Beauty & Fashion

“High heels are pleasure with pain.” -Christian Louboutin

Help. I’ve fallen in love with a pair of shoes.

I first became aware of the shoe designer Christian Louboutin in 2007, when my fashion-blogging heroine Gala Darling wrote, of some peeptoe Loubs she’d recently tried on, “Every girl needs a pair of shoes that make them feel like they’re having palpitations… [These] are the ideal shoe for drinking cocktails outdoors in the warm night air, surrounded by stars (in the sky & around you, darling) & cameras. Oh, yes.” Gala writes about clothes and accessories so evocatively, describing not only what to wear but also how to wear it, in what situations, in what spirit. I filed away this particular sentiment somewhere deep in my brain, assuming I would never own a pair of Louboutins – which can cost anywhere from $500 up to $4,000 a pair – but wanting, nonetheless, to feel that starstruck-summer-night feeling someday, in some shoes.

Weird, then, that 12 years later, I happened to see a pair of Louboutins on TheRealReal that were almost identical to the ones Gala had raved about, marked down 75%, and that I now own them.

See, my partner likes feet and shoes. In my mind, this sometimes gets lost in the shuffle amongst their numerous other kinks – I mean, who’s gonna fixate on the world’s most common fetish when there’s weirder stuff like hypnosis and crying to play with? – but it does come in handy sometimes. They did, for example, encourage me last summer to buy my now-beloved pair of red peeptoe clogs, and they’re always happy to offer opinions on socks, stockings, and shoes I’m considering snapping up. So I guess it makes sense that when I went on a Louboutin-ogling spree online recently and spotted these Lady Gres royal blue crepe satin pumps with a 4.75″ heel, my partner’s eyes practically bulged out of their head. (I can’t totally confirm that, because we were texting and not face-to-face at the time, but the highly enthusiastic texts spoke for themselves.)

“I could get them for like $230 with the current discount code on the site,” I wrote, “but I’m not sure I’m that committed to buying heels I would wear like 1-2 times a year.”

“Buuuut, like, maybe I am,” my beloved wrote back. “I gotta sleep on it.”

Three minutes later, they added, “Okay, I slept on it. This can be an early finished-your-book present.” I screamed.

I am much less critical of high heels these days than I would have been just a few years ago. While I’ve pretty much always been a “fuck it, do what you want” type of feminist when it comes to other marginalized people’s aesthetic choices, my own stance on heels for myself was predominantly that they weren’t worth the trouble. I’d wobbled through a femme awakening in high school, in cheap faux-leather pumps and agonizing ankle boots; I’d begrudgingly worn padded Naturalizer heels to a wedding, and occasionally clomped around in the aforementioned heeled clogs. Discovering the increased stability of ankle straps was a minor revelation, but for the most part, I eschewed heels for my signature Frye boots, often even when a dress code called for something less… equestrian.

But then I realized I was kinky, and a few years later, I read Summer Brennan’s excellent book High Heel. These two discoveries, taken together, formed the basis for my new understanding of heels: that wearing them could be sexy, pleasurable, and even feminist, despite – and sometimes because of – the pain and discomfort they cause.

See, for very good reasons, women’s pain is often interpreted as unfeminist. After all, we’ve endured pain of various sorts, underdiagnosed and underacknowledged, for millennia. We’ve broken our backs cooking and cleaning for ungrateful men. The patriarchy has crammed us into corsets and Spanx and, yes, heels. The pain systematically inflicted on women’s bodies is a political issue.

But I believe that when you can’t yet dismantle the game completely, one wise approach is to try to play it. Or maybe to cheat.

Enjoying wearing heels for masochistic reasons feels to me like cheating at the game of patriarchy, in the best way. It’s saying, “Okay, fine, I’ll do what you’re telling me to do – but only for my own perverted reasons, not for yours.” My ultra-feminist partner gets this totally – they would never force, coerce, or cajole me into painful shoes just to sate their fetishistic desires. They see my own inclinations toward fashionable masochism and just push me a little further in that direction. A dominant going “hubba hubba” has been the cause of many submissives’ silliest and most joyful decisions.

My Sir had the blue Louboutins (or “Blueboutins,” as I have admittedly been calling them sometimes) shipped to their apartment in New York, so they would be here by the time I arrived. My sweetheart presented them to me in a bright red gift bag that matched the shoes’ iconic soles, and then slipped them out of their slightly beat-up box and onto my feet. We both gasped and sighed and moaned like we were watching a particularly cinematic cum shot in a porn scene. The shoes were that good, that erotic.

The next day, my partner kneeling to gently kiss my satin-encased feet gradually transitioned into a full-on human furniture and trampling scene. I read aloud from an Augusten Burroughs book while digging my sharp heels into the exposed skin of my partner’s back. The shoes already fit my feet perfectly but I wanted to make them fit my life, my sexuality, and my personality too – and that meant making them into pervertibles of sorts. If you’re a kinkster and you spend $200+ on a fashion item you can’t also use as a sex toy, are you really getting your money’s worth?

The real challenge came the following day, however, when I wore the Loubs on a test run to the Starbucks around the corner from my Sir’s apartment. My Apple Watch says I walked less than half a mile round-trip fetching us breakfast and coffee, but by the time I arrived back home, I was panting and aching like I’d just crossed a precarious tightrope. It felt like I had. The shoes engaged muscles I didn’t know existed, and necessitated a glacially slow walk that made impatient New Yorkers veer around me with derisive huffs. I’d held onto mb’s arm the entire time to keep myself upright, and the intimacy and kinkiness of that made this simple walk feel like a kink scene. Like a damsel in bondage, I was reliant on my partner – and my own sheer skill and resilience – to get me through the experience. It was submission and masochism and deference – not only to my dominant but to the shoes themselves – and it was delicious.

I’m not saying high heels are empowering for everyone. They’re not even wholly empowering for me. Obviously they wouldn’t be right for a situation where I had to dance, or run, or even walk quickly. I wouldn’t wear them to an event that called for me to be a staunch, savvy badass, just as I wouldn’t give a valedictorian address in fetishwear – it wouldn’t put me in the right headspace and it just wouldn’t be appropriate. But they’re perfect when it comes to the purposes I wanted them for: turning my dominant’s face into a heart-eyes emoji and elevating me into the strong submissive I want to be.