(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.
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
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