Women pay hidden cost for beauty

The Boston Herald

January 28, 2001

The pretty young woman hobbling out of her apartment, struggling with her crutches and the heavy glass door, put it all in perspective.

She was tall, thin and fair with curly brown hair, long legs and her two feet in blue cushioned toeless things that people wear after surgery. She was having a hard time walking, the crutches and the feet things new, the sidewalk slick, the morning cold. I assumed she was a dancer and that tight toe shoes and high-heeled tap shoes were the reason behind whatever had happened to her feet.

She used to be a dancer, she said. Standing beside me on a corner waiting for a cab, she told me this.

"But now I model and it's worse because I'm on my feet all day and my feet are always in high heels."

High heels cause bunions, which cause an enlargement of a joint in the toe. The enlarged joint hurts. Bunions require surgery. Surgery is followed by weeks of recuperation. "Is it painful?" I asked. "Very," she said.

Our cabs came then so I didn't get a chance to ask the next question: "After your feet are better, will you wear high heels again?" But I didn't have to ask because I know the answer.

Of course she will. She'll wear heels again because her job requires her to wear heels.

And that's the end of story. We are not so much creatures of comfort as we are creatures of habit. And our habit is to listen to whatever Madison Avenue and Hollywood say.

Except, imagine for a minute, this same young woman coming out of a lean-to or a grass hut somewhere in the backwoods of a third-world country, her feet bandaged, her gait slow, young but old because of how she walked.

And imagine learning that she was bandaged and now hobbled because of some tribal "custom" that required her to force her feet into leather things that not only hurt her but that required her to walk all day on tip-toe.

The international community, headed by the United States, would be all over this, demanding change, charging mutilation, begging the world to see the intrinsic harm in this cruelty called "custom." There would be symposiums and lawsuits and finger-pointing and breast-beating and demands for intervention and political asylum.

But bunions to our Western way of thinking are just bunions, hardly the equivalent of sexual mutilation. And yet, they're in the same family, are they not, the bunion not intrinsic to the foot but the result of something done the foot We don't see this, of course. Because we see what advertisers want us to see: high fashion, style, sex appeal, some illusive allure.And that's the bottom line-sex, allure, how a woman looks. The woman as physical object is back with such a vengeance, it makes the head of a person who lived through the 1960s spin. Marilyn Monroe was a model of modesty compared with the stars of today, 4-inch heels just part of the Barbie Doll wardrobe.

Watching the Golden Globes last week, I wondered how it came to be that the sexual revolution ended in this, women not liberated from anything other than their clothes, women today more objectified than they ever have been.

In Rome last week, Italy's highest court of appeal ruled that a man who patted a woman's bottom was not guilty of sexual harassment. The pat, the court declared, was merely an "isolated" and "impulsive" incident.

This news made its way to America and around the world because tales like this make people squawk about the lack of morals and good sense in other places.

We seldom scrutinize ourselves and our own lack of morals and good sense.

Alessandra Mussolini, deputy of the right-wing National Alliance and granddaughter of the late dictator Benito Mussolini, called the ruling "a new shame and a new humiliation for women."

This may well be. But also a shame is not what is done by men to women, but what women continue to do to themselves.