Life Is Too Short to Fake Being Tall

I am not sure if this is true, but yesterday's New York Times reported that more than a few women attending the Cannes Film Festival were banned from walking on the Red Carpet, which despite being nonsensical is still something some women enjoy doing, for the "sin" of wearing flat shoes and not high-heels. This is indeed a sorry state of affairs.

The wearing of high-heeled shoes apparently goes back many hundreds of years, and since there have already been scores of scholarly papers written on the subject I won't bother to plagiarize them here. Let it suffice that since historical reasons no longer exist, today it is just plain dumb to wear shoes that are not properly designed for the human foot. The fact that women do this and men do not pretty much sums up why men rule the world and likely always will, at least as long as such shoes are being manufactured. After Armageddon, all bets -- and probably most shoes -- are off.

Despite the growing body of medical evidence that "high heels drastically alter the wearer’s posture, displace the foot and ankle bones, strain the knee joint and tighten the surrounding tendons, leading to osteoarthritis and hammertoe due to the narrow toe box," many women of affluence and influence wear shoes like the ones shown below in the hopes of looking sexy (getting one of those men who rule the world), feeling powerful (by getting access to the bank accounts of one of those men who rule the world), or gaining a few inches of height (to look taller). When I see them trying to navigate the cobblestone streets of Portland's Old Port district, usually slightly drunk since that is the scene down there, especially in summer, I feel sad for all of us.