High Heels: Article in Wall Street Journal says high heels are out of fashion, but fails to understand how they make women more sexually attractive

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-smart-chic-women-are-abandoning-high-heels-forever-1541704765?mod=nwsrl_fashion&cx_refModule=nwsrl

High heels have nothing to do with literature and multiple personality, but I can’t help comment, because I once published an article in a psychiatric journal about the psychology of personal appearance. It is the third article cited in Wikipedia’s entry on sexism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexism

This is the basic principle regarding what it is in clothing and makeup that makes a person more sexually attractive (other than by correcting abnormalities): It exaggerates an average anatomical difference between the sexes.

The first thing that people think of in regard to high heels is that they make a woman taller. Actually, in regard to sexual attractiveness, this is a drawback to high heels—because women are, on average, shorter than men—and being made taller detracts from a woman’s sexual attractiveness unless she is abnormally short.

The anatomical difference between men and women that high heels exaggerate is that women’s feet, on the average, are proportionately smaller. (Hence, the story of how Cinderella’s small feet were prized.)

Historically, one thing that was done to make women’s feet smaller was foot binding, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_binding, but that was abandoned for obvious reasons.

High heels, like foot binding, impair a woman’s mobility, but the main thing they do to enhance sexual attractiveness is to create an optical illusion that the woman’s feet are smaller than they actually are, because, visually, the length of a person’s foot is the length of their body (when they are standing) that is parallel to the ground. And when a woman wears high heels, her foot appears shorter, because only the front of her foot is parallel to the ground.