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“The Problem with Birkenstocks” by Annie Kreighbaum illustrates so perfectly the fantastical through-the-looking-glass distortions of reality that we collectively we know as “Fashion“. Unpacking this article was kind of fun in the “Wow..really??” sort of way. What wasn’t so fun is that amount of shaming that is going on and the expectations of self-policing and in general the absolute necessity of being hyper-aware of you looks and how others perceive you.
“Birkenstocks are the Chipotle of footwear. Like opting for a burrito bowl and a side order of guac at the end of a long workday, you wear them when you’re in no mood to try. And you don’t feel too bad about it either, because they reek of integrity and liberalism and therefore don’t invite the same harsh criticism as things like foam flip-flops or Arby’s. But still, too much Chipotle is never a good thing.”
Just so we are clear where the biases are, as a person who wears Birkenstocks all the time, the idea that they are somehow the Chipotle of footwear just leaves me scratching my head. That somehow they are a last resort when you are “in no mood to try” – well that grinds against my feminist fancy in an entirely different way and is definitely the topic of another post.
“Your foot might splay a little bit,” said NYC podiatrist Dr. Hillary Brenner in response to a rumor my coworker’s friend, this girl Alison, heard from her shoe sales guy at Jeffrey that all the Birkenstocks and locker room slides women are wearing nowadays are making their feet bigger—thus forcing them to size up on their Fall ’14 footwear purchases. 38? Guess again, now you’re probably a 38.5.”
[Alarm Klaxon] Whoop whoop whoop! Ladies it is with considerable regret that I have to inform you that your feet are getting….*whispers* bigger. You thought Cinderella was just a story! Oh no no no, Double XXers – you have to live by this shit because the grotesquery of moving from a 38 to 38.5 must be considered a horror that should not be named.
Unless of course you’re a bland, humourless, feminist killjoy like myself who lives for blaming on this sort normative buncombe.
“Splay” is a great word, and by that Dr. Brenner simply means that the muscles and bones inside of your feet are getting a nice little stretch and they don’t want that feeling to end. So it’s not like they’re gaining weight—they’re just not as toned.”
Gaining Weight!?! Gaining Weight?!? Good Lard! Anything but that… Is there no hope? Also, how do feet that are squished inside shoes that don’t fit = toned?
“Your foot gets comfortable in these types of shoes and only certain muscles are working. Then when you go into a high heel that’s more narrow and stiff, your foot can’t splay as much. Different pressure points are being loaded, and you’re having to use muscles you haven’t used in a while.”
Wait, what? It sounds like you’re making an argument that it’s just ‘different muscles’ being used when you go from ergonomic brikenstocks to the damaging instruments of torture known as high heels. You’re not actually making that argument against healthy feet and promoting the damage high heels are responsible for?
“But there are abs somewhere under the mushy softness of your lazy Birkenstock feet, and they can be un-splayed and ready for the heel-loving city life.”
Holy hell, you are toe-tally going there. Because having footwear that fits is completely the equivalent of “mushy softness”. Did you feel the lip curl of disgust there? The comparison between flabby abs and now your damn flabby feet? Can we get a little more hate and shame on for female bodies?
What, exactly the fuck, is heel-loving city life? Who loves manoeuvring around in the frigidly winter-dark icy streets in high heels? I want Dr.Brenner to try the icy-fun-dance in high heels – the pain of his twisted ligaments would bring me a great deal pleasure (keeping with the theme of the post, would that be shodden-freude ?).
‘Dr. Brenner suggests training your feet back into a pair of your old heels rather than buying new ones, “You still have the same foot as you’ve always had, it’s not growing wider, it’s just getting put into a different device.”
“Oh,” says the doctor who, in theory. has sworn to do no harm – you ladies just need to acclimatize to having your toes squished and your tendons abnormally stretched. It is like taking a round with the thumbscrews before heading to the rack…you just need to warm up!
“You’ll feel it at first, in the same way that your body will feel sore after the first time of doing a workout tape. But after a while your body gets used to that workout and new muscles are being stimulated. Eventually you won’t feel as sore. It’s a good idea to wear a variety of shoes overall, so that your entire foot is being worked on a regular basis.”
All you need is time to get used to wearing damaging footwear. Awesome.
“So, and correct me if I’m wrong, the takeaway here is that you can eat as many burritos as you like, just do it while wearing heels?”
No. The take away is that you’re advocating against women wearing shoes that properly fit and you’re attempting to shame them into wearing shoes that can potentially damage their bodies.
Did you catch the “subtle” sexist trope?
Fearless amateur sociologist Sam Pepper conducts ground breaking social experiments such as this one.
The video apparently was moved to private, here is recap of the lowlights of Pepper’s activities.
Yah… he really did that and continues to do creepy things to women objectifying and violating their personal boundaries because in our society in 2014 – the boundaries of women don’t matter. This individual is showing us exactly what women have to put up with on a daily basis (and yes of course not exactly this, everything comes in degrees).
Look at the number of hits on this video, look at the number of “thumbs up”. If anything the greater idea being sent is how much toxic misogyny is present in our culture and how acceptable it still is.
Laci Green summarizes what we can do about sexual predators like Mr.Pepper in this video here.
And if you really need more confirmation of the misogyny present in our culture, do check out the comment section as it speaks volumes to how far we still have to go in establishing the radical idea that women are people too.
DM2525 hits on some of the similarities between radical christian and radical islamic goals and thinking. I think that a believer from either side would reflexively call this video a gross mischaracterization of their faith and the positions that they hold.
Perhaps, but from an atheistic point of view it really is same poo, different pile – just applied in the differing constituencies to varying degrees. Are US christians pining for a formal theocracy? It may certainly seem like it but I think they are just responding to societal pressures in a way that makes sense to them.
The social pressures (mostly due to the plundering of society by the elite) are then analyzed through the looking glass of christian religion and the set of solutions that dogmatic christian thought offers.
Given that the base of christian though is well, based on fear and magic we can deduce why so many religious solutions to societal problems are ineffective and often counter-productive.
Consider the example of given in the video of the Woman and her role. Is the reasonable answer to the problem of women in society(?) their isolation and cloistering to the domestic sphere? The answer of course is a resounding “No”, but consider what the religious have to work with as their moral and philosophical grounding with regards to women.
The Koran and the Bible are based on the musings of dudes in a society that treated women as inferior by nature – there is nothing in either text that allows for the progress women have made toward them being regarded as full human beings and thus neither source should be considered when it comes to women and their place in society.
Yet, this exactly the case, that is that people are using religious texts to try to understand the society that they are living in *now* and it just doesn’t work out very well.
I’m not sure if all religious dogma has an logical endpoint in theocratic rule, but the stuff that we are dealing with here (radical islam and christianity) is certainly in love with theocracy and is doing its best to bring those conditions to fruition.
Why yes, yes they are. Next question. But hey, here’s a video with a catchy tune replying to the anti-feminist Christina Hoff Sommers.
Rich Terfry explores some similar sounding tunes in this clip.
I’ve been keeping tabs on this game since it was announced. An open world, stealthy, combaty, psy-opsy medieval romp through some of the back story of Tolkien’s fantasy world. This of course isn’t actual game footage, but a rather a clever marketing ploy to hype up the release of the game.
It has swords, orcs, and digital gore. You have been forewarned.
Many thanks to Elizabeth Bear for today’s comment on our culture.
“My Least Favorite Trope (and this post will include spoilers for The Lego Movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, The Matrix, Western Civilization, and—cod help me—Bulletproof Monk*.) is the thing where there’s an awesome, smart, wonderful, powerful female character who by all rights ought to be the Chosen One and the hero of the movie, who is tasked with taking care of some generally ineffectual male character who is, for reasons of wish fulfillment, actually the person the film focuses on. She mentors him, she teaches him, and she inevitably becomes his girlfriend… and he gets the job she wanted: he gets to be the Chosen One even though she’s obviously far more qualified. And all he has to do to get it and deserve it is Man Up and Take Responsibility.
And that’s it. Every god-damned time. The mere fact of naming the films above and naming the trope gives away the entire plot and character arc of every single movie.
I thought for a minute that Guardians of the Galaxy was going to pull off a subversion. They were so close. All they had to do was have somebody make the point that We Survived The Magic Radiation Because We All Worked Together, but no, it’s the pure fucking light of Chris Pratt’s Y chromosome that rescues the day again.”
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