speaking with a female friend of mine the other evening I mentioned my love of heels on women. It is often said women pay close attention to shoes on men, but the first thing I generally notice about a woman is her shoes. An artful and highly stylized pair of heels will get my attention every time. I’m not talking about what men derogatorily refer to as “stripper shoes,” but noticing the difference between a pair of Christian Louboutin’s or Manolo Blahnik’s. In contrast a pair of Keds or ballet flats causes an immediate dismissal on my part. For the record, I'm single. The anthropologist E. O. Wilson has said,

Based on comparative animal ecology and behavior one would predict that males should be advertising through the display of their assets (physical or otherwise). And while males do advertise in Western society, females also engage in equally conspicuous advertising and sexual signaling. Not only do we have male-male competition and female choice, but we also have female-female competition and make choice acting simultaneously...

Increased heel height creates an optical illusion of ‘shortening’ the foot, slenderizes the ankle, contributes to the appearance of long legs, adds a sensuous look to the strike, and increases height to generate the sensation of power and status.[¹]

It’s unquestionably unfair and a clear objectification of an otherwise unique and possibly fascinating human being, but there it is. For me this is no different than noticing the difference between a man who knows how to accurately tie a full windsor knot or a cheap Men’s Warehouse suit and a hand tailored one. As Flaubert said, "Le bon Dieu est dans le detail" (the good God is in the detail).

We are keen in America to wave the flag and point out how different we are than our Muslim counterparts but the reality is we are much closer than we care to admit. One of us is trapped by a religion of consumerism and it’s formal constraints and the other by the Islamic tradition of the 600’s. Women of means who wear burkhas in Saudi Arabia or the U.A.E. will wear Christian Dior or Yves Saint Laurent underneath. Despite the constraint of their dogma, the individualism is there and the need to assert individual power remains. In America women live by the law of The Gap, LIMITED, H&M or Charlotte Russe. These popular clothing stores produce the same mundane fashions year after year. To see women on the streets or in offices is to see compliance to a consumer sameness. But shoes — shoes can be the one standout in an otherwise bland world. It is a way to compete as E. O.Wilson stated. Even a knock-off pair of Louboutins, with their Catholic-red underbellies is enough to establish a subtlety of power even if the rest of the ensemble is jeans and a tee shirt. This, I argue is the underlying push toward ever higher heels in the U.S., our growing sense of repression in an ever more ironic world that asks women to simultaneously exhibit hyper-sexualized behavior while being good domestic, child-rearing, church-going wives and mothers. Stilettos may be an expression of a collective post 9/11 PTSD.

On a deeper level of semiotics, shoes are a fetish. As Marcel Danesi states in his book Of Cigarettes, High Heels, and Other Interesting Things, “The fetish is a sign that evokes devotion to itself. In some cultures, this devotion is a result of a belief that an object has magical or metaphysical attributes.” Despite heels being painful, causing deformities or several other generally negative health conditions, millions of women in western culture wear them every day. The economic restrictions of the recession coupled with the complexities of daily modern life, likely elevates our need for some kind of magic. As Elizabeth Semmalhack has indicated, heel height in the US and economic depression are a corollary[2]. High heels are a socially acceptable form of sexual expression, unlike the limited possibilities of tattoos or plunging necklines. Think Sarah Palin in the last presidential election. Indeed women can be the biggest promoters of their own high heel wearing;

Zoe Mayson, a business psychologist, suggests that I am not alone in valuing the heel as a professional asset. "There are a lot of people who think women do themselves a disservice by wearing heels, but I'm not in that camp. They are a psychological asset, and we can use them to our advantage. I work a lot with men in suits around a boardroom table, and I would never lead a session in flats. Heels give me gravitas that I would not have in lower shoes.

"From an evolutionary point of view, natural selection favours traits that increase our individual reproductive success. Heels get you noticed and give you physical stature, which in turn, gives you power, without compromising your femininity. So often, women have to take on male attributes to be successful in the workplace, and this is a great way of digging our heels in and saying no."[3]

I have no interest in creating more pain or difficulty for women. I can’t imagine the daily complications and difficulties encountered by women from the glass ceiling of workplaces and the inequality of pay to the simple biological issue of menstruation. It is indeed true most men wouldn’t last a week in a woman’s shoes (sorry for the pun.) In fact there’s a hilarious movie by the late Blake Edwards called Switch where Ellen Barkin plays a man trapped in a woman’s body that comedically highlights this very idea. I do think that owning one’s own drives, desires and compulsions leads us all to a healthier outcome. I am looking forward to the day when this madness of derisive punditry that pits one against the other will end. Repression has persisted a lot of bad things in this country beginning with its birth and the wholesale slaughter of Native Americans by English Puritans. Perhaps heels will come down in height and I’ll become less emphatic about their distinguishing qualities on women when we grow more open as a society. In the meantime I continue my search for the woman with the perfect pair of Christian Lacroix’s.

The desert of ideas

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As we depart the oughts and move squarely into the teens of the 21st century our collective conscious seems to bookend the one that I entered college witnessing. After watching Avatar for the first time this week, several things became crystal clear about the current state of affairs. There is much chatter lately among the punditry regarding the ineffectual state of the Democratic party and liberals in general. The right-wing might be crazy conspiracy nuts but they sure to do stay on point and get things done. On the other hand the Obama administration seems frozen in conciliatory conversation and aggressive compromise. Well, the pundits, satirists and talking heads should watch Avatar. It is obvious to me that so-called liberals are trapped in an ecotopian dream-state that envisions a fantasy world where fairness rules and the davids slay the Goliath's of the right. Cameron’s bleeding heart, indigenous loving fantasia mirrors in many ways the beliefs and actions of liberals throughout America. If only we could all get along.

I entered college with the shooting of John Lennon and the movie Blade Runner topping the box office. This during the powerful rise of the conservative Ronald Reagan. Before Ridley Scott started making vacuous movies about legends (the lousy remake of Spartacus called Gladiator and the soon to open Robin Hood) he made extraordinary, artful visions of a bleak future where we were imprisoned by technology and were forced to come to terms with the fierceness of nature. The acrid, orange air of LA is filled with billowing clouds of fire from oil refineries while hover cars push up above the constant rain and din in order to navigate the largely evacuated landscape. This is the vision of Blade Runner, a planet ravaged by centuries of industrialization and enterprise where the smart inhabitants leave the scarified surface for the “outerworlds.” This vision based on the paranoid genius of Philip K. Dick is the world of Blade Runner. Technology is viewed as a continuation of our current rapacious desires, where genetics runs wild and the wealthy simply abandon that which they’ve contributed to destroying. In my mind that is the reality we are headed for, not some ecotopian, blue-bodied re-imagined experience of ourselves.

I’ll do my best here to avoid commenting on the insipid dialogue and recycled plot lines of Avatar and focus on the visual aspects of the film. The CG & 3D is the dazzle that appears to be blinding everyone from thinking. As mythic-loving creatures we are prone to what’s called locked-in syndrome in software development. When technology was a stone tool or a copper sword, locked-in myths like Beowulf took hold, later replaced by the magic of Merlin and the visions of Hamlet. These are the stories that are the backbone of western society and they are the narratives that have been locked-in to our collective conscious (Joseph Campbell did an extraordinary job of revealing this in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces.) This myth-making is now a dangerous achilles heel for us. Technology has raised the bar several orders of magnitude where myths now have the potential to be falsely lived through virtual environments, 3D movies, and HDTV. Even those forms would be benign enough on their own if they weren’t being expressed in warfare with pilotless drones, robotics and computer simulations. Video games have already been reinforcing something Avatar heralds — you can’t die. In a video game you re-spawn or are reborn to fight another day and try again to defeat the fill-in-the-blank. Avatar ends (and I’m sure I’m the last person on earth to have seen the movie so I’m not spoiling anything here) with the lead character being reborn into the body of his avatar Na’vi body.

The events of 9/11 were the early signals of a new paradigm shift. It provided a window to the roots of terror by the disenfranchised in a new century. Technology has equaled the playing field of conflict in unexpected ways because of our 21st century commitment to technicism. This is witnessed by the use of cell phones to trigger suicide bombers and roadside IED’s, the use of a plane as a missile and recently the hacking of our pilotless drone cameras. These are the strategies of the disenfranchised. They are actions built upon the anxiety that disproportionate access to wealth and a state of perpetual war have promoted. James Cameron gets it exactly wrong in his plot on how the Na’vi, led by a human insider would have responded to overwhelming force and the destruction of their sacred tree. The Na’vi would have assuredly used a kind of terrorism as response. This is absent in the movie for the very reason I stated earlier, Cameron is blinded by thinking the old paradigms of natural balance are still in place. The Cherokee despite early victories learned rapidly that a Na’vi-like strategy only results in your enemy (who holds considerably superior technology) will simply return in greater overwhelming force and greater technology. The absurdity that arrows, no matter how large are a match for modern day weaponry only adds to the delusion of Avatar. Violence begets more violence. Vengeance is a failed strategy.

There are of course exceptions to this rule. Vietnam serves as one of them. However, desire to maintain war is predicated on the value of the resources. Geopolitical positioning simply isn’t enough of a driving force to continue such a conflict. If Vietnam had contained the largest oil reserves on earth, we’d still be there. Of course in Avatar the entire point of the film is a corporations plundering of the natural resources of the Na’vi planet. What’s curious to me is, Cameron clearly is creating a political film underneath a visual spectacle but he’s not really interested in doing the heavy lifting that requires. Instead he thinks a dabble of commentary and a modicum of plot will be enough to enrich his political position. There are no journalist characters, as there are in so many good political films, nor is there any idea of the connection to earth. Several times throughout the movie the corporate demons and military commanders state their concern for the PR end of the genocide, but never is there any indication precisely how this information would get back to earth.

It is impossible to love technology and believe in an ecotopian future. This dualistic thinking is perpetuated throughout Avatar. On the one hand, Cameron is suggesting technology brought by the humans only serves their greed and avarice and on the other he believes the technology of the Na’vi is quaint and enlightening. Both societies are waring societies, they simply have different levels of technology. How long before the Na’vi take over some of the remnants of human technology? To me it is this language of hope that encourages complacency when it comes to understanding what stands in the way of us solving gigantic global problems that threaten our very existence. When Republicans in our government take on a unilateral attitude of “no” to everything, we as liberals, if we are true liberals must face it squarely and revolt. No amount of hope or reconciliation is going to suffice. Great things were not accomplished in history by committees but rather by the enduring and persistent efforts of individuals working toward a greater good. However, just as Cameron’s hero takes on mythic proportions in Avatar, we must be cautious not to blindly follow those individuals whose brilliance creates breakthroughs for us. As the British were wise to vote Churchill out of office once the war had ended, so must we be willing to vote those representatives out of office who do not pursue solutions but rather compromise. You can’t compromise with a corporation because its very charter is sociopathic in nature. We should pay attention to representatives who say they will reform corporations while they simultaneously accept money from them. Heed the words of Adam Smith, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public…” We especially need to be cautious of being dazzled by 3D renderings and the promise of utopian solutions as a means to solving our problems. Naiveté is equal to apathy and ignorance when it comes to politics. Avatar has the political naiveté of a 7 year old while tackling very adult concepts.

If we realize the true extent of the damage we have incurred to our nation and the damage we have inflicted to the globe, only then can we begin to repair it. If we persist in wishing upon a star for some popular uprising led by a mythical hero that somehow manages to overthrow the military-industrial complex in favor of a new ecotopian paradise (the essential plot of Avatar) then we are doomed to failure. This wishing only leads to complacency and as Thomas Jefferson said, “All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to = remain silent.” There is a deafening silence in the message of Avatar and worse it is being fed to 100 million viewers.

The philosopher Slavoj Žižek has much more thoroughly and eloquently described these ideas in his book “Welcome to the Desert of the Real”. Buy a copy and tell Mr. Cameron to buy it too.