[ExI] how did high heels happen?

[Gordon]

"Heels grew in popularity during the 1500s to keep riders, both male and female, from slipping from the stirrups.... The simple riding heel soon gave way to
more stylized heels that were higher and thinner in the mid 1500s after Catherine de Medici made them more fashionable than functional... In the early 1700s, France's King Louis XIV (The Sun King)
would often wear intricate heels decorated with miniature battle scenes. Called 'Louis heels,' they were often as tall as five inches. The king decreed that only nobility could wear heels that were colored red (les talons rogue) and that no one's heels could be higher than his own... During the course of the century, a cultural kind of foot fetishism manifested itself in various media..."

Dangerous Elegance
A History of High-Heeled Shoes
http://www.randomhistory.com/1-50/036heels.html



________________________________
From: Ben Zaiboc <bbenzai at yahoo.com>
To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org 
Sent: Tuesday, December 27, 2011 3:52 PM
Subject: Re: [ExI] how did high heels happen?

"spike" <spike66 at att.net> mused:

> 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.

Umm, speak for yourself, Spike, but many men do find high heels sexy.

I believe it's because they change the curvature of the spine, making the buttocks more prominent.
So it's not the heels themselves, but what they do that attracts men (maybe engineers fixate on the peculiar footwear and don't notice the rump-enhancing effects).

A bit like corsets, I suppose.  Ghastly and confounding contraptions (even worse than deckchairs), but they change the waist-to-hip ratio, in the sexy direction.

Not that this has any bearing on your actual question.  I think the Barbie doll idea has some merit.

Ben Zaiboc

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