General Discussion

KamaAina

(78,249 posts) Mon Dec 8, 2014, 01:21 PM Dec 2014

Science proves high heels do have power over men

http://www.sfgate.com/news/science/article/Science-proves-high-heels-do-have-power-over-men-5942754.php

Scientists from the Universite de Bretagne-Sud conducted experiments that showed that men behave very differently toward high-heeled women. The results, published online in the journal "Archives of Sexual Behaviour," may please the purveyors of Christian Louboutin or Jimmy Choo shoes — yet frustrate those who think stilettos encourage sexism.

The study found if a woman drops a glove on the street while wearing heels, she's almost 50 percent more likely to have a man fetch it for her than if she's wearing flats....

But on women as "signifiers of femininity," raised shoes initially appeared in Ancient Greece and Rome, according to Elizabeth Semmelhack of The Bata Shoe Museum. In Rome, where the sex trade was legal, high heels helped clients identify prostitutes in crowds.

Although high heels were worn for centuries in the Ottoman Empire and in Persia for horseback riding, they only minced into the West in the 1500s, when they were associated with imperial power and popularized as erotic in the 19th and 20th centuries. Such was the allure that a person with status or wealth became referred to as "well-heeled."