Argumentative Essay On High Heels

1.0 Introduction

Beauty is not only an aesthetic category which applies to faces and bodies of women, but it describes women as a whole. Besides being a language of identity, it also able to reflect a woman’s status (Peiss and Man as cited in Foo 2010). However since the definition of beauty may be different for each individual, therefore the idea of beauty ideals is created by society to fix the standard in defining beauty (Peiss as cited in Foo 2010).

Each parts of women’s body has its own beauty idealisation. Nowadays, high heels become a beauty standard for women’s footwear in most society (Foo 2010). Even though there are several controversial health issues regarding high heels, because of the preference on high heels by society, it creates

This is because the illusion of slenderizing the ankle when wearing heels contribute to long legs’ appearance (Brown 2007) and give a feminine look to the gait (Rossi 1999) in which those enhancement make women more alluring (Gueguen 2014). Besides, with heels, women look more appealing to men due to the prominence of buttocks and displaying of the chest resulted from the body adaptation to maintain an erect posture (Brown as cited in Foo 2010; Rossi 1999). Attractiveness of women with high heels has been proven by Gueguen (2014) through his experiment where woman in heels is the quickest to be approached by man in club, which only took 8 minutes while woman in flats is 14

This is because, with heels, when the tendon shortening, it flex the hips (Smith 1999) and create a muscular look on women’s calf (Brown as cited in Foo 2010) in which Friedman and Galton (as cited in smith 1999) emphasise it as fashionable. But, continuous wearing of high heels will reduce the efficiency of the tendons to contract (Rossi 1999) and hence, the individual will experience a sense of falling backward (Smith 1999) along with cramp muscle and pain in joints once they lowered the heels (Brown