I'm starting a new human evolution book project. Technically I've already started it but I've got the greenlight
from my agent so it's for real.
So much writing, at least for me, is just exploratory,
organizational vomit that I never times infinity wish to see on the printed
page.
But, here, let me show you my vomit from this morning:
High heels are sexy
because they change a woman’s posture so that her boobs and butt stick out and
that’s attractive because boobs and butts and because waist hip ratio.
Wait,
no, they’re sexy because they make a person taller and taller is universally attractive.
What if they’re a handicap or a fitness indicator like a risky bird call or a
peacock’s tail? The hampered, painful locomotion signals to potential mates how
badass the high heel wearer is. “We will have badass kids!” say high heels.
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Or
they keep women from being able to escape too quickly if ambushed by aroused
men, but that’s too macabre for me to consider further and pisses me off.
How about, they’re sexy because we decided they are.
Culture is weird and powerful: neck lengthening rings, circumcision, Taco Bell.
Or they’re sexy because they make a woman’s feet look small for her height and
this is sexy because … Fibonacci? (Must do calculations.) I don’t know.
"Hold me closer tiny footed," isn’t how the song goes.
But, wait,
high heels change a woman’s locomotion. Women who walk in them have an
exaggerated female-stereotyped gait. Ask those biomechanists who said so.
That’s why heels are sexy, then, they heighten femininity and project its
signal further out across the savannah, and into the gaze of more men for
longer in each of their numerous salivating minds.
But why are swinging hips
sexy? Because they’re opposite of a man’s?
But there’s something else that
heels do to gait. They make a person unstable, careful, as if they're just
learning to walk. One slips into those torture slippers and they're suddenly
precious, adorable, in need of rapt attention. Like a toddler, walking for the
very first time.
The idea’s out there, somewhere, that heels make a woman
helpless and that’s attractive to men who want to rescue women. This toddler
idea is just a fraction of a degree away from that one. Is male attraction to
helpless women the same thing that drives them to be doting fathers? Gawd. If
that’s true, that means I shouldn’t be as annoyed when they want to rescue full
grown women, and when full grown women want to be rescued, because, after all,
it’s just good fatherly mojo. But, we’re not babies, dammit.
High heels. Sexy
for so many reasons, but also because they make women into babies and, hey,
wait a second...
We don’t think babies are sexy. What the bleep am I talking
about? Back up: what we prefer in babies can be preferred in adults for
fundamentally similar reasons but those preferences can result in different
outcomes.
Attractive helpless babies get cared for and not sexualized (too
much) and attractive helpless women do too but that affection includes bleeping.
It all makes perfect sense. How on earth did our lineage survive this long without high heels?
