In Praise of High Heels

Even before Cinderella's step-sisters tried to squeeze their feet into her glass slipper, women's shoes were already the schizophrenic icon of female subjugation and folly, as well as sexuality and power.

Folklore around the world has various versions of the Cinderella story, dating even as far back as the ancient Greeks. The female foot has been bound, twisted and fetishized over millennia, and this practice continues today with the eternal popularity of the high-heeled shoe.

On Saturday, a Singapore radio station, will stage a Stiletto Race at 11am at the Singapore Flyer, where participants will have to run 100m in three-inch high heels. The race is akin in spirit to similar events in Milan, New York, Sydney and even in Tenerife, where the race is run by drag queens.

At the peril of sprained ankles and shattered tarsals, there will emerge an eventual winner on Saturday. But of what? Of negotiating urban terrain in impossible footwear? It is a Pyrrhic victory, some cry, one that reinforces the stereotype of the woman as a hobbled, tethered creature of man's and now her own volition.

Feminists have long vilified the high-heeled shoe as the devil's work, leading many strong and successful women to have a somewhat conflicted love-hate relationship with their vertiginous indulgences in luscious Pierre Hardy or the latest Giuseppe Zanotti number.

Feminist arguments aside, any woman in high heels understands the power she immediately wields. Her posture changes as she straightens up, her back arches and her shoulders are pulled back. She is automatically elevated, physically, to stand shoulder to shoulder with a man, if not towering over him. High heels, with a suit, convey sexuality, femininity and power - an intoxicating combination in the boardroom.

However, Elizabeth Semmelhack, curator of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, Canada, in an interview with Collectors Weekly last year, expressed her reservations about this common perception: "It seems like what wins for women in the culture is not the Harvard education that you have and how many cases you correctly argue in court; it's whether or not when you walk into a room, you make all the men want to drop to their knees. For me that's very problematic, because if the high heel is an accessory of female power - and if the definition of female power is sexual - that power has a very short shelf life."

Semmelhack is right, but only up to a point. Shoewise, a woman's power is derived not just from her high heels, but from the fact that she has many choices today. No woman lives in stilettos exclusively. She is likely also to own sneakers, flip-flops and ballerina flats, among others. Her shoe collection reflects her many personality aspects and roles - as CEO, mother or sportswoman.

High-heeled shoes have long signified power and status, even among men. In the French court and in Europe of the 17th century, men wore heels to mark themselves as part of the elite (prompting women to hike their heels up even higher). In the early 1700s, Louis XIV, the Sun King, who wore heels as high as five inches, decreed that red heels were to be worn only by nobility and that no one's heels could be higher than his.

Today, with more women earning their own money, heels have inadvertently become a sign of empowerment and emancipation. It is little surprise, therefore, that this trend has dovetailed with the rise of the celebrity shoe designer in the 1990s. The high-priced creations of Christian Louboutin and Manolo Blahnik go beyond mere footwear, approximating near works of art.

While my Chinese ancestors had their feet cruelly mangled in lotus shoes, women today enjoy the benefits of 21st century engineering and research that have created towering wonders that raise us up even as they encase our feet securely and safely.

Most importantly, a woman wears high heels today because she is allowed to celebrate her sexual power. In the past, her sexual appeal came from the perception of frailty symbolized by restrictive footwear and curtailed movements.

So the fact that we can take part in stiletto races today is progress indeed. There is also smug satisfaction to be had in the knowledge that very few men can sprint 100m in high heels with the same balance, style and power as we can.

Drag queens excepted, of course.