Friday, June 19, 2009

We Have Met the Enemy and She is Us

Walt Kelly's "Pogo" originally said something to the the title's effect. As I did my share of damage to the remote in search of weather this morning, "Good Morning America" caught my eye.
The reporter who filed the feature is tall, slender, elegant. She crafted a story on the allure of stilleto heels and a workshop offered in New York about how to walk in them. Like any mortal, she caught her heels on sidewalk cracks, in sewer grates, throwing herself off balance here and there, but continuing to wear them anyway.
I conceed that they do enhance the look of one's legs, but at what cost? At thirteen, I wore my first pair with any height at all. A month in a cast put me off anything higher than, oh, let's say my Birkenstocks. Some of the women in the feature sported bunions, a common result of wearing the shoe equivilant of skyscrapers. No.
Why do we forget the law of supply and demand? If we keep buying them, and try to convince each other we can't be cool without them, they'll just keep making them. We also need to remember that the men who are truly worth our time would never ask us to potentially harm ourselves in the name of vanity, and we should not ask that of ourselves, either.

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