Oh sure, part of it is that we too easily fall prey to the winking, leering seductiveness of a swankly designed pair of trotters, just as men seemed hard-wired to succumb to craven lust by tv screens as oversized as a porn star’s bosom.
But the root of the issue is this: Its nearly impossible to find a pair of shoes that are not only stylish, but that you can walk more than two blocks in before they slowly start to saw off various parts of your feet. So its not that we really want or need 30 pairs of summer shoes… we’re just caught a constant quest to find at least ONE pair that we can get through a cocktail party or workday in without sustaining multiple oozing, throbbing pain points.
For most of my life, I simply refused to go the girly route, avoiding heels and any other style of shoe that could not be worn with socks. It was so simple and comfortable: All I needed was one pair of leather shoes for work/going out, and a pair of converse for off-hours.
But that left me looking either like a ridiculously old and archaic bobby sockser and/or somebody with orthopaedic issues whenever I wore a dress or skirt, because the only flat soled shoes available looked like something an aging nun with bunions would wear.
Say Chip! Let's head out to the Chinese sock hop!
Who needs swank footwear when you're married to Jesus?
As I rounded the corner into middle-age, I wanted to step up my professional game and dress more appropriately for my age. So I started to buy modest heels (which make it feel like you're walking on knives shoved up your feet); followed by wafer-soled flats (which make it feel like you're being pounded with a sledgehammer on the sole of your feet) … and I have been painfully hobbling my way through summers ever since.
I take little comfort in realizing that I was right to eschew practicality for fashion all those years, because this experience has confirmed what I had suspected all along:
- Not only is going sockless slimily nasty, but you’re a goner without a layer of fabric to prevent the burning, chafing friction of human skin against leather.
- Those little protective nylon sockets that are supposed to fit invisibly inside your shoes? Useless. Take 3 steps and they’ve slipped off your heel and are irritatingly bunched up under the arch of your foot.
- Seriously?
3) A shoe that feels like a perfect, supple, comfortable fit in the store will invariably turn out to be an agent of torture about 15 minutes into Day 1 in the real world.
4) Shoe salespeople are eternal liars. Some of their standard, bald-faced untruths include:
- “Don’t worry… the leather will soften and stretch to the shape of your foot”; which means “Waste money on some cancer-agent-rich stretching spray that doesn’t really do anything, and resign yourself to wearing a complex array of protective bandaids (which will be scraped off and need to be replaced several times a day) and just gritting through the pain until, maybe, after several years of intense suffering, the shoes will finally be broken in and comfortable. At which point they will be falling apart and will have to be replaced.”
- “Too big/too loose in the heel? Just buy a pair of these insoles and they’ll be fine”; which means “That’ll be $12 for insoles that just half fall out when you take a step and the shoe still flops off your foot, so you are constantly in danger of tripping on all this dangling footwear apparatus and will have to devise a highly unnatural and uncomfortable way of walking to try to get around that.”
- “Just buy some of these adhesive rubber pads that you can stick to the problem areas in your shoes… they’re AMAZING!”; which means “… they’ll stay in place for about 30 seconds, then migrate up your foot so you’re limping around looking like you’ve got some kind of alien slug feeding off your ankle, but thanks for another $7, sucker.”
- All useless
- And my personal favourites: “These winter boots are completely waterproof” and “No.. its easy to clean salt stains off suede…. Using this $15 can of highly toxic cleaner spray.”
Approximate retail value: $700
Number of units that don't cause pain: 0
Cumulative utility percentile: .00000001
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