Wearing High Heels

Wearing high heels is an essential element of fashion for many women. Spike heels, also called stilettos, have heels of 4 inches or higher. The glamour and sex appeal of spike heels cannot be denied. The illusion of longer, more slender legs that wearing high heels offers is hard to resist for women of all ages...especially given the seductive appeal of such an illusion on the opposite sex. But it's not just a woman's legs that undergo a change when she wears high heels; her bosom and bottom are also accentuated. High heels help force the back to arch and the bust to push forward and buttocks to look more shapely ...and what is the result? The entirety of the female figure becomes more defined and is made more alluring. The result is that men want to stare. They just do. And women like that.

Some women insist that they have other reasons for wearing high heels; reasons that have nothing to do with looking sexy. (By high heels, I'm including any heels over 3 inches.) In a culture that places a high value on height, the extra inches that high heels add to a woman's appearance can make the difference between feeling insignificant and feeling noticed and important. This is especially true for petite women, who must battle against being thought of as perpetually dainty. When wearing high heels, a woman is very much aware that her level of attractiveness goes up, but just as importantly, and in some situations much more importantly, her sense of personal power in enhanced. Most people understand that true personal power transcends appearances, but if you are still working on developing that inner sense of power (as most people are), appearances are important.

So, we conclude that high heels serve to make women appear more seductive, an effect everyone enjoys, and can also give them a greater sense of power.

How nice it would be if we could just stop here and say, "yeah, high heels are just great."

But, sorry. There's just one little problem. High heels are great...as long as you don't wear them every day..or really, not very frequently. If you generally slip your feet into high heels every morning on your way out the door to work, you are putting your lovely feet at risk. In fact, your feet may not be lovely for long. There's nothing pretty about bunions, those bumps that appear on the side of your foot, which most doctors say are primarily due to poorly fitting shoes. Shoes that squish your toes together, as do almost all high heels, simply do not allow for proper alignment of your toes. After a lot of this treatment, abnormal bone growth on the big toe can occur, accompanied by the soft tissue enlargement that we see as the bump, or bunion.

Once you have a bunion, it does not go away on its own. Foot surgery to correct the unnatural bone formation is the only way to get rid of a bunion. And if you continue to wear tight-fitting shoes, the bunion will just get worse until the pain becomes unbearable if your foot experiences any kind of pressure at all. Then you will be wearing open sandals all the time or wider, low-heeled shoes with bunion guards. You may even have to wear a bunion splint. Corns and calluses are other unsightly results of wearing shoes that are not kind to your feet.

Bunions are bad news, but so is the general foot pain that can develop if you wear high heels too much of the time. Besides the suffering your toes go through, just think of the pressure on the balls of your feet. This pressure is actually seven times more than you have if you wear flat shoes, because three-inch heels cause you to walk with your weight on the balls on your feet. This can cause painful inflammation in the joints in your foot, as wells as swelling in the nerves between your toes.

While we're having this charming discussion, let's not leave out back pain. High heel shoes cause you to lean forward and the body's response to that is to decrease the natural forward curve of your lower back to help keep you in line. This faulty alignment can lead to muscles having to work overtime and guess what that gives you... back pain.

Women are four times as likely as men to suffer from foot problems, and the associated aches and pains related to foot problems. And if you focus on bunions alone, women are 80%-90% more likely to have bunions than men.

None of this is news; podiatrists and other doctors have been decrying the ill effects of high heels on women's bodies for a long time. But we continue to wear them, and maybe always will. But, hopefully,we will someday be wise enough to view wearing high heels as something we do in moderation only, like drinking alcohol (or as we should drink alcohol.) Our feet will be happier and healthier, as will the rest of us.

And, besides, a happy, healthy woman is the most seductive woman of all.