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My sister says there are two kinds of shoes: fuck-me shoes, and fuck-you shoes. I've spent most of the last decade wearing the latter, in rebellion against - or is it "in recovery from" -- an adolescence of the former. I still remember how awkward I felt in my first pair of Doc Martens, which my inner ear insisted on hearing as "Dyke Martens." They were so rounded, so ungainly. I remember walking across the Boston bus station, convinced that everyone in the crowd was staring aghast at my feet. As if someone were going to call my mother and tattle. That was my freshman year of college, my first year in Massachusetts. Sometime that year I learned that Docs didn't slip and skid on ice the way my svelte, pointy boots did. Plus you could fit wool socks under a pair of Docs: critical, for my cold-prone Southern-raised feet. Plus they felt good. When I started casting an appraising eye back at the women who were flirting with me, I got a good laugh out of the euphemism "women who wear comfortable shoes." If "women who wear comfortable shoes" were queer, who would choose to be straight? My feet had found the promised land, and they weren't leaving. Of course, one can't wear Docs year-round. The northern summer is short and sweet, and nobody wants to be encased or stifled then. The answer? Birkenstocks, of course. Mine were the two-strap model. I fantasized about having the panache to carry them off in vivid purple suede. Living in my rural New England college town spoiled me, shoe-wise. Everyone I knew wore comfortable shoes. Thick rubber Tevas, LL Bean "duck" boots -- this was the haven of the fuck-you shoe. I-don't-care-how-it-looks shoes. Actually-I-think-clunky-is-cute shoes. C'mon-baby-you-know-you-want-a-woman-with-the-balls-to-wear-these shoes. The best part? People in the comfortable shoe club seemed happy to flirt. The shoes acted as a signifier. Other folks wearing clunkers like mine tended not to mind a meaningful smile or lingering glance. Of course, maybe that was just college -- or maybe the people in comfortable shoes were just, you know, happier. Wearing men's clothing isn't very transgressive for women anymore; the only time I've ever really felt I was crossdressing was the time I rented a tux. But wearing my Birks and my Docs had then, and still has now, a tinge of a cross-dressing feel. A bigendered feel. And that's a sexy feel, to me. I like masculinity, and I like femininity, but I've always had a soft spot for the grey area in between. |
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Of course, there was trouble the first time I went home to visit in Texas. I got all dressed up for an evening out: linen pants, silver jewelry, the works. Plus, of course, my Birks. And stepped out of my room to the sound of my mother saying, "Oh, honey. You're not going out in those, are you?" It became a familiar sound over the years, almost a mantra. Expected. And then I'd leave again, and my mother's words would become something to chuckle about, because where I've chosen to live, nobody expects me to wear anything in particular, and I like it that way. After eight proud years in fuck-you shoes, I'd stopped even noticing the femmey little things some women opt to clamp on their feet -- until I fell in love with my mother's heeled black boots. They were ankle boots, made of a soft leather so far removed from my chapped and cracked combat boots it might not even have come from the same species of animal. They had little zippers up the inseams, with lovely, sculpted, undeniably high heels. I don't have a shoe fetish, but I was approaching an unhealthy attraction to those sleek little boots. I felt traitorous. My mother's heeled black boots were sexualized in a traditional "I'm-the-femme, look-at-me" way. After so many years of insisting on the right to gaze, developing an interest in shoes so clearly designed for being looked at felt like backsliding. Or was I just locking myself into another box? I didn't want to trade an automatic assumption of femininity for an automatic assumption of a lack thereof. Why couldn't my feet swing both ways? So I admired the boots aloud on my mother's next visit north. She apparently didn't think anything of it; Chanukah came and went without any shoeboxes arriving on my doorstep. So I resorted to dropping hints. "I sure liked those boots you had on when you came to visit," I said. Then, as the months went by and the UPS guy failed to come, "I was looking at boots like yours, but nobody up here seems to have them for narrow feet." Finally the subtlety paid off: the boots went on sale (winter things go on sale early in South Texas) and a pair arrived for me! The little card insert which came with them from the manufacturer told me they were designed to "make love to my feet." They don't, exactly. At the end of a day, they kind of hurt. I don't doubt that they're more comfortable than a lot of heels, but they're hardly, well, comfortable shoes. Still, they're gorgeous. I thanked my mother profusely, half-afraid she'd gloat now that I was apparently returning to what she'd call sanity on the shoe front. But Mom is nothing if not gracious; she didn't rub her victory in. She did something even more effective -- she kept shopping. |
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Less than a year later, my mother's taken to calling me on her cell phone from department stores every time she sees shoes on sale. As it turns out, she loves hunting for shoes for me long-distance; it's the next best thing to having me there to shop with. (Better, probably. When I'm shopping via phone calls, I don't get grouchy after an hour or two.) Now three slim pairs of heels and pumps line the top rack of my shoe shelf, and the heeled black boots sit primly in the garage, next to the combat boots and the shit-kickers, the low Docs and high Docs and brown knock-off Docs. And now, from time to time, I find I like wearing my mother's offerings. I walk differently in them. My legs feel longer. My hips sway. My friends who like to ogle find random reasons to walk three paces behind me. It's kind of fun. The thing is, my feet still ache after a few hours in heels. And as much as I get a laugh out of my sister's notion of fuck-me shoes versus fuck-you shoes, I have issues with the binary dynamic it sets up. So, what, the comfortable shoes I was wearing all through the years when I actually discovered sexuality weren't sexual, weren't sexy? They sure as hell were to me. And to the folks I discovered sex with. What my sister was really describing, I've come to think, is the difference between femme shoes and butch shoes. For most femme types -- and that's the default setting for women in the South where I was reared -- it's the delicate shoes that bring out one's attitude. Sometimes it's the extreme shoes, the ones with spike heels, the ones with the pointiest toes. Lately the trend seems to be towards shoes with ridiculously-long points, like children's book elf-slipper caricatures. Perhaps the fact that the shoes hurt after a while is part of their charm. Certainly the fact that those pointed heels can look lethal in more ways than one doesn't hurt. Conversely, for the butch women I know, and for the not-butch-but-still-wear-jeans-and-flannel-every-day folks (the default setting for New England college girls), what sets off the sexy attitude is being able to, you know, actually feel their toes and not fall down on the ice, to go from sidewalk to hiking trail without skipping a beat. Butch sexy shoes are utilitarian shoes, shoes you can do stuff in. Lately I've been recovering my inner femme. Sometimes I put on lip gloss. Last week I traded in my ponytail for a bob. And, now and again, I'm venturing into femmey shoes. The other day, admiring a pair of red boots, I returned my "you can't have too many books" motto to its motherspun origins. "You can't have too many shoes, right?" I asked as I ogled the red leather and listened to my friends chuckle at my footwear lust. So really, my sister's paradigm still holds -- though it's more a question of what brings out your feistiest, sexiest attitude at the time, not actual shoe style or shape. If I walk down a street like I own it, like I want people to be looking at me, like I look good and I know it, then the shoes I'm wearing are fuck-me shoes, whether they're my clunkiest rubber-soled mud boots or my tiniest wedges of pointy toe. Maybe it's no surprise that what I like best is being able to choose, not having to abide by anybody's default settings. Plus, I like being able to mix and match: clunky shoes with lipstick, pointy boots with worn-out jeans. Different shoes ring my bell differently, depending on my mood, the day, my own inner sense of gender and style and desire. That goes for the shoes on my own feet as well as the shoes on the people I scope. The shoes I find sexiest are those worn with a sense of power. Nothing turns me off more than somebody in prissy shoes picking her way through a muddy field, for instance, or trying to keep his white tennis shoes pristine on a crowded street. Put me on a dance floor and I'm as likely to stare at someone slamming around in steel-toed boots as someone pirouetting in a fancy heel. Truth be told, I'm likelier to go for the former. Sometimes high femme reminds me too much of the gender ghetto I fled the South to break out of. At the same time, it feels good to be exploring my own periodic femme tendencies: very few things say "diva" like the right pair of heels. After all, choice really is the point of liberation. And after all, if I'm in a fuck-me mood, any shoe into which I slip my foot becomes a fuck-me shoe, no questions asked. It could be Manolos, it could be Docs. You never know with me. And if you play your cards just right, I might even let you get right down there and give 'em a spit-shine.
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12.07.06: Scarlet Letters -- in case it isn't glaringly obvious -- is currently
on an extended hiatus. The web has changed, we've changed, and
we're trying to figure out how we both fit together now, which isn't a process we want to rush. If you're looking for more current SL-related content, you can
have check out upcoming books from editor Heather Corinna and previous co-editor Hanne Blank, check out Heather's current sexuality sites, or explore sites through the femmerotic network. We hope to be back with you soon, as fresh, challenging and
unexpected as ever.
In the meantime, by all means, enjoy our years of past content,
all of which still remain in the public and subscription areas.
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