Food for thought: High Heels

[adrianh]

[FONT="]I have a thing for a lady in high heels, but historically, there was only one reason why heels were attached to the shoes of a lady.[/FONT]
The reason is simple: back in the day, women rode horses as well, to do so effectively, they required heels to negotiate the stirrup of a horse i.e it holds the foot of a rider..

I find this very hard to believe. Men have the exact same problem with stirrups. The addition of heels to riding boots was purely to keep the boot in the stirrup and had no relation to the sex of the rider. I bet that men wore stirrup heels long before women did.

You must also consider the definition of high heels. A stirrup heel doesn't need to be higher than about 15mm which is not considered to be a high heel. High heels are anything over about 40mm which is too high for horse riding.

[Citizen X]

I find this very hard to believe. Men have the exact same problem with stirrups. The addition of heels to riding boots was purely to keep the boot in the stirrup and had no relation to the sex of the rider. I bet that men wore stirrup heels long before women did.

You must also consider the definition of high heels. A stirrup heel doesn't need to be higher than about 15mm which is not considered to be a high heel. High heels are anything over about 40mm which is too high for horse riding.

"Elizabeth Semmelhack, curator for the Bata Shoe Museum, traces the high heel to male horse-riding warriors in the Middle East who used high heels for functionality, because they help hold the rider's foot in stirrups. She states that the earliest high heel she has seen is depicted on a 9th-century CE ceramic bowl from Persia"[1]


Also bear in mind that in historically, we had a very sexist world i.e. 'it's a man's world,' this has changed for the better. The implication is that a man would by necessity have a proper cowboy boot, the heel of a cowboy boot was and is very manly.
Somewhere along the historical line women started to ride horses, so something had to be done with their footwear to accommodate the stirup

On the lighter side, a well dressed lady in high heels definitely has some effect on men..

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[1] Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-heeled_footwear. Accessed 1 April 2014