ShoeSense

Slowly reemerging, securely hanging on to the heel of Twisty's awesome brogue

I haven't posted in a long time, and it's not just because fixing the house and taking care of in-laws got the better of me.

If you noticed, I have two kinds of links on my sidebar, the fun ones and the serious ones. I would classify all the fashion blogs and retail sites I link to as "fun" without exception. This is not to say that fashion blogs cannot be thoughtful, well written, insightful, and all that. Still they differ dramatically from the second type of links I chose to stick on my sidebar, which belong to feminist women I admire. Those sites usually tackle, well, feminist issues, which is not to say that they can't be entertaining, funny, even airheaded at times.

Fundamentally, one type of links is just a long answer to the question, "What should we wear?". The second kind of sites attempts to answer a rather different question--"How can we empower women?"

Occasionally, these questions intersect, since, traditionally, the fashion world has been (by and large) the realm of women and gay men--two traditionally disenfranchised groups. For example, fashion commenters may point to an outfit and deem it slutty; feminist commenters will be up in arms about a similar comment, especially when used to justify rape--you know, the typical "The way she was dressed, she was asking for it" argument.

So, lately I've been reading too much of the latter type of comments to safely float back to my usual mindless shoeblogging. I mean, I read and thought about shoes, especially when Twisty posted this:
Which is, by all accounts, an awesome shoe which I now covet and I bet I can't get anywhere.
But more than that the context of this photo her post on "Sex," a follow-up to her other excellent essay on the ridiculousness that is the sports corset, gave me pause. Her comments about the empowerful woman in particular made me sad because I know and/or see so many women who fit exactly into that pathetic definition. And it gave me pause also because, upon reexamining my life, I can find a few points of intersection with that definition--well, save the high heels, the "sporset," and my general aversion to plastic surgery. At any rate, the uberbrilliant Twisty and her many scintillating commenters say it better than I (both pro and con, mind you!). Go read already.

The other blog that gave me pause exists no more. Granny Gets a Vibrator (no link since it has been usurped by some seedy "search" site) belonged to Liz, a truly empowered woman if I saw one. At over fifty years of age she started lifting weights and became a beautiful, fit, muscular athlete that defined our usual notion of femininity and age. Her blog was very well written, insightful, funny at times, and also dealt with feminism, racism, sports, family, art. She was recently diagnosed with an aggressive type of lymphoma, and on top of that, her love life began to unravel. Her last post was about that, and I think the many comments she received (with the inevitable and in my opinion perfectly useless advice) prompted her to take down her blog in what seems to be an irreversible move. She is one of the women I admire a lot and I miss reading her every day. On top of that I just visited a friend in hospital during his first round of chemo also for lymphoma, so I know that the road that lies ahead of her can't be easy at all.

So..... you can see that against this relatively grim background, one thinks much less of what shoes to wear.

Except, can anyone direct me to a place where I can get those Twisty shoes? They are awesome!!!!!!!!

posted by Cristina Hanganu-Bresch @ 7:04 AM