Survey: Men would wear heels
BEIJING, March 9 (UPI) — A survey conducted by one of China’s most popular Web sites indicates that many men would wear high-heels to experience the pains felt by significant others.
The online survey by 163.com attracted more than 3,000 responses, most of which were from men who said they would wear heels for their wives or girlfriends to demonstrate their love and understanding, Xinhua, China’s official government-run news agency, reported Monday.
“I am worried whenever I see my wife wearing high-heeled shoes, because it seems to hurt so much,” a husband from China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region said.
Source: UPI
Dr. Nirenberg’s Comments:
The predecessor to the modern day high heel shoe is a 12-inch platform shoe found in a tomb in Egypt and dated to be three thousand years old (1000 B.C.).
In ancient Greece, Aeschylus, the father of Greek drama, had his actors wear platform shoes—the more important the actor’s role, the higher their shoes. The idea of wearing platform shoes soon caught on with the status conscious public.
The high heel as we know it today began around fifth teen hundred A.D. to help prevent the feet of horseback riders from slipping forward in stirrups.
No one knows for sure who invented the high heel, but some believe it was Leonardo da Vinci. (Interestingly, da Vinci called the foot “a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.”)
The rider’s high heel measured one and a half inches high and over the coming decades, beginning in France, evolved into a more stylized heel, relegated to the male aristocracy and measuring three to four inches in height.
This is where the term “well-heeled” came from. The rider’s heel also gave way to the modern cowboy boot.
In the early 1700s, France's King Louis XIV decreed that no one's heels could be higher than his own
When the French Revolution occurred in the late seventeen hundreds, it became unpopular to be part of the upper class and high heels disappeared.
They reemerged in the eighteen hundreds, mostly among women.
High heels came to America in the 1850s by way of a prostitute who had emigrated from France and brought her high heels. She worked at a well-known brothel in New Orleans and prancing in front of the customers, quickly became the most in-demand girl.
The brothel’s other women began wearing high heels and discovered that when wearing them, they could double their fee.
Soon afterwards, word of high heels spread and women began ordering them from France. In 1880, the first factory in the U.S. began manufacturing high heels.
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