My long-held prejudice against very high-heeled women's shoes (I seldom wear them myself when I am cross-dressing and have always felt they mostly demean the women who wear them) has been dented by a persuasive new essay The Power of High Heels.
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In her piece in the latest online Guernica Magazine the Brazilian writer Rafaela Bassili tackles with verve the familiar prejudices against high heels. She trills that they are not necessarily all about indulging and encouraging the male gaze but "can exemplify an assertive personality, a refusal to be ignored".
![Julie Bishop's red satin heels, pictured in August 2018. The shoes are now seen as a symbol of empowerment among Australian women. They were donated to the Museum of Australian Democracy. Picture: Alex Ellinghausen Julie Bishop's red satin heels, pictured in August 2018. The shoes are now seen as a symbol of empowerment among Australian women. They were donated to the Museum of Australian Democracy. Picture: Alex Ellinghausen](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/fdcx/doc72xu6j31yzo1gsd2bgk6.jpg/r0_0_4978_3064_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Bassili's piece has beguiled me not only because I have been thinking a lot lately about women's clothes (for reasons I'll come to in a moment) but also because there is always something mind-ticklingly stimulating about well-expressed, contrary ideas.
Discerning readers (ye precious few!) will have noticed that this column does its best to be a column of ideas.
There is something intellectually admirable about anyone who tackles, with contrary flair, an entrenched point of view.
The patron saint of this kind of activity may be the late Christopher Hitchens, a saintly atheist, who, aware of the gushing worldwide adoration of Mother Theresa set out to show that she was in fact an awful human being. Whether he succeeded or not with his book The Missionary Position - Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice is less important, for my argument here, than the fact that he tackled such a Mt Everest of a task.
Perhaps a better example to illustrate this little column's fondness for ideas is Meghan Flaherty's essay Ode To Grey, first published in The Paris Review late last year and seized upon by this columnist for rapturous mention.
Flaherty chose to argue how and why the colour grey (more accurately the colours grey for there are umpteen hues of grey), the most ignored of colours, is wondrous and has depths of character that make gaudy colours seem frivolous and trivia.
I am putting Ms Bassili's The Power Of High Heels in this kind of exalted company because her praise of high heels, largely her feminist praise of them, seems so audacious. My own prejudices against them have been very strong.
As a reporter I can remember sighing in print that it seemed a shame Kate the Duchess of Cambridge, visiting Canberra, felt the need to always totter everywhere on ludicrously vertiginous high heels. But was it wrong of me to mock the regal heels?
I haven't room here to do Bassili's argument justice. Do read it yourself. But here's a taste. Here she is praising a character, Nathalie Chazeaux, in the 2016 movie Things To Come. Nathalie Chazeaux is a high school philosophy teacher and academic, whose life gets swept up in misfortune.
"The film is striking in all of its aspects," Bassili marvels, "but what I couldn't forget was the way Nathalie's wedge heels click clacked on the floor."
There is something intellectually admirable about anyone who tackles, with contrary flair, an entrenched point of view. The patron saint of this kind of activity may be the late Christopher Hitchens.
"How loudly she moved from place to place; how her movement characterized her struggle ... Essential to her movement is the sound her heels make on hard floors, which consistently asserts the presence of femininity. You can hear her when she's coming around from a couple of rooms over, click clacking with the same force she does when she is determined to leave. It's more powerful than slamming a door, the way these shoes clack, because they linger for a while before they completely cease. It's also hovering, imminent, as if the room, by listening to the sound of her approach, can feel her presence before she is even there - much in the way clouds turn grey and the wind picks up before a storm. And once the weather resettles, you're left with a space that has been changed by the force that has reckoned with it. No place is the same after Nathalie's shoes have come and gone."
Has Canberra never been the same since, on her 2014 visit, Kate the Duchess of Cambridge, click clacked among us?
Even before reading The Power Of High Heels women's apparel has been much on my mind. Like most men I tend to do most of my cross-dressing privately, around the home, noticed only by understanding loved ones. But there are times when it is useful and appropriate for a man to disguise himself in public places as a woman.
So for example of course one never goes to Floriade as a man. It is not only that Floriade is such a girly event (often the only remotely male things at Floriade are the garden gnomes) but also that as a famous Canberran famous for mocking Floriade I can't afford to be caught there actually enjoying myself. I'd be outed on social media and pilloried as a hypocrite.
And now as I write, I find myself attending a University of the Third Age course at which I am the only man in a class of 40 of us appreciating the artworks of London's great galleries. And so I stick out, like the proverbial sticking-out objects I cannot name in a family column.
I suppose the menfolk of my female classmates are all somewhere else attending some more manly courses, on blacksmithing say, on big game hunting or pipe-smoking.
Alarmed at being such an oddity at this class I am considering disguising myself as a woman, so that I unobtrusively fit in there just as I do when I am frocked-up at Floriade.