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Helen Croydon: You won't get me back into flatties

All this heel bashing is a conspiracy against the feminine power a stiletto can yield

Monday 09 November 2009 01:00 GMT
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Apparently the killer heel is out. Or so declared one Sunday newspaper this weekend. As I tore it open to find out exactly why and who has decided that women's favourite indulgence since fashion was invented is to be snatched from under our feet, so to speak, a friend caught the headline over my shoulder. She shrieked in horror that how on earth would she be able to seduce a man in flat shoes.

Whoever made up the news that heels are out is so wrong. The heel will never be out because, you see, it isn't about comfort or practicality. It isn't even about height – it is about power, posture and the ultimate expression of femininity. Imagine if someone decided to write that ties are out of fashion. Would the alpha male really start cutting up his Paul Smiths and turn up to the office with an open shirt, breathing a sigh of relief that at last his throat and upper chest hairs can breathe?

Same goes for our footwear. There is something about a long, elegant, shapely heel on the end of a pedicured foot and a stockinged leg that screams, I'm a sassy woman, I'm confident and I must be very balanced because I can channel all my body weight on the 5cm-squared surface area of the ball of my foot.

I fear there is a planned coup to topple the heel. In September the TUC called for risk assessments on women wearing high heels at work and there was talk they could be banned. As if that would ever happen. There would be an army of women marching in Manolo Blahniks to the home of Brendan Barber, and HR officers would be attacked from all angles with the blood-red soles of Louboutins should they dare to suggest that female employees should change into trainers.

And the same month, Katie Holmes was lambasted for allowing her three-year-old daughter, Suri Cruise, to wear heels, even though they were only one-and-a-half inches and she looked perfectly comfortable. Then, to top it all, the Society of Chiropodists and Podiatrists issued a warning against elevated footwear, claiming that we risk bunions, chaffing, hard skin, ingrown toenails and hammer toes. What was its point exactly?

Now, thanks to the likes of festival goers such as Kate Moss and Lily Allen, and loafer-lovers like Alexa Chung, even the glossies are giving the boot to mouth-watering silver-studded platforms and good-enough-to-eat peep-toe thigh boots. They are replacing them with dull pictures of pumps, ugg boots and flip-flops.

Next, someone will be telling me that hoarding boxes of shoes that I have never even worn, just so I can look at them, is not a fulfilling pursuit. I can't help thinking that all this heel bashing is a conspiracy by men and women who are scared of the feminine power a stiletto can yield. If people want to put their podiatric welfare above sashaying hips, long legs, taut calf muscles, an inner pleasure that lasts all day and the ability to level up eye-to-eye with the men in the boardroom, that's fine. But they shouldn't try to stop the shoe-lover from enjoying her innocent pleasure: sex on legs.

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