I had a whole collection of hippie outfits back in the day. My mom thought I was gay, but I just liked colorful clothing. Back then, you were straight or you were weird - where "straight" meant "didn't do drugs"... I was proud to be weird!
I got my hippie nickname from the back of an old radio I saw at a garage sale:
Equipped with Truetone Stratoscope
Eliminates aerial and ground
This was more of my disco phase, I suppose. I have very fond memories of the young lady who made the flying wings necklace for me! :-) And I still had some kind of eye for color - I didn't notice until a couple of years ago that I'd totally color-coordinated my clothes with the airplane!
Can't say I particularly care about what people wear. But I have an interest in footwear and how it relates to human location. In short: heels are bad. The higher they are, the worse. You have a heel in your foot. It's more than adequate.
Feel free to wear whatever you want, but when it comes to footwear, some things are best avoided if you want to stay in good working order.
I've always found the history of fashion to be fascinating because of the light it throws on people's inner lives. A relevant quote from the diary of Samuel Pepys, where he proudly notes the date when he first attached buckles on his shoes (thereby announcing himself as a young gentleman on the rise):
"Sunday 22 January 1660
To church in the afternoon to Mr. Herring, where a lazy poor sermon. And so home with Mrs. Turner and sitting with her a while we went to my father’s where we supt very merry, and so home. This day I began to put on buckles to my shoes, which I have bought yesterday of Mr. Wotton."
"Attractive women wearing skirts sat in a park mid-day. At precisely noon, they all lit cigarettes. Press, who had been told by Bernays to watch for something interesting, snapped pictures.. cigarette companies now doubled their consumer base"
I don't think they had to work that hard. Cigarettes check a lot of boxes - oral fixation, the way the smoke moves, the whole concept of a style accessory(1)... it has panache that alcohol certainly can't match.
(I don't know the proper name for it, but the idea of one object as part of your person that draws attention, kind of like how a good photograph needs a focal point that naturally draws the eyes)
Sure, but they were still culturally taboo until Bernay's media exploitation. I think this is kind of fascinating -- imagine one tweet suddenly opening up a segregated demographic.
Why would you turn women away for not wearing heels? I never understood the appeal of them. I'm actually very attracted to women who wear skirts with sneakers.
I doubt it's as ridiculous as the article makes it sound, but I'm not familiar with this story. It sounds like hired security was told what the dress code was and was overzealous.
Evening dress at Cannes is black tie. Women's formal shoes tend to be heels. Rhinestone flats really are not black tie appropriate.
I think a sensible analogy, for men, is straight tie vs. bowtie. You're asking for trouble if you forego the bowtie.
Likewise, I think a man wearing heels will also be turned away.
If folks have a problem with this, then I can think of no better crowd to dictate what is appropriate dress than the Hollywood elite, so I suspect this will resolve itself without much ado.
Heels accentuate the legs. I agree though, there's something very attractive about a woman in slacks, sneakers, and a loose-fitting Guns-N-Roses tshirt.
It's too bad this got killed off the main page. I guess maybe it's not relevant to HN.
Anyway, as a mid-20s straight man who likes wearing 5" stilettos, finding out the history of when and why men did and didn't do the same is interesting to me. As it is, the only time I feel comfortable wearing them out is during the Folsom Street Fair (and maybe Pride too but I feel that doing so might encourage assumptions of my being gay among viewers/my friends, which is not necessary bad, but just not a view of myself that I particular want to promote, as it is incorrect.)
Finally, the two men who mentioned attempting to walk in them and failing make me somewhat disappointed; whether or not they expect women to wear heels, they probably generally enjoy it when they see a woman in heels and could get a much better appreciation for her efforts (especially if she's still out after an 8 hour day wearing them.)
Edit: apparently it's not nuked off page 1. Could have sworn it was.
When I see a woman wearing heels, I just think of the damage she is doing to her feet and how uncomfortable she must be. I am not sure why I should be appreciative of her efforts.
My girlfriend wear heels fairly often; frequently enough to make me ask about the comfort of them since she never complains about them, and she's no glutton for punishment.
I cannot remember the specific details, or even pointedly vague ones, but she prefers heels with a stiff platform base of right around an inch, and an actual heel height of right around 3-inches or so. No pointy toes, just the curved ones. This is the style she wears; only the color changes.
She loves other styles, but doesn't wear them due to the pain involved. She has lots of 'bootie' styles with lower heels, and plenty of sharp-looking standard Oxford styles with a small heel.
Her feet aren't beat up and she doesn't complain about pain unless she's trying to con me into a foot rub.
I can see what she's talking about. The lowish heel doesn't force the toes into a wedge which isn't there to begin with due to the non-pointy nature of the front of the shoes she wears, and the firm platform base means that every part of her leg from the knees down aren't fighting to keep themselves aligned on a platform that can be fairly flexible.
You actually are appreciating her efforts with your thoughts. Appreciate doesn't mean value/like necessarily, it can mean to understand the implications of in a neutral-preference manner.
Regardless, there are many men who appreciate heels in the other sense (sexy, etc) who give no thought to the effort required to wear them.
Wearing them myself lets me do both :)
I mostly feel sorry for women who feel pressured to wear heels even though they might not personally want to. Likewise for makeup, jewelry, plastic surgery, black women with straightened hair, bald men with hair transplants, men in suits on hot days, people eating too little because they feel pressured to stay thin, etc.
When people choose to do/wear those things because they like them, or choose to have extensive piercings or tattoos, etc., more power to them.
In other words, the problem for me is with social expectations that discriminate against people who don’t put extensive money, time, discomfort, and sometimes injury on the line to look the way society expects.
Exactly. But you will be told that you are policing choices, restricting freedoms, or even oppressing people for pointing out that social expectations exist. Because of the natural process of selection, the ideology of social neoliberalism has reached its peak in the last 20 years. Choices of the individual are reflexively defended in every case, because the framing of individuality won; it was the framing most rewarded by those social groups with the most power.
Can you please point out an example of someone being accused of oppressing people for pointing out that social expectations exist? If that is so widespread, I'm sure the web will provide plenty to link to.
I'm asking because I feel you and I live in a different reality. The concept of gender roles and its restrictions on free personal choice is, as far as I know, completely accepted by the mainstream, and while I'm sure there are dissenters, the idea that they are the dominant opinion is baffling to me.
This is not to say gender roles or other social expectations are dead - of course not, they're extremely powerful. But I certainly don't agree that it's taboo to point it out.
I have to admit I don't understand your example. The only people being accused of oppression are the legislators of the bill in question. I don't see anyone being accused of oppression for pointing out that social expectations exist. Who exactly is doing such pointing in that example?
Feminists point out the social expection of the availability of women's bodies for use. They have been and will continue to be accused of oppressing and marginalizing johns. It's a straightforward situation in which johns are identified as engaging in unnecessarily "taboo" sexual behavior by society, just like lesbians and gay men, and thus you should afford them the same consideration and lack of criticism if you are a Good Liberal.
Feminists who point out objectification and the expectation of sexual access are slapped with the label "SWERFs" (sex-worker exclusionary radical feminists). Meghan Murphy writes quite a lot about it so see her other pieces.
It's in Portuguese, but essentially it's about kids coming home and saying that their school colleagues had to them that (1) her mother was too old, (2) that they aren't her "real" parents (she's obviously adopted), and (3) that he shouldn't have two dads, and it ends up with them hugging each other.
When Coke, one of the more important symbols of the dominant system, has an ad about social expectations and people defying them, it's kind of hard to argue that it's not a well accepted concept!
Do you or do you not believe in the gender socialization of women? Do you believe femininity, as a culturally constructed set of expectations, is a neutral and non-destructive, or positive and constructive, historical event in human history, or that it is destructive? Or do you believe that femininity is a natural psychological feature in the minds of women?
While he's answering that, can you explain why you like grapefruit (if you like grapefruit) or don't like grapefruit (if you don't like grapefruit)? Because I totally don't get it. :-)
"Because I enjoy the sensations it provides" is often the only analysis we can provide for our tastes. Sometimes we can break it down further, and people with unusual tastes are frequently pressed (politely or not) to "explain" their tastes.
This is understandable--we're genuinely curious about tastes that differ from our own--but it's also a bit myopic, because we so rarely turn the same unanswerable attitude on our own tastes. Simply because something is common does not make it immune to analysis, and I strongly encourage anyone who wants to ask this kind of question to give a preamble for their own taste in similar matters.
So if you're straight and want to ask a gay man, "What is it about the male body that turns you on?" first say, "The thing that makes women attractive to me is..." I have no idea how to answer this: I'm boringly straight and just find the female body inherently attractive. I can appreciate male beauty the way I can appreciate a beautiful building, but there's simply no attraction. I've come to accept that my gay friends are just wired differently from me.
I'm not saying "all differences of taste are unanalyzable" but that our legitimate curiousity about other people's tastes should be an opportunity to analyze our own.
Well, grapefruit is food. It's good for you. It has fiber and vitamin C...
Grapefruit I get. Being attracted to men I get (despite the fact that I'm straight). But I don't get stilettos because they just look like they'd be so damn uncomfortable. The only reason I can see to wear them at all is to conform to some societal norm.
If I met a straight woman who claimed to enjoy wearing neck ties I would be equally nonplussed.
Amusingly enough, my straight (well, maybe a little bi) girlfriend enjoys wearing ties on occasion. But she looooves scarves so there's not terribly much
Of a jump there IMO
And I'll bet that not all women's bodies are equally attractive to you; that not all men's bodies are equally attractive to the next gay male you ask; and that not all high-heeled shoes are equally interesting to Mr. Throwaway.
An awful lot of attraction and esthetics is cultural, and the rest of it is personal.
No, I got it, but it doesn't actually follow. Popular perception has no correlation to health value. Saying that something is bad for you does not disprove the idea that it is often perceived as "powerful," just like Apple Jacks can (I assume) taste good without tasting like apples.
Note that I'm not saying that wearing high heels is a good idea.
As a male, heterosexual ballroom and latin dancer -- who has never worn heels higher than men's 1.5" Latin dance shoes -- I totally get that there can be a real powerful, masculine feeling from walking strongly on the balls & toes.
Health effects are a different issue, and you aren't going to learn feeling from Wikipedia, or intellectually at all. It is experiential.
> They look nice, I want to look nice. They feel powerful, I want to feel powerful. Men's shoes are boring, I don't want to be boring.
I'm sorry, but that makes very little sense. If you want to look nice then you need to go by what society judges as nice and society does not consider a man with heels to "look nice".
You've been down-voted, probably because this assertion seems somewhere between weird and offensive to most people here, but I'm genuinely curious as to why you believe it.
This is particularly relevant to HN because most of the people here are interested in innovation, and innovation comes from precisely deviating from the standards of society. As Henry Ford famously remarked, "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."
This is the reception that innovators of all kinds get, and currently men's dress is incredibly restricted. We aren't quite stuck in Victorian days, but the diminishment of acceptable fashion choice for men in the past 200 years has been huge. In 1800 a man could still wear colourful clothing, jewelry, and makeup. Fifty years later, a man could wear clothes that would shock no-one if seen on the street today, and nothing else.
I don't quite buy "the Enlightenment" as the whole answer, or even part of the answer, but there is no doubt that cultural shifts around that time had the effect of putting all men in uniform clothing. Think about that for a minute: women are allowed to wear almost anything today. Men are given a tiny number of acceptable choices, and no one much minds. I'm considered extravagant because I sometimes wear a bright red blazer to the theatre, which would be permitted if I were gay, but when I show up with my girlfriend it gets me insulted.
200 years ago men who were a hell of a lot more manly than me wore far more extravagant clothing and no one batted an eye (except maybe a few women who thought they were particularly attractive dressed like that.)
This is a lousy situation for straight men in the modern world: we deserve to be more than uniformed ciphers in the public eye, and rejecting society's judgement of what looks nice is a necessary step to take, just as rejecting society's judgement of what suitable entertainment is was necessary to the radio and film industry, rejecting society's judgement of what suitable travel technology is was necessary to the automobile and aircraft industry was, and so on. And you better believe that conservatives were frequently strongly against those innovations as well.
Innovation is driven by people with the courage to reject society's judgement and replace it with their own, and we should honour that courage, not denigrate it.
> "You've been down-voted, probably because this assertion seems somewhere between weird and offensive to most people here, but I'm genuinely curious as to why you believe it."
I have come to believe it because I have come to realize that it is the only notion of "nice" that has real utility.
I only wish somebody had explained that to me earlier in life. I spent too much of my youth disadvantaging myself socially by failing to prioritize how I present myself to others.
> I have come to believe it because I have come to realize that it is the only notion of "nice" that has real utility.
Utility means that something produces (directly or indirectly) satisfaction for the person making the decision. Doing what society judges as nice has instrumental utility, in that it can help you get better responses from society, which either can produce utility for you directly or help get others to do things which produce utility for you.
Doing what pleases yourself -- including aesthetically as in favoring what "looks nice" to you -- has direct and immediate utility, however.
Both are "real" utility. Which is greater utility will vary considerably.
Put it this way, I find that what other people think about me has more impact on my life than what sort of cloth is hanging from my body.
I think that anyone who actually stops to consider this, actually weighs how their dress effects how the rest of society interacts with them, will arrive on the same conclusion (unless they have some serious issues to work out). If cloth honestly has more of an effect on you how other people treat you, you've probably got a disorder.
You're making the assumption that by "nice," he means "what society judges as nice," rather than what he personally considers to look nice, and that assumption is almost certainly wrong.
Which is a testament to its power, since a valid reason broke your brain's entire sense of "reasonable." You don't get it because you can't get it, you simply don't have the cognitive capacity for the idea, or else you would have allowed for it to make some sense, even if it didn't appeal to you.
That's only true if you're wearing them out and trying to please others.
Society doesn't inform my preferences at home nor does it see what I'm wearing behind closed doors.
Plus, with the right body type and shoes, you too could look quite nice in heels. Or full drag. Except I'm not into that but you are free to do as you like.
Edit: I haven't been able to post for an hour so I have nowhere else to put this: sorry Silverstorm I'm 6'3". Doesn't mean I don't like being taller though.
I have no desire to publicly out myself on this. My girlfriend, mother even, and quite a few friends know. I did mention wearing them publicly at Folsom, but I expect no judgment there as there are much more interesting things going on than a man wearing black boots (plus, Folsom is an event about acceptance as much as it is about an particular fetish).
If you're pointing out the zip code in the username, oh no! I mentioned SF and used an SF zip code! Someone might recognize me!
For some reason I cannot reply to your reply, so my apologies, here's a sibling.
You mistake that other user for me. Check the names. He seems to mind his privacy less, and I applaud him for that.
Anyway, I don't see how what he has said is a troll either. Ask s businesswoman if she feels more powerful in slacks and 4" heels (tastefully covered by said slacks because the height itself confers the power, the heels may actually serve as a distraction from that.) I'm sure some will say "no, I just wear these because firm X has a policy" but many others will feel oppositely.
Edit: yet another confused poster. Why would I log out and log back in to my main account to respond? Sometimes multiple people have the same surprising preferences and choose to respond to add their own voice to a thread. Who knew?
Edit2: you edited your post to call out a comment after I explicitly said that it's another poster. Had you been correct, I would have deleted said comment. As it remains, I suppose he must be just another heel wearing man. Crazy! Maybe I should email to find out his favorite brands.
Edit3: the homophobia, transphobia, and inability to be comfortable with an anonymous person's personal choices is precisely why I decided to post so much on this thread today.
It is not necessary to proclaim that you are straight to strangers, and making this kind of disclaimer before talking about clothes or hair or disco, or anything else merely serves to perpetuate stereotypes.
I can tell you that I take my children to Toronto Pride every year. Is it necessary for me to get into my sexuality?
Fashion is weird. Throughout history and cultures, man/women clothing changed and still changes wildly.
It's a bit sad that in western culture there's such a strong bias between sexes in clothing, were each sex has his own set of "acceptable" uniforms. With feminism women gained much more freedom in that regard, but men don't have much choice.
It's not unthinkable that while men tend not to care, there are men that also like pretty/colorful/different things, irregardless of their sexual preferences, but simply abstain to express due to social pressure.
I don't really buy it, while men are expected to put a masculine spin on things, they still have lots of freedom in their fashion choices, most just choose to abstain out laziness or because they don't like drawing attention to themselves.
Just to pick an obvious, big one: there is no choice besides pants. More subtle? try lace, but without giving a sexual orientation connotation to it. Color choices seem to be more neutral now, but only for older segment of the population. Under 10 years of age pink is definitely not well seen for boys, but blue is "ok" for girls to wear for an outsider.
My personal theory has been that, because height has so much power influence (e.g., tall people are better paid[1], have better sexual prospects), boosting one's potential power can be seen as dishonest.
Hah, dishonest. First of all it's no more dishonest than dressing up in other ways, with clothes or make up or what have you. Secondly if people are "impressed" or whatever by the stature you project what does it matter if it is "real" or not? Is the experience diminished because they didn't happen to be "born" with that stature? If we're going to rationalize things like that, you might as well go into why you think someone being born with genes that facilitate a certain height is more "impressive" than someone who isn't so tall, naturally. If you feel that someone being tall projects "power" or something, then what does it matter for that visceral moment that they were born with it or not? You're going to give a person a raise for projecting a certain stature, but get upset when a person happened to be not-so tall?
I went looking for heel supports for weightlifting recently. I found out there are a lot of men who apparently wear very high heel supports to boost their height - obviously not the same as wearing a high healed shoe from the outside, but the same from the inside.
http://www.pbase.com/geary/image/86712900
I had a whole collection of hippie outfits back in the day. My mom thought I was gay, but I just liked colorful clothing. Back then, you were straight or you were weird - where "straight" meant "didn't do drugs"... I was proud to be weird!
I got my hippie nickname from the back of an old radio I saw at a garage sale:
https://www.google.com/search?q=truetone+stratoscope&tbm=isc...Here's a photo from five years later when I took my mom flying:
http://www.pbase.com/geary/image/120224799
This was more of my disco phase, I suppose. I have very fond memories of the young lady who made the flying wings necklace for me! :-) And I still had some kind of eye for color - I didn't notice until a couple of years ago that I'd totally color-coordinated my clothes with the airplane!