Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are. -Quentin Crisp, author
Finishing the sixth and final season of "Sex and the City" (mock me if you wish, but I'm 94 episodes closer to understanding women), I was appalled by the quantity of shoes the women owned. More so, I watched aghast at the hundreds of dollars and hours each spent in acquiring more shoes!
Even though Sarah Jessica Parker has a clause in her contract where she keeps every outfit she wears for the show, I could not empathize with spending five hundred dollars only to wear the shoes out for a night, lose them, and spend twenty-two minutes fretting over such a loss.
Women and their shoes - sigh. Perhaps I'm jealous, because if women cared about men half as much as they cared about shoes, then we wouldn't need therapy. Or maybe men and shoes have too much in common: we're here to look pretty and shut up, support women, be easily replaced, and one pair never seems to be enough.
I once thought shoes belonged at the bottom of the closet, but having seen women's closets I wonder where they keep their clothes.
As my feet have settled comfortably at their adult size, my footwear needs have simplified dramatically. I buy one pair of shoes a year, and wearing those shoes every day for everything I do and everywhere I go is what makes them only last a year before they're downgraded to lawn-mowing shoes. The only time I absolutely need shoes is at the bowling alley, and then they're only two dollars.
It'd be easy to blame Prince Charming and his precious, yet completely impractical, glass slippers for the obsessive shoe-shopping habits of women wanting to be Cinderella for a night, but that'd only be simplifying the problem.
Shelves of shoes are just another thing women believe they need to be attractive, when men could care less. If I'm checking out how a girl looks, I start with her face, and if I make it all the way down to her footwear without finding something interesting in between, then there's not a pair of shoes in the world that could salvage her in my eyes.
So shoes, like make-up, are just another sign of female insecurity-the gift that keeps on giving. Women wear shoes for other women, to literally keep them on their toes. I can completely understand putting on a pair of shoes and feeling new, confident, and sexy (well, maybe not the last one) but it's not a feeling I'm addicted to or use as a crutch for my low self-esteem (I have journals for that).
A good pair of shoes should go with more than one outfit, not cost the arm and leg you use to put it on, and most importantly, feel comfortable.
Whatever idiot convinced the first insecure woman that to be wanted by men she needed to wear platforms of torture, commonly known as high-heels, should have to wear them himself. In all fairness, it's the most impractical device in a woman's wardrobe and should be mailed to a third world country so the poor people there might appreciate being barefoot.
There is no intelligence in putting on high-heels, stumbling into a formal event, and then throwing them in a pile by the door to dance barefoot. As if dancing isn't hard enough, men now have to worry about stepping on barefoot women, while our shoes are perfectly comfortable.
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