You Must Be High If You Wanna Wear Heels!

High heels cause such damage to a person’s body, it is completely nonsensical to wear them for any occasion. Each person has the right to do whatever they want to their own body – but I would like to challenge our view on high heels. Stilettos, Wedges, and Pumps all share one thing in common – they damage your body.

For this reason, I personally do not find them attractive – and in fact – find them quite the opposite.

Heels are only worn for the cosmetic appeal, and because of society’s patriarchal impositions on women and their own assumptions about beauty and sexual selection. They really serve no actual function.

People in all sorts of cultures do ridiculous things to their bodies in order to appear beautiful. They cut chunks of their skin out, file their teeth into fangs, and they elongate their necks to the point where they look more like giraffes.

I have heard martial arts instructors suggest using them in a self-defense context, citing them as useful trauma-causing tools. I question whether or not this is actually the case. Surely almost ANYTHING can be used as a weapon, but by the same token why not carry a banana with you everywhere and stick the pointy end into an attacker?

Let’s look at the 2 kinds of violence a person is likely to face – social and asocial – and examine if high heels really can be useful.

SOCIAL VIOLENCE

When does someone put on heels? When they are going out on the town, or out for a nice dinner, or out to a special event.

If social violence is to occur, it is going to be very difficult to flee the situation while wearing heels, so the heels will likely come off.
However, if there is social violence occurring, there is usually alcohol involved (after all – where are we wearing heels?…..in places that serve alcohol). Violence and alcohol share a first cousin, and that cousin is broken glass. You rarely have one without the other in settings where alcohol is served. If you cut your foot open on broken glass, especially in a public area – you risk blood loss and infection – as well as giving yourself a disadvantage toward the end of protecting yourself.

“Yeah, but you can take off your heels and use them to stab attackers in the eyes”, or other such arguments are ludicrous. Even if there is no broken glass or other rough terrain, it would take you an exceptional amount of time to remove your heels and to use them with enough force and accuracy to do any significant damage. You could have a far better effect (and far quicker) with even just an open hand. The time you would take to remove your shoes to use them as a weapon is longer than the time it would take to already be severely injured by your attacker.

They can be used to dig into shins and feet, but your stability would be far too compromised to really be optimally mobile (as you would want to be for the duration of a personal attack).

ASOCIAL VIOLENCE

What if you are attacked asocially? This would be a possibility if you are on a date, walking to your car after a long day at the office, waiting for a taxi to go to your best friend’s birthday….or a million other possible scenarios. Typically you are alone.

In an asocial setting, you very rarely see the violence coming. The attack is likely an ambush. Heels will hinder you in many of the ways described above. The difference here is that you have even less time to deploy them as you are already under attack. Again, you could probably do far more damage and better your chances of escape using your bare hands.

Of course, if your shoe was already in your hand for some reason, then you could use it – but the odds against this being the case seem astronomical.

THE OTHER SIDE

Some people argue that women are not going to let go of wearing these types of shoes, and because of this they craft entire classes and programs around performing self-defense in heels. While I can see their point, this attitude perpetuates an illogical meme, rather than challenge the currently held norm.

I wore high heels once. I volunteered with the White Ribbon Campaign – an organization that works toward the goal of ending violence against women and girls. We conducted a “Walk a Mile in Her Shoes” fundraiser, where participants walked a mile in high heels.

A great cause indeed. During the stiletto and pump marathon, women chuckled and guffawed at the men hunkering around like their knee caps were inverted. You could almost hear the collective “Now you know what it I have to go through.”

But did anyone stop to ask, “Why the hell do I wear these stupid things anyway?” They are worn because women think they are pretty, and make them look good. And men perpetuate this idea, to the detriment of women’s health.

What a shame…that a woman would think that she HAS TO go through that torment just to look appealing.

Transgendered men that try to emulate women also put themselves through hell to look like women, and also force themselves into the little hobbling devices.

To train women realistically in heels is a liability. I would imagine that if you jostled a woman around in a manner similar to what she would experience during REAL violence (and not cardio karate playtime with friends), you would have enough broken and sprained ankles on your hands to fill an entire armada of hospital beds.

Violence is difficult enough to navigate without crippling your chances. I mean, why not fight blindfolded, too? After all, blindfolds make you look sexy and classy.

CONCLUSION

In summation, heels of any sort are horrible for your body, and are not so great for functional use in self-defense contexts.

Flat-bottomed shoes are where it’s at. They can be sexy, stylish, functional, and comfortable with components that actually aid your posture and stability.

We really should be making conscious choices for functionality in fashion.

High heels should be nothing more than a history lesson.

– T.J. Kennedy

Hybrid Fighting Method

* high heel image above courtesy of imagepoop.com

Meditation Can Reshape Your Brain

Neuroscientist Sara Lazar’s amazing brain scans show meditation can actually change the size of key regions of our brain, improving our memory and making us more empathetic, compassionate, and resilient under stress.

Thinking Inside The Box

We often hear people talking about “thinking outside of the box.”  Usually what is meant by this metaphorical box is the boundaries defined by some line of thought.  By exploring new possibilities different from the previous ways of approaching something, whether it be a business or artistic pursuit, we hope to leap past the confines of the old ways using a novel approach.  Without people pushing through the boxes of convention, society would stagnate and we would never have the pioneers and leaders to inspire us and drive us to improvement.  We recognize Gandhi, Einstein, Martin Luther King, Amelia Earhart, and Bruce Lee as pioneers who have made their mark in the world; their excellence came about from their willingness to push past and eventually redefine the “box.”

The ability to think outside the box is a valuable skill and is requisite for improvements.  However, that doesn’t mean that thinking inside the box is useless or even undesireable.  The framework of the existing boxes have their own values. Previous established frameworks are often in place for good reason: they work.  The human mind is very good at finding structure in things and working from within developed structures.  Even without a previous framework in place, we will try to establish an underlying structure to achieve understanding.  Currently existing boxes can provide a prebuilt framework to serve as a launching point to facilitate the process of understanding.  Using pre-existing boxes saves you the time and effort of building your own model of understanding, and possibly even saves you the unnecessary effort of duplicating existing frameworks.  The conventional boxes can get you up to speed faster, particularly in pursuits that require being able to do things (for example, computer programming, painting, or even writing).

Though the box is often depicted as a constraining structure, the box paradoxically often empowers creativity and the ability to change.  With no reference framework, our perceptions of the task at hand consist mostly of unknowns.  With so many things unknown, we become uncertain, tentative, and possibly frozen into inaction.  It is here where working inside the framework of the box becomes most valuable.  The box provides a model which either explains the unknowns or defines a course of action to break the cycle of uncertainty and inaction.  The box framework provides the starting point for exploration, and it is from this process of exploration that creativity and change can arise.  You can hand a child paints and brushes, but the child probably won’t become the next Picasso without some framework for learning how to use the paints.

It is the exploration of the box that eventually leads to the recognition of the limits of the box.  Being able to think outside of the box requires that we know what inside and outside the box actually mean.  Thinking “outside” of the box is meaningless without the context of understanding what defines the box; understanding the box and being able to work from within the box gives us a starting point to learn to recognize and perceive the box.  Recognition of the box is the first step needed to move beyond the box and push outside of it.

While we may ultimately wish to break through the confines of the box and become one of the innovators thinking outside of the box, we cannot completely discount the value of thinking “inside” the box.  Thinking inside of the box complements the ability to move beyond the box.  As long as we can learn not to be confined by the box, we can find value thinking both inside and outside the box.

Johnny Kuo