What's it with all those shoes?

How come everyone, including the people that make ads and commercials, thinks women are completely, absolutely addicted to shoes? Why not clothes (eh, okay)? Why not books?

I’ve often wondered about that. It seems a given that a woman might own a few more pairs of shoes than a man, simply because her clothes may be more varied (not me, I have some sneakers for good weather, some ankle-high leather sneakers for bad weather, and some boots for winter/snow). A woman with a more varied wardrobe than mine might need some different pairs of shoes. To go with dresses and skirts, to go with pants, for winter and summer use. Even so, in most cases that would be what? Ten pairs? Twelve? Fifteen? Even if she has some shoes that only go with one outfit (because they’re colour matched), she would also have pairs that go with a variety of outfits (black pumps, for example, go with nearly every dress - and pants as well). Even if she also has shoes with various heel heights, she could hardly fill a whole wardrobe with them, could she?

Yet marketing people and screen writers (both for the big and the small screen) seem to think that every woman is at every time hunting down new shoes. Why? What would be the use of having two hundred pairs of shoes? You’d never wear them all. There would be at least one hundred pairs that you never wear or so rarely you could just as well not have them. (The same, in my opinion, goes for clothes, but they’re not the main topic.)

The woman who will do everything for shoes has become a trope by now. I, personally, think that “Sex and the City” is to blame, since at least one of the main characters had a serious shoe addiction. It might also be to blame for the many women who think that you should always wear high heels, despite the terrible things they do to your feet and body. Not to mention how often I have seen women hobble along in those shoes and thought ‘what made you think wearing those heels was a good idea?’

Heels on women’s shoes have been a little raised for a long time (since it became a fashion item for women to wear heels, the first heeled shoes were actually worn by men). But a little raised means an inch or two, not eight, ten, or twelve inches. Personally, I don’t wear heels at all, I usually wear flat shoes, but I don’t think wearing slight heels is that bad for a person’s health.

Women’s shoes come in a lot more variety than men’s shoes and that is not a surprise. But that doesn’t mean every woman wants or ‘needs’ to own a pair each of all the shoes out there. Yet you will find a lot of commercials which only seem to rotate around the fact that women always want shoes and can never get enough of them. And that’s outright stupid and might only make young women think they have to be like that to be ‘real’ women.