Oh dear. I can see that I’m going to have to spell it out.
Who said that you could only be glamorous whilst wearing high heels? Not me. Are you wilfully misunderstanding because you don’t want to engage with the question
Which is, why do posters feel the need to sneer at high heel wearers? Why the need to describe women choosing to wear that type of shoe as ‘silly’ ‘weird’, or ‘tottering’? Why pretend that the alternative to wearing loose, shapeless clothing is dressing like a sex worker or Mrs Thatcher circa 1987?
You don’t see anyone leaping into threads to describe wearers of black spongy flatform shoes as ‘weird’ or ‘silly’ or ‘stomping’, do you? No, it’s the sexy shoes that attract the spite, or the more dressed up style choices (previous posters’ unusual scarves or coloured boots, for example). Why is that?
Well, the obvious answer is that something about those garments makes their critics feel insecure, or bad about themselves. Bad enough to criticise the wearers, and bad enough not to be able to control your contempt. Because if you truly believed that everyone should wear what they want, you wouldn’t be saying, “I can’t see why anyone would ever want to wear heels, they look silly”, or calling a mum picking up her kid “weird and outdated”, would you?
The ‘potential husband stealer’ thing was a joke hinting at what I think the real reason for the vehemence of the high heel hatred is. You can be reassured that I haven’t been spying on your marriage and thus do not need to be told about which shoes your husband has seen you wearing. That’s not just because this is an anonymous forum.
You must admit that there is more to this than concern about strangers’ future potential bunions though, right? If that were the case then anyone who found high heels uncomfortable would keep their views to themselves and wouldn’t feel the need to call those who do wear them ‘weird’ or ‘silly’ or ‘tottering’.
What tends to provoke this sort of spite and the desire to put other women down? We all know that it’s competition and the sense that other women are somehow making you look bad, for which they must be punished. Either by sneering comments in a forum like this (there are many similar threads, many expressing the view that women in fitted dresses and heels look ‘junior’ and ‘thick’) or by the passive aggressive behaviour described upthread. Why pretend otherwise?