A Philosophical Defense of High-Heeled Shoes
and other useless, beautiful things.
I. Mind over Matter
Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a delightfully well-dressed person. She wears bright colors, luxurious fabrics, bold silhouettes, and magnificently high-heeled shoes. But she didn’t always dress this way. In a 2014 essay for Elle, Adichie describes an early-career moment:
Once, at a workshop, I sat with other unpublished writers, silently nursing our hopes and watching the faculty — published writers who seemed to float in their accomplishment. A fellow aspiring writer said of one faculty member, “Look at that dress and makeup! You can’t take her seriously.” I thought the woman looked attractive, and I admired the grace with which she walked in her heels. But I found myself quickly agreeing. Yes, indeed, one could not take this author of three novels seriously, because she wore a pretty dress and two shades of eye shadow.
Adichie identifies her reaction as something she picked up in America. “I had learned a lesson about Western culture,” she explains: “Women who wanted to be taken seriously were supposed to substantiate their seriousness with a studied indifference to appearance.” Adichie’s assessment rings true. As my own first-hand experience and a wide range of pop-culture tropes and media portrayals attest, many in the West reflexively regard feminine fashion as either vapid or crass, depending on context and the specific attire in question.
A pattern of thinking philosophers call soul-body or mind-body dualism, combined with misogyny, is responsible for this attitude. Broadly speaking, dualism is the idea that human beings consist in two parts: a person’s best, truest, most-alive self, a soul or a mind; and the degrading prison or dull instrument this self inhabits, a body. That is, according to dualism, the soul or mind is both separate from and superior to the body. By extension, endeavors and activities centering the mind are assumed to be superior to those centering the body.
At first glance, dualism seems to be a claim about individuals, not classes or groups. But the Western tradition persistently associates some kinds of people (male, white, heterosexual) with the mind, and other kinds (female, non-white, queer) with the body. These associations both incite and reinforce oppression. Since the mind is superior to the body, the thinking goes, the mind-people are superior to, and ought to rule over, the body-people.
As with any intellectual inheritance, we need not accept dualism as a given. It is not an immortal truth handed down from on high. It is merely one option among many, subject to the contingencies and particularities of history like any other idea. So let’s investigate. Where does dualism come from? How accurately does it describe the human condition? What alterations might we make?
II. The Platonic Descent
Dualism in the West begins with Plato. In a famous passage from the Republic, he asks us to imagine prisoners confined to an underground cave. The prisoners are fettered so that they must stare straight ahead. There’s a fire burning behind them. Between the prisoners and the fire, people carry statues of every shape and kind. The prisoners see shadows projected on the wall of the cave, and take these shadows for reality.
Now imagine that one prisoner breaks free. He climbs up and out of the cave, emerging into the sunlight after great effort:
At first, he would see shadows most easily, then images of men and other things in water, then the things themselves. From these, it would be easier for him to go on to look at the things in the sky and the sky itself at night, gazing at the light of the stars and the moon … Finally, I suppose, he would be able to see the sun — not reflections of it in water or some alien place, but the sun just by itself in its own place — and be able to look at it and see what it is like … After that, he would already be able to conclude about it that it provides the seasons and the years, governs everything in the visible world, and is in some way the cause of all the things that he and his fellows used to see.1
Plato thinks this story captures the essence of the human condition. On his view, reality is a ranked hierarchy. Most things are mere deceptive appearances — fake and confused, like the shadows projected on the cave wall. A few things are real, stable, and true, like the stars in the sky. And one thing is supremely real — sustaining, ordering, and transcending everything else, like the sun shining above the earth. Plato arranges these levels from lowest to highest. Mere images and objects made entirely of physical matter are down at the lowest and worst levels, while an incorporeal being called “The Form of the Good” is the sole occupant of the highest and best level.
According to Plato, humans are stuck somewhere in between the lowest and highest levels of reality. We each have two basic parts, a body (low) and a soul (high). Therefore, there are two basic paths each of our lives can follow, depending partly on luck and partly on our choices. Each person will follow either a downward trajectory, dedicating themselves ever more fully to the destructive pleasures of the body and the attractions of the sensible world; or an upward trajectory, dedicating themselves ever more fully to pure intellect, eventually reaching the Form of the Good. A person will remain in the cave and be degraded by it, or they will make the arduous climb into the redeeming light of day.
The process of leaving the cave and reaching the sun is known as the “Platonic Ascent.” Many later thinkers in the Western tradition adopt and transform it for their own purposes. 800 years after Plato, Augustine reinterprets the Platonic Ascent as the soul’s journey upward and inward, away from the sinful world and into the exalted light of God. 1,200 years after that, René Descartes counsels us to withdraw from the unreliable sense-impressions afforded by our bodies toward the clear and distinct ideas in our minds. In the 20th century, Simone de Beauvoir writes about the human quest to overcome immanence and achieve transcendence. We still speak of “raising ourselves” above poor worldly circumstances, “taking the high road” when someone treats us badly, and “reaching a higher plane” of wisdom and insight.
What about the prisoners who don’t leave the cave, those who follow a downward trajectory? Plato thinks that certain kinds of people are by nature more prone to prioritizing their bodies at the expense of their souls — and therefore more emotional and less rational — than other kinds. Women are one of Plato’s chief examples of lesser people. As philosopher Elizabeth Spelman explains:
Plato seems to want to make very firm his insistence on the destructiveness of the body to the soul. In doing so, he holds up for our ridicule and scorn those lives devoted to bodily pursuits. Over and over again, women’s lives are depicted as being such lives. His misogyny, then, is part of his somatophobia: the body is seen as the source of all the undesirable traits a human being could have, and women’s lives are spent manifesting those traits.2
Like the Platonic Ascent, Plato’s mapping of women to the body and men to the rational soul or mind persists throughout the Western tradition. (Genevieve Lloyd’s The Man of Reason provides an excellent historical synopsis.) We can still detect its legacy today, in enduring tropes about women’s nature and appropriate role in society.
For example, recall former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence’s reported refusal to eat an unchaperoned meal with any woman but his wife, even though national politics are routinely conducted over lunch. Pence isn’t alone. Along with other evangelical Christian men, he’s following the “Billy Graham rule.” One motivation behind such behavior is the image of the woman as temptress. Regardless of their intentions or professional roles — things pertaining to the mind — this trope reads women as nothing more than dangerously desirable bodies, liable to seduce a man away from sober virtue and godliness.
For another example, take the recently-trending ideal of the tradwife. According to this trope, women are best confined to the private sphere and subordinated to their husbands, while men are uniquely suited to participate in the public sphere and govern society. Notice how the private sphere encompasses those parts of life most closely associated with the body: pregnancy and childbirth; food, clothes, and sex; maintenance of a dwelling. Meanwhile, the public sphere encompasses the pursuits of the mind: this is where one devises cunning business strategies, develops legislation, debates policy, pursues scholarship, and invents new gadgets.
Now consider Western attitudes toward personal appearance and attire. On the one hand, we treat fashion and cosmetics as women’s special province. Marketing campaigns for intensive skincare regimens target women by default. Women are the most common customers at nail salons and plastic surgeons. Women’s clothes tend to be colorful and revealing, prioritizing aesthetics over function; men’s clothes tend to be simple, practical, and modest. When people deviate from these conventions — when a woman refuses to dress up for dates, say, or a man wears makeup — they’re often castigated for behaving in ways inappropriate for their gender. (Hostile reactions to the tomboy, the butch, the dandy, and the drag queen offer more extreme examples of this same dynamic.)
Yet, on the other hand, we in the West also treat fashion and cosmetics with disdain. Often (as in Adichie’s story), we assume that fashion and cosmetics don’t matter, or that they’re incompatible with truly worthwhile work. Often we judge feminine attire as manipulative and tacky. (“She’s dressing like that to get favors from the boss.”) Often we interpret a woman’s clothes as soliciting sexual attention, whether she intends it or not. (When a woman is raped, many wonder what she was wearing; when the answer includes anything too distinctively feminine, some decide she was asking for it.)
The Platonic reading of women as bodies, and of bodies as bad, neatly explains these attitudes. Since women are more body than mind, on this view, it’s natural and fitting for women to concern themselves with the body’s care and display. But (the Platonic view continues) since bodies are inferior at best and dangerous at worst, naturalness and fittingness offer no excuse; rather, women’s nature justifies men’s contempt and control.
III. Loose Women
Plato doesn’t say much about why he maps women to the body and men to the rational soul, but his own intellectual inheritance offers some enticing clues.
Across the varied domains of human life and knowledge, the ancient Greeks prize order and the boundaries that create and maintain it. By Plato’s time many of them have come to view the world as a kosmos, an harmonious whole encompassing and organizing everything that is. The kosmos is not only what happens to exist, the way things happen to be arranged, but what ought to exist, the way it is best for things to be arranged. Therefore, the ancient Greeks think, people must preserve the order of the kosmos by exercising rational self-control. In particular, they must pay special attention to boundaries — keeping everything in its proper place and carefully guarding the thresholds — in both public and private life.
One place Plato expresses this principle is in the Republic’s definitions of justice. For the citizens of a city, “justice is minding one’s own affairs and not being a busybody” (433a8–9). A just city is one in which all citizens concern themselves only with the roles and possessions they have been assigned by the rulers, never reaching for those assigned to others. Similarly, a just individual is one who “gets what are really his own affairs well-organized, masters himself, puts himself in order [kosmēsanta], becomes his own friend, and conforms the three parts [of his soul] to each other” (443d3–5). The just person creates kosmic harmony within himself and, as a result, never lets his desires and emotions exceed their proper bounds.
For Plato, one of the most serious threats to justice and order is pleonexia. The Greek word “pleonexia” can mean “greediness,” “arrogance,” “advantage,” “profit,” and “excess.” A strong case can be made that Plato uses it to mean something like “the desire to get more and more, especially at others’ expense.” We might say that, for Plato, pleonexia is the desire to push past one’s own boundaries into that which belongs to others, and take it for oneself.
Plato illustrates the damage pleonexia can do with the story of the Ring of Gyges, in which a shepherd finds a ring that makes him invisible. The shepherd promptly murders his king, marries the king’s wife, and claims the king’s territory for himself. This story outlines a three-step process. It begins with pleonectic desire (the shepherd, or some part of him, wants more sex, wealth, and power than he is entitled to). Given an opportunity, pleonectic desire leads to the violation of boundaries (the shepherd uses the ring to invade the king’s public and private domains). Finally, the violation of boundaries causes a metamorphosis (the shepherd illicitly transforms himself from a lowly laborer into a king, or someone who appears to be a king). As a result, the kosmic order that once harmonized the shepherd’s community is destroyed.
Where does pleonectic desire come from? Plato seems to think it is a consequence of the soul’s partnership with the body. Because human souls are always embodied while on earth, and bodies need things like food, sex, and clothes, some part of every soul must desire these things to keep itself alive. But since bodily goods are temporary (we need to eat every day, for instance) our bodily appetites will never be permanently and completely satisfied. Bodily appetites are essentially pleonectic. Therefore, Plato thinks, while they are joined to their bodies, most people will be unable to eradicate pleonexia completely. The just person puts the rational, non-pleonectic part of his soul in charge of his bodily appetites, preventing their pleonectic nature from infecting his overall character. The unjust person, on the other hand, imposes no limits on his bodily appetites; he becomes pleonectic through and through.
Meanwhile, starting well before Plato, the ancient Greeks tend to view women as leaky and fluid. Medically speaking, healthy male bodies are said to be hot, tightly-woven, and dry, while healthy female bodies are said to be cold, spongy, and wet, getting wetter and more free-flowing in the course of the reproductive cycle. Here’s a typical passage from a Hippocratic medical treatise:
Indeed, when [a woman] gives birth, the small vessels become more easy-flowing for the menses. What makes them easy-flowing is the lochial purgation. If there has been a liquefaction of the body, [the flesh] near the belly and the breasts liquefy the most, but the rest of the body also liquefies. As the body liquefies, of necessity, the vessels open themselves and become more easy-flowing for the menses, and the womb opens more because the baby has moved through them and caused both pressure and strain.3
Many ancient Greek physicians and philosophers identify dryness as the healthiest condition for a human being, and the physical cause of intelligence and rationality. Wetness, meanwhile, is often said to hinder or destroy intelligence. For example, Heraclitus, one of the very first Greek thinkers to discuss the soul, says that “a dry soul is wisest and best,” like a “ray of sunlight.” When a drunk man cannot “understand where he is going” and must be “led, stumbling, by a young man,” it is because “he has a wet soul.” In general, “for souls it is death to become water.”4 Heraclitus and other dry-soul enthusiasts often neglect to mention women, but the implications of this view are clear: the wetness of women’s bodies prevents them from thinking clearly, or perhaps from having a fully-developed soul at all.
Another distinctive feature of female bodies, according to some ancient Greek physicians, is the hodos: a vaginal tube that extends straight from the head to the genitals, with a mouth (stoma) at either end. The condition of the bottom of the hodos (e.g., how much sexual experience a woman has had), these physicians say, can be inferred from the condition of the top (e.g., the sound of a woman’s voice). These physicians also prescribe two-part treatments for certain ailments, one part for the upper mouth and one for the lower.5
The significance of these ideas is more than medical. Stories in which women release disorder and suffering into the world (like Pandora) or change into another kind of animal in response to duress (like Philomela) are no accident. As classicist and poet Anne Carson explains:
In myth, woman’s boundaries are pliant, porous, mutable. Her power to control them is inadequate, her concern for them unreliable. Deformation attends her. She swells, she shrinks, she leaks, she is penetrated, she suffers metamorphoses.6
Myth makes a culture’s implicit assumptions explicit, telling things as they are from a particular group’s perspective. From the ancient Greek perspective, women are liquid, leaky, and expansive in every domain — including the political, moral, and metaphysical. In particular, Carson suggests, the ancient Greeks see women as characteristically letting things flow out of both their mouths that ought to stay contained: excessive emotion, disordered speech, undisciplined sexuality, unlimited desire.7
There are many ancient Greek rituals and customs for containing women within their proper bounds, symbolically and otherwise. An especially good example is the female headdress, which respectable women are supposed to wear in public. Much like bras and control-top pantyhose today, the headdress serves both to cover a part of female bodies considered especially sexual, and to forcibly restrain that body part from its natural tendency to expand or flow. One of the most common words for a woman’s headdress is krēdemnon, which has two other meanings: the encircling battlements of a city, and the cover or stopper for some container, like a wine-jar. For an ancient Greek woman, to don socially-appropriate clothing is to put a lid on.
Writing about headdresses, Carson cites this fragment from Sappho:8
... for my mother [used to say that]
in her youth, if someone had her hair tied round
with a purple band
this was a great ornament indeed.
But the girl with hair yellower
than a flame...
[...]
For you, Kleis,
I have no idea where I can get
a brightcolored headbinder.
But as for the Mytilenean one. ...
...
I had...
brightcolored ...
these things of the Kleanaktidai...
exile... [city]
memories:
... terribly leaked away ...Sappho writes this poem in exile from Greece, where she cannot find a headdress for her daughter, Kleis. As Carson points out, the word for “ornament” in the fourth line is kosmos. Everything, Kleis included, is out of order, out of place; outside the encircling boundaries of home, it all “leaks away.”
Late in the Republic, Plato says that people dominated by bodily appetite “are always looking down in the manner of cattle, stooping their heads to the earth or the dinner-table, feeding and mating” (586a5–7). Their “greedy desire [pleonexias] for these things” makes such people “kick and butt with iron horns and hooves, slaughtering each other” (586b1–2). The reason people dominated by appetite behave in this way, Plato continues, is that they are not trying to satisfy the rational part of their souls, a “leak-proof container” (586b3–4). He supplies the other half of this metaphor in the Gorgias, comparing bodily appetite to a “leaky jar” or a “sieve” that can never be filled (493a–c). Although Plato doesn’t say so, it’s tempting to speculate that he views women as the leakiest jars, the most pleonectic and least rational, of all.
IV. In Praise of the Useless
Although they do so very imperfectly, modern fashion and cosmetics aim to enhance women’s beauty. One way to answer the charges that begin this essay — to paraphrase: that feminine fashion is useless, or useful only as an underhanded means — is to re-examine the relation between beauty and usefulness.
One strand of the Western philosophical tradition argues that beauty just is usefulness. For example, one of Plato’s contemporaries, the philosopher and historian Xenophon, includes this exchange in one of his dialogues:
Socrates said: …“and all other things that human beings use are held to be beautiful and good for the same things — whatever they are useful for.”
“Then,” Aristippus said, “is even a dung-carrying basket beautiful?”
“Yes, by Zeus,” Socrates said, “and a gold shield is ugly, if for their own work one should be well-made, and the other badly.”9
The word translated as “beautiful” and “well-made” here is kalos, which can also mean “noble,” “virtuous,” and “favorable.” The most consistent translation might be “valuable,” or simply “good.” So, in effect, the view Xenophon puts in Socrates’ mouth assimilates the many possible kinds of goodness, including beauty, to usefulness. Something is beautiful only insofar as it is fit for some purpose.
The modern logic of the homo economicus, the ideally-rational economic agent, construes the world in much the same way. From the perspective of such an agent, the value of a person or thing consists only in its usefulness or productivity or resale price; every kind of value is commensurable and interchangeable with every other kind. Efficiency and homogeneity are the chief virtues. This sort of reasoning is at least partly responsible for the marginalization of elderly, disabled, and neurodivergent people — none of whom are known for being useful — and for the drab design aesthetics dubbed “utilitarian” and “industrial.”
There’s another tradition in the philosophy of art, conventionally said to begin with Immanuel Kant, that associates beauty with a deliberate separation from everyday questions of usefulness. To treat something as a work of art, on this view, is to make it the object of “disinterested contemplation,” or to approach it with what a 20th-century philosopher named Edward Bullough calls “Psychical Distance.”10
To observe an object with Distance, Bullough says, is to put it “out of gear with our practical, actual self; by allowing it to stand outside the context of our personal needs and ends.” Bullough gives the example of a fog surrounding a ship at sea. Viewed from the perspective of a passenger eager to return home, fog means anxiety, confusion, danger, delay. But if a passenger deliberately sets aside her desire to return home, and pays attention to the fog itself — “the veil surrounding [her] with an opaqueness as of transparent milk,” “the curious creamy smoothness of the water,” and so on — she might find it beautiful, even poignant. Putting the fog “out of gear” with her practical calculations makes space for a new experience, something unexpected and, possibly, profound.
Out of gear … out of joint … out of order … out of bounds.
Albeit in a very different context and with a very different intent, Bullough is echoing Plato’s complaint about women and the body. Bullough and Plato both identify a tendency toward disruption when we look at things slantwise, when we separate them from the context of their proper functions. And Plato seems to recognize that people relegated to the bottom of a social hierarchy — people who want more than they’ve been given — tend to be more disruptive than those resting contentedly at the top.
Put this way, Plato’s critique offers the raw materials for a defense of feminine fashion, and indeed of useless and beautiful things more generally. The wealthy and powerful always find ways to present the order on which they depend as rational and good: see, for example, the divine right of kings, social Darwinism, capitalist realism, and rhetoric about the poor (never the rich) taking “personal responsibility” for the economic conditions of their lives. The systems of oppression and exploitation these ideas support need putting out of gear.
Bigger, apparently more consequential means of change, involving collective action and reform or revolution, are important. But they’re also complex, and therefore fragile. They require many people to work together, and they often need the cooperation of large institutions (like banks, telecom companies, newspapers, and police forces) to achieve lasting results. Should public opinion shift or a few well-placed people bring their influence to bear, such initiatives can fall apart (or devolve into violence) overnight.
Compare this to the quiet but insistent statements that unnecessary ornaments can make. Perhaps one of Adichie’s brightcolored headscarves, or a pair of impractically high-heeled shoes. Borne on a tide of bodies, these objects can flow into every corner of society: homes, schools, corporate headquarters, government buildings, bars, restaurants, factories, and hospitals. They can draw involuntary second glances, subtly deforming the established contours of observers’ attention. They can challenge an order based on efficiency, homogeneity, and scarcity with a unique and unexpected abundance. They can say: whether you like it or not, I am here, I am beautiful, and I exceed the bounds of my use.
When feminine fashion is practiced with these aims, it is not vapid, or manipulative, or tacky. It is gratuitous. This word can mean “unnecessary” and “unwelcome.” It can also mean “given or granted without return or recompense”; “unearned”; “free.” Scholars believe it derives from the Proto-Indo-European root *gʷerH-, which also gives us “gratitude” and “grace.”
V. Lights
Personally, I find I am too much a creature of the modern West to abandon the dualist contrast between body and soul. Instead, I consider the body and the soul to be equally noble, equally good. I agree with Plato that the human capacity to care about more than what our physical survival requires — to reason, and use reason to love — is a very fine thing. But I also believe that the body has its own value, and that physical pleasure can lead us to joys and truths we wouldn’t otherwise have reached.
The Hebrew Bible’s first creation story includes this passage:
And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the heavens to divide the day from the night, and they shall be signs for the fixed times and for days and years, and they shall be lights in the vault of the heavens to light up the earth.” And so it was. And God made the two great lights, the great light for dominion of day and the small light for dominion of night, and the stars. … And God saw that it was good.11
God had the right idea, I think. Our lives shouldn’t be guided by any one light alone. I am happy to let Plato’s Sun have dominion of my days: to live the life of the mind, pursuing rationality and knowledge, as best I can.
However, for dominion of my nights, I need a different light. Let me share one last poem, by the 20th-century Greek poet C. P. Cavafy. Cavafy was queer, in a time and place where this was neither respectable nor safe. He once wrote:12
In a small and empty room, four lone walls,
covered in a cloth of solid green,
a beautiful chandelier burns and glows
and in each and every flame there blazes
a wanton fever, a wanton need.
In the small room, which has been set
aglow by the chandelier’s powerful flames,
the light that appears is no ordinary light.
The pleasure of this heat has not been fashioned
for bodies that too easily take fright.
The Allegory of the Cave and the Sun is related in Republic 514a–517a. The quoted portion is 516a–c, translated by C. D. C. Reeve.
“Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views,” p. 118. There are a few striking passages (e.g., Meno 72c–73c, Republic 454b–456b) where Plato says that a woman can achieve any of the virtues a man can achieve, given the right personality and circumstances. But Plato more often emphasizes women’s inferiority to men. For example, he claims that certain types of men are bad moral examples for young people, but the class of women in general, especially when they are characteristically preoccupied with their bodies (as in childbirth), are bad examples (e.g., Republic 394d–396b). He says that an excessive display of grief “is what a woman does,” while “taking pride in keeping quiet and enduring” is “what a man does” (Republic 605c–e). He claims that men who live unworthy lives are punished by being reincarnated as women (Timaeus 42a–c and Laws 944a–e). Spelman discusses additional texts in which Plato positions women as inferior to men.
From On the Diseases of Women I. Translated by Laurence Totelin, in “A Woman in Flux: Fluidity in Hippocratic Gynaecology,” in Holism in Ancient Medicine and Its Reception.
Fragments 118, 117, and 36.
For an overview of ancient physicians’ approach to the female body, including further discussion of the hodos, see Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece, edited by Helen King, pp. 27–39.
“Dirt and Desire: The Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity,” p. 79, in Constructions of the Classical Body, edited by Jamie Porter.
“The Gender of Sound,” in Glass, Irony, and God.
From Fragment 98a–b, translated by Carson.
Memorabilia 3.8.5–6, tr. Amy Bonnette with emendations.
In a paper called “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle,” reprinted in Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology, edited by Steven Cahn.
Genesis 1:14–19, translated by Robert Alter.
“Chandelier,” translated by Daniel Mendelson.