Tanya Sweeney: Waving goodbye to my heel-wearing life was an easy step

A few days ago, my one-year-old daughter strapped herself into a pair of my high heels and, like a chubby-legged Bambi, managed to somehow skitter across the landing in them in one piece. “She probably walks better in them now than I do,” I thought to myself.

A decade ago, I could have entered, and won, many golds in the heel-wearing Olympics. I would cycle through town in four-inch spike heels, not a bother; stand in a bar for hours on end in stilettos; I even attended an open-air gig in red suede heels (not recommended). There’s not a cobble in the city that could better me. I’ve done the Howth cliff walk in block heels. The point I’m making is that I wore them absolutely everywhere. For ages, my friends often referred to me as tall (I’m five-foot-three), because they had no reason to think I was anything shorter than five-eight.

I was confident and comfortable in heels and I wore it
as a badge of honour

Party Feet sole cushions? For amateurs. Back-up pair of ballet flats hidden in the handbag? Pathetic. I was confident and comfortable in heels – though Lord knows it took me a while to build up this particular skill – and I wore it as a badge of honour.

The only question now is, why? In caps, 64-point, in bold and italic and underlined. Why?

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In the noughties, heels were definitely having a bit of a moment. We can blame any manner of Stateside for-her comedies, or commercial women’s fiction book covers, but heels were the embodiment of glossy, aspirational femininity. A sexy and glamorous shorthand that told the world you were doing the whole “being a woman” thing right. In 2006, Camilla Morton wrote a book entitled How To Walk In Heels: The Girl’s Guide To Everything and, in my youthful naiveté, I believed this was an essential challenge to master.

Prompted somewhat unimaginatively by certain fashion/pop culture moments, I slobbered over footwear like it was an actual fetish. My peers and I were caught up in that weird, Celtic Tiger consumerist wave. One friend recommended rubbing Bonjela into the balls of one’s feet and travelling with painkillers in the handbag, just in case. A friend of mine likes to remind me of the moment where I went into Brown Thomas, fresh out of college, and I threw down 500 of Mastercard’s finest pounds on a pair of Prada butter-soft leather boots. I wore them precisely once. They were excruciating to wear; besides, I worked in a bar at the time. My friend hung onto the Prada box, to store things in.

All of this, after a year of wearing nothing but flat shoes, feels like a sort of madness now. Spending so much of my adult life being uncomfortable… and for what? To feel sexy? To look sexy to others? And did I ever truly enjoy it, that feeling of looking good, tempered with an actual physical pinch? Or was I simply bowing to a pressure to wear them without ever really examining why? The truth is I felt better in them. I stood taller. Felt somehow prouder in my appearance. Enjoyed making the effort.

My legs haven't looked quite as shapely in the mirror since, but so what?

Here’s some interesting science. Behavioural scientist and University of Brittany professor Nicolas Guéguen conducted an experiment in 2014. His 19-year-old model was dressed in a tight top as a constant and then her shoes were switched up. When she tried to get pedestrians to stop and answer a survey while wearing flats, 40 per cent of men responded. That number doubled to 80 per cent when she was in high heels. He took the experiment to a bar too and found that even when seated, the woman was approached by a man, on average, in 14 minutes if wearing flats and in only seven minutes if wearing heels.

“Wearing high heels makes women look more long-legged and gives them a sexier posture,” Mairi Macleod, PhD, an evolutionary biologist, has said. “This could lead some men to perceive women in heels as more sexually available, explaining why these women are approached more readily.”

It could be argued that the male gaze is not quite the thing it was in 2014, for me at least. MeToo has happened, and I’m a 40-something woman whose idea of polished grooming means wearing a top that doesn’t have Farley’s Rusk on it.

And then, of course, the heels got well and truly shelved when there was no place to wear them. I won’t lie. Waving them off was easy. My legs haven’t looked quite as shapely in the mirror since, but so what? My 2005 self, struggling to walk in her Prada boots, looks a bit pathetically try-hard with the benefit of hindsight.

Come to think of it, I often read back on women’s magazines from times past with a sense of wonder, reading the mind-blowing things they gently suggested to women who wanted to feel sexier or attract the attentions or approval of others. Hair ironing. Waist training. Brazilian waxes. All of it marketed as somehow empowering and glamorous. Bonjela and painkillers? It never ceases to amaze me, through it all, how little we women have valued our own personal comfort.