High heels can be a pain in the feet

(SCIENCE SOURCE) -
 “That is not how your foot has evolved to walk,”
  a Bethesda podiatrist says when showing
patients an X-ray of a woman in high heels.
His warnings are often ignore

Often painstakingly selected to complete outfits, high heels put stress not just on feet, but on ankles, knees and backs, contributing to the approximately $3.5 billion spent annually in the United States for women's foot surgeries, which cause them to lose 15 million work days yearly. So why do women continue to wear these portable torture machines? High heels have their perks. It makes a female become taller, certain body parts become more prominent and noticeable, and they make a girl's legs look longer. Women wear heels to work, to formal events, meetings, and whenever else they please. Unfortunately, high heels also come with many negative effects on the body. 

Out of the same shoes that bring out a woman's elegance are the long term effects of inflamed nerves, inflamed ligaments, a shortened Achilles tendon and calf muscles, and hammertoes. Heels can be a girl’s best or worst friend. As I walk around town on a Friday or Saturday night, I can’t help but wonder how some girls wear heels every time they go out! After I wear heels for one night, chances are I won’t be wearing heels the next night because my feet are still recovering from the previous night.  Sure, heels can top any outfit, but is the pain really worth it? Most women know that wearing heels is bad on some level – surely the excruciating pain at the end of a night out shows that - and even Sarah Jessica Parker once spoke out about the effect all the Manolos did to her feet. “I went to a foot doctor and he said, ‘your foot does things it shouldn't be able to do',” she said. “'That bone there – you've created that bone. It doesn't belong there’.”

Sergio Rossi black platform ankle boots

Take Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. She wears four- or five-inch heels to work most days; on a recent Tuesday, she towered in five-inch stiletto-heeled black Sergio Rossi open-toe booties.“There are lots of things that impact the way you look that aren't necessarily optimal for every muscle in your body,” says Pletka, who admits that she has some high pairs “that are uncomfortable, no question.” But, she adds, “You want to look nice. I always get nice comments on my shoes. And I like it.”

Psychologists Paul Morris, Jenny White, Edward Morrison and Kayleigh Fisher from the University of Portsmouth, in the UK, have recently proposed a novel evolutionary theory about why women favor high heels. In their recent study, entitled "High heels as supernormal stimuli: How wearing high heels affects judgments of female attractiveness" the psychologists compared ratings of women walking in flats, with the same women walking in high heels, in order to establish whether or not walking in high heels enhances the attractiveness of gait.

The study, published in the academic journal Evolution and Human Behavior found that for all walkers’ attractiveness was much higher in heels compared with the flat shoes. Both males and females judged high heels to be more attractive than flats. Males and females also agreed which were the attractive and unattractive walkers. The authors of the study conclude that high heels are an important part of the contemporary female wardrobe -the minimum number of high heeled shoes owned by those taking part in the experiment was four, and the maximum 25.The results indicate that the female walk is perceived as much more attractive when wearing high heels than not. One, conscious or unconscious, motivation for women to wear high heels might therefore be to increase their attractiveness.On reflection, we can agree that women feel empowered when wearing heels but do we need to take in consideration of genes, biology and evolution?

Reference:

http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138(12)00122-5/abstract