[ExI] how did high heels happen?

[spike]

>. On Behalf Of Stefano Vaj
Subject: Re: [ExI] how did high heels happen?

 

2011/12/28 <natasha at natasha.cc>

>>Looking at high heels is like looking at sculpture.  Wearing high heels
feels sexy. .Not all high heels are uncomfortable.


>.After all, we have been standing on the balls of our feet for most of our
evolutionary history... :-)  -- Stefano Vaj

 

Ja, almost all mammals do that.  Humans and the great apes are (I think) the
only beasts walking around bearing load on the heels.  Anyone know a counter
example?  This is easily seen if you have a pet dog or cat.  They are more
analogous to humans than we realize, although they are proportioned a bit
differently.  For instance, look at their hind leg.  I almost seems like
their knee is backwards, but that isn't a knee, it is an ankle.  The knee is
the same as ours, but it his higher up, so that the femur is shorter.
Mammal skeletons are all pretty similar in structure.

 

Stefano's point is well made: if you look at the balls of the feet, it is
clear those things are structurally capable of bearing a load.  Perhaps
relevant is the fact that our toes can bend nearly perpendicular to the
metatarsals but our fingers cannot bend that far off the axis of the
metacarpals.  The way I would interpret that is that perhaps the feet bore
the load differently a few tens of millions of years ago than they do now.
In the old days, humans walked similarly to the way other mammals did.

 

So then, consider my observation that in some cases, pre-adolescent girls
are attracted to shoes that cause that kind of walking.  It appears to be
completely unrelated to attracting attention (she likes the shoes even when
alone), apparently unrelated to auto-eroticism (she's six), unrelated to
peer pressure (her peers do not have those), apparently unrelated to fashion
(she doesn't get the other aspects of fashion), but clearly she gets wildly
excited by the shoes themselves in a most puzzling way.  

 

Evolutionary psychology encourages me to make a big reach, loosely based on
Stefano's observation, just to see it ridiculed: the appeal of the
high-fashion shoe is somehow hardwired into the structure of our brains, a
faint echo from long forgotten ancestors who walked on the balls of the
feet.  This faint urge is immune from reason, it flatly defies analysis.  

 

This and the puzzling "sport" of bullfighting for instance are two examples
of what I will call the Reprehensible Principle: 

 

Just because we understand that we human brains have a reptilian core does
not cause us to cease having one.

 

No, scratch, I can do better than that.  Bullfighting is reptilian.  Fashion
shoe attraction is mammalian.  Writing internet posts puzzling about it is
pure higher primate.

 

spike

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