[ExI] how did high heels happen?

[spike]

I am a long-time veteran of observing wild beasts, noting odd
characteristics and behaviors, but I have observed a behavior of the most
inscrutable of beasts, the wildly complicated homo sapiens, which has me
stumped completely.

 

My six year old niece is visiting.  She has one sibling, an eight year old
brother.  She is the exact opposite of a tomboy, a real frilly-laced girly
girl.  Her mother is not that way, but the daughter sure is.  She has few
external influences in that direction that we know of: Disney movies
perhaps.

 

In any case, she has been wanting high heel shoes.  So for Christmas her
parents gave her some toy glass slippers like Cinderella wore to the ball,
which have heels, but it really wasn't what she was shooting for.  We
googled on women's shoes, and she was wildly excited by stiletto heel pumps.
We tried to explain that little girls don't wear such devices, but she would
have none of that.  She wants these high heels, so now this presents some
puzzling questions.

 

Why would a pre-adolescent child be so fervently attracted to such a
garment?

 

My previous theory on high heel shoes has been destroyed.  I had assumed
that women thought that men found high heel shoes sexy (we don't) and so
wearing such a contraption would attract men.  But that doesn't apply to my
first grader niece, who has shown no particular attraction for boys and as
far as we know has no foggy clue of the concept of sexual attraction or
copulation.  But she is attracted to those shoes like bees to honey.

 

Question: could this behavior be somehow hard wired into human brains?  Has
anyone any speculations or theories that could explain why a little girl
would be inclined to wear something that is uncomfortable, impractical and
discouraged by her own parents?

 

spike

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